Drupal vs Ghost vs WordPress

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Drupal

10.8K
3.8K
+ 1
359
Ghost

504
499
+ 1
219
WordPress

96.1K
38.6K
+ 1
2.1K

Drupal vs Ghost vs WordPress: What are the differences?

# Key Differences Between Drupal, Ghost, and WordPress

<Write Introduction here>

1. **Customization Options**: Drupal offers extensive customization capabilities, making it suitable for complex websites with specific requirements. On the other hand, Ghost focuses on a minimalist approach, providing limited customization options but ensuring a seamless blogging experience. WordPress falls in between, offering a balance of customization and ease of use for various types of websites.

2. **Content Management**: Drupal is known for its robust content management features, allowing users to organize and categorize content effectively. Ghost simplifies content creation and publishing, ideal for bloggers looking for a straightforward platform. WordPress boasts a user-friendly interface with a wide range of plugins and themes for tailored content management needs.

3. **Community Support**: Drupal has a dedicated community of developers and contributors, offering extensive support through forums, documentation, and events. Ghost, being a newer platform, has a smaller but highly enthusiastic community that focuses on continuous improvement. WordPress has one of the largest communities in the CMS space, providing extensive resources and support for users of all levels.

4. **Security Features**: Drupal is often praised for its robust security features, with regular updates and strong community oversight to address vulnerabilities. Ghost emphasizes security as well, with encryption and secure hosting options built into the platform. WordPress, while secure with updates and security plugins, may be more susceptible to security breaches due to its widespread popularity.

5. **Performance Optimization**: Drupal is highly scalable and optimized for performance, making it a preferred choice for large websites with high traffic. Ghost, being lightweight, excels in speed and performance for blogging purposes. WordPress can be optimized for performance with the right plugins and configurations but may require more effort compared to Drupal and Ghost.

6. **Ease of Use**: Drupal is known for its steep learning curve and can be challenging for beginners to navigate. Ghost offers a simple and intuitive interface, making it easy for users to get started with minimal guidance. WordPress, with its user-friendly dashboard and extensive documentation, strikes a balance between ease of use and complexity for users of varying skill levels.

In Summary, Drupal, Ghost, and WordPress each offer unique strengths in terms of customization, content management, community support, security, performance optimization, and ease of use, catering to different preferences and requirements in the CMS landscape.
Decisions about Drupal, Ghost, and WordPress
Kamaldeep Singh

I usually take a slightly different tack because the technical level of people I usually am dealing with is lower. I tend to be pitching to decision makers and not tech people. A bit of my standard answer is below.

Wix and Squarespace are proprietary systems meant for unsophisticated users who want to build their own websites quickly and easily. While they are good for that specific use case, they do not offer any way to move beyond that if your needs arise. Since they are proprietary closed systems if you need something more advanced at some point your only option is to start over.

WordPress is an Open Source CMS that allows much more freedom. It is not quite as simple to setup and create a new site but if you are talking to me then you are not looking to build it yourself so that is really a non-issue. The main benefit of WordPress is freedom. You can host it on virtually any decent web hosting service and since it uses PHP and MySQL you can have virtually any developer take over a project without problem.

I believe in open source because of that freedom. It is good for me as a developer and it is good for my clients. If something were to happen to me or my company you would have no problem finding another qualified WordPress developer to take over the site in a totally seamless fashion. There would be no need to start from scratch.

Additionally the extensible nature of WordPress means that no matter what your future needs, WordPress can handle it. Adding things like e-commerce and custom quoting systems are just two examples of advanced solution's that I have added to WordPress sites years after they were first built.

WordPress is used by tiny one person businesses all the way up to major websites like the NY Times and I think it is right for this project as well.

See more
Xander Groesbeek
Founder at Rate My Meeting · | 5 upvotes · 221.7K views

So many choices for CMSs these days. So then what do you choose if speed, security and customization are key? Headless for one. Consuming your own APIs for content is absolute key. It makes designing pages in the front-end a breeze. Leaving Ghost and Cockpit. If I then looked at the footprint and impact on server load, Cockpit definitely wins that battle.

See more

10 Years ago I have started to check more about the online sphere and I have decided to make a website. There were a few CMS available at that time like WordPress or Joomla that you can use to have your website. At that point, I have decided to use WordPress as it was the easiest and I am glad I have made a good decision. Now WordPress is the most used CMS. Later I have created also a site about WordPress: https://www.wpdoze.com

See more
Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of Drupal
Pros of Ghost
Pros of WordPress
  • 75
    Stable, highly functional cms
  • 60
    Great community
  • 44
    Easy cms to make websites
  • 43
    Highly customizable
  • 22
    Digital customer experience delivery platform
  • 17
    Really powerful
  • 16
    Customizable
  • 11
    Flexible
  • 10
    Good tool for prototyping
  • 9
    Enterprise proven over many years when others failed
  • 8
    Headless adds even more power/flexibility
  • 8
    Open source
  • 7
    Each version becomes more intuitive for clients to use
  • 7
    Well documented
  • 6
    Lego blocks methodology
  • 4
    Caching and performance
  • 3
    Powerful
  • 3
    Built on Symfony
  • 3
    Can build anything
  • 2
    Views
  • 1
    API-based CMS
  • 45
    Beautiful
  • 35
    Fast
  • 29
    Quick/simple post styling
  • 20
    Live Post Preview
  • 20
    Open source
  • 19
    Non-profit
  • 16
    Seamless writing
  • 6
    Node.js
  • 5
    Fast and Performatic
  • 5
    Javascript
  • 4
    Simplest
  • 3
    Wonderful UI
  • 3
    Handlebars
  • 3
    Full Control
  • 2
    Magic
  • 2
    Clean
  • 1
    Headless CMS
  • 1
    Self-hostable
  • 415
    Customizable
  • 366
    Easy to manage
  • 354
    Plugins & themes
  • 258
    Non-tech colleagues can update website content
  • 247
    Really powerful
  • 145
    Rapid website development
  • 78
    Best documentation
  • 51
    Codex
  • 44
    Product feature set
  • 35
    Custom/internal social network
  • 18
    Open source
  • 8
    Great for all types of websites
  • 7
    Huge install and user base
  • 5
    Perfect example of user collaboration
  • 5
    Open Source Community
  • 5
    Most websites make use of it
  • 5
    It's simple and easy to use by any novice
  • 5
    Best
  • 5
    I like it like I like a kick in the groin
  • 4
    Community
  • 4
    API-based CMS
  • 3
    Easy To use
  • 2
    <a href="https://secure.wphackedhel">Easy Beginner</a>

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Drupal
Cons of Ghost
Cons of WordPress
  • 1
    Steep learning curve
  • 1
    DJango
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 13
      Hard to keep up-to-date if you customize things
    • 13
      Plugins are of mixed quality
    • 10
      Not best backend UI
    • 2
      Complex Organization
    • 1
      Do not cover all the basics in the core
    • 1
      Great Security

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is Drupal?

    Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.

    What is Ghost?

    Ghost is a platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing. It's beautifully designed, completely customisable and completely Open Source. Ghost allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even fun to do.

    What is WordPress?

    The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Drupal?
    What companies use Ghost?
    What companies use WordPress?

    Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

    What tools integrate with Drupal?
    What tools integrate with Ghost?
    What tools integrate with WordPress?

    Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

    What are some alternatives to Drupal, Ghost, and WordPress?
    Joomla!
    Joomla is a simple and powerful web server application and it requires a server with PHP and either MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server to run it.
    Django
    Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.
    ProcessWire
    ProcessWire is an open source content management system (CMS) and web application framework aimed at the needs of designers, developers and their clients. ProcessWire gives you more control over your fields, templates and markup than other platforms, and provides a powerful template system that works the way you do
    Typo3
    It is a free and open-source Web content management system written in PHP. It can run on several web servers, such as Apache or IIS, on top of many operating systems, among them Linux, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, macOS and OS/2.
    Laravel
    It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.
    See all alternatives