Drupal vs WordPress: For content and marketing teams

Content creation is at the heart of any digital marketing strategy, especially for enterprises that manage vast amounts of information across various digital properties. 

For content creators and marketers, WordPress feels like a powerful yet familiar workspace. Because WordPress powers 43% of the internet, your current and future content and marketing hires would have already used it in some capacity. WordPress’s intuitiveness coupled with its ubiquity gives it a unique advantage in the Drupal vs WordPress comparison in the content creation context. 

Let’s start by exploring some key content creation strengths of WordPress.

Block-based editing

The defining feature of WordPress’s Gutenberg editor is its block-based editing system. Each piece of content—whether it’s a paragraph, image, video, or button—becomes its own block. This means that content elements are distinct, enabling users to move them around, edit them independently, or reuse them across the site.

Key benefits:

• Modular content creation: Content creators can easily adjust, update, and repurpose blocks to quickly create different layouts without requiring developer assistance.
• Consistency and flexibility: Block-based design ensures that content formatting is consistent, but at the same time, content teams have the freedom to mix and match content elements for varied, engaging pages.
• Ease of use: The visual, drag-and-drop nature of the blocks reduces the learning curve for non-technical users, making it faster for teams to onboard new content creators.

Real-time previewing, a handy drag-and-drop functionality (at both block and section levels), and inline editing further improve the content creation experience. 

Support for modular content

Unlike Drupal’s entity-based content modeling, which requires deep configuration and developer involvement (as you’ll see in just a bit), WordPress delivers a seamless, block-based editing experience that empowers content teams to build, manage, and scale structured content without technical bottlenecks.

At the heart of WordPress’s modular content system is the Gutenberg block editor, which treats content as a series of reusable, customizable components. Blocks (as you just saw above) function as independent content elements—text, images, buttons, embeds, and dynamic content—that can be arranged and structured effortlessly. This approach eliminates the need for rigid templating or complex configurations, making modular content creation accessible to non-technical users while maintaining design and structural consistency.

For more advanced modular workflows, block patterns and reusable blocks allow content teams to define repeatable content structures that can be edited centrally and applied across multiple pages. This streamlines content governance and ensures consistency across enterprise-scale sites, reducing the redundancy and fragmentation often seen in traditional CMS setups.

Beyond the block editor, WordPress’s Custom Post Types (CPTs) and Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) offer deeper control over structured content. CPTs allow businesses to define distinct content models—such as case studies, events, or documentation—while ACF extends this by enabling custom metadata and field structures. Unlike Drupal’s entity system, which requires extensive backend configuration, WordPress’s modular setup can be implemented with minimal effort while remaining highly flexible.

With these solutions, enterprises favoring Drupal for its modular content creation capabilities can seriously reconsider.

Collaboration for content creation

WordPress excels at collaboration, especially when compared to Drupal. With its user-friendly interface and a growing suite of collaborative tools, WordPress has become the go-to platform for enterprises looking to streamline content creation workflows across teams. Here’s how WordPress stands out:

1. User roles and permissions

WordPress provides granular control over user roles and permissions. Content creators, editors, administrators, and authors can all have specific access rights, allowing enterprises to define and restrict what each user can see or edit. This is particularly useful for organizations with multiple content creators or stakeholders involved in the content approval process. Common roles include:

• Administrator: Full control over the site.
• Editor: Can create, edit, and publish content.
• Author: Can create and publish their own posts.
• Contributor: Can write content but not publish it.
• Subscriber: Can view content but not edit.

These built-in roles facilitate seamless collaboration while maintaining a level of control and organization within the team. The system is easy to manage and set up, reducing administrative burdens and allowing for quick onboarding.

You can easily build upon WordPress’s default role/access management to create a system that meets your enterprise needs.

2. Editorial workflows

WordPress has evolved its editorial workflow capabilities over the years. With the addition of features like content scheduling, revision history, and content approval systems, WordPress enables content teams to manage content at scale. Editorial workflows can be customized, which allow teams to manage content calendars, track editorial progress, and even implement content approval processes.

At rtCamp, we’ve even delivered customized WordPress dashboards to meet our clients’ needs—you can truly make the editorial dashboard your own with WordPress.

For large enterprises managing multiple content teams, these features help keep content organized and ensure a smooth, transparent collaboration process. Teams can track the status of articles, whether they’re in draft, review, or published stages.

3. Real-time collaboration

WordPress is also seeing integrated real-time collaboration features (often brought over through customizations or plugins). These allow multiple authors to contribute and work simultaneously on a single post, allowing for a smooth collaborative experience. 

Let’s talk about Drupal now.

Drupal’s CKEditor 5 editing experience

When it comes to content editing, Drupal has come a long way, with its current editor, CKEditor 5, offering a significantly better content creation experience than the rigid forms-based content creation Drupal teams are used to.

But while CKEditor 5 represents a significant improvement in Drupal’s content editing capabilities, it still falls short in several areas when compared to WordPress’s current Gutenberg editor. 

Block-based editing

While CKEditor 5 provides a more flexible editing experience than previous Drupal editors, it doesn’t support a block-based system out of the box. Content elements are still tied together in a more linear fashion, making it harder to quickly rearrange or reuse specific content elements without more manual adjustments or additional custom development.

In fact, there are “pro” versions of the editor from Drupal developers that you may want to consider for a decent content creation/editing experience.

Ease of use

While CKEditor 5 offers improved user-friendliness over Drupal’s older editing interfaces, it still doesn’t match the seamless, user-centric design of Gutenberg. The interface can feel more traditional, and non-technical users may find it less intuitive compared to the streamlined, visual editing environment offered by WordPress.

As a result, there is a steeper learning curve for content creators, particularly those unfamiliar with Drupal’s ecosystem.

Content reuse

While CKEditor 5 allows for reusable content through rich-text editing, it doesn’t natively support a system for easily reusing individual content components in the way Gutenberg does. For enterprise environments that need to reuse specific pieces of content (like marketing banners or specific text modules), Drupal requires more manual effort or custom development to replicate the same level of efficiency.

In all, while it doesn’t yet offer the same degree of block-based modularity that WordPress’s Gutenberg editor does, CKEditor 5 has elevated Drupal’s content editing experience, making it much more accessible and efficient for teams looking to streamline their workflows.

However, when compared directly to WordPress in the Drupal vs WordPress context, WordPress still holds the edge in terms of ease of use and flexibility for non-technical content creators. Nonetheless, CKEditor 5’s improvements are a positive step forward for Drupal, offering more options for enterprises that prefer to stick with the platform.

Modular content creation in Drupal

Unlike traditional WYSIWYG page editing, Drupal treats content as structured entities composed of multiple fields. Each entity is composed of discrete fields, enabling content administrators to build complex content structures without relying on custom development. This structured approach ensures that content remains reusable across different parts of a site, as well as external applications through RESTful APIs, GraphQL, or JSON:API.

Drupal’s Paragraphs module is a key component of its modular content creation. Instead of relying on a single body field for rich text, Paragraphs allows content editors to create structured, nested components, such as text blocks, images, videos, or call-to-actions, which can be rearranged dynamically. This component-based model is particularly valuable for enterprises with strict design and content governance policies, ensuring consistency while still allowing flexibility for content creators.

Beyond Paragraphs, Drupal’s Layout Builder introduces a drag-and-drop interface for assembling modular content while maintaining structured data integrity. Enterprises benefit from this by enabling marketing teams to compose landing pages without breaking underlying design frameworks. Layout Builder works alongside Drupal’s Block system, which allows content pieces to be reused across multiple sections of a site, reducing redundancy and streamlining content management workflows.

While Drupal’s modular content system offers structured data, reusable components, and deep customization, it introduces significant complexity in setup, management, and scalability. The reliance on Paragraphs, Layout Builder, and the Entity API makes content creation highly configurable but also burdensome, requiring ongoing developer oversight to maintain flexibility without compromising performance.

WordPress, in contrast, delivers modular content creation with far greater ease and efficiency. Instead of rigid entity-based structuring, WordPress leverages block-based editing with Gutenberg, offering an intuitive, user-friendly interface that empowers content teams to build complex layouts without relying on developers.

Collaboration in Drupal for content creation

Drupal has always been a powerful CMS for large-scale, complex websites, and it offers a wide range of collaboration tools for content teams. However, compared to WordPress, Drupal’s collaboration tools require more technical expertise to implement and customize, especially for enterprises without dedicated IT teams.

1. User roles and permissions

Drupal offers a granular level of control over user roles and permissions, with the ability to create custom roles and permissions for different levels of access. This provides enterprises with complete control over who can see and edit content, as well as the ability to define complex workflows that involve multiple team members.

However, this level of customization comes with its challenges. Setting up and managing these roles can be cumbersome for non-technical users, and large teams may require a dedicated Drupal expert to ensure everything is configured properly.

2. Editorial workflows

One of Drupal’s greatest strengths is its ability to create highly customized editorial workflows, thanks to modules like Workflows and Content Moderation. These modules allow enterprises to create approval systems, define content review stages, and assign content to specific users for review or editing. Additionally, content teams can have specific permissions to work with different content types, such as articles, blog posts, or media assets.

However, while these workflows can be powerful, they often require additional modules, significant setup, and customization. This can be a barrier for enterprises that need to quickly adapt or that lack a dedicated development team to configure the system.

3. Real-time collaboration

While Drupal does offer basic content revision history and tracking, it lacks native real-time collaboration features. Multiple users editing the same content simultaneously can be challenging, and content creators may need to refresh the page frequently to see updates from other team members.

For enterprises that rely on real-time collaboration, especially when working across multiple teams or locations, Drupal may feel slower and less intuitive than WordPress.

SEO

When it comes to enterprise SEO, both Drupal and WordPress offer powerful capabilities, but they take different approaches.

Drupal provides built-in SEO-friendly features like clean URLs, customizable meta tags, and structured content organization. It also integrates well with schema markup and offers granular control over technical SEO settings, making it a strong choice for enterprises that require highly customized, developer-driven SEO strategies. However, optimizing Drupal often requires technical expertise, as many features rely on module configurations rather than an intuitive interface.

WordPress, on the other hand, excels in usability while still delivering enterprise-grade SEO performance. With its extensive plugin ecosystem—including industry-leading solutions like Yoast SEO and Rank Math—WordPress makes it easier for non-technical teams to manage SEO at scale. Features like automatic XML sitemaps, real-time content analysis, and deep integration with Google tools (Search Console, Analytics) ensure that enterprises can optimize content efficiently.

Additionally, WordPress benefits from its fast-paced innovation in core development. With ongoing performance improvements in WordPress Core, better support for Core Web Vitals, and a rich ecosystem of plugins for structured data, enterprises get a strong SEO foundation with minimal custom development. These features give WordPress an edge in the Drupal vs WordPress SEO discussion.

Multilingual features

When comparing Drupal vs WordPress in a multilingual context, both platforms support multiple languages. However, WordPress currently relies on plugins for full multilingual capabilities, while Drupal offers it as a core feature (through a core module). But that’s changing.

WordPress has long had a rich ecosystem of multilingual plugins, giving enterprises flexibility in how they manage translations. But with multilingual capabilities becoming increasingly crucial for global businesses, WordPress is moving toward native multilingual support. It’s already part of the official roadmap.

The fourth phase of Gutenberg’s development is set to introduce native multilingual features directly into WordPress core, eliminating the need for third-party plugins for multilingual functionality. Additionally, a community-driven initiative is actively working on streamlining WordPress’s language configuration, making it easier to set up WordPress in different native languages.

For enterprises operating in multilingual environments, this evolution means WordPress will soon offer out-of-the-box capabilities for managing global content—without compromising on flexibility or requiring additional plugins. That said, even the existing multilingual solutions are known to work seamlessly at scale.

Content analytics

Drupal provides some very basic native content analytics through its core Statistics module, which tracks things like page views. 

For detailed insights, you’ll have to use a dedicated analytics solution.

That said, Drupal’s modular architecture allows for advanced custom tracking, including event-based analytics, taxonomy-driven reporting, and user segmentation. Enterprises that need granular control over data collection—such as tracking specific user interactions within structured content models—can achieve this through custom module development and integrations with external BI tools. However, this approach often demands ongoing developer involvement and a more complex setup compared to WordPress.

When it comes to WordPress, in addition to third-party content analytics platforms, you can also use Parse.ly. Parse.ly is an advanced content analytics platform designed to provide real-time insights into audience engagement, reader behavior, and content performance. Originally an independent analytics solution, it was acquired by Automattic (the parent company of WordPress VIP) in 2021.

If you’re on WordPress VIP, Parse.ly comes as part of the managed service, providing deep content intelligence without requiring additional setup.

But Parse.ly isn’t exclusive to WordPress VIP. While it is integrated into WordPress VIP as a built-in analytics tool, it can be used with any WordPress site, irrespective of where it’s hosted. Actually, even Drupal sites can use Parse.ly because it works as an independent solution as well.

Compared to WordPress’s plugin-based analytics and Drupal’s core Statistics module, Parse.ly offers far more advanced insights, such as:

• Real-time content performance tracking
• Audience segmentation based on engagement patterns
• AI-driven recommendations for content optimization
• Historical trends and predictive analytics

While Parse.ly is deeply integrated into WordPress VIP, it remains a cross-platform analytics tool that enterprises can use on Drupal, standard WordPress, and other CMS solutions. It’s just that WordPress VIP users benefit from seamless integration and Automattic’s direct support, making it the most frictionless way to leverage Parse.ly’s full capabilities.

AI in content creation

The Drupal vs WordPress debate in content management isn’t complete without addressing AI-powered content creation.

WordPress’s AI advantage: Plug-and-play solutions

WordPress plugins like Jetpack AI bring on-demand content generation, SEO optimization, and personalized recommendations to enterprise sites with minimal configuration. Coming from the WordPress family, this works almost natively. 

You can also bring OpenAI capabilities into WordPress through custom-coded integrations or via plugins that connect to GPT-based APIs. This holds for most AI solutions.

Additionally, managed enterprise hosting plugins like WordPress VIP are actively integrating AI-driven insights to enhance editorial workflows, making it easier for content teams to automate repetitive tasks, optimize for engagement, and create high-quality content faster.

Drupal’s AI Approach: Developer-driven customization

Drupal does not yet have a core AI module and relies on third-party modules and API-based implementations for AI-powered capabilities. A few considerations:

• AI-driven personalization is available via Acquia’s marketing tools, which integrate with Drupal but are part of Acquia’s enterprise offering rather than Drupal itself.
• AI modules such as ChatGPT for Drupal allow AI-generated content creation, but these require developer customization to optimize effectively.
• Enterprises can also integrate OpenAI, IBM Watson, and Google Cloud AI through custom API workflows, but this typically demands more engineering effort than WordPress’s plugin-based approach.

With AI becoming an essential part of modern content strategies, WordPress is leading the way by making AI integration seamless, scalable, and more user-friendly.

Drupal vs WordPress: Headless content delivery

Both WordPress and Drupal offer headless (decoupled) content delivery capabilities, but their approaches, flexibility, and enterprise readiness differ significantly.

WordPress: Headless with flexibility and ease

While WordPress was originally designed as a monolithic CMS, its headless capabilities have matured significantly in recent years, particularly for enterprises. Key features include: 

• REST API & GraphQL via WPGraphQL: WordPress natively supports the REST API, and enterprises can leverage WPGraphQL, an open-source plugin that enables more efficient and flexible data querying.
• Gutenberg as a headless block editor: Gutenberg can be configured to work in a headless setup, making content editing more intuitive even in decoupled WordPress setups.
• Progressive decoupling: WordPress offers a progressively decoupled approach, enabling developers to maintain traditional WordPress rendering where required (for the web channel, for instance), while also providing APIs for seamless integration with frontend applications.
• Enterprise-grade API management via managed hosting platforms: Managed enterprise hosting solutions like WordPress VIP further offer robust API scaling and performance optimization, ensuring content delivery across multiple channels without heavy engineering effort.

Drupal: Built for headless from the start

Drupal has long been positioned as a “content-first” CMS with strong API-driven capabilities. It supports fully decoupled and progressively decoupled architectures out of the box.

• Built-in JSON:API and GraphQL Support: Drupal natively provides JSON:API and GraphQL support through modules, enabling structured content delivery to any front-end framework (React, Vue, Angular, etc.).
• RESTful Web Services: Drupal allows fine-grained control over API responses, enabling enterprises to manage structured content across multiple platforms (web, mobile, IoT, etc.).
• Progressive decoupling: Like WordPress, Drupal too offers a progressively decoupled model that allows developers to use traditional Drupal rendering where needed while still exposing APIs for front-end applications.
• Acquia’s API-first enhancements: Enterprises using Acquia (Drupal’s enterprise cloud) get additional headless tools, including AI-powered personalization and cloud-native API management for large-scale deployments.

In general, WordPress offers a more accessible headless approach, making it ideal for content-driven enterprises that need API-powered content delivery without significant engineering overhead.

Why WordPress wins for enterprise content creation

In the context of content creation, the Drupal vs WordPress comparison has a clear winner: WordPress. While enterprises have historically favored Drupal for its modular content features and standardized content governance, WordPress has significantly leveled up in this area.

With the Gutenberg block editor, reusable blocks, and flexible content structuring, WordPress now offers the same modularity without the complexity, making it the superior choice for enterprise content teams.