They are both content management systems. One was built specifically for bloggers (which is a pretty large market segment) and the other was built for any arbitrary type of content (which although it is an even bigger market, the ambiguity of it negatively affects awareness of what Drupal can do).

Nonetheless, should large and arbitrary be better than specific? You could convert Drupal into a WordPress blog by just defining your blog post type in Drupal’s database. A commenting system is already there for all types of content. It also has user registrations out of the box with an even more advanced user roles system than WordPress. So why not use it?

If all you want to do is blog, then WordPress is an already customised Drupal installation for you. It will give you all the stats you need and some plugins for the peripheral features you need for your blog.

However if your blog is less than half of your website’s content, then the time you will spend tweaking WordPress is more than the time you will spent tweaking Drupal. The time spent adding new types of content into Drupal is linear, and in most cases it is faster than doing it with plain PHP. It’s main benefit is that it allows non-programmers to edit vast amounts of arbitrary types of content without hassling the developer.

Well, is that good? It depends. If you don’t want the hassle of customer support for content updates to their website, that’s the way to go. However website maintenance might be your milk and bread. That’s arguable though, WordPress can still be configured with plugins like Advanced Custom Fields so that its users have the same level of control over the content.

Both systems have a relatively steep learning curve, I have no side by side comparison but you can assume that you will waste time on both systems to learn about them.

WordPress is a bit better when it comes to version control, as more things will most likely be in PHP files. However Drupal is much more heavily reliant on the database, which makes multiple developers working together on it a big pain. To this day this remains my personal biggest annoyance with Drupal, how would you get a large team of developers to work on the same website?

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