Wordpress is fundamentally a blog posting app with a rich plugin and editor ecosystem for advanced usage. It starts out simple, can result in a functional website in a matter of minutes, but can be expanded a LOT to meet your needs. And it's largely backward compatible and major versions usually provide some escape hatch in the form of a plugin that can revert to some previous functionality or preferred UX (like undoing the newer block editor in favor of the simple rich text one of yore). Once you set it up and add some basic caching and security plugins, it's pretty much ready to go.

Drupal is a content management system management system that requires you to spend hours upon hours learning how to manage the software itself before you can start making useful schemas and content. It starts out overly complex and it becomes unusably cluttered with advanced usage. It's horrendously bloated, the kind of shitty enterprise monolithic app (so common in the 90s and 2000s) that did a thousand things poorly, in order to sell itself to management. End-users suffer. The editor experience is horribly slow and the UX sucks. The developer experience is decades behind modern systems, and even worse than Wordpress. The API docs are a confusing mess of clobbered together notes across incompatible versions. The plugins are mostly abandoned. The upgrade process is really not an upgrade; it is a total rewrite (and they've had to postpone the mandatory end of life several times over because so many people struggled with that process). It's a very fragmented ecosystem full of tech debt and endless frustration. And as a result, it's spawned a lot of third-party consultancies and agencies that specialize in Drupal – in a bad way, as in they just help hold hapless small businesses hostage in the Drupal hellscape. It's open-source, yes, but extremely subject to proprietary lock-in, not just within Drupal but within an individual version range of Drupal.

Drupal is bar none the single worst software I've EVER had to work with, and the only framework I absolutely refuse to ever work with again, no matter how much a client wants to pay for it. I would absolutely not recommend it to anyone for any use case, and would very strongly encourage the use of ANY alternative framework, even that rando repo on Github that only has 2 stars from 5 years ago.

It's not just me, either... 3/4 of people who worked with Drupal never want to do so again: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology/#2-web-frame...

To put that in context, compare it to the much-hated (here) React (double the % of people want to keep using it) or even Next.js (almost double). Drupal is TWICE as hated as the most bloated JS framework out there. jQuery soup is more liked. ASP is dramatically more loved. Drupal is right down there with Gatsby, the first AngularJS, and other dead frameworks.

And that new SO visualization is a bit confusing. The older style (2022 and prior) makes it clearer that Drupal is the 2nd-most "dreaded" framework out there: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-loved-dre....

Stay far, far, FAR away from Drupal if you value your time, happiness, or sanity.

If you're looking for a Wordpress alternative, look at any other self-hosted CMS, or a headless system, or something you clobber together out of Airtables, or a flat file CMS, or Access, or Filemaker, or just anything, really. Not Drupal.