Drupal vs WordPress (2026): cost, skill and which to choose

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The quick verdict

Pick WordPress if you run a small or mid-sized business site, a blog or a WooCommerce store and want the widest choice of themes, plugins, hosts and people to help. It is the most used CMS by far, it runs on cheap shared hosting, and you can manage most of it yourself. We build on WordPress every week, so this is the platform we know first-hand.

Pick Drupal if your site is large and structured: many content types, many editors with different permissions, several languages or strict security reviews, with a developer or agency on the team. Both are free, open source and fully portable, so both score 10 out of 10 on our exit score. The real difference is how much skill each one takes to build and run.

Side by side

The add-on counts come from Drupal.org’s module list and the WordPress.org plugin directory. Usage is from W3Techs, which also found WordPress on 58.3% of sites with a known CMS, against 0.9% for Drupal. The exit score is our 10-point measure of how much of your site you can take with you; see every platform on the exit scores page.

Cost over 3 years

The example site: a small business site with a .com domain and one Google Workspace inbox. We price it on budget shared hosting and on managed hosting for each CMS. Pantheon hosts both Drupal and WordPress at the same price, which makes a fair like-for-like column.

How we got these numbers:

• Hostinger (Drupal). Its pricing page lists Premium at $119.52 for 48 months, paid up front, renewing at $10.99 a month, and its Drupal hosting page offers a one-click Drupal install (that page showed a higher $143.52 the same day; we use the pricing page). A fourth year is already included, and WordPress on the same plan costs the same. The domain is free for the first year.
• Bluehost (WordPress). The $3.99 a month Starter price needs a 36-month term: $143.64 up front, then $9.99 a month. The domain is free for the first year.
• Pantheon. Basic is $500 billed yearly, so $1,500 over 3 years, or $1,980 billed monthly at $55. It includes dev, test and live environments, backups and a CDN. No domain is included.
• Kinsta. Single 35k is $350 billed yearly ($35 billed monthly), so $1,050 over 3 years, for one WordPress site and 35,000 visits a month.
• Domain. Namecheap’s listed .com prices as a stand-in: $11.28 for the first year and $18.48 a year to renew. With a free first year from the host, you pay two renewals: $36.96.
• Email. Google Workspace Business Starter at $7 per user per month on the annual plan: $252.

Premium add-ons can change the picture on both sides. A WordPress site often pays a yearly fee for a premium theme or plugins; Drupal’s contributed modules are free, but the hours to configure them are not.

Design and ease of use

WordPress is the easier start. You pick a theme, edit pages in the block editor, and add features with plugins from one directory. One-click installers are standard on shared hosts, and updates run from the dashboard.

Drupal has closed some of the gap. Drupal CMS 2.0, released January 28, 2026, made Drupal Canvas, a visual page editor with live previews, the default. It also added site templates and recipes that set up groups of modules for you. Drupal says Canvas needs no Drupal knowledge to start. Behind the scenes, though, Drupal is installed and updated with Composer, a command-line tool, and its content modeling (content types, fields, views, roles) is powerful but takes planning.

Put simply: a non-technical owner can run a WordPress site alone. Most Drupal sites are run by a team with technical help.

Content structure

This is where Drupal earns its reputation. Content types, fields, taxonomy and views (lists and filters built from your content) are part of core, and so are detailed roles and permissions. A site with staff profiles, events, locations and research papers, each edited by a different team, fits Drupal’s model out of the box.

WordPress starts with posts and pages. Custom post types and fields come from plugins or code, which works well, but on a large site you end up relying on several plugins to do what Drupal does in core. For a typical business site with service pages, a blog and a contact form, WordPress’s simpler model is a plus, not a limit.

Store, blog and SEO

• Store. WooCommerce, a free plugin, turns WordPress into a store with 0% platform fees; many features use paid extensions, such as WooCommerce Subscriptions at $279 a year. Drupal Commerce is free, supports Drupal 10.3 and 11, and 41,680 sites report using it. Payment processor fees apply on both.
• Blog. WordPress started as a blogging tool, and posts, categories, tags and comments are core. Drupal handles articles and blogs well too; the Byte site template includes one.
• SEO. WordPress core has clean permalinks and XML sitemaps, and plugins such as Rank Math add meta, schema and redirects. Drupal CMS includes built-in SEO and accessibility checks and sitemaps. Both give you full control of titles, URLs and code. See our SEO entry.

AI features

Drupal CMS 2.0 ships optional AI tools: pages generated from a text prompt, an admin chatbot for site-building tasks, AI-suggested image alt text for a person to review, and an AI Dashboard. It lists built-in support for the amazee.ai provider, with free tokens included, plus OpenAI and Anthropic.

WordPress core does not list comparable AI tools in our research. AI writing and design features on WordPress come from plugins and hosts, priced separately.

Upkeep and security

Both need regular updates, and both had busy weeks in October 2026. Drupal fixed a critical remote code execution flaw on October 14 (SA-CORE-2026-014) and urged site owners to install a critical PHP update on October 21. Drupal’s security releases come on the third Wednesday of each month.

Drupal also has a deadline coming: Drupal 10 reaches end of life on December 9, 2026, and Drupal 12 is planned for the week of December 7, 2026. WordPress 7.1 came out on August 19, 2026, with a 7.1.2 maintenance release on September 22. WordPress major updates are usually run from the dashboard; Drupal major versions are a developer task.

Leaving later

This is a tie. Both are open source, so you own the code, the database and the media files, and any host that runs the CMS can run your site as-is. Neither sells you a domain, so it stays at your registrar.

• Drupal: 10/10, skill to leave high. The Drupal User Guide says to back up the database, the uploaded files and the codebase. The free Backup and Migrate module can do this on a schedule, and Pantheon lets you download code, database and files backups.
• WordPress: 10/10, skill to leave medium. Tools, Export makes a standard WXR file of posts and pages, and a full backup of files and database moves to any WordPress host. Our glossary explains website backups.

Moving between them is a website migration, not an export. The FG Drupal to WordPress plugin moves articles, pages, categories, tags and images in its free version; users, comments, menus and redirects need its paid version. Going the other way, Drupal’s WordPress Migrate module imports a WordPress WXR file. Our guide to leaving your website builder covers the steps.

Pick Drupal if… Pick WordPress if…

Pick Drupal if you have many content types and editors, need fine-grained permissions or several languages, face formal security reviews, and have a developer or agency for builds, updates and the next major upgrade.

Pick WordPress if you want to build and run the site yourself or with a small budget, want the biggest choice of themes, plugins and hosts, or plan a WooCommerce store. It is the default we would suggest for most small businesses.

Neither? Look at…

• Joomla: a free PHP CMS between the two, with multilingual sites and user access levels built in.
• Ghost vs WordPress: for publications and paid newsletters.
• Our full Drupal review and WordPress review for plans, gotchas and more detail.

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