From Craft CMS to Drupal

We are the Craft CMS to Drupal migration experts

Challenges with Craft CMS

Key pain points

The elephant in the room is PHP. Craft requires a traditional LAMP-style hosting setup with PHP 8.2+ and MySQL or Postgres, which immediately rules out the serverless and edge-first hosting that modern JavaScript frameworks thrive on. You're managing servers, configuring OPcache, tuning database connections, and dealing with all the operational overhead that comes with self-hosted PHP applications. For teams already working in the JavaScript ecosystem, this is a hard sell.

Major version upgrades are genuinely painful. Craft doesn't support skipping major versions, so migrating from Craft 2 to 5 means stepping through every version in between. Each jump brings breaking changes to Twig templates, PHP requirements, and plugin compatibility. We've seen agencies spend weeks on upgrades that should have been straightforward. The Team tier starts at $279 per project and the Pro tier costs $399, plus $99 annual renewals for both. A free Solo tier exists for single-user projects, but costs still add up for agencies, especially when you factor in plugins and the recent trend toward stricter licence enforcement in the control panel.

The community, while passionate, is relatively small compared to WordPress or even newer headless CMS platforms. When you hit an edge case or need help with a niche plugin, you may find yourself digging through GitHub issues rather than finding a ready answer. And while Craft Cloud exists as a managed hosting option, it's still maturing and doesn't yet match the deployment experience you'd get with platforms like Vercel or Netlify.

PHP hosting requirements

You need a traditional server with PHP 8.2+, MySQL or Postgres, and proper configuration. No serverless, no edge deployment, no modern hosting shortcuts.

Painful major version upgrades

You can't skip major versions, so upgrades mean stepping through each release with breaking Twig, PHP, and plugin changes along the way.

Smaller community and ecosystem

The community is dedicated but small. Finding answers to niche problems often means digging through GitHub issues or waiting on forum responses.

Licence costs add up

The Team tier is $279 per project and Pro is $399, both with $99 annual renewals, plus paid plugins on top. A free Solo tier exists for single-user projects, but costs add up quickly for agencies managing multiple client sites.

Learning curve for non-developers

Craft assumes your team includes developers. Content editors coming from WordPress or simpler tools will need time to adjust to the more structured interface.

Twig templating limitations

Twig is clean but limited compared to modern component frameworks. Complex UI logic gets awkward, and you're locked into whatever Twig version Craft supports.

Benefits of Drupal

Key advantages

We'll give credit where it's due: Drupal is a serious CMS for serious projects. If you're building a government portal, a university website, or a massive multilingual platform that needs to serve content in 24 languages, Drupal is genuinely hard to beat. Its content modeling is incredibly deep, its permissions system is enterprise-grade, and its multilingual capabilities are arguably the best in the open-source CMS world. The European Commission runs on it for a reason.

Where Drupal really shines is in complex, structured content architectures. You can model relationships between content types, build granular taxonomies, and set up editorial workflows that would make other CMS platforms weep. If your content team has 50 editors across multiple departments with different access levels, Drupal handles that without breaking a sweat. It's also one of the few traditional CMS platforms that has genuinely embraced decoupled architecture, so you can use it as a headless backend with a modern frontend framework if you want.

The community is smaller than WordPress but significantly more technical. Drupal developers tend to be proper engineers, and the ecosystem reflects that. Module quality is generally higher, security patches are taken seriously, and the project has strong governance. If you're in an enterprise or government context where compliance, accessibility, and security auditing matter, Drupal is a well-trodden path.

That said, we'd only recommend Drupal for projects that genuinely need its power. If you're building a marketing site or a blog, you're using a sledgehammer to hang a picture frame. Talk to us first, and we'll figure out if Drupal is actually the right fit or if you've been sold on it by someone who bills by the hour.

Exceptional content modeling

Drupal's entity and field system lets you build deeply structured, relational content architectures that most CMS platforms can only dream of. Complex taxonomies, references, and custom types are all first-class citizens.

Best-in-class multilingual support

With over 90 languages available out of the box and proper translation workflows baked in, Drupal is the gold standard for multilingual sites. No plugins, no hacks, just native support that actually works.

Granular permissions and workflows

The access control system is absurdly detailed. You can lock down roles, content types, fields, and editorial workflows with a precision that enterprise clients genuinely need and other platforms struggle to match.

Viable headless architecture

Drupal's JSON:API and GraphQL modules make it a legitimate headless CMS option, letting you pair a robust content backend with a modern frontend framework like Next.js or Nuxt.

Strong security track record

The Drupal security team is proactive and well-organized. Security advisories are clear, patches are timely, and the community takes vulnerabilities seriously, which matters a lot in government and enterprise contexts.

Open source with no vendor lock-in

You own your data, your code, and your hosting. There's no monthly SaaS bill that scales with your content volume, and you can move between hosting providers without rewriting anything.