Case Study
View Case StudyTray.ai
Migrating hundreds of thousands of pages, re-platforming and extending for the leading composable AI integration platform
From Dato CMS to Drupal
We are the Dato CMS to Drupal migration experts
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Challenges with Dato CMS
Key pain points
DatoCMS gives all the vibes of Prismic, but is somehow less flexible. It can feel like a glorified drag-and-drop schema builder. The moment you want to do anything mildly custom, the walls start closing in. And yes, the pricing stings. It scales fast, which is great for Dato, not so great for anyone trying to run a startup without selling a kidney.
The ecosystem is small, the extensions are thin, and deeper customisation often turns into "well, I guess we're building that ourselves." There's no hard spend cap — DatoCMS confirmed overages accumulate automatically on paid plans with no way to set a budget limit, so surprise bills are a real risk. Once your project grows, you quickly realise drag-and-drop doesn't magically give you validation or extensibility. If you need something genuinely custom or long-term scalable, there are better choices. Just contact us before you start one of the most expensive journeys.
Limited customisation options
DatoCMS hits a ceiling fast if you need deeply custom logic. The drag-and-drop model is convenient, but it doesn't give you the freedom a code-first setup would.
Pricing based on traffic
Costs scale with usage, which can get painful quickly for growing sites. Traffic spikes = surprise bills, and there's no hard spending cap to protect you.
Steeper learning curve
While the UI is simple, the API-driven side demands more technical understanding. Non-developers may struggle once things get complex.
Need for additional plugins
Out-of-the-box features only go so far. More advanced workflows often require plugins or custom development to bridge gaps.
Limited feature set scalability
Great for small–mid projects, but larger, more demanding setups can outgrow what DatoCMS offers out of the box.
Potential integration issues
Certain frameworks and tools need careful configuration, and edge cases appear more often than you'd expect in more mature CMS ecosystems.
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.
Common questions
Dato CMS to Drupal migration FAQs
Answers to the most common questions about Dato CMS to Drupal migration
How does DatoCMS compare to other headless CMS platforms?
DatoCMS sits in an interesting middle ground. The UI is polished and editors pick it up fast, which puts it ahead of more developer-centric options like Hygraph or Strapi. The image pipeline is genuinely excellent, with automatic optimisation and responsive transformations built in. Visual Editing launched in February 2026, so editors can now click directly on page elements to make changes with real-time updates — available on all plans including Free. Where it still falls short is customisation depth. Compared to Sanity, you hit ceilings sooner when you need custom validation, unique editorial workflows, or deeply nested content structures. Compared to Contentful, DatoCMS is cheaper at lower tiers but has a smaller plugin ecosystem. It's a solid choice for small to mid-sized projects, but larger builds tend to outgrow it.
What does DatoCMS pricing look like as traffic grows?
DatoCMS pricing is tied to API calls and bandwidth, which means costs scale with your traffic. The free tier includes 100k Content Delivery API calls per month and 10GB of bandwidth. Separately, the Developer plan Content Management API limit was raised to 25k monthly calls in April 2026. The Professional plan runs €199/month on a monthly basis, or €149/month billed annually, with higher limits including 1M CDA API calls and 1TB bandwidth per month. The Enterprise tier is custom-priced. One real concern worth flagging is that there is no hard spending cap. DatoCMS confirmed in their community forum that paid plans let overages accumulate automatically with no way to set a budget limit — so a traffic spike or viral post can generate surprise bills without warning. Set up API caching aggressively and lean on static generation to keep costs predictable. If budget guardrails are critical to your team, factor that in before committing.
Is DatoCMS good for non-technical content editors?
For basic content editing, yes. DatoCMS has one of the cleaner editor interfaces in the headless CMS space. Drag-and-drop schema building means content teams can understand the structure visually, and the media library is well-designed. Visual Editing — launched February 2026 across all plans — now lets editors click directly on live page elements rather than switching to a separate preview environment, which closes a long-standing gap. The issues that remain are around scale. Editors managing content across multiple locales find the interface gets cluttered. The Structured Text editor has been noted as slow on very long documents with heavy hyperlink use (a bug patched in April 2026, so recent versions should be fine). For teams coming from WordPress or HubSpot, the shift away from WYSIWYG-first thinking is still an adjustment, but Visual Editing reduces the friction considerably.
What should you watch out for when migrating from DatoCMS?
The migration path out of DatoCMS is cleaner than most. Both GraphQL and REST APIs give you full content access, so extraction is straightforward. Schema mapping is the main planning task, since DatoCMS's modular content blocks need to be translated to whatever structure your target CMS uses. The thing to watch is image URLs. DatoCMS serves images through its own CDN with transformation parameters baked into the URL, so you'll need to re-upload assets and update references across your content. Budget 3-6 weeks for a typical DatoCMS migration. If you're using their Structured Text field type, allocate extra time to convert that into your new CMS's rich text format.
How do I migrate a website from Drupal?
We export your content, taxonomy, user data, and media from Drupal's database, then restructure everything for the target platform. Most Drupal migrations we handle move to Sanity or a headless setup with Next.js. The timeline depends on how many content types, custom modules, and Views you're running. A typical mid-size site takes 4-8 weeks. The hardest part is usually untangling custom module logic and rebuilding it in a modern stack.
What are the best Drupal alternatives?
For enterprise projects that need structured content and granular permissions, Sanity is our top recommendation. It matches Drupal's content modelling depth without the PHP overhead or the shrinking talent pool. For simpler sites that were on Drupal because someone chose it 10 years ago, WordPress or even Webflow might be enough. The right alternative depends on whether you actually need Drupal's power or just inherited it.
How do I migrate from Drupal 7 to a modern CMS?
Drupal 7 reached end-of-life, so this is urgent for many teams. Rather than migrating to Drupal 10 (which is essentially a rebuild anyway), most of our clients choose to move to a headless CMS instead. We extract your Drupal 7 content using Drush and custom migration scripts, then map it to the new platform's schema. The frontend gets rebuilt in Next.js or a similar framework. It's a bigger project than a version upgrade, but you end up with a system that's actually maintainable long-term.
How much does a Drupal migration cost?
It varies wildly based on content volume, custom modules, and frontend complexity. A small Drupal site with 500 pages might cost $15,000-$30,000 to migrate. Enterprise Drupal sites with thousands of pages, custom workflows, and multilingual content can run $50,000-$150,000+. The honest truth is that Drupal migrations are expensive because the platform is complex. But the ongoing savings from reduced hosting costs, easier maintenance, and cheaper developer rates usually justify the investment within 12-18 months.
Is Drupal still worth using in 2026?
Only if your project genuinely needs what Drupal offers, meaning deep content modelling, granular permissions, and multilingual support at scale. For government and large institutional sites, it still makes sense. For everything else, the shrinking developer pool, high maintenance costs, and painful upgrade cycles make it hard to justify. We've moved many teams off Drupal who were paying $200+/hour for specialized developers when a modern headless setup would have served them better at a fraction of the ongoing cost.
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