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Why we still bet on Drupal in 2026 — and where we’d reach for WordPress instead.

The honest side-by-side breakdown we wish someone had handed us in 2018. Content modeling, accessibility, performance, plugin ecosystems, and the org-fit question nobody talks about.

Most takes on Drupal vs. WordPress in 2026 are tribal. Ours is operational: we've shipped sites on both for thirteen years, and we still pick Drupal for roughly one in three projects.

Drupal wins when content modelling is the hard problem — when editors need entity references, paragraphs, layout-builder regions, and a permissions matrix that doesn't fit a single role. WordPress wins when content is plain (posts and pages), the marketing team owns the site day-to-day, and the editorial cadence is high.

What tipped this post into existence: a client last quarter spent six months on a WordPress build for what was clearly a Drupal problem. Three editorial roles, four content types with cross-references, an approval workflow. We rescued it in seven weeks on Drupal 10.

The deciding question we ask: would two new editors join a year from now? If yes, content-model rigour matters. That's Drupal. If the answer is no and the site is a marketing surface, WordPress is the faster, cheaper, more familiar choice — and we'll build you a custom theme so you don't end up plugin-sprawled in eighteen months.

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