Drupal 7 end-of-life was extended up to November 2023. Many companies are struggling to upgrade to Drupal 8 or Drupal 9, because of the high costs of such migration and the loss of Drupal's momentum. Drupal has been slowly dying since 2017 as it missed significant innovations :
- Headless CMS revolution
- Microservices approach to the backend
- API-first architectures
- Cloud-native building
- Admin UX simplicity
- Total Cost of Ownership of Drupal projects
In this article, we'll see what CMSes are the best alternatives to Drupal for 2023.
How did we select the Drupal alternatives?
There are hundreds of CMSes out there but we only selected a few that can really compete with Drupal's rich ecosystem of modules. Let's dig into features of good Drupal alternatives for 2023:
- Structured content modeling (the ability to create data models with typed fields, references, and taxonomies)
- Publication workflows (states, transitions, and associated dashboards)
- Headless API (being able to consume CMS content through an API)
- Fine-grained authorization (define user roles and their permissions)
- Structured rich-text editor with embeds (a simple way to include any social link - YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc...)
- Scheduled publication
- Notifications (workflow status changes, new content creation)
- Content collections management (manual list of ordered content)
- Query builder (define queries in a visual way to retrieve content based on criteria)
- Revision history (being able to roll back to any version of the content)
- Front-end pages builder (being able to manage front-end pages, and define blocks and content)
- Digital assets management system
- Internationalization (localization of content and translation workflows)
- Multi-site management (being able to manage multiple sites from a single instance)
- UI extension (being able to extend SaaS functionality with custom code)
- Webhooks (being able to react on some CMS events with external code)
Best Drupal CMS alternative for e-commerce & portals: Hygraph
If you're running Drupal e-commerce or an internal portal, you must consider migrating to Hygraph. Hygraph is one of the latest headless CMS out there. Their main edge: is GraphQL. The whole CMS is built around GraphQL Schema.
Hygraph offers all major features for content editing and staging, but it also comes with the power of GraphQL federation. That means you can easily glue together multiple back-end APIs into a single GraphQL endpoint (like GraphQL Portal or Hasura).
That's why, for us, it's the best Drupal alternative for e-commerce and portals, as those projects usually make extensive usage of APIs (it's very easy to integrate Shopify Storefront API with Hygraph and their federation for example).
Pricing: from 300USD / month
Hygraph Cons: no front-end page builder included, quite limited digital assets management support
Website: https://hygraph.com/
Best Drupal CMS alternative for Media & Publishers: Arc XP
Arc XP is the CMS created inside the Washington Post, built by journalists, for journalists. It's clear that if you're a media or a publisher company running Drupal, you need to see how powerful Arc XP is.
Not only do they include all CMS features, but they also offer a complete Digital Assets Management system, a video hosting, and distribution system, and a full set of features to organize and manage a newsroom.
They also offer integrated hosting and CDN, Arc XP covers most of the costs of running a media/publishing website. If you want to go further with Drupal to Arc XP migration, check this guide.
Pricing: from 5000USD / month
Arc XP cons: no integrated localization support
Website: https://www.arcxp.com/
Best Drupal CMS alternative for Enterprise corporate: Contentstack
Contentstack is a headless SaaS CMS that perfectly suits corporate enterprise accounts. They provide a full set of features to manage multiple digital properties, front-end previews, and extensive publication and content staging workflows.
What we really love about Contentstack is its ability to group content updates into releases and bulk-publish those simultaneously.
Pricing: from 2000USD / month
Contentstack cons: front-end hosting is not included
Website: https://www.contentstack.com/
Best Drupal CMS alternative for SMBs: Prepr
Prepr is the most feature-rich headless SaaS CMS, including many features that usually are externalized out of CMS, like personalization, A/B testing, and recommendation.
Prepr is therefore perfectly suitable for smaller companies websites. With a single solution, you can manage a website almost entirely with Prepr.
Pricing: from 400USD / month
Prepr cons: limited extensions/plugins capabilities
Website: https://prepr.io/
