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Wordpress Vs Liferay Vs Drupal - Know the Difference

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Ashish Jain

June 19, 2017

The CMS and enterprise portal wars are heating up with a plethora of options. WordPress and Drupal have been popular CMS contenders and Liferay has joined the race. All the three CMS and enterprise portals happen to be open source and deliver great experiences. However, this is where the major similarities end. These three products have different capabilities and the choice to use one over the other stems mainly from what the business needs and business objectives are.

In this blog, we take a look at some of their salient features and assess where they can be optimally and most suitably utilized.

Liferay

Gartner considers Liferay as a ‘leader’ in its Horizontal Portal Products Magic Quadrant. Despite the fact that the enterprise portal market seems to have lost some of its media shine over the past few years owing to new collaboration tools and newer integration frameworks, Liferay has consistently managed to grow its revenue. It has been written in Java and the Liferay Portal can run on any computing platform that runs Java Runtime Environment and an application server.

Here are some of the main features of Liferay:

  • Liferay has an easy to use programming interface that allows users to create basic websites and facilitates easy admiration even without programming knowledge.- It has a built-in web content management system that facilitates the building of websites and enterprise portals as an assembly of pages, portals, themes as well as common navigation.

  • It offers support for plugins for multiple programming languages including Ruby and PHP portlets. Liferay follows open standards for content, web services, front end technologies, portlets etc. which help in reducing the total cost of development and deliver an immediate ROI.

  • Liferay Portal allows users, developers and admins integrate content and services from backend or legacy applications by supporting multiple integration methods such as REST, SOAP, RSS etc. along with proprietary API’s.

  • Owing to its lightweight, scalable, and open source architecture, it helps developers meet the high availability and high-performance demands of the enterprise of today. It also allows the developers to scale the system efficiently as the user base increases.

  • It offers a hook and extension plugin model that allows developers to tailor product behavior to suit their requirements without the need to upgrade or rewrite code from scratch.

  • It offers a comprehensive choice of databases, operating systems, and application servers to run on. This ensures that the infrastructure and skills investment is happening optimally.

  • Its highly modular functionality helps to make the websites smaller and thereby more efficient with an increased speed of operation

WordPress

WordPress contributes to 60% CMS use across the globe. It is one of the foremost, if not, leading CMS and open source blog systems and has become an integral part of the internet’s architecture. WordPress powers 27% of the entire internet and WordPress 4.6 has been downloaded 21.7 million times! Now, these are compelling figures!

Here’s a look at some powerful WordPress features:

  • It allows users to develop powerful and feature-rich websites without advanced technical know-how. It has a highly intuitive and user-friendly user interface that allows users to easily navigate and use the platform.

  • It has a lower setup, maintenance, and customization cost and it is free to install, deploy and upgrade.

  • WordPress offers great extensibility by offering over 47,000 plug-ins for all means and purposes. It also has user-generated extensions which ensure that websites are not limited by extensions created by the enterprise alone.
  • It has multi-user capabilities and allows multiple users to contribute web content
  • WordPress themes are mobile friendly and responsive so they can fit any form factor. The WordPress dashboard can work capably on a smartphone as well as on a PC, which makes website management easier.
  • It is optimized for speed and also offers social media integration.

Drupal

Drupal is an open source web content management platform that helps developers carve out amazing digital experiences. It is developer-friendly and can be used to design complex websites. It supports some of the world’s busiest sites and is capable of handling high user volumes and traffic.

  • =Drupal offers advanced URL control and each item of content can be given an individual URL. Drupal also makes it easy for developers to automate custom URL structure for different content types.
  • It has a powerful taxonomy system that makes it easier to tag and organize content.
  • Drupal offers strong user role and access control functionality that allows developers to create unlimited custom user roles with custom access levels as required.
  • It is highly flexible and can be used to develop complex enterprise websites, simple blogs and even high-traffic eCommerce websites with ease.
  • Compared to WordPress, Drupal websites have a faster response time and load easily.
  • It offers advanced data modelling and integration capabilities with a variety of applications and services.
WordPress Drupal Liferay
Well-Known Users BBC America, Sony Music, MTC News Infusionsoft, Mint, Stanford University – Humanities Center Volkswagen, Allianz, and Lufthansa
Ease of Development WordPress has a highly customizable and flexible framework that allows developers and designers create and modify layouts and applications. Developers can easily create new content types and create advanced custom views without writing any code by using the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views Modules. It has many out-of-the-box features and portlets that enable developers to create and customize a CMS site, an enterprise portal system or an enterprise social networking site with ease.
SEO Capabilities WordPress is SEO friendly – it takes all SEO responsibility and offers several SEO plugins that improve search engine rankings. Drupal provides great search engine capabilities owing to its SEO modules. Liferay provides a wide range of features to help the site rank up higher on the search results. The latest version offers easy ways to create SEO friendly sites.
Support Unprecedented community support. Getting answers to complex problems is easy owing to the large developer community and websites that offer free WordPress support. Support via the active and knowledgeable Drupal community. Completely supported product and offers 24x7x365 platinum support with a 1-hour response time SLA which includes access to all available service packs, security alert notifications, phone, and web-based support, hot fixes etc.
Best Suited for
  • Basic websites for SME’s
  • News or blogging sites
  • Websites that need faster additions and scalability
  • Websites with multiple content contributors
  • eCommerce websites with significant traffic & traffic spikes
  • Websites that demand scalability and stability
  • Large enterprise level Content Management Systems
  • Community platforms that witness multiple users simultaneously performing different actions
  • Enterprise Portals
  • Large enterprise usage Intranet as well as Internet websites that need scalability
  • Websites that need multiple content projects to be developed in parallel and scheduled for publication
  • Websites that need Affiliated Sites Management
Areas of Concern
  • Modification operations require a working knowledge of PHP
  • While WordPress offers a plethora of plugins, they tend of impact the script’s efficiency.
  • Unlike other applications, WordPress script is not as well protected
  • WordPress CMS might not be best suitable for those websites that have high content volumes
  • Updating to newer versions of WordPress can cause conflicts with older plugins that can significantly impact website functionality
  • Limited availability of themes when compared to WordPress
  • High learning curve so features lower on the usability matrix
  • Does not offer backwards compatibility
  • Owing to the breadth of tools and capabilities, Drupal can face some issues in terms of loading and scalability when compared to WordPress
  • Inadequate developer guide, documentation, and tutorials
  • Relatively steeper learning curve compared to WordPress and Drupal owing to the lack of information

Now armed with the above information, it should be easier to choose the right CMS for your enterprise.

The InfoBeans team has a deep expertise in these and various other Content Management Systems. We have helped hundreds of enterprises across the world select the best suited CMS and also helped them develop their web applications using those. If you have some application in mind and not sure which CMS to choose or, want to migrate your existing application to the latest CMS technology, talk to our CMS experts – for free.

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