Drupal is an open-source CMS developed by Dries Buytaert in 2001. Today over 1.6 million sites run on Drupal, including NASA, Tesla, The Economist, Oxford University, and many US and European government sites (whitehouse.gov was once on Drupal). Drupal is a "developer-first" CMS โ more complex than WordPress but stronger in security, scaling, and content-management flexibility.
Drupal vs WordPress
The main difference is the target audience. WordPress targets bloggers and small businesses with "build a site in 5 minutes." Drupal targets professional developers and projects with complex content strategy. Technically Drupal uses the concept of a "node" โ every piece of content (article, page, product, event) is a node enriched with custom fields. This approach makes building large site structures very flexible.
On security Drupal is notably ahead โ drupal.org has an official security team, CVE patches ship quickly, and the core is built "secure by default." WordPress has more issues mainly due to plugins. That's why WhiteHouse, NASA, EU institutions chose Drupal.
When Drupal is the right choice
Drupal is right when: (1) you have a large content site โ 10,000+ pages, complex taxonomy (categories, tags, attributes up to 3 levels); (2) multilingual โ Drupal's multilang is stronger, 100+ languages; (3) corporate workflow โ content creation, review, approval, publishing with roles; (4) high security needs โ banks, government, healthcare; (5) custom functionality โ Drupal's API is powerful enough to write any module in PHP.
Localization and maintenance
Drupal core supports 100+ languages including Uzbek. Themes are fewer but quality: Olivero (Drupal 10 default), Claro (admin), Gin Admin (premium). Modules 49,000+, mostly free. Drupal maintenance is more expensive than WordPress โ developers are fewer and rates higher. In Uzbekistan a Drupal specialist runs 200-400K sum/hour, WordPress 80-200K sum.
Key drawbacks
The biggest drawback is the learning curve. For beginners the admin is complex; terminology (node, taxonomy, content type, view, block, region) is unfamiliar. Migration is heavy โ Drupal 8 to 10 upgrade takes 2-3 weeks because modules and themes change fundamentally. The plugin ecosystem is smaller than WordPress.
Sayt.uz practice
Drupal is rare among Sayt.uz clients โ only 14 active Drupal sites as of January 2026, mostly educational institutions, banks, and government-adjacent projects. Average Drupal build cost: 8-25M sum depending on content, monthly maintenance 1.5-4M sum. Advice: if you plan under 10,000 pages, WordPress is enough 90% of the time; Drupal makes sense only when content complexity and security requirements truly demand it.