Magento or Drupal Commerce - Which one is a better Web development platform

We have been working in the field of website development for more than 12 years. We tested and understood all the nuances of working with such platforms as Magento and Drupal like no one else.

In this article Drupal support team shows you all the “underwater rocks” of Magento and Drupal. We compare these two platforms and try to direct you to what suits your business better.

To begin with, they started off with different intentions —  Magento was designed for e-commerce, whereas Drupal was designed for content management. Why does this matter? Well, we can explain.

What is Drupal?

Drupal is an open-source platform for building amazing digital solutions. Anyone can use it, and it will always be free. Drupal is a platform for the development of sites of any complexity that offers a boundless ability to configure and expand the functionality of your site.

It is not only a huge information management system but also a reliable base for creating web applications. Do not forget that Drupal is the third most popular platform for creating websites in the world.

In order to become a Drupal developer and understand the whole system, however, you need to study more materials and patterns than on other CMS.

What do we mean? There is a huge community of developers and other professionals in the various aspects of project implementation on this platform. They will help you master this CMC.

If you have any questions, it’s easy to find answers on the Internet. There are also tasks that no one has done before. You can create solutions from ready-made code, or make a new one. Therefore, Drupal is an excellent platform. A large number of themed sites and forums provide unlimited opportunities for your development in the use of Drupal.

Main advantages of Drupal:

• Has a general authorization between partner sites.
• Has a server protection mechanism during overload.
• Many free themes and templates that can provide a wide variety of solutions in the design of the site.
• Ability to create multilingual websites.
• Powerful admin panel.
• Allows users to find, manage, and structure content very easily, regardless of size.
• Provides flexibility in choosing the format of posts from the admin panel (HTML, full HTML and PHP).
• Easier site administration in comparison with other CMS.
• A good set of different modules and add-ons.
• Drupal has a large and active community.
• Relatively easy installation.
• A well-thought-out security system, which is very important for any CMS.

Disadvantages of Drupal

• Difficulty in mastering for beginner webmasters.
• Work with modules.
• Good performance requires good hosting.

What is Magento?

Magento is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms. Users are able to create online stores with this open-source platform. CMS Magento is made in PHP and MySQL and is open source. It can also be modified at any time and adapted to your own needs. Currently, it is wholly managed by Adobe.

Magento originally was designed to provide e-commerce services, and is considered easy to understand.

If you are just beginning web design, you may need to study Magento a bit due to the lack of a built-in visual designer. For more advanced users, working with Magento will not be a problem.

Main advantages of Magento:

• Multiple payment systems, including PayPal.
• High speed, even if there is a large influx of visitors.
• Adaptability of templates for mobile devices.
• An abundance of built-in tools for managing online trading.
• An abundance of built-in functions, including currencies, languages, discounts and coupons, reports and much more.
• Makes it possible to create several online stores simultaneously, and then manage them from a common center.
• There is access to HTML and PHP code.
• A built-in caching system to speed up page loading.

Main disadvantages of Magento:

• It's inefficient to use this platform for running large stores, because it is difficult to master it. The development cost is much higher compared to other popular CMS.
• It will be difficult for a fresh webmaster to cope even with the installation and initial configuration of the system.
• Requires a considerable cash investment.
• Difficulties with customizing templates.
• Extensions and templates for Magento are more difficult to create than for other popular systems.

Compare Magento vs Drupal Commerce

1. Payment Gateways

Drupal Commerce

Drupal Commerce provides an open-source secure software that allows you to schedule inventory, track orders and manage payments through 114 different payment providers. Dozens of world-famous payment gateways with lots of options (PayPal, Payplug, Authorize.Net, Braintree, Stripe, Square etc.) are waiting to come to your website. Different authorization modules are also available.

Magento

Magento supports 12 payment gateways worldwide. The platform offers fraud protection services, simplified registration and money management with Magento Payments. Full authorizations are processed through PayPal, Braintree and Authorize.Net.

2. Design

Drupal platform

Drupal has several themes available in the admin panel. It can be standard themes or you can change the design. You can create your own design.

Templates are presented and filtered by popularity, but you can also search for topics by keywords.

You can choose themes with responsive design, since  the number of only-mobile users is growing. You can change the appearance and structure of the theme in its settings after installation. There are two tools in the administrative panel:

1. Block Layout - a constructor in which the webmaster moves the blocks of the template with the mouse.
2. Theme Settings - the color scheme of the template in which the color of each element is edited. In addition, the settings for displaying images, logo and favicon are configured here.

A big plus is that the administrative panel has its own theme, which can be changed. This is another advantage of Drupal's flexibility. It can be changed for yourself as much as you like.

Magento platform

After installation only the standard theme will be available on the site. It is needed only to demonstrate the capabilities of Magento.

After, you need to find a suitable design option, upload it to the server and configure it to your liking. There are free options.

However, your site will be good only if you are willing to pay for the design. Magento admin panel is designed in a classic style for such things. To edit a template, you must know at least PHP, HTML, and CSS.

The Magento theme consists of three components:

• Layouts defining the design
• Templates consisting of a mixture of PHP and HTML, that are  responsible for the appearance of individual elements
• A skin files which provide for the displaying of colors, fonts, images and establishes the rules for the location of elements.

3. Learning Curve and Online help

Drupal

Online help for Drupal is provided through questions to the Drupal community, as well as to the Slack support channel or forum. There are currently 20,000 questions in the blog.

Magento

Magento is a more demanding e-commerce environment. Official Magento support is limited to core code issues. Magento has a dedicated Stack Exchange community, as well as a help domain and a thriving network of third-party sales consultants.

4. SEO

Drupal

Drupal tools for SEO optimization are modules. They work well. You can automate all the processes by configuring the modules.

For example Token, CTool or Pathauto are used to create aliases automatically. Aliases help to assign normal URLs to pages.

XML Sitemap is used to create a sitemap. Without it, search engines will incorrectly index the resource. In addition to these, there are many other SEO modules.

Magento

Magento CMS is open source. It is written in PHP (specifically uses the Zend Framework). It is already optimized by default for the requirements of search engines and in the basic functionality offers tools for adding meta tags and other SEO parameters.

CMS Magento boasts a comprehensive report function. Thanks to this function, you can carefully monitor the movement of goods, you can find out what visitors pay the most attention to.

Meta tags are not automatically generated. You can fix this by using a third-party module or template.

Due to the cumbersome structure, there is a problem with the low site loading speed.

5. Hosting

Drupal

Drupal has strict requirements for hosting on heavy loads. For the site to work without fail, you need a productive server. This is relevant for different projects. There are also so-called hooks, which should fix any problems with the system.

Magento

One of the main features of the Magento CMS is the fact that this platform is quite demanding on hosting. You definitely need a high-quality hosting provider to use it.

Final thoughts

So, Magento is a powerful CMS that is suitable for launching online stores with a serious budget and a staff of specialists. If you are looking for platforms to create a small platform for e-commerce, then using this engine is unlikely to be effective.

But Drupal is well suited for creating various business projects, and continues to develop further in this direction. Most often, corporate websites, personal sites, blogs, and social sites, online stores are created on this CMS. Drupal is a niche product for professionals who come to the system from other CMS or frameworks.

It stands out with excellent SEO optimization out of the box and the ability to create your own types of content. Drupal is suitable for both professional developers who are able to build their own system configuration on the basis of the kernel, and beginner webmasters who can use ready-made assemblies. It is effective when you want to create a large project that will be distinguished by stability and a high level of security.

We hope that all this information will help you choose between the two platforms. You can always contact DruDesk for any web services.