How Drupal can save you money with its open source origins
Choosing a platform to build a web resource on is an important step. This decision influences your business, your future ability to change something and, of course, your budget. If you care about saving money, then an open source CMF will be a nice option. Whatever you own, Drupal fits well for small business and for big web portals too — for example, Drupal serves fine as an e-commerce platform. We have already described the advantages and disadvantages of Drupal. Today we will focus on its open source nature. Find out what benefits it has as opposed to its enterprise competitors.
Open source benefits at the example of Drupal:
No license fee
Using proprietary software presupposes paying license fees. This can be a one-time fee or an annual subscription. Some even charge a per-seat license, which depends on the number of individuals who have access to the software. This means that if you need to extend your team in future, it will result in additional expenses.
An open-source license, on the other hand, allows to you to review, modify and share the source code for free. If you have decided to create your website on Drupal, you can get access to its modules free of charge, which are like Lego blocks. You just choose the ones you need, download and install them. Drupal modules give you freedom to build any functionality you want. So your company can spend little to no money with a Drupal open source solution.
The power of a world-wide community
“Come for the code, stay for the community” is Drupal’s slogan. The Drupal community unites the whole globe for open conversation. Its members can communicate with each other via different online chats, forums and social media as well as meet face to face in various events like drupalcons, drupalcamps, meetups, training days and so on. There is a lot of space provided for exchanging experiences and for fruitful collaboration that positively affects the quality of the content management software itself.
Regular improvements
Sure, with the practical experience of thousands of web development community members united together, it’s not hard to analyze a CMS and find out what should be optimized. So, you can enjoy Drupalers’ contribution in a form of new versions of old modules as well as new modules and new themes. If you are taking into consideration the tendency of the growing popularity of mobile devices, Drupal 8 has many mobile improvements. So, you can rely on constant functionality enhancements as well as keeping your site up to date.
All you have to do is periodically check whether your website needs Drupal core and module updates. All newly released features are free for downloading and installing. So, updating Drupal to the latest version isn't a problem at all.
Ease of debugging
If you purchase a proprietary software, you only get exclusive rights over it, which limits you. So, if some errors occur on the site, you will have to wait for support from your vendor who has access to the code. Unlike proprietary software, in open source software like Drupal, the actual source code is not hidden. This means that you or any skilled developer can open a so-called “black box,” observe what’s inside, look through the code and fix a bug. In open source programs, bugs are usually passed on to an online issue tracking system that is publicly available to anyone.
Regardless of whether you rely on your employee or hire a third-party Drupal specialists (for example, Drudesk) to solve problems on the site or to optimize it, you’ll get more freedom and more control when having an open source project supported than a proprietary one.
Conclusion
People are used to valuing things that they need to pay for and underrating things they can get for free. But take into account all the benefits of an open source software like Drupal before making up your mind when creating a website. Remember, also, that it’s never too late to switch to Drupal from any other enterprise solution. Our team is always ready to help you enjoy all benefits of Drupal.