TYPO3 vs Drupal: What Content Management System to Choose

Choice of a platform is a vital component of starting an online business, which largely defines its future success. As there is a great number of CMSs, each pointing out its advantages over competitors, owners are often at a loss when they face the need to choose. Agiliway has started its own series of articles providing the comparison of CMS platforms in order to help you understand, which platform suits your needs best, which advantages you might gain or which hurdles you are likely to meet. This article will look at the difference between Drupal and TYPO3.

It should be noted that the unquestionable leader controlling about 60% of the CMS market is WordPress, reviewed in a previous comparison of CMSs. However, this statistics does not necessarily mean that WordPress is always the best solution. As a rule, WordPress is only the simplest one, which is recommended for small websites and blogs, while Drupal and TYPO3 are better suited for more complex enterprise websites with security needs. What is more, the systems have higher shares on separate markets, for example, TYPO3 is very popular in DACH countries.

Let us look how the two Content Management Systems compare according to the following characteristics:

• Open Source CMS. Both Drupal and TYPO3 are open source. This means that the platforms are free and highly customisable. Thousands of experienced programmers actively contribute to the sources debugging them and adding new extensions, and the support is great for both Drupal and TYPO3: the CMSs present comprehensive documentation, support forums, chat rooms, and other resources easily found on the net.
• Functionality. Both Drupal and TYPO3 have powerful functionality and are very flexible. Drupal has several thousands of plugins, while TYPO3 boasts to have 60,000+ extensions available. Plugins and extensions expand the core functionalities of the platforms and provide new solutions designed to meet specific users’ needs. Unlike Drupal, TYPO3 also has its internal language called TypoScript, using which develops can create additional elements including dynamic content.
• The both CRMs are distinguished for the wide variety of content options available. For example, Drupal allows to create and manage text, blogs, videos, polls, podcasts, statistics, etc. TYPO3, too, supports images, tables, forms and multimedia in addition to plain text while allowing a lot of control over the layout of the page.
• Another advantage, which is peculiar to the two CMSs, is the advanced users’ rights management, even though management features are different for Drupal and TYPO3. Specifically, in Drupal, an administrator can assign specific permission rights to users including a permission to manage a specific part of a website. TYPO3, in its turn, may even have multiple users with the role of an administrator. There is an elaborate access control over all workflows and ability to assign granular rights to groups of users such as editors or reviewers.
• Localization. TYPO3 is renowned for its multiple localisation options and multi-language functions. Still, while TYPO3 itself is available in 50 languages, Drupal is available in as many as 181 languages, which is really impressive considering that even the most widespread WordPress is available in 50 languages too.
• Integration and SEO. Both CMSs integrate with CRM and ERP, which are classic business applications. While TYPO3 provides good SEO and social media engagement tools, which promote website listing and facilitate marketing efforts, Drupal is still number one in term of SEO as it has been initially designed to address all search engines preferences.
• Scalability. Both Drupal and TYPO3 allow running multiple websites with one base installation. In the case of Drupal, the websites will have the same core code, modules and themes, but different content enabled modules and theme, and settings. TYPO3 core installation also allows to create new websites using the current one as a template and share content and extensions between the websites.
• Security. Security is one of the reasons why both Drupal and TYPO3 are recommended for large enterprise websites, as these communities do take security seriously.
• Installation, customisation and hosting needs. Comparing to WordPress or Joomla, both Drupal and TYPO3 are more difficult to install and customise, so that this is definitely not a task for a beginner. While Drupal and TYPO3 offer ample possibility for the developers to create professional optimized solutions, the developing expertise in implementation, configuration and administration of each platform has a steep learning curve. Learning TYPO3 may eventually take even longer time than learning Drupal, as a developer will have to master a TypoScript, the internal language of the system. This means that users will have to invest in their corporate programmers’ education or into expert services. Mind that finding TYPO3 experts outside DACH countries may be a challenging task (for example, in Ukraine, which has become a prominent IT outsourcing destination, Agiliway might still be the largest provider of TYPO3 experts). Considering hosting, both CMSs are rather heavy and their hosting requirements are high, which can drive expenses smaller websites and blogs will find burdening.
• Peculiarities. Although many characteristics of Drupal and TYPO3 are comparable, the two systems have unique peculiarities we should note here. In particular, Drupal is known for providing poor content administration experience, even though developers can install additional modules and extensions to provide content managers with backend and make it more intuitive and easy-to-use. At the same time, Drupal is particularly suitable for creating social community solutions and is, thus, widely used for institutions’, universities’, and media-based websites. In its turn, TYPO3 is distinguished for its modularity. Its backend has easy-to-use drag and drop functions. Another important advantage is the ability to change the structure of the page, there being no fixed order of blocks or sections.

Conclusion

Either Drupal or TYPO3 are rather difficult to learn, but the features are well worth it for the companies looking for well-tailored and secure software solutions and ability to scale. While TYPO3 will be great for creating complex websites for corporate use in a business-critical environment, Drupal would be definitely better for websites creating a social community and encouraging users to create content.

Agiliway specialises in both Drupal and TYPO3 and the team of our developers can help you launch your website using the CMS of your choice, migrate to another platform or add new functionality to the existing solution.

READ ALSO: Agiliway Carries Out Gradual Migration from TYPO3 to Laravel