Drupal entered the e-commerce business 20 years ago, making it the oldest PrestaShop competitor.
I have used Drupal for my e-commerce business but decided to go back to PrestaShop after a few years.
In this article, I will introduce the most significant Drupal weaknesses and why I chose PrestaShop instead.
I will also explore the following:
- Similarities Between PrestaShop And Drupal
- Drupal Is Dying
- Drupal vs. PrestaShop Popularity
- Ecommerce Drupal vs. PrestaShop
- Support of PrestaShop vs. Drupal
- SEO Of Drupal vs. PrestaShop
- Conclusion
Similarities Between PrestaShop And Drupal
Both are open-source e-commerce solutions, meaning that both are free. You only pay for hosting and additional custom needs: themes, plugins, and custom development.
Both platforms are multilanguage and support multiple currencies. In addition, it can be customized with large amounts of themes and plugins.
Drupal Is Dying
If you look into Drupal vs. PrestaShop Google Trends, you will see that Drupal popularity is decreasing. I assume that the main reason for that is the growing trends of other platforms (like WooCommerce).
The monthly keyword count shown in the Google Trends picture is too low to make a good judgment.
Drupal vs. PrestaShop Popularity
Drupal was never very popular. It is an excellent platform overall but never reached popularity like PrestaShop.
That might seem slightly against the Google trends picture shown in the previous chapter. Still, the web consists of over 5k Drupal sites and almost 200k PrestaShop stores.
Drupal holds only about 3% of the market share, and the rest of it (more than 97%) is taken by PrestaShop.
Another essential metric to consider is that Drupal is losing to PrestaShop in all segments (top 10K sites, top 100k sites, and even top 1M sites).
PrestaShop is leading in countries like France, Spain, Italy, Poland, and many others. Drupal is only popular in Yemen.
Ecommerce Drupal vs. PrestaShop
I reviewed WordPress vs. PrestaShop before and noted that these two are very different things – one is a blog platform, and another is an e-commerce platform.
The same is with Drupal vs. PrestaShop. Drupal is CMS (Content Management System), and PrestaShop is an e-commerce platform. So to have purchased your Drupal – you would have to install some addons or even hire a developer to do that.
For content management, Drupal is great, but from my own experience – WordPress would be better for SEO, and it is a more up-to-date system. More than a hundred times more popular than Drupal.
Support of PrestaShop vs. Drupal
When talking about e-commerce, most customers want to have some support for their questions for the first few years. That is because they usually face custom questions like tax or custom workflow handling.
This is the biggest weakness of Drupal – they don’t offer support.
PrestaShop offers support, but that one is paid.
Fortunately, both platforms have official forums where you can ask your questions. Moreover, both are active enough to get your questions answered.
SEO Of Drupal vs. PrestaShop
Drupal has fundamental SEO management. That means that this platform only allows you to control things like meta title (a title that is shown in Google results in your browser tab) and similar basic things.
PrestaShop is more advanced when talking about SEO. I have a PrestaShop marketing blog category that you can explore for more tips.
Sitemap building, meta title and description building, Open Graph data, responsive theme, and more could be found only in PrestaShop.
Conclusion
We have reached the conclusion section whereby now you should know that:
- Drupal is a great content management platform that might be unsuitable for e-commerce and better replaced by PrestaShop.
- Drupal is slowly dying, so you better check out WordPress or similar solutions for content management.
- PrestaShop is a fantastic go-to platform for online e-commerce businesses.
I have compared more platforms, see PrestaShop Comparison category.