TYPO3 vs Drupal

When it comes to a Content Management System for your website, making the right choice among the galore of options available is incredibly important. One should be careful enough of weighing the advantages of one over the other, and how suitable these merits are for the particular website in question. Our detailed comparison between Drupal and TYPO3 can help you in this regard.

What is a Content Management System?

Abbreviated as CMS, a Content Management system is a software application that you can use to create, modify, publish and manage digital content. From blogs to images, videos to eBooks, a CMS can be used to build and manage a website displaying these and other forms of content on the internet. 

More and more businesses are choosing to create and manage their websites with a CMS for greater ease of use. A Content Management System eliminates the need for highly technical know-how concerning website building and maintenance. This is perfect for start-ups, freelancers as well as medium- to large-sized businesses who wish to make regular changes or add frequent updates to their websites, without the hassle of getting restricted to bulky lines of code. 

Choosing the Most Suitable System for Your Website

With the current market emerging with newer Content Management Systems every day, it becomes important to be selective and refined about which CMS suits your needs the most. The unquestionable market leader in the field happens to be WordPress, which holds 65 % of the CMS market share. Click here to go to our WordPress article.

However, content management systems like Drupal and TYPO3 are not far behind in terms of efficiency and suitability. While there are more than 1 million Drupal sites online today, TYPO3 is increasingly grabbing the attention of large enterprises all over the world. Both Drupal and TYPO3 beat WordPress when it comes to handling complex websites for businesses with greater security needs.

Drupal

TYPO3

Pocket-friendly Pricing

Wide and Popular Market Presence

Easy to use

High Performance and All-round Control

Organized Content Management Support

Easy Integration and SEO

Efficient Scalability

High Levels of Security

Easy Installation and Customization

Hosting Support for Large, Heavier Websites

Multilingual support

Unmatched Multisite support

Easy Maintenance and Updates

Resourceful Community

Pricing

Both Drupal and TYPO3 are open-source Content Management Systems, which means they are free to use as well as highly customizable as per your needs. Being open-source, Drupal and TYPO3 witness regular contributions from experienced developers all over the world, whether for new extensions, debugging or additional support.

Market Presence

Drupal beats TYPO3 in this area with a market share of around 2 % and is thus in the top ten of the most popular CMS. The top three are WordPress, Shopify and Joomla. TYPO3 finds a mention in the Global Top 15, with a market share of around 0.5 %. Drupal has managed to overtake TYPO3, even though it is younger.

Ease of Use

Drupal does not require any technical or advanced skills for learning or using the platform. However, this comes at the cost of a lack of advanced customisation using drupal. On the other hand, TYPO3 is better suited for those who can use their development skills to make the best out of the platform. While it may take longer to adapt oneself to the content management system’s wide-ranging functions, TYPO3 offers a smooth experience once you have mastered its internal language.

Performance and Control

Both Drupal and TYPO3 offer wide-ranging modules and extensions that contribute to a more effective overall performance of the CMS. Drupal’s diverse modules have something for everyone and are suitable for the creation/modification of multiple content types – text, blogs, images, videos, podcasts and so on. When it comes to speed, TYPO3 offers faster results compared to Drupal.

On the other hand, TYPO3 boasts over 60,000 such core improvements and additions. The platform runs an internal language called TypoScript which can be used to create dynamic content – this feature is absent in Drupal. Also, with it’s extensive support for layout control and diverse multimedia, it emerges as a winner in the segment.

Content Management Support

Drupal and TYPO3 bring to the table powerful functionality, impressive flexibility and massive support for a rich content variety. Both platforms provide numerous plugins and extensions to meet the specific needs of customers. TYPO3 stands out with its dedicated internal language TypoScript, which helps in the creation of dynamic content as well as specifics, such as page layout control and more.

Content management on TYPO3 follows a tree structure, which is far more organized and convenient compared to Drupal’s List Structure. Handling complicated functional processes becomes easier on TYPO3 once you have mastered its internal language. Drupal provides moderate functionality support in this case. Even the website stability is higher in TYPO3 compared to Drupal. 

Integration und SEO

Both TYPO3 and Drupal offer integration with CRM and ERP for handling comprehensive business applications. Drupal was designed to address search engine preferences specifically, hence it has dedicated support for integration and SEO. However, TYPO3 also provides standard SEO and social media engagement tools for enhancing marketing and branding efforts on the web.

Scalability

Both TYPO3 and Drupal were created keeping larger businesses and enterprises in mind, and therefore allow running multiple websites with one base installation. However, there is a slight difference: all the websites created using Drupal will have the same core code, modules and themes despite the difference in content-enabled modules, themes and settings. On the other hand, TYPO3 allows new websites to be created using the current one as a template. Content and extensions are sharable between two or more websites, which is more beneficial to large-scale enterprises handling multiple websites.

Security

Both Drupal and TYPO3 are highly recommended for large scale enterprise solutions, which demand tighter security around their web solutions. TYPO3 is the most secure CMS around and brings the highest levels of security to the table, while Drupal serves security purposes moderately.

Installation and Customization

Drupal and TYPO3 are not as easy to install and customise as WordPress or Joomla. Although both the CMS platforms provide enormous scope for developers to create optimised digital solutions for large-scale enterprises, it requires advanced learning and skilled technical developers to reach the pinnacles of complexity, implementation, configuration and administration using Drupal or TYPO3.

TYPO3 comes with a special internal language – TypoScript – which can take longer to master. Installation is hassle-free, and customisation is smooth too once TypoScript has been adapted to. Those who would nevertheless like to use TYPO3 because of its many advantages can make use of our TYPO3 expertise, simply contact us for this without obligation.

Talking about Plugins, TYPO3 plugins are easier to use and come with plug-and-play functionality. On the contrary, Drupal plugins are highly developer-focused and call for more advanced user management for setting up additional tools and API expansion.

Hosting

The hosting requirements for both TYPO3 and Drupal are high because of the CMS being comparatively heavy for both. This makes these content management systems much more suitable for large-scale enterprises and their complicated, hierarchical websites. These needs cannot be met with simpler CMS like WordPress.

Multisite Features and Multilingual Support

Both Drupal and TYPO3 were created keeping enterprises in mind. However, TYPO3 wins the battle with its incomparable multisite features. Drupal, on the other hand, is not always the most comfortable to set up because of complicated processes for multisite support. In terms of multilingualism, Drupal takes the lead with its support to 180+ languages, while TYPO3 is available in over 50.

Maintenance and Updates

TYPO3 requires regular updates for smooth functioning, while its overall maintenance procedures are both costly and time-consuming. On the other hand, high-end websites created with Drupal also demand considerable investment.

Community

Both TYPO3 and Drupal offer extensive community support to developers and users of the respective platforms. Comparatively, TYPO3’s community is much more compact. However, there is no dearth of learning and problem-solving – community is indeed a resource of any tips, hacks, steps and solutions that you are looking for. On the other hand, Drupal’s moderate-sized community boasts of hundreds of forums and multiple blogs for help.

Wrapping it up

Choosing the right CMS depends more on your specific needs than a general overview of which CMS is better overall. One needs to carefully analyse the respective aspects and weigh them with a careful study of their requirements. Drupal continues to have a larger market compared to TYPO3 but the latter has assumed greater significance for large-scale enterprise solutions due to unmatched security, content framework and dedicated internal language support.

TYPO3: Flexible and powerful

We are convinced that TYPO3 is the right choice and offer our customers a wide range of services related to the CMS. You can also count on our TYPO3 support and trainings so that you too can become a TYPO3 professional. We have even developed a solution on the basis of TYPO3 with which websites can be implemented particularly quickly, efficiently, cost-effectively and with a top design: Our sgalinski Website-Base is available as a website for a fixed price or as a subscription in the service model, with which you don't have to worry about anything other than the content of your website. For the TYPO3 Website-Base, we have also created extensive documentation for the response of a website, which can be used at any time and completely free of charge.

FAQ

What are the advantages of open source CMS?

One advantage of open source (content management) systems is obvious: download and use are free of charge. This would even make it possible to test different systems for one's own website, since there are no costs for use. In addition, open source systems offer other advantages that should not be underestimated. Since the code is freely accessible, an active community gathers around almost every open source CMS, which works on extensions and the development of the respective system. With the necessary technical skills, such a system can be flexibly adapted to your own or the community's desired requirements. Often, additionally developed plugins and functions are also free of charge.

Why use a CMS?

A web presence is now mandatory for virtually every company. But not every company can or wants to employ a developer for its website. Content management systems allow technically less affine persons to enter content, manage and add web pages. A programmer is therefore only needed, for example, when changes are made to the design or when new functions are added. However, the daily editorial work can be done by anyone who has access to the content management system (backend), as the backend of a CMS is designed in such a way that no programming skills are required to manage website content.

How is a CMS structured?

A content management system is structured differently than a pure HTML page. Whereas in the latter, content is hard-coded and must be changed in the code if the content needs to be adjusted, in a CMS, template code and content are separate from each other. This means that changes to the content have no consequences for the function and design of the website. At the same time, content can be entered via a (in most cases) user-friendly interface, so that content changes can be made without a developer.

What makes a good CMS?

A good CMS system should on the one hand be easy and intuitive to use for editorial staff. On the other hand, there should be some leeway for the development of a website, so as the company grows, it may be necessary to build a more complex site structure, add new languages or manage multiple sites simultaneously, without compromising on security. TYPO3, for example, is a CMS that is mostly used in the enterprise sector, because it fulfills exactly these characteristics: It is flexible, extensible and one of the most secure content management systems in the world.

Contact us

You would like to realize your website with TYPO3 or switch to TYPO3? – Then we are the right agency for your project related to the content management system TYPO3. Simply contact us with your project idea for a non-binding offer!