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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.