Drupal alternatives

Once a leading CMS, Drupal’s popularity has been shrinking fast. As of May 2025, its market share has declined to 1.2% (a 25% decrease since 2024), and usage has dropped to 0.8%.

The reasons are obvious: Drupal is powerful but resource-heavy, upgrades are complex, and the learning curve can even frustrate experienced developers.

Organizations looking for Drupal’s alternatives now have two options: stick with a traditionalmonolithic CMS or pivot to a headless, API-first CMS to deliver cohesive omnichannel experiences.

In this blog, we explore why users seek Drupal alternatives, and highlight six CMS options that deliver where Drupal falls short.discuss Drupal’s drawbacks and six strong alternatives.

#Drawbacks of using Drupal

Upgrades are painful

With Drupal, moving from one major version to another often requires reimplementing templates, retraining staff, and migrating custom modules separately.

Basically, a lot of time, effort, and money.

The challenge is even greater for small and mid-sized organizations, which used to be Drupal’s sweet spot. That’s because many organizations lack the deep expertise or the budget to handle complex Drupal upgrades. For them, what should be a straightforward process quickly turns into an expensive, time-consuming roadblock.

When the cost of upgrading ends up being higher than what was initially spent to build the site, you’re better off looking at alternatives.

Heavy maintenance

Running Drupal gives organizations full control over their site, but that control comes at a cost. And that’s the cost of maintaining a bloated CMS.

Teams must handle the entire technical stack, including server setup, database configuration, module updates, security patches, and more. Unlike SaaS-based or managed headless CMS, Drupal isn’t plug-and-play.

For lean organizations, maintenance can quickly drain their resources. For enterprises, Drupal’s heavy maintenance can forever keep their developers busy, making it difficult for them to focus on new product launches and building new digital experiences.

Limited agility and poor fit for omnichannel strategies

This high-maintenance burden makes Drupal less attractive for companies that want more agility. Every update or major change requires planning and testing.

While newer versions of Drupal can be decoupled for a headless-like omnichannel experience, it isn’t inherently headless. Even with decoupling, Drupal often demands heavy customization, custom APIs, and ongoing developer support.

It was designed as a web-first CMS, which creates limitations when organizations want to deliver a seamless omnichannel experience across web, mobile apps, and other devices.

In short, Drupal can technically support omnichannel delivery, but it isn’t the most efficient or scalable way to achieve it.

#Drupal vs. headless CMS

As mentioned above, Drupal can be used in a decoupled and work in a ‘headless-like’ way, but headless is not the same as decoupled.

Here are the key differences between the two.

Headless CMS: It provides only the backend application and APIs to connect to the frontend. You can choose the best frontend technologies based on your needs. The backend and frontend don’t need to run on the same framework or programming language. Changes can be made quickly to the backend without affecting the frontend.

Decoupled CMS (Drupal’s approach): The Drupal Decoupled project separates backend and frontend, but it still has a default frontend layer. You can replace it with another frontend, or you can continue building on Drupal’s APIs. However, since this is an extension and not part of Drupal’s native architecture, it often feels like an add-on fix instead of an integrated solution.

In practice, headless Drupal usually means twice the work. Decoupling requires setting up APIs or database connections to a new frontend framework, then building that frontend from scratch instead of simply updating Drupal’s existing one.

#Top 6 Drupal alternatives

1. Hygraph

Hygraph is a headless CMS designed for building and managing mission-critical applications. With its GraphQL-native, API-first approach, Hygraph supports rapid content development and deployment and helps you deliver seamless omnichannel experiences.

Here are some of the key features of Hygraph:

• GraphQL API: GraphQL capabilities, including support for GraphQL mutations, let you query only the data you need for faster performance and reduced load times.
• Content federation: You can integrate data from various backends into a single GraphQL API to simplify content management.
• Schema builder: The low-code, drag-and-drop builder helps you define the schema and structure of your content API within minutes.
• Digital asset management: Host and organize your assets or even add custom metadata to your uploaded files.
• API playground: Test different queries, mutations, authorization, and environment before you take everything online.
• Granular permissions: Set up custom roles with specific access controls to streamline data management.

2. Strapi

Strapi is an open-source headless CMS built with Node.js, which makes it easy to work with JavaScript. It also offers a flexible API that supports GraphQL and RESTful APIs.

There are pre-built components available that make it easy to improve app functionality without manual coding. Developers can also define custom content types.

While Strapi is highly customizable, setting it up can require considerable effort, especially when it comes to scaling.

3. Storyblok

Storyblok is another headless CMS that separates the backend from the frontend. Its composable component feature organizes content into reusable and dynamic blocks, which can be customized and adapted across different channels.

Storyblok supports both REST and GraphQL APIs, but it claims that the REST API is more feature-rich.

However, it can be complex to set up, and the outdated documentation only makes things more difficult.

4. Directus

Directus is an open source headless CMS and back-end-as-a-service (BaaS) with support for both REST and GraphQL APIs.

It supports a number of SQL databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite, giving you complete control over your database schema. You can choose to self-host and use your own existing database or go the cloud hosting route using Directus Cloud.

But despite its flexibility, switching between versions can be complex, and the documentation is inconsistent. There are also lesser ready-made extensions available as compared to other headless CMSes.

→ If you want to continue the monolithic path, here are the two major players in the CMS market.

5. WordPress

WordPress is a traditional monolithic CMS launched in 2003, and it still holds more than 61% of the CMS market share.

It has a block-based editor and drag-and-drop tools that make it easy for non-technical users to set up websites. Developers can use custom code to add more functionality to websites.

However, WordPress is still web-centric. If you want to set up omnichannel content delivery or deeper integrations, WordPress can feel rather rigid and require constant workarounds.

6. Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is Adobe’s enterprise-grade content management system. It can handle large, complex deployments, along with high traffic environments. It also integrates seamlessly with the Adobe ecosystem.

However, AEM comes with a steep learning curve, and there are only selected developers who specialize in it, which can quickly increase costs and slow down the implementation time.

Overall, AEM is powerful, but for simpler needs, it can feel bloated and unnecessarily complex. It is only recommended for big enterprises.

#Why choose Hygraph as an alternative to Drupal?

Hygraph is a headless CMS with a powerful GraphQL API. Its queries and mutations offer developers more flexibility and better performance in comparison to Drupal, which requires additional setup and custom configurations. Its content modeling capability supports complex content structure with extensive validations.

Hygraph is built with both development and marketing teams in mind: It facilitates collaboration with its headless architecture, so that developers can focus on innovation. At the same time, editors can create the content they want. Hygraph provides a rich interface with batch operations, custom roles, stages, and everything it takes to enable a delightful editorial experience.

#Final words

If you are already looking for Drupal alternatives, moving to a monolithic CMS doesn’t make sense–unless you want a CMS with similar complexity and limitations.

Instead, you can move to a headless CMS that’s lighter, faster, and built for omnichannel.
Hygraph stands out because of its GraphQL-native, API-first approach. It gives teams the speed and scalability to deliver content anywhere, without the overhead of Drupal.

If you want a CMS that grows with your business, powers complex digital experiences, and balances flexibility with reliability, Hygraph is the one.