Plus, you’d be drafting another third party into the mix - which could get difficult to manage if you’re already working with different vendors for every dimension of your business. The alternative is to use cloud-hosting for your Drupal sites, which makes a lot of sense, but will still burn a hole in your pocket. This all falls under the umbrella of scaling, and if you’re self-hosting your Drupal sites, the scaling process will be relatively slow and costly. You’ll need larger server space to accommodate traffic spikes, you’ll need to launch new websites and apps to serve different geographic locations, you’ll need to quickly build microsites and landing pages for events and conferences, and you may even decide you want to add new functionality, like eCommerce. Drupal's Scaling CostsĪs your company scales, your Drupal site will have to scale, too. For larger and more complex Drupal sites, it can take anywhere between 185 to 250 hours.

Some noted that their Drupal 8 migration required them to develop a new website from scratch because their old custom themes and custom modules in Drupal 6 and 7 were incompatible with Drupal 8’s Symfony framework.Īccording to MTech, migrating an average-sized Drupal site from Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 takes between 50 to 70 hours. Drupal is a versioned software, and in order to get the latest features and support, you will have to migrate to the newest version when the time comes.įor example, when Drupal 8 was released back in 2015, developers found migrating from Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 to be extremely onerous and time-consuming. The former will cost you time (keeping Drupal updated is a never-ending task), while the latter will not come cheap.īut perhaps the most significant costly pain when it comes to looking after your Drupal site is migration. If you don’t have the technical expertise to do this, you can either set aside some time to learn how to do so or hire an experienced Drupal developer to take care of the maintenance. Drupal is a maintenance-heavy CMS platform that requires a great deal of time and attention in the back end.ĭrupal regularly releases core updates and security patches which you have to install manually. Otherwise, you will lose more time and money making changes throughout the project and shopping through thousands of themes and extensions just to get your Drupal site’s desired look and functionality.īesides the substantial implementation costs, you also need to consider the costs of looking after your Drupal site once it’s up and running. This is all assuming that you have a set of clearly defined requirements in terms of design criteria, features, and capabilities. For Drupal sites with a large amount of custom development, various content types, and complicated workflows, the implementation cost can reach upwards of $100,000. For instance, if your Drupal site is going to utilize many content types and follows a complex workflow for content creation, this is going to cost more than having a simple site that has a limited number of content types and a fairly straightforward workflow.įor a standard Drupal project, with minimal custom development, it will take between 6 to 8 weeks to build at the cost of approximately $30,000 to $40,000. The cost to implement and customize alone can cost anywhere between $15,000 to $100,000 depending on the scale of the project. Sure, Drupal 8 now boasts a more user-friendly interface with drag-and-drop composition, but you’ll still require a team of full-stack developers (or the services of a full-stack agency) to help you develop, customize and implement your Drupal site. That’s because Drupal is geared more towards being a developer’s tool. Implementation Costs of Drupalĭrupal may be free to download, but if you’re a non-technical user coming from a non-technical company, you’re going to struggle with the implementation process. In fact, at the enterprise level, Drupal can get very, very expensive.

In that sense, Drupal is very much a free CMS.īut when you’re leveraging Drupal to build a large-scale omnichannel web presence spanning websites, native mobile apps, progressive web apps, and IoT devices, the additional work, development, and risk that comes with Drupal are far from free. Drupal is widely known as a free and open source CMS platform - but the word “free” really ought to have an asterisk.įor a small company, you could indeed download Drupal and host it on a relatively cheap server, accruing minimal costs to maintain a simple website.

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