Open source. Free forever. Built for the web since 2001.
Drupal is a free, open-source Content Management System that gives developers and content teams complete control over how digital experiences are structured, managed, and delivered — across websites, apps, kiosks, and beyond.
From a university dorm room to the world's most trusted CMS
Drupal began as a message board created by Belgian student Dries Buytaert in 1999 to keep in touch with fellow students at the University of Antwerp. When Dries left the university, he decided to publish the software on the internet — and the name "Drupal" was born, derived from the Dutch word druppel, meaning "drop".
What started as a simple communication tool gradually attracted contributors from around the world. By the mid-2000s, Drupal had become one of the leading open-source CMS platforms, powering everything from personal blogs to high-traffic news organisations. The launch of Drupal 8 in 2015 marked a pivotal shift — adopting modern object-oriented PHP, Symfony components, and a configuration management system that finally made Drupal a serious contender for enterprise projects.
Today, Drupal is maintained by a global community of over 100,000 developers, designers, and strategists. It is the platform of choice for governments, universities, media companies, and Fortune 500 enterprises that need a digital foundation they can trust for decades, not just quarters.
Who uses Drupal?
Drupal is trusted by organisations that cannot afford to get their digital infrastructure wrong — governments handling citizen services, universities publishing research, media companies serving millions of readers, and enterprises managing complex product portfolios across multiple markets.
Universities
- Cambridge University
- University of Toronto
- Princeton University
Public Sector
- European Union
- New York State
- UNESCO
Publishing
- WWE
- Arsenal
- Television Academy EMMYS
Corporations
- Nokia
- GE
- Pfizer
Drupal vs other platforms
Every CMS has trade-offs. Drupal optimises for flexibility, security, and longevity — at the cost of a steeper initial learning curve. For organisations building something that needs to last, that trade-off is almost always worth making.
| Feature | Drupal | WordPress | Contentful |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open source & self-hosted | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | ✗ SaaS only |
| Custom content modelling | ✓ Native, no-code | ~ Via plugins | ✓ Yes |
| Enterprise security model | ✓ Dedicated team | ~ Plugin-dependent | ✓ SOC 2 |
| Multilingual (native) | ✓ Built into core | ~ Plugin required | ✓ Yes |
| Headless / API-first | ✓ JSON:API in core | ~ REST API | ✓ API-only |
| No licence fees | ✓ Always free | ✓ Always free | ✗ Paid tiers |
| Ideal for | Complex, long-term projects | Blogs, small sites | Headless, developer teams |
Ambitious by design, not by accident
Drupal's philosophy has remained consistent across 24 years: give builders the tools to create exactly what the project requires, without imposing artificial limitations in the name of simplicity. This produces a system that rewards investment — the more deeply a team understands Drupal, the more confidently they can build things that would be impossible on other platforms.
Freedom over convenience
Drupal doesn't impose a way of thinking about content. Builders define the structure, editors define the content, and the platform gets out of the way.
Longevity over novelty
Features are added deliberately, with backward compatibility in mind. A Drupal site built today is designed to still be maintainable a decade from now.
Community over corporation
No single company owns Drupal. Decisions are made by a community of contributors, ensuring the platform serves users rather than shareholders.
Transparency over opacity
Security advisories are published publicly. Roadmap decisions are discussed openly. There are no hidden fees, no dark patterns, no surprises.
Drupal is not just software — it is a community. The reason it has lasted 24 years is not because one company kept it alive, but because tens of thousands of people around the world believed in the same thing: that the web works better when the tools that build it are free, open, and shared.
Want to go deeper?
Read our in-depth articles on building, scaling, and maintaining Drupal — or explore what it can do.