Comparison of Gatsby vs WordPress vs Drupal

WordPressWordPress

WordPress is a free and open-source content management system based on PHP & MySQL. Features include a plugin architecture and a template system. It is most associated with blogging but supports other types of web content including more traditional mailing lists and forums, media galleries, and online stores.

DrupalDrupal

Drupal is a free and open-source content management framework written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides a back-end framework for sites ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites. Systems also use Drupal for knowledge management and for business collaboration.
Legend
Icon
Excellent (fully available)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Poor (not possible)
Feature AvailabilityExcellent (fully available)Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)Fair (needs customization or limited)Poor (not possible)
IconFeature Availability
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Poor (not possible)
Poor (not possible)
Performance
CategoryGatsbyWordPressDrupal
Delivery OptimizationGatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Build your site as static files which can be deployed without a server.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Cache your site on a CDN distributed throughout the globe.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Use Google’s AMP’s static page format, which enables faster loads and are privileged in Google search results.
Payload optimizationGatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Load images progressively by displaying a blurry placeholder image before loading the full heavyweight asset, thus preventing pages from appearing incomplete.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Enable modern browsers to load the right size of image assets given viewport size through responsive images.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Inline CSS within your rendered HTML in order to prevent blocking page load in the case of a separate CSS file.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Host fonts on your own server so you can load them from your local filesystem so that a page load-blocking request to external servers does not occur.
Progressive Web App (PWA)Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Provide offline access via service workers in Progressive Web Apps so that users on spotty connections can access your site.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Prefetch all the content needed to load the next link you click in the background while you browse the page as it loads.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Allow browsers to serve content locally without an extra network call when a user visits a previously visited page by fingerprinting static resources that aren’t expected to change.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Fetch only the code for the loaded page on page load as opposed to the code needed to run the entire application.
Developer Experience
CategoryGatsbyWordPressDrupal
Maintainability and debuggabilityGatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Reduce operations overhead by using serverless hosting that doesn’t require security or framework upgrades or accessing a live production server.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Click a Preview button or refresh the page to preview what your content looks like while writing or editing a piece of content.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
See UI changes without refreshing the page in your local development environment browser while editing content.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
See UI changes without refreshing the page in your local development environment browser while editing code.
Declarative renderingGatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Plug and play internal or external third-party components from a shared codebase or component library.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Use a unidirectional data flow without complex interdependencies that are present in other data flow approaches like MVC in order to build complex front-end components.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Use declarative queries in GraphQL that are colocated with your components to retrieve only certain data in a certain shape. Gatsby also pulls data into the GraphQL API so you can query it in your local IDE or query constructor.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Use a hierarchical UI approach by declaratively passing properties down child trees in React, with faster debug cycles through the DevTools extension and element-by-element state comparisons.
Modern development practicesGatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Use asset pipelines, the compilers of the web stack, to transform images and discrete code into minified, raw HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that browsers can parse.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Use languages like Sass and LESS and libraries like Glamor and Aphrodite to colocate CSS with JavaScript and HTML in React in order to solve common problems in vanilla CSS like global namespacing, nondeterminism, dead code elimination, and minification.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Access modern JavaScript features including syntactic sugar, new language features, new data structures and types, and modularity.
Governance
CategoryGatsbyWordPressDrupal
SecurityGatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Protect your application from cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities that could expose your site to attackers.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Enable access control through cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) to prevent unwanted access through vectors such as distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Use environment variables so you can deploy configuration to hosting services without exposing them in your codebase.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Provide user authentication through an authentication provider that will permit access to sensitive areas of your application.
DesignGatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Use tools like Typography.js to make it easier to programmatically design your site by generating CSS that adheres to a certain intended design.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Poor (not possible)
Poor (not possible)
Export application components for use in other applications such as Sketch, which has integrations like react-sketchapp for React components.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Poor (not possible)
Poor (not possible)
Leverage component libraries in other applications like Sketch with integrations like react-sketchapp to accelerate the articulation of your style guide.
Accessibility
CategoryGatsbyWordPressDrupal
Accessible markupGatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Provide a baseline of progressive enhancement where all sites can be accessed as static HTML and CSS and where all fundamental functionality is preserved without JavaScript being enabled.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Leverage ARIA landmarks to provide semantic markers that indicate certain page elements for users of assistive and accessible technologies such as screen readers.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Introduce meaning to HTML to reinforce desired semantics and to aid the navigation of your site by users of assistive and accessible technologies such as screen readers.
Accessible defaultsGatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Provide focus management on each page change through libraries such as @reach/router, an accessible routing library.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Leverage a framework with a clear and robust accessibility statement explaining its position on accessibility and that it is a first-class consideration.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Leverage a framework with full compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. Gatsby is partially compliant.
Documentation
CategoryGatsbyWordPressDrupal
Tutorials and guidesGatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Read an introductory tutorial with a step-by-step process to help new users get started quickly.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Read a guide with a step-by-step process to help you source data from a data source such as a CMS.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to incorporate a CSS framework such as Sass, LESS, Glamor, or Aphrodite.
Development guidesGatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to perform routing and route management in the framework.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to perform testing and quality assurance such as linting within a development workflow.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to perform debugging and troubleshooting within a development workflow.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to improve performance benchmarks within the framework.
Feature addition guidesGatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to add media assets such as image and video to your application.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to add search capabilities and indexing to your application.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to add analytics integration and segmentation to your application.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to add authentication providers to gate access to your application.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Read a guide with a set of instructions to perform search engine optimization for your application.
Ecosystem
CategoryGatsbyWordPressDrupal
EcosystemGatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Leverage an existing component ecosystem such as React’s, which includes out-of-the-box component libraries and curated sets such as JSCoach.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Plug your application into static hosts such as Netlify, Render, or surge.sh. WordPress and Squarespace include built-in hosting.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Leverage a theme ecosystem with various options for your application to take on a custom look and feel. Jekyll has themes, and WordPress and Squarespace offer default theme selection.
IntegrationsGatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Leverage a framework that has integrations off the shelf with more than 20 other systems.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Leverage a framework that has integrations off the shelf with more than 50 other systems.
CommunityGatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Fair (needs customization or limited)
Collaborate with other developers on an individual basis in a community that offers a pairing program for mentorship.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Good (partially available, e.g. plugins)
Purchase items from a swag store to express your support of the framework community.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Feel welcome and empowered to contribute within a community that has an official code of conduct governing all interactions.
Gatsby logoWordPress LogoDrupal Logo
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Excellent (fully available)
Understand how to contribute to a community with a clear section in documentation for new contributors.