When it comes to SharePoint vs Drupal, there are a number of important aspects that must be taken into consideration. Initially, SharePoint began as a document management system, but through the addition of many new features and applications, it got transformed into a content management system.
Today Microsoft SharePoint has grown from simply being an intranet platform. It has turned itself into a powerful web framework that has the ability to run large sites and attain the same ranking as do the other content management platforms. On other hand, Drupal gives you an opportunity to create just about anything you can imagine be it a corporate website, intranet, extranet, customer portal, or CRM.
However, both of these content management systems possess their respective pros and cons. Therefore, before you choose either of these systems, it is crucial that you take the following factors into consideration for making a healthy comparison.
SharePoint VS Drupal
Local Development Environment Setup
Analyzing local development environment setup is one of the most important steps in SharePoint vs Drupal comparison. If you are looking to set up SharePoint on a local box, then you may find it hard, as a Windows Server is required to manage a SharePoint website; therefore, you should either get Windows Server on your local box, or go for a virtual machine. This will enable you to enhance your local hardware to meet the memory requirements. Also, using a virtual machine to develop a site is difficult.
Drupal is comparatively easier to set up, manage, and run. It can run on nearly every platform and is totally free. Moreover, most Drupal modules are open source and therefore are supported by the Drupal community.
Integration with 3rd Party Services
Integration with 3rd party services holds significant importance for SharePoint vs Drupal comparison. When it comes to the integration of SharePoint with other third party services, it always seems to have an upper hand, mainly because of the fact that it integrates well with other Microsoft services. Thus, if your company has opted for Microsoft services, then SharePoint is definitely an ideal option. This is simply because you would want to have Windows system administrators and developers.
Drupal can be configured to integrate with Microsoft services, but it is not as easy as it is for SharePoint.
Database Access
SharePoint does not provide developers access to its SQL databases. Though the developers can technically access it, it can easily lead to data corruption. Also, to share data with another system you need to go through numerous steps.
Drupal offers you complete access to a database. It offers you many performance features, such as menu caching, block caching, form caching, and CSS/JS caching. These options augment the performance of websites.
Cost
In this corporate world, cost is something that must always be considered, and the same holds true for SharePoint VS Drupal. When it comes to buying SharePoint, Microsoft offers some nice pricing options for the buyers. In the start, SharePoint used to be extremely expensive, because you had to deal with endless expenses, such as upfront costs, hardware costs, per user costs, and desktop software costs. Although some of these prices are still there for the server version of the program, the SharePoint online system involves a lot convenient and less expensive pricing system.
SharePoint simply provides you with a bigger and wider platform to achieve more with fewer operations.Though Drupal is a free framework, the expenses involving development and support can elevate the total cost, especially when you are in need of solutions that offer a lot more than just a basic content management system.
After going through and analyzing SharePoint VS Drupal, it is obvious that SharePoint is the better solution.
