With WordPress’s continuing quest to offer a more well rounded feature set, and Drupal’s efforts to become more and more new user friendly, the two are rapidly traveling on a crash course toward the other.
Drupal’s got the current edge in terms of potential. It’s just too flexible to not be a foundation for whatever your online projects are. From fully featured e-commerce solutions to a newly integrated framework for creating new types of content, Drupal has the structure to build almost anything conceivable. It’s definitely a step up from WordPress, where your options are “page” or “post”. A little coding knowledge and you can take on any big boy.
But head to head against WordPress, it fails on a number of levels. Want to embed and display images? WordPress does it out of the box. Drupal requires set-up, installing modules, tweaking and performance enhancement. Running a high traffic site? Drupal’s going to need more tweaking and a healthy review of cache settings, installation of more modules and that’s just to start. On a shared server, Drupal, with enough modules to compete with WordPress’s feature-set, will choke.
So if you’re dealing with resource limitations, or you need a simple and clean user interface, WordPress is the winner. If you’re looking at a complicated design, with the need for cutting edge code, Drupal should be your playground.