Drupal Vs Brightspot - A Detailed Comparison

A Content Management System(CMS) is a software platform enabling businesses to create digital identities and organize, deliver, and modify content with little or no technical knowledge. The evolution of the internet led to the emergence of multiple open-source and proprietary CMS. However, the numerous CMS options have always confounded businesses. They often find it challenging to choose a CMS that offers the best-in-class services suited to their requirements. With so many options available, it can be overwhelming to choose the best platform that suits your business needs.

Drupal and Brightspot are two popular platforms in the market offering robust features and functionalities.  This blog provides a detailed comparison of the two CMSs to help you choose the right CMS.

Drupal vs Brightspot: A Deep-dive into Features & Functionalities

• Content Management
  Drupal is a highly flexible content management system, offering various content types, fields, and taxonomies. It provides advanced content creation, editing, and publishing tools. It enables content teams to manage and publish content across multiple channels and implement a custom workflow based on organizational governance standards. 
  
  Brightspot CMS too provides user-friendly predefined content types and templates for easy content creation and management. The platform enables content teams to create content types that flow and transform easily to all channels and endpoints. 

• User Management
  Drupal offers comprehensive user management capabilities with role-based access control (RBAC), permissions, and authentication options. It allows for granular control over user permissions and enables administrators to create customizable roles and permissions to limit user access to specific website sections. 
  
  Brightspot also offers advanced user management functionality. The editing UI(user interface) can be configured to suit different roles, permissions, and publishing needs. 

• Workflow Management
  Brightspot enables editors to create customized workflows, improving their efficiency while reducing dependencies on developers and IT teams. Its robust workflow management features, allows content teams to define and manage content approval workflows, versioning, and content preview. 
  
  Drupal also provides extensive workflow management capabilities with customizable workflows, stages, and actions. However, Drupal requires additional modules and configurations to provide Brightspot equivalent workflow management features

• Search
  Drupal has built-in search capabilities and can also be integrated with third-party search engines to offer more advanced search features. It provides faceted search, search filters, and search customization options. Brightspot’s built-in search capabilities utilize Elasticsearch for efficient and lightning-fast search results and support search indexing and querying of content.

• Multilingual Support
  Drupal is famous for its robust multilingual support, providing automated language translation, which enables you to deliver a superior user experience. It has multilingual functionality as an out-of-the-box feature and does not require additional modules or integrations. Brightspot also provides multilingual support that enhances your business localization strategy irrespective of how simple or complex your needs are. 

• Media Management
  Drupal allows content creators to upload, organize, and manage various media files, including images, videos, audio files, and documents. It offers features that  enable users to create and display media in different formats and sizes across different devices. Drupal supports third-party integrations with popular digital asset management (DAM) systems.
  
  Brightspot offers powerful media transformation capabilities, including automatic image resizing, video transcoding, and file format conversion, to ensure media assets are optimized for different devices and channels. Additionally, Brightspot offers advanced metadata management, versioning, and rights management features, which are especially important for organizations that require strict control and governance over their media assets.

• SEO Optimization:
  Drupal offers out-of-the-box SEO features such as customizable URLs, meta tags, headings, and image alt tags, which allow content creators to optimize content for search engines. Additionally, Drupal has a large ecosystem of SEO modules and plugins that offer advanced SEO features, allowing users to enhance their website's SEO performance.
  
  Brightspot also offers SEO optimization capabilities including automatic image alt tag generation and XML sitemap generation to improve content indexing. It also offers content insights and analytics features that provide SEO recommendations and suggestions to improve content performance.

• E-commerce Support
  Drupal provides a flexible and extensible platform for e-commerce. Its Drupal Commerce module enables businesses to create complex e-commerce websites with custom workflows, integrations, and user experiences. 
  
  Brightspot offers robust e-commerce capabilities built on its flexible and extensible platform. The comprehensive set of e-commerce features and advanced media management capabilities makes it easy for businesses to manage their e-commerce content, products, and orders efficiently. It may require additional customization and integration to achieve e-commerce functionality similar to Drupal.

• Analytics
  Drupal offers extensive analytics capabilities with built-in data collection, reporting, and analysis tools. It provides customizable dashboards, reports, and visualizations. Brightspot also offers built-in analytics capabilities that provide insights into website performance and user behavior with real-time analytics dashboards displaying data on website traffic, engagement, and content performance.
  
  Both Drupal and Brightspot CMS can be integrated with popular web analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics, allowing businesses to gather data on website traffic, user engagement, and conversion rates for performance analysis. 

• Performance and Scalability
  Both Drupal and Brightspot CMS can handle large websites and high traffic volumes. However, Drupal is often considered more suitable for large-scale, enterprise-level websites due to its scalability and performance optimization features, such as caching, content delivery, and database optimization. 
  
  Brightspot utilizes a microservices architecture and cloud-based infrastructure, allowing horizontal scaling to handle increased traffic and content load. It also provides advanced caching, content delivery, and image optimization features to ensure fast page load times and smooth performance. 

• Responsive Web Design
  Drupal's out-of-the-box mobile-friendly features enable designers and developers to create a responsive website that automatically adjusts to different screen sizes and viewports.
  
  Brightspot provides responsive web design capabilities that ensure the content and user experience are consistent and visually appealing across different devices.

• Enterprise Integration
  Drupal seamlessly integrates with CRMs and multiple third-party applications with the help of integration modules and Application Programming Interface (APIs).  It integrates with Salesforce, MailChimp, Google, Facebook, and others.
  
  Brightspot enables businesses to integrate with external systems and third-party applications, such as CRM, ERP, and other enterprise systems, to streamline workflows, automate processes, and enhance content management capabilities.

• Marketing Automation
  Drupal facilitates marketing automation workflows and enables enterprises to manage a massive volume of customer data. However, Drupal does not have a default integrated marketing and analytics functionality but rather leaves room for businesses to choose the marketing automation tools that best meet their needs.
  
  Brightspot includes built-in marketing automation tools, enabling businesses to create personalized and targeted marketing campaigns. It comes with over 50 pre-built integrations to popular third-party marketing automation solutions. The choice between the two platforms depends on the business's priorities and the extent of marketing automation capabilities required. 
  
• Security
  Drupal is one of the most secure CMS, which acts in its favor and leads to a  high adoption rate among top businesses and private organizations. Platform security is managed by a Drupal security team consisting of experts from around the globe to spot and report vulnerabilities in the core Drupal platforms and community-contributed modules. These security updates need to be updated periodically in the Drupal core.
  
  Brightspot prioritizes security with features such as user authentication, role-based access controls, and encryption of sensitive data. It also provides regular security updates and patches to address potential vulnerabilities and protect against security threats.
• Accessibility
  Drupal provides default support for Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA). It includes several accessibility tools out-of-the-box with modules like Block ARIA Landmark Roles and more that enable businesses to deliver enhanced user experiences. There is no need for additional accessibility tools or plugins, as inbuilt functionality allows businesses to create a website accessible for all.
  
  Brightspot adheres to accessibility standards, ensuring that websites are accessible to users with disabilities. It includes semantic markup, alternative text for images, and keyboard navigation support.

How Do Different Personas View Drupal and Brightspot?

• Content Creators/Editors
  Drupal offers superior editing options to content creators and editors, with one of the options allowing them to use the full edit mode, where any content item can be easily edited using CKEditor. And now, with CKEditor 5 being used in Drupal 10 and above, authors and editors are in for a more enhanced experience. 
  
  Brightspot CMS is user-friendly, with an intuitive interface and drag-and-drop functionality that makes content creation and editing easy. The content creator and editor may not require extensive technical skills. Both CMS are equally efficient editorially.
• Site Admins
  Site admins may find Drupal's admin interface comprehensive, with extensive customization options for roles, permissions, and workflows. Drupal also offers a wide range of contributed modules that provide additional functionality for site admins, such as site configuration, user management, and site analytics.
  Brightspot CMS's admin interface is intuitive and easy to use, with user management, workflow management, and content organization features. 
• Designers
  Drupal's themes offer designers flexibility and enable them to extensively customize the website's appearance and layout. 
  
  Brightspot offers a clean design and user-friendly interface that may appeal to designers who prefer simplicity and ease of use. Designers may find Brightspot themes sufficient for creating visually appealing websites.
• Developers/Architects/Techies
  Developers, architects, and techies may find Drupal's extensibility and flexibility appealing, with a robust module system that allows for custom functionality and integrations. A Drupal developer requires proficiency in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the front-end and Object-oriented PHP and MYSQL.
  An API-first framework provides developers, architects, and techies the flexibility to seamlessly configure new integrations in Brightspot CMS as needed. Brightspot has over 70 out-of-the-box integrations that enable them to accelerate CMS development and deployment.
• Marketers
  Drupal integrates with third-party marketing automation tools, allowing marketers to choose tools that best meet their requirements. The modules are available in Drupal for incorporating web personalization features. 
  Brightspot's in-built integration capabilities enable seamless integration with proprietary or third-party data sources or marketing automation platforms. 

Drupal and Brightspot: A Glimpse into the Pros & Cons

• Cost
  Drupal is an open-source CMS that doesn’t require upfront license fees, unlike proprietary Brightspot CMS, whose cost can vary depending on the specific business needs and requirements. Drupal has multiple hosting options at different price points.
• Adoption
  Drupal websites are economical compared to Brightspot websites. Drupal has a comparatively large and active community of developers and users, which has resulted in widespread adoption due to a vast ecosystem of modules, themes, and plugins. Drupal has relatively more market share and industry-wide adoption, with about  5,25,167 websites using Drupal CMS, while Brightspot CMS powers 1,674 websites.
• Vendor dependency
  Drupal CMS offers more freedom and control, with businesses having the flexibility to choose their hosting and infrastructure. There is no vendor lock-in for Drupal, unlike proprietary Brightspot, which depends on vendors for updates, maintenance, and support. 
• Community
  Drupal has a community of more than 1,000,000 volunteers and sponsored contributors working collaboratively. Strong community results in constant updates, improvements, and security patches being released with a wealth of knowledge and support available in the Drupal community forums and online resources. A strong community makes Drupal a reliable platform giving greater confidence to enterprises for adoption. A proprietary Brightspot CMS has a smaller community and may rely more on vendor support and resources.

Drupal offers the advantage of being open-source, widely adopted, and having a large community, which can result in lower costs. It is hosting service agnostic and offers innumerable third-party integration. Brightspot may have higher costs and more vendor dependency as a proprietary CMS. 

Before you choose a CMS, you must carefully evaluate your requirement, budget, the time required for learning, development, and maintenance, and the support needed from vendors. Our consulting-led services can help you with a systematic and methodological evaluation of Drupal and Brightspot CMS to enable you to make an informed decision.  

We have expertise in Drupal-based website development and maintenance and have helped businesses across industries to create a robust digital presence. We can also help you with Brightspot CMS implementation. Get in touch with us right away.