Drupal’s big day has arrived—on January 15, the community unveiled Drupal CMS. The global launch party was grand. Drupal enthusiasts worldwide organized over 60 events to celebrate, but with all the excitement, there’s also a fair share of confusion. Almost immediately people not close to the community began asking: “Isn't Drupal itself a CMS? Then what is this new product?”
If you’re already comfortable with Drupal as a powerful, open-source framework, you might be wondering why Drupal CMS is being presented as something distinct. In this post, we’ll shed light on the differences, explain where Drupal CMS fits in the ecosystem, and help you decide whether it’s the right choice for your next project.
What Is Drupal?
Before we dive into Drupal CMS, let’s quickly revisit what Drupal has traditionally been.
Drupal is an open-source content management framework known for its flexibility, power, and extensibility. Developers and organizations worldwide rely on Drupal to build not just straightforward websites, but also wide variety of web applications, internal tools, and digital experience platforms (DXPs) that handle complex workflows, e-commerce, multilingual content, and more.
However, Drupal’s unrivaled flexibility often comes at the cost of a steeper learning curve. While this complexity enables developers to create highly tailored and intricate solutions, it also deters those new to the platform. Smaller businesses and individuals looking for straightforward, no-fuss website creation have often turned to no-code/low-code platforms like Squarespace or WordPress.
This shift towards easier-to-use platforms has admittedly created a perception that Drupal is only suited for larger, more complex projects, which isn't entirely accurate. This has led to Drupal's decline in popularity within smaller site-building circles, not due to a lack of capability, but due to its (perceived) inaccessibility.
Drupal community and the Drupal Association have been aware of this challenge.
Over recent years, efforts have intensified to make Drupal more accessible and to improve its developer experience. These endeavors have paved the way for Drupal CMS (former codename: Starshot), a solution designed to lower the entry barrier while preserving the core strengths that Drupal is known for.
Is Drupal CMS Replacing Drupal?
Drupal CMS is the product of the Drupal Starshot Initiative, announced in May 2024 by Dries Buytaert (founder of Drupal and Acquia). The goal? Make Drupal more accessible to a broader audience—especially marketers, content editors, and other non-developers—without sacrificing Drupal’s famous power and flexibility.
Framework vs. Product
The introduction of Drupal CMS marks an evolution in the way Drupal is perceived and utilized. Historically, Drupal has been known as a robust and versatile framework—referred to as Drupal Core. This framework and its ecosystem of thousands of modules has been the backbone for countless websites and web applications, allowing developers to shape and mold their projects in virtually limitless ways. It’s a powerful engine, finely-tuned for those who have the technical expertise to harness its capabilities.
Built squarely on the solid foundation of Drupal Core, plus numerous community modules, Drupal CMS offers a new approach: more immediate usability with its pre-assembled features. It's like moving into a furnished apartment: everything you need is already in place, but you can still decorate and rearrange to your liking. It caters to a broader audience.
Drupal CMS enhances accessibility by delivering a polished, intuitive interface (thanks to amazing Gin admin theme with various tweaks) and a suite of pre-configured functionalities (recipes) that are ready to be deployed.
It’s Drupal, assembled into a product.
This also means that when you update Drupal CMS to a new version, all the pre-packaged non-Core modules will be updated alongside it. You can trust that these updates have been rigorously tested for compatibility with the latest version of Drupal Core (and each other), ensuring they're production-ready.
For developers, this is a significant advantage over using just Drupal Core for most types of website projects. It eliminates much of the guesswork and stress around compatibility or potential breaking changes during updates to non-Core modules included in the Drupal CMS package. And speaking of included modules—there’s no shortage of them.
What’s in the Box?
Out of the gate, Drupal CMS includes smart defaults with modern, well-designed admin and content structure without hours of custom configuration, that gives Marketers and content creators an ability can jump in without a CS degree.
Here are some of the biggest things included that was showcased during the launch event (click on links to watch short video demos):
- Search — enhanced search with autocomplete and faceted search, an enterprise-grade functionality out-of-the-box.
- Privacy and Consent Management — a user-centric approach to privacy and consent management, making regulatory compliance easier and more effective.
- Media Management — good old Media boosted with features like focal point control, image style cropping presets respecting the focal point, and accessibility improvements.
- Accessibility — these built-in tools provide real-time feedback during content creation, helping identify and resolve potential issues that could affect the user experience for visually-impaired visitors.
- Analytics — this integration streamlines the setup of Google Analytics and Tag Manager, something that 75% of marketers use.
- Experience Builder (part 1 and part 2) — though not yet ready for primetime, it will bring a massive improvement in visual page building. EB brings drag-and-drop simplicity to an enterprise-grade component architecture, backed with Drupal's legendary content modeling features. And it truly looks fantastic!
- AI — it’s 2025, what else would you expect? Read more on this below.
Most of the above is made possible with Recipes. Perhaps the most anticipated feature, Recipes package modules, content types, and configurations for specific use cases—like event management or media publishing—so you’re not starting from scratch.
Recipes bundle years of expertise into repeatable, shareable solutions.
A Drupal recipe is a tool for site builders and developers to add functionality to a Drupal site. It provides a series of steps to add functionality. These steps could be taken manually to arrive at the same point. For example, community might create a blog recipe that configures modules to provide a great blogging experience and also creates a few sample posts. Or it can include a number of other Drupal recipes and modules to build a full site experience. Ideally Drupal recipes would not configure an entire site themselves but would break out their functionality into smaller Drupal recipes that can be reused by other Drupal recipes.
AI, the Drupal Way
One of Drupal’s strengths has always been its adaptability, and with AI, the community took an extra leap. While many platforms only dabble in text generation or automatic meta-tag creation, Drupal aims to integrate AI more deeply into the entire workflows of developers, site builders, and editors.
Drupal’s AI tooling isn’t limited to just generating blog posts or rewriting content. It’s woven into search, site configuration, and automation.
At the heart of Drupal’s AI ecosystem is the AI module, which serves as both a framework and a toolbox. Its modular design allows seamless integration with various AI providers and models, whether proprietary like OpenAI or open-source alternatives like Huggingface and Ollama. This abstraction layer ensures flexibility, enabling developers to choose the AI tools that best suit their needs, including hosting their own models for full control over their data.
The possibilities are expansive:
- Semantic Search and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): AI's Search submodule uses embeddings and vector databases (like Milvus, Zilliz, or Pinecone) to provide highly accurate and context-aware search results. Whether users need to explore large content repositories or ask chatbots specific questions, this integration ensures precise and relevant responses while minimizing hallucinations often seen in AI-generated outputs.
- AI-Powered Workflows: through tools like AI Automators, site builders can configure workflows to automate tasks such as content enrichment, web scraping, and file analysis. This can be extended further with Drupal's amazing ECA (Event-Condition-Action) module, making it possible to create even more complex, tailored workflows with ease.
- AI Assistants and Chatbots: an API framework for configuring and managing chatbots, enabling advanced natural language interactions. Whether embedded in admin dashboards or public-facing interfaces, these assistants streamline content updates, site building, and user support.
At Omedia, we’re committed to giving back to the Drupal community. As a proud supporting organization, we’re maintaining these two modules in the AI ecosystem:
- Gemini Provider — enables usage of Google’s Gemini models across the AI modules. Right now, it supports text-to-text chat and we plan to expand into multimodal capabilities like text-to-speech and embeddings.
- Model Context Protocol (MCP): turns Drupal into a server for the Model Context Protocol, a standard introduced by Anthropic to dynamically extend large language model (LLM) contexts using local and remote data sources. Dig deeper into MCP in Anthropic's announcement post.
For Every Role in the Ecosystem
The Drupal AI module is designed to benefit everyone in the Drupal ecosystem. For Site Builders, the intuitive interfaces make it easy to implement AI features without writing a single line of code. With its user-friendly orchestration tools, Drupal Administrators can enable and configure AI features effortlessly, reducing the overhead of managing complex integrations.
And for Developers, the module’s flexibility simplifies AI integration, eliminating the need to manage API keys or compatibility across multiple vendors. It provides a robust foundation to build custom AI-driven applications or extend existing capabilities.
In Drupal CMS, these AI capabilities are part of the packaged experience:
- AI-powered search picks relevant results using semantic language understanding.
- CKEditor integrations streamline content creation with suggestions and quick references.
- AI chatbot reduces manual tasks for admins, helps them discover best practices and configure modules for specific needs.
It’s a shift that puts Drupal on a new level of efficiency, going far beyond the standard “type in your prompt to generate content” approach.
Key Differences: Drupal Core vs Drupal CMS
So, is Drupal CMS really any different from Drupal Core? The simple answer is: “Yes—and no.” Technically, Drupal CMS is a "distribution" of Drupal, meaning it contains Drupal Core plus a curated set of modules and default configurations.
While Drupal Core is the foundational framework that can be expanded in thousands of ways thanks to the vibrant ecosystem of modules, Drupal CMS is a pre-packaged version with additional features and a refined interface out-of-the-box. By shipping with these elements, Drupal CMS dramatically shortens the time from install to launch for many typical use cases.
It’s important to remember that Drupal CMS is still 100% Drupal. Starting with Drupal CMS instead of barebones Drupal Core doesn’t restrict your ability to extend or modify the platform. In fact, everything you can do with Drupal Core, you can also do with Drupal CMS.
Drupal Core remains an excellent choice for agencies and developers creating complex, highly customized solutions that don’t require the numerous modules commonly used in most web applications. However, Drupal CMS doesn’t impose any limits on future customizations—it’s still the same flexible and extensible Drupal at its core.
Choosing Drupal CMS doesn’t mean you’re “missing out” on the real Drupal experience. Beneath the pre-configured modules and features, Drupal Core powers the platform, allowing developers to extend, customize, and build as they would with the framework alone.
The Strategic Shift and Its Implications
The decision to roll out Drupal CMS reflects an intentional strategy: broaden Drupal’s appeal beyond developers while retaining its powerful underpinnings.
Eight months ago, Dries Buytaert invoked a “moonshot” analogy, comparing the Drupal Starshot Initiative to the ambitious spirit of the JFK-era space race. That sense of urgency paid off—Drupal CMS materialized remarkably quickly and is already influencing how people perceive Drupal. It is designed to tackle common challenges organizations face as they scale. Features like built-in privacy and consent management address growing regulatory demands, such as GDPR and CCPA, out-of-the-box. This sets a higher standard for CMS platforms in promoting a more privacy-conscious Open Web.
The initiative is complemented by efforts to modernize Drupal’s branding and marketing, including an updated Drupal.org and a refreshed tagline: “Create ambitious digital experiences.”
These changes reintroduce Drupal to the market as a modern, composable platform that meets the needs of both marketers and developers.
The creation of Drupal CMS has been a catalyst for increased collaboration within the Drupal community. Since the initiative began, contributions to Drupal projects have surged, with a 40% increase in activity. This collective effort highlights the strength of the Drupal community in delivering ambitious goals through open-source collaboration.
How to Choose between Drupal CMS and Drupal Core?
You now know what both Drupal Core and Drupal CMS bring to the table. So which one fits your use case?
Choose Drupal Core if:
- You have complex, highly customized requirements. Your project involves unique workflows, intricate integrations, or highly specific functionality.
- Your team has strong development expertise. They are comfortable working with raw Drupal Core and building custom modules.
- You need complete control. You want to carefully select and configure every module, ensuring no preexisting decision gets in your way.
- You’re building for large-scale enterprise needs. Projects requiring deep integrations with third-party systems, or handling large datasets often benefit from starting with Drupal Core.
- Your budget allows for extended development time.
Choose Drupal CMS if:
- You are just starting with Drupal. Drupal CMS offers a gentler learning curve without sacrificing power or flexibility.
- You want a smoother, out-of-the-box experience for a content-heavy website and your team includes more marketers or content creators than developers.
- You have limited time or budget. The pre-packaged features and recipes in Drupal CMS save significant time and effort, allowing you to launch quickly.
- You need privacy, consent management, and SEO tools built-in.
- You want future scalability without a steep learning curve.
For many organizations, Drupal CMS will significantly cut initial development time while leaving the door open for future customization. For those needing absolute freedom from day one—or with extremely specialized needs—Core may be a better fit.
Drupal CMS represents an exciting evolution in the Drupal world. It wraps the power of Drupal Core in a more accessible package. Still, Drupal remains Drupal—open-source, highly customizable, and driven by a passionate global community.
Today, more than 500,000 websites rely on Drupal, powering digital experiences for organizations like NASA, BBC, UNICEF, Tesla, and numerous government agencies worldwide. This widespread adoption underscores Drupal's versatility and enterprise-grade capabilities. Its economic impact is equally impressive—the Drupal Association estimates an $3.5 billion generated annually through Drupal-based projects by a global network of Drupal service providers.
How Omedia Can Help
At Omedia, we’ve been in love with Drupal since 2011, serving clients across a range of industries. Whether you need a quick start with Drupal CMS or a more elaborate setup using Drupal Core, we have the expertise to guide you from ideation to launch.
- Custom Drupal Solutions: We tailor each project to your business needs, ensuring that even if you start with Drupal CMS, you can evolve it over time.
- Seamless Upgrades: Need to migrate from older versions of Drupal? We’ve done countless upgrades with minimal disruption.
- Full-Service Cycle: From architecture design to post-launch maintenance, our team covers every step.
- Transparent Communication: We believe in clear, concise communication at all times, keeping your project on track and avoiding nasty surprises.
Ready to see what Drupal CMS or Drupal Core can do for your organization? As a specialized Drupal development agency, we can help you navigate the nuances and choose the best approach for your goals. Learn more about our company and contact us for a free consultation. Let’s make your next Drupal project a success!