When comparing Hugo vs Drupal, the Slant community recommends Hugo for most people. In the question“What is the fastest CMS for web content (news website with some static pages) ?” Hugo is ranked 1st while Drupal is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Hugo is:
Code can be viewed [on GitHub](http://github.com/spf13/hugo).
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Open-source and free
Code can be viewed on GitHub.
Pro Fast
Pro No dependencies
All other SSGs expect you to have a full toolchain setup for their language. Hugo is written in Go and distributed as an executable for unix, linux, windows and mac. Just download and run.
Pro Clean workflow
Create your new site, run the Hugo server, edit. Lather, rinse, repeat. Hugo stays out of the way.
Pro Flexible
Pro Good documentation
Pro Many themes available
Pro Draft mode
Allows you to see changes in real time.
Pro Single binary - cross platform
Pro Single source publishing
Can create PDFs, eBooks, RSS-Feeds, language and market specific Websites from single content folder.
Pro Great multipurpose development platform
We are using Hugo as the base-framework for a full blown knowledge management system, idea-management and inhouse brainstorming tool. Hugo source-code is well structures and comes with top components out of the box, that makes every solution built on this framework incredible fast and scalable accross platforms and corporate silos! Hugo - when being used as a framework is a game-changer that puts Sharepoint, Wordpress and Co. back to the shelf.
Pro Very active community
Pro Easy to add new content types, data files, and taxonomies
Pro Great for enterprise use
Drupal is stable, with powerful version control and access control methods and can handle large amounts of traffic.
Pro Free and open source
Drupal is free to use and open source.
Pro Active community
Drupal have one of biggest and more active communities across FOSS, maintaining a large and vibrant ecosystem of extensions and installation profiles.
Pro Great templating engine
Twig is a game changer!
Pro Multi-lingual support
Starting with Drupal 8, there's built-in multi-lingual support.
Pro It's easy to transfer config changes from dev to production
Pro Highly customizable
Drupal can be customized to do almost anything. It was built ground up with the intent of using a wide variety of small modules to get the exact result wanted instead of just the most common solutions.
Pro RESTful
Drupal 8 has REST services built in.
Pro Good accessibility
Pro Drupal has full SEO capabilities
(vs Joomla, which lacks SEO capabilities), there is an essential issue for promotion.
Pro Semantic HTML5
Pro Excellent SEO
Drupal was designed from the beginning to follow best practices in regards to SEO.
Pro Responsive front-end and back-end
Drupal 8 follows responsive design philosophy out of the box, both front-end and back-end.
Pro Drupal 8 and higher leverage composer and all of the wonderful PHP packages. Instead of building functionality from scratch, it utilizes existing libraries
Cons
Con No tutorial on how to create a theme from scratch
Con Steep learning curve
Drupal is not easy to get into and out of the box doesn't offer much. To get Drupal doing what you want it to, modules are required. To get modules, an understanding of how Drupal works is required. And that takes time.
Con High resource consumption
A more complex Dupal installation can easily exhaust 256 MB of RAM with only one or two visitors.
Con Documentation is a joke
With currently 3 different version of drupal in active use, and at that constantly changing capibilities within 2 of those, it means that when you look for documentation is if often for a different version that you are running and in addition is not at all easy to consume. Often the info you need is in comment #100 of a thread.
Con Lacks good free modules and themes
Most good third-party modules and themes are costly.