When comparing Drupal vs Gatsby JS, the Slant community recommends Gatsby JS for most people. In the question“What is the best open source alternative to WordPress for web-publishing?” Gatsby JS is ranked 3rd while Drupal is ranked 5th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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
Pro No page reload when navigating
Pro Based on React.js
Editing markup is phenomenally easy when you have components.
Pro Live reload
Every change you make can be almost immediately seen in a browser.
Pro A lot of plugins
Gatsby offers a lot of plugins to integrate tools like SASS, typescript, styled components, etc.
Pro Very active development
Gatsby is very actively developed and the maintainers are very helpful.
Pro Built-in code and data splitting
Pro Open Source
Pro Take content from any source
Gatsby can generate the pages with content from any sources like Drupal, Wordpress, Contentful, etc. If the source plugin is not coded for your solution, you can create it.
Pro A static site and a React app in one
The static pages are generated by Server Site Rendering of the React app. So you have all benefits of a static site, and all benefits of a React app, which is very powerful.
Pro GraphQL Data Layer
Pro A lot of examples
Gatsby have a lot of examples sites in his github repository.
Pro Beautiful out-of-the-box blog starters
Cons
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.
Con A bit raw
You'll maybe have to tweak some JSX if you want something that's not covered by available themes.
