When comparing ExpressionEngine vs Drupal, the Slant community recommends Drupal for most people. In the question“What is the fastest CMS for web content (news website with some static pages) ?” Drupal is ranked 4th while ExpressionEngine is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Drupal is:
Drupal is stable, with powerful version control and access control methods and can handle large amounts of traffic.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro No restrictions on how a site can be designed
Pro Focus on security
Pro Commercial support
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 Simple pages can hurt performance
A simple page can rack up on database queries. Many sites usually suffer from this. Create an empty page and there's a few queries that run and it's unneccessary.
Con Can be overkill for simple or smaller sites
Con Cost is high
Especially for commercial sites
Con Built on top of codeigniter: an outdated framework
Codeigniter was cool.... back when PHP was at 5.2
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.