Drupal vs. WebWave

Overall, I would give my rating of Drupal a 7/10 because there is an easy user experience for those without a website background but there is some technology work required to build more website capabilities that aren't as user-friendly. Drupal is specifically well suited to update content (like changing Relationship Manager cards when there is employee turnover), post announcements (putting up a holiday banner to let our customers know the dates we will be closed over Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc., and creating a sophisticated website hierarchy of pages (for our firm, several dropdowns depending on if you're looking for personal banking, business banking, investment banking, about us, etc.).

Incentivized

Well suited: Small businesses and entrepreneurs: WebWave is an excellent option for small businesses and entrepreneurs who need a professional-looking website without spending a lot of time and money. It's easy to use, customizable, and offers fast load times and responsive design. Less appropriate: Large e-commerce websites: If you're looking to create a large e-commerce website with a vast number of products and advanced features, WebWave may not be the best option. Its e-commerce functionality is limited compared to other website builders, and it may not be able to accommodate the needs of a large-scale online store. Also, if you need much coding, you would rather have it with something that is wordpress-based.

Incentivized

• It has excellent security features and consistent updates.
• It allows for extensive customization with the integrated themes and core code, especially when you first install it. This allows our dev team to get creative with marketing initiatives.
• There is a large online community of Drupal users that consistently help answer any questions and issues

Incentivized

• WebWave's site builder is the platform's truly innovative feature. I've never come across another service that deploys a layer-based approach in web design, as most of them usually deploy a grid-based system. This is an incredible alteration that ensures WebWave behaves much like a traditional graphic design tool, thereby resulting in an experience that is a lot more intuitive and instinctive. I believe this has the potential to radically change the way people approach no-code web design.
• WebWave provides automatic, daily backups and a free SSL certificate for every website. This results in excellent security.
• WebWave's support team is first-class! I had some teething-issues in the beginning, but the support team quickly got me back on track.
• WebWave's community/forum is an excellent place to vote and request new features. This proves the development team is committed to making WebWave better by listening to their users.

• Security and new release notifications are a hassle as they happen too often
• Allowing them to write PHP modules is a big advantage, but sometimes integrating them is a small challenge due to the version the developer is working on.
• Steep learning curve, but worth it

Incentivized

• Some scope for improvement in UX (colors are not very appealing). It is simple to use but design is a little dated. Especially in the builder section, I'd like to see modern design for buttons and maybe gradients also: as this is where visual motivation is also important
• Some edits take effect only after pressing OK. That should be eliminated as it's an unnecessary addition. It's also kind of annoying to do that again and again, which can add up to a lot as we do so many small tweaks while building the website.
• Few things (maybe glitches) in design. The rectangle below the footer was uneditable for me. I spent quite some time trying to figure it out so I'm convinced it's a glitch.
• Website speed should be increased.

The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.

As a team, we found Drupal to be highly customizable and flexible, allowing our development team to go to great lengths to develop desired functionalities. It can be used as a solution for all types of web projects. It comes with a robust admin interface that provides greater flexibility once the user gets acquainted with the system.

Incentivized

Very easy to use, intuitive, has many options and plug-ins, and is cheap.

Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).

Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.

Incentivized

As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.

Incentivized

1. The support person does not seem to understand the issues, and seems like they go off to talk to somebody and revert back every 5 to 10 minutes. It takes up a lot of time. 2. There is a lack of reading material to address simple issues like changing the website name in the dashboard, pasting a code, etc.

Incentivized

I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.

The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.

Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%

Incentivized

Drupal can be more complex to learn, but it offers a much wider range of applications. Drupal’s front and backend can be customized from design to functionality to allow for a wide range of uses. If someone wants to create something more complex than a simple site or blog, Drupal can be an amazing asset to have at hand.

Incentivized

WordPress is a more flexible and adaptive content management system than Webwave. In addition to the functionalities that are already built-in, I am unable to add any customizable plugins or add-ons. However, in the majority of cases, the inherent features of Webwave are sufficient for developing a website that serves its intended purpose. Webwave also makes it possible for you to add animations and the appearance of each of your design elements, whereas WordPress builders require additional plugins in order for users to access most of such capabilities. Webwave has several essential design features available internally, thus saving money and time.

Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.

Incentivized

• Given the endless possibilities that Drupal can have, we tend to have great support going on when we get a website launched
• It has become much much faster and easier for us to launch a new project due to reusability
• Configuration management in Drupal helps greatly with CI/CD, saves us costs

• saved 30 hours per year per site (previously I had to manually run updates and check if everything is fine)
• earns money for me without a touch (thanks to automatic billing of my customers for hosting and support) - additional (ca.) 120 USD per year per site
• no negatives so far