What Drupal is in October 2026
Drupal is an open source PHP content platform under the GPL, run by the Drupal Association and a large contributor community. You can host it yourself or buy hosting from a specialist vendor, and there is no licence fee for the software. The cost sits in developers, hosting and the upgrade cycle. The table below gives the short answer to upgrade, decouple or leave.
According to the core release schedule on drupal.org, Drupal 10 reaches end of life on December 9, 2026, and Drupal 12 is scheduled for the week of December 7, 2026. Drupal 11.4 shipped in the week of June 29, 2026. Drupal 7 has been unsupported since January 5, 2025. Check the schedule again before you commit to a date, since release weeks can move.
There is also Drupal CMS, now at version 2.0 according to drupal.org. It is a packaged distribution for marketers and site builders, with the Canvas visual page builder, site templates and ready integrations. It suits a new marketing site. It does not change the decision for an existing large estate, which runs on Drupal core and custom modules.
| Your situation | What we usually recommend |
|---|---|
| Drupal 10, healthy codebase, few custom modules | Upgrade to 11 before December 2026 and keep Drupal |
| Drupal 7, 8 or 9 with heavy custom code | Compare the cost of a staged upgrade with a rebuild; often a replatform |
| Editors are happy, the front end is slow or hard to change | Keep Drupal as the back end and decouple the front end |
| Editors fight the admin, developers are hard to hire | Replatform to a headless CMS built around your content model |
| New site, small team, no legacy | Drupal CMS or a lighter headless platform |
When staying on Drupal makes sense
Stay when your governance needs are real. Drupal handles granular roles, editorial workflows with moderation states, large taxonomies, multilingual content and many sites from one codebase. If you have those requirements and the site works, a replatform buys you little and costs a year.
Staying also makes sense when you have an in-house team that knows Drupal. Specialist skills are a cost driver, but a trained team on a supported version is cheaper than retraining everyone on a new stack.
Decoupled Drupal with JSON:API
Drupal ships JSON:API in core, so every entity type can be read through a standard API without extra modules. GraphQL is available as a contributed module. This is why Drupal is a credible headless back end.
In a decoupled build, Drupal keeps content modelling, workflow, permissions and media. A Next.js application renders the pages and calls the API at build or request time. Editors keep the admin they know. Visitors get a front end that ships far less markup and JavaScript than a typical Drupal theme.
Decoupling has traps. In-place editing and layout tools that depend on the Drupal theme stop working, so preview needs its own build. Caching moves into your front end, and you must wire cache invalidation to publish events. Path aliases, redirects and metadata need to come from the API, or your SEO breaks quietly. We plan these in the first week, using the headless CMS approach we apply on every platform.
When we would move off Drupal
We recommend leaving in three cases. The first is an unsupported core with custom code that nobody wants to touch, where an upgrade is a rewrite anyway. The second is a team that spends most of its time on theme work and module updates instead of product. The third is editors who need a lighter interface than Drupal gives them.
The targets we use most are Payload or Strapi for teams that want code-owned content models, and Contentful or Sanity for teams that prefer a hosted service. Strapi and Payload both run on Node.js, so one JavaScript team can own the whole stack.
Upgrade or migrate: the decision in five checks
- Count custom modules and themes. Few modules means an upgrade is cheap; dozens means you are already rebuilding.
- Check which contributed modules are abandoned for Drupal 11.
- List the editor complaints. If they are about the admin, an upgrade will not fix them.
- Ask whether you will keep paying for Drupal specialists in two years.
- Price both paths with the same scope, including content migration and redirects.
Our Drupal migration service starts with this audit. The general steps are in our CMS migration checklist, and the wider migration services page lists the platforms we move content from.
What we build
- A Next.js front end on top of an existing Drupal back end, with preview, incremental revalidation and a component library the editors can map to content types.
- A content migration from Drupal to a new CMS: scripts that read nodes, paragraphs, media and taxonomy through the API, write them to the new schema, and report differences before cutover.
- Integrations with search, identity and CRM, so the new front end does not lose features the old site had.
- Redirect maps and URL parity, so organic traffic survives the switch.
For proof, read how we replatformed a Drupal 7 site for a European enterprise healthtech organization. It had over 1,200 content nodes in four languages, and LCP dropped from 4.3s to 1.5s after the move to Next.js and Payload.
What Drupal costs to own
Drupal has no licence fee, so the drivers are different from a SaaS product:
- Specialist developers, who are scarcer than JavaScript developers in most markets.
- Hosting and security patching, including the monthly security release window.
- Major version upgrades, which come every few years and need testing of every custom module.
- Front end work, which is large if the theme is custom.
We scope each project after a short audit. For extra hands, you can hire Drupal developers from us directly. Time and material work uses our usual $50 to $150 per hour range.
