Ask HN: Drupal or Django for my startup? and why

I've been Drupaling for 13 years, before that I was J2EEing, before that I was AS/400 RPGing. Before that I was PASCALing at college, BASICing and Assemblering at home. I've seen all kinds of businesses and startups, and I've seen what works and what doesn't.

My advice to you is to use Drupal because you can get far fast. Use lean methodology (lean canvas etc.) and get your MVP out as fast as possible and start making money. Don't try and build lots of functionality that you don't know works, and by works I mean makes a profit.

Watch GaryV, as he says - the market is always right. Focus on selling cars or vin checking or whatever it is you're doing, nobody apart from techies give a hoot what your site is built on. Some of the biggest sites in the world are built on PHP, e.g. Facebook. Some of the biggest sites are built on Drupal, e.g. Weather.com (the most personalised site as every visitor sees a different output, and delivers data to mobile apps).

Your code won't help your business succeed, selling will.

moine,

imho ... i worked with both of them :)

simplified

* drupal is a really nice, secure and extensible portal-system which can be enhanced with plugins written in php

* python-django is a web-framework based on common design-patterns

whats better for you!? it depends what you want to achive, but i think for a startup - and a maximum of flexibility + scalability - i would prefere python-django.

why? as a "general" webframework its more flexible than the portal/plugin approach of drupal + i would prefer python over php.

Wrote a 100k line of code financial app in Drupal 7. It's not compatible with D8, and expect the same with D9. Testing is less than an afterthought in the community, docs in D8 are usually empty pages when you dig in, the technology is loosing mindshare and not many are hiring. These are all red flags for a startup. It can be used to build apps but I would stay away.

Go with Django. Python is a more productive and clear language. Django is excellent at ensuring an upgrade path, provides great docs.

If you have well defined services, it sounds like you do, then make them apis. You could have separate Djano apps or use Flask, a great micro framework.

Overall my experience with Python and the community for building web apps has been great.

You should compare something like laravel(https://laravel.com/) or symfony(https://symfony.com/) against the djangoproject(https://www.djangoproject.com/). I think this is a more appropriate choice. If you are not sure about the dev-performance of your team with a naked framework, you should consider something like the Oro-Platform(https://github.com/orocrm/platform) or Odoo(https://github.com/odoo/odoo). You can also work with a e-commerce/shop system like oscar(https://github.com/django-oscar/django-oscar) or shuup(https://github.com/shuup/shuup) as a base.