Drupal vs FatWire - Any thoughts?

Question

Hi folks,

a company I am working for is considering the usage of a CMS, apparently two of the suggested CMSs are Drupal and FatWire.

FatWire is proprietary and quite expensive, therefore it seems that there is a not so big community build around the product. Functionality seems to be extensive, even though a few design choices seem counter-intuitive and long-winded.

Drupal instead is open source and has an big community backing the product. There are plenty of books around and usage seems more intuitive.

---

Functionality wise I am unsure on how they compare. The main features that the company's team seem to like are team workflow features and revision control (present in FatWire, even though the implementation seems quite limited).

---

Hopefully some of you guys have been faced with these two products before, and might have a few suggestions up their sleeve.

Help would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

They are very different products -- apples and oranges really -- so it would depend on your organization and your needs.

For one example, all of the features listed at FatWire's website can be easily and quickly built into a Drupal installation .... if you already have someone who knows Drupal. If you don't have that expertise in house, and don't have enough spare time and resources to get someone trained, then FatWire could save you a lot of time and aggravation.

In a broad sense, Drupal is probably the more powerful of the two over the long run. But, it's a modular system and there's no real centralized brain controlling everything. It takes a little while before your team can get to the point where they know the right module to solve a certain problem, or the most effective way to build certain pages.

Depending on what the website it worth to your company, and the amount of customization you expect, you might find it easier to get a paid product that meets your needs right out of the box.