Storyblok vs Drupal: A Technical Comparison

Why choose Storyblok?

When comparing Storyblok and Drupal, you're looking at two fundamentally different approaches to content management. Drupal is a powerful, open source Content Management Framework (CMF) known for its flexibility and scalability. It can be tailored to build almost any kind of digital experience, but this power comes with significant complexity. Storyblok, in contrast, is a modern, SaaS-based headless CMS designed to streamline the developer experience and empower content teams with a best-in-class visual editor.

While Drupal can be configured to run in a headless (or "decoupled") mode, it requires deep technical expertise, extensive configuration, and ongoing maintenance of the underlying infrastructure. Storyblok provides an API-first, component-based architecture out of the box. This allows developers to work with their favorite frontend frameworks, while content editors build and manage pages in an intuitive editor.

If your team values rapid development, a joyful authoring experience, and freedom from infrastructure management, Storyblok offers a clear advantage.

Out-of-the-box (OOTB) offerings

Storyblok is a feature-rich platform that provides essential tools as standard, not as add-ons. Key OOTB offerings include:

• Visual Editor: a real-time, interactive editor that allows content teams to edit content and compose layouts directly on the page.
• Modular content blocks: reusable components that map 1:1 with your frontend components, enabling true composability.
• Built-in localization: manage multi-language content with field-level or folder-level translation support, enhanced by AI.
• Folder-based routing: an intuitive system where the CMS folder structure automatically defines the URL paths for your website.
• Role-based access control and workflows: granular permissions and approval workflows to manage content creation at scale.
• Collaboration Tools: features like field-level commenting, the Ideation Room, and the Concept Room help streamline teamwork.
• Robust APIs and SDKs: a powerful Content Delivery API, Management API, and dedicated SDKs for major JavaScript and PHP frameworks.
• Built-in Image Service: on-the-fly image optimization and transformation.

In contrast, while Drupal is highly extensible via its module system, achieving a similar feature set requires identifying, installing, and maintaining a collection of contributed modules. This increases complexity and the total cost of ownership.

Setup and first impressions

The difference in initial setup between Storyblok and Drupal is stark and highlights their core architectural differences.

With Storyblok, a developer can sign up and have a project running in minutes. Using Storyblok CLI, you can bootstrap a new project integrated with your framework of choice (like Next.js, Nuxt, or Astro) and connect it to the Visual Editor in under a minute. Alternatively, Storyblok’s Blueprints offer pre-built templates that are automatically cloned in GitHub and deployed to Netlify or Vercel, giving you a fully functional starting point instantly. As a SaaS platform, Storyblok handles all infrastructure, so there are no servers to configure or databases to manage.

Setting up Drupal is a far more complex process. As a self-hosted platform, you are responsible for the entire stack. The typical workflow involves:

1. Setting up a local development environment: this requires tools like DDEV, Lando, or a manual LAMP/LEMP stack configuration.
2. Downloading Drupal core: using Composer, you download Drupal and its PHP dependencies.
3. Running the installer: a web-based installation wizard guides you through database configuration, site setup, and creating an administrator account.
4. Ongoing maintenance: you are responsible for server maintenance, security patches, and updates for Drupal core and any contributed modules.

This entire process is built around PHP. This means your hosting infrastructure must be PHP-compatible (which can add significant cost and complexity compared to static hosting environments), and your development team must be proficient in PHP for backend customization and maintenance. While Drupal offers complete control, this initial overhead and ongoing maintenance burden stand in sharp contrast to Storyblok's "it just works" model, which allows developers to focus on building features, not managing infrastructure.

Visual Editor

This is where Storyblok truly shines. The Visual Editor provides a genuine WYSIWYG experience that empowers content teams. Editors can interact directly with a live preview of the website, click on any component to edit its content, and visually build pages by adding, removing, and reordering components from a library. This direct, intuitive interaction bridges the gap between the CMS and the final output, giving editors the confidence to create and iterate on content without developer intervention.

Drupal's authoring experience, while powerful, is fundamentally form-based. The core Layout Builder module provides a backend drag-and-drop interface for arranging fields and blocks within a layout, but it isn't a live preview of the frontend. Editors are arranging abstract representations of content, not interacting with the final page. While in-place editing is available for simple text changes, it doesn't support the composition of complex, component-based layouts. Achieving a user experience comparable to Storyblok's Visual Editor in Drupal would require significant custom development or reliance on a collection of contributed modules that may not integrate seamlessly.

Collaboration

Storyblok is built for modern content workflows with collaboration at its core. Features are available across all plans, including:

• Field-level commenting: team members can leave feedback and discuss changes on specific pieces of content directly within the editor.
• Content workflows: define custom stages (Draft, In Review, Approved, and more) to formalize the content lifecycle.

Drupal has a robust and mature system for managing permissions and content states. The core Workflows module allows administrators to define sophisticated editorial processes. However, it lacks the fine-grained, real-time collaboration tools that Storyblok provides. There is no built-in commenting system for content fields, nor are there dedicated spaces for ideation. These functionalities must be added via third-party modules, which can introduce complexity, potential integration challenges, and security risks.

Rich text editor

Both platforms provide a powerful rich text editing experience. Drupal integrates CKEditor 5 into its core, offering a configurable and extensible editor for long-form content. Administrators can customize toolbars and create different text formats with specific permissions. The output is clean, structured HTML.

Storyblok’s editor is also built on the solid foundations of Tiptap, providing all the standard formatting options you’d expect. However, it enhances the authoring experience with several built-in features that often require custom implementation in Drupal:

• Component nesting: easily embed other Storyblok components directly within the rich text field, allowing for complex layouts within a single content block.
• AI-powered actions: generate, summarize, or improve content with integrated AI tools.
• Document export: convert and export content to Markdown, ODT, or DOCX.
• Document import: import from Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or other formats.

Also, Storyblok provides official packages that integrate with supported frontend frameworks. These packages offer a seamless way to fetch and render content from Storyblok, and they're available for both JavaScript and PHP.

While Drupal's CKEditor is a powerful tool for formatting text, Storyblok's solution is designed as a flexible content canvas, making it easier for editors to create rich, dynamic layouts without leaving the visual editor.

Integration with frontend frameworks

Storyblok is designed to make the developer experience as smooth as possible. It provides dedicated SDKs for all major frontend frameworks (React, Vue, Nuxt, Svelte, Astro, and more). These SDKs handle the heavy lifting of connecting to the API, fetching content, and, most importantly, dynamically rendering your frontend components based on the CMS data. The @storyblok/react SDK, for example, provides a StoryblokComponent that automatically maps the JSON from the API to your React components. This creates a clear, predictable, and low-effort integration.

Integrating a decoupled Drupal instance is a much more manual process. While Drupal has a powerful JSON:API module in its core, it is up to the developer to:

1. Fetch the data using standard HTTP requests
2. Parse the complex, normalized JSON response, which often involves resolving relationships and included data
3. Write custom logic to map the different content types and fields to the appropriate frontend components

There are no official, framework-specific rendering SDKs provided by the Drupal project. This means developers spend more time on boilerplate integration logic rather than building features.

Content modeling

Storyblok’s content modeling is built entirely around the concept of blocks: reusable, nestable components that map directly to your frontend code. This component-based approach is intuitive for both developers and content editors. You can define different types of blocks:

• Content Type: the top-level entry point, like a Page or Article.
• Nestable: the building blocks of your pages, like a Hero, Feature Grid, or CTA.
• Universal: blocks that can function as either a Content Type or a Nestable component.

This structure makes it easy to create flexible, modular layouts. Editors can compose pages by mixing and matching these components, and developers have a clear 1:1 relationship between the CMS structure and the codebase.

Drupal's content modeling is based on a more traditional, relational database structure. You create Content Types (like Article or Basic Page) and add Fields to them. To achieve a component-based architecture, the Drupal community widely uses the contributed Paragraphs module. Paragraphs allow you to create reusable "components" that can be added to a page. However, this is an add-on, not a core module. The developer experience is less direct, and the data structure returned by the API for Paragraphs is far more complex to parse and render compared to Storyblok's native component-based JSON.

Routing and localization

In Storyblok, routing is simple and intuitive. The folder structure you create in the content repository directly translates to the URL structure of your site. A story named about-us inside a folder named company will resolve to /company/about-us. This makes site architecture easy for editors to understand and manage. For localization, Storyblok supports both field-level translation (translating individual fields within a single story) and folder-level translation (creating separate content trees for each language), offering flexibility for different internationalization strategies. Plus, Storyblok offers several AI-powered features to assist with content translation.

Drupal includes routing and URL aliasing in core, but decoupled Drupal has no built-in concept of routing. Developers must build the logic in the frontend application (or with additional backend logic like an alias resolver endpoint, or Views configuration) to fetch the correct content based on the URL. This gives developers flexibility, but editors don’t see a direct folder-to-URL mapping like Storyblok’s system. While Drupal’s multilingual capabilities are powerful for traditional, monolithic sites, configuring them for a decoupled frontend and managing translated paths requires extra configuration and technical expertise.

Additional Features

Storyblok includes several unique features designed to enhance the entire content lifecycle:

Ideation Room

A collaborative sandbox where content teams can draft and refine ideas in a structured way, or brainstorm new content, before they become official entries. This keeps all content-related work within a single, version-controlled platform.

Concept Room

A visual planning tool that allows teams to map out site structures, user journeys, and component relationships with a drag-and-drop interface. This helps align developers and content teams before implementation begins.

AI features

Storyblok integrates AI directly into the authoring experience, offering AI-powered translation, SEO optimization, and content generation.

Drupal's core does not include these features. Similar functionality would need to be custom-built or integrated via third-party services, adding to the development and maintenance overhead.

Side-by-side comparison

	Storyblok	Drupal
Architecture	Headless-native, SaaS	Monolithic (can be decoupled), Self-hosted/PaaS
Visual Editor	✅ Built-in, real-time, WYSIWYG	❌ Requires Layout Builder + custom code
Component-based model	✅ Native "Blok" system	❌ Requires "Paragraphs" module
Developer experience	✅ Framework SDKs, simple API	🫤 Manual integration, complex API
Setup time	Minutes	Hours/days
Infrastructure Mgt.	None (Handled by Storyblok)	Full responsibility of the user
Folder-based routing	✅ Built-in	❌ Requires custom implementation
Collaboration tools	✅ Comments, Ideation/Concept Rooms	❌ Requires third-party modules
Built-in AI	✅	❌
Joyful CMS	😁	🤔

Conclusion

Drupal is an incredibly powerful and versatile open source framework that can be adapted to multiple use cases. Iit remains a viable option for large, complex, and highly customized projects with a dedicated technical team to manage its infrastructure.

However, for most modern development teams, Storyblok offers a superior experience. It is purpose-built for the composable era, providing a seamless workflow that bridges the gap between developers and content editors. Its component-based architecture, best-in-class Visual Editor, AI features and developer-friendly SDKs allow teams to build and ship faster, with less overhead and more joy.

If you want to empower your content team with true visual editing, free your developers from infrastructure maintenance, and build scalable digital experiences with modern frontend frameworks, Storyblok is the clear choice.

Further resources

• Thinking about migrating from Drupal to Storyblok? Follow our Migrating Drupal articles to Storyblok tutorial to get started.