Both Drupal and WordPress are great options for Content Management Systems (CMS).
There is some overlap in their abilities, and each has its different strengths.
As a simple analogy, WordPress can be thought of as a base model SUV, and Drupal as a off road SUV with towing capabilities.
If you plan to do 100% city driving, then having a fully equipped SUV isn’t always practical. Also if you plan to do heavy towing, and off road trips, then you might strain the capabilities of the base SUV model.
Drupal is more robust and shines more with complicated projects, and WordPress is great for blogs and smaller projects.
WordPress
About 27% of the internet uses WordPress as it’s website platform.1 That is a staggering number and shows the popularity of WordPress.
WordPress is best suited for blogs, simple Ecommerce, and presenting information to it’s user. Due to it’ s nature of being a CMS it will allow you to modify content and placement without requiring the use of advanced technological ability. WordPress is very easy to setup and manage.
Drupal
Drupal takes up approximately 2% of all the internet sites.1 While this is considerably less than WordPress it is still a staggering amount of users for this CMS. There are reasons why WordPress is more popular that Drupal. The same way, most people can achieve their goals with a base model SUV and don’t need the off road model is the same way to compare why Drupal is less used. Drupal is used by a lot of enterprises, fortune 500 companies, and universities because of it’s robustness. Drupal is also a more popular choice for high traffic websites than WordPress.1 If your site is complex and complexity can increase overtime then Drupal is a clear winner for you.
To Summarize:
Drupal is recommended for a complex site that is ever growing and changing, and has various users and roles.
WordPress is recommended for a simple blog, or simple site, with not much plan for change and complex features.
1. “Usage statistics and market share of WordPress for websites“. W3Techs. Retrieved Feb, 1 2017.