I recently gave a talk at DrupalSouth Wellington 2026 covering something a lot of us in the Drupal community have been wrestling with: has the past couple of years been a market correction or something more fundamental? And more importantly - how can Drupal remain competitive in a CMS market that's changing quickly?
The downturn was real - and it was a global phenomenon
When I last spoke at DrupalCon Singapore I was very confident about PreviousNext's position after 15 years of stability. What followed was our business contracting through 2025 as clients reduced budgets, so it's been a tough couple of years for many digital agencies.
But here's what gave me some comfort: we're not alone. Global digital holding companies like WPP, Publicis Groupe have seen their businesses shrink by around 30% and their share prices have seen corresponding falls. These aren't small Drupal shops. They employ thousands of developers across dozens of countries. The downturn has been a global phenomenon.
The single biggest reason is now clear. During COVID, organisations pulled forward years of digital transformation budgets to move services online quickly. By 2025, that spend had run dry. Enterprise marketing budgets generally halved and new projects froze. The good news, as of early 2026, is that the freeze is starting to thaw - projects that were put on hold still need to be completed.
Compounding this is AI. Companies have shifted budget toward AI investments, web traffic (Including Google search) is down around one third as people increasingly get information without visiting websites, and clients are questioning the ROI of large digital investments. This is real disruption - not incremental change.
Drupal's competitive position is stronger than the narrative suggests
With that context set, the more interesting question is: where does Drupal actually sit competitively?
When people talk about Drupal's "decline", they tend to cite overall install numbers. At its peak between 2014-2016, Drupal powered around 1.2 million sites. Today it's around 735,000 - a 40% fall on paper. But that framing misses the point entirely.
Drupal 8 made a deliberate strategic choice to cede the small-site market to SaaS platforms and focus on larger, more complex sites. What happened to those 500,000 sites that moved off older versions? Most were the exact sites Drupal had consciously repositioned away from. In their place, modern Drupal (version 8 and above) has grown to over 500,000 sites concentrated at the upper end of the enterprise market - exactly where the strategy aimed.
The data from builtwith.com is striking. Across the internet as a whole, Drupal sits in the top ten CMS platforms. Narrow it to the top million sites by traffic and Drupal is a clear second behind WordPress, with four times the presence of Adobe. Narrow further to the top 100,000 and Drupal is still second. In the top 10,000 - the sites that matter most - still second. For a product that critics routinely describe as being in decline, holding second place across every meaningful traffic tier is a remarkable result.
The CMS market itself is also growing, not shrinking. With around 900 CMS products for clients to choose from, it reached $30.9 billion in 2025 and is forecast to hit $45.7 billion by 2030 - 15-20% annual growth. There are still 250,000 websites launched every single day, generating 400 exabytes (400 million terabytes) of data annually for six billion internet users. The world's need to manage content isn't going away.
What about the impact of AI on the CMS market?
It's a fair question to ask whether AI will eventually replace the CMS entirely. The honest answer is: for basic brochureware sites, this is already happening. Tools like static site generators, SaaS website builders, and even WordPress sites at the simpler end of the market are genuinely at risk from AI that can generate and deploy a good-looking site quickly.
But Drupal is more insulated. A university platform with hundreds of content editors, 15 years of content governance, complex workflows, security requirements, and dozens of third-party integrations can't be vibe-coded overnight. The governance and institutional knowledge wrapped around these platforms isn't in the code - it's in the people, the processes, and the content structures that have evolved over time. That's not something AI replaces soon.
The bigger near-term pressure is client expectations. AI will accelerate Drupal development - modules, themes, migrations, custom functionality. Clients will start expecting projects to cost less and move faster. Agencies that adapt to this reality will thrive. Those that don't will find it a hard road.
How Drupal is keeping pace
Drupal competes across three distinct categories. DXP (Digital Experience Platform) competitors like Adobe and Sitecore offer monolithic, all-in-one platforms. Composable/MACH competitors like Contentful offer headless, API-first approaches. And then there's Drupal - which does both, often simultaneously.
When a client needs an enterprise-grade DXP, Acquia's stack, built on Drupal, competes directly with Adobe Experience Manager at substantially lower total cost of ownership. When a client wants API-first composable architecture, Drupal has been doing that since 2015 - not API-only, because you retain all of Drupal's power for user management, content modelling, and workflows while delivering content via headless interfaces. And for organisations that need a hybrid - vast content management capability combined with headless interfaces and third-party integrations - that's Drupal's genuine sweet spot.
Uniquely positioned to serve all three categories is not a weak compromise. It's a unique competitive advantage.
Drupal CMS changes the pitch
Where Drupal has historically struggled is in sales pitches. If you've ever had to spend weeks building a custom demo just to show a prospect what Drupal could do, or watched a client get dazzled by an proprietary CMS demo while yours involved explaining modules, you'll understand the problem. Drupal's out-of-the-box experience was, to be blunt, severely lacking.
The Starshot initiative launched in early 2024 to address exactly this problem. In under a year, Drupal CMS 1.0 shipped in January 2025. A year later, version 2.0. Achieving this in an open source project, coordinating volunteers across working groups while keeping Drupal Core stable, was remarkable to see unfold. If you or your organisation contributed, it deserves to be said: it wouldn't have happened without you.
Drupal CMS changes what's possible in a pitch. You can now install Drupal CMS, launch a polished, fully functional demo in minutes, and show a client exactly what they'll be working with. The days of "trust us, it can do that" are over.
The key feature releases in Drupal CMS 2.0 are worth highlighting:
- Canvas - A WYSIWYG page building experience built from scratch, moving beyond the Paragraphs vs Layout Builder debate that's divided the community for years.
- Recipes - One-click install for bundled feature sets. Want SEO tools? Find the recipe, click install, done. No more trawling 50,000 modules.
- Site Templates - A modernised approach to Distributions, bundling a complete theme and feature set into a single install.
- AI integration - Whether it's a chatbot helping users learn Drupal features, AI agents building functionality, or AI enhancing content, it's all available now.
Acquia Source also launched in late 2025, offering Drupal CMS as a SaaS product for organisations that want the power of Drupal without managing infrastructure.
Find out more about Drupal CMS »
Pamela Barone, the Drupal CMS Product Lead (sponsored by her employer Technocrat), gave a fantastic keynote at DrupalSouth Wellington that provides a much deeper dive into the rapid innovation that's been possible.
Five takeaways from my talk
For agencies and end-user organisations leaving this talk (or reading this post), here's what I'd ask you to take away.
One: The market opportunity is real. The web is still growing. Drupal is still dominant behind Wordpress at every tier that matters. Recent innovations have substantially strengthened the competitive position. There's a bright future ahead for organisations that lean into it.
Two: Leverage the hybrid CMS position. Drupal's ability to function as DXP, composable, or hybrid in a single platform is a genuine differentiator. Use it in client pitches. Most alternatives force a choice between these models.
Three: Drupal CMS changes what's possible. Use it for client demos and smaller projects. You can secure clients by building smaller projects faster while retaining Drupal Core's full power when clients need to scale.
Four: Adapt to AI now. It's the new operational reality. Agencies and organisations that maintain human accountability while using AI to increase speed and reduce cost will win.
Five: Invest in the open source technology your organisation relies on. Drupal is open source, which means there's no single company responsible for its future. The Drupal Association manages the infrastructure, coordinates initiatives, and facilitates the community that keeps it all going. If your agency makes money building on Drupal, or your organisation has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees by using it, supporting the Drupal Association is an investment in your own future - not a donation.
Get involved
A few specific actions worth taking:
If you're an agency that's not already a Drupal Certified Partner, the entry level requirements are minimal, so there really is no excuse. It's becoming a real differentiator in pitches - being able to say "we don't just use Drupal, we actively help build it" carries enormous weight with informed buyers.
The Drupal Marketing Initiativeis actively seeking involvement from Drupal Certified Partners. The DA is doing the top-of-funnel work for the community - helping expose Drupal to enterprise buyers who might not have considered it. That benefits every agency selling Drupal.
The Drupal AI Initiativehas 31 partners and $1.5 million in cash and in-kind contributions committed to defining how AI is integrated ethically and effectively into Drupal. Getting involved now gives you a seat at the table as those decisions are made.
The competitive opportunity is Drupal's to lose
The CMS market is still growing strongly and Drupal holds a unique competitive position. Recent product innovation has addressed legacy weaknesses and the community that builds and sustains Drupal is a benchmark that other open source projects to aspire to. Despite the recent digital market downturn and impact of AI, Drupal's future remains bright for agencies that build projects with it and for organisations that rely on it keeping pace with evolving requirements.