Drupal vs Kiln

Drupal is content management software for building websites and applications. Drupal CMS is a ready-to-use platform for marketing teams, content creators, and site builders, built on Drupal 11 core. Included tools cover media management, SEO, AI-driven website building, consent management, analytics, search, and automatic updates. Drupal supports structured content, multilingual publishing, editorial workflows, custom user roles, and APIs for serving web, mobile, and other channels from one source. Thousands of modules, themes, and distributions can extend it, and it can connect with external services and organizational applications. Drupal identifies accessibility, API-first architecture, security, performance, and scalability as core capabilities. The software is free open-source software with no licensing fees, but self-hosting and technical setup are required. Linux or a similar system is recommended for hosting; Windows is supported only for development, not production. Drupal CMS offers temporary browser-based trial sites. After setup, Drupal CMS itself is not updated, although installed modules and themes are updated like other Drupal sites.

Kiln is an open-source, click-to-edit CMS for static sites. Invited editors change content directly on a site, with edits saved as Git commits in a repository owned by the site owner. Supported content includes text, images, documents, blocks, galleries, events, and calendar items. The publishing workflow includes drafts, scheduled publishing, named versions, history, and restoration. Owners sign in with GitHub, while invited editors and members can use Google sign-in and be scoped to particular pages or sections. Reviewer seats can comment only; suggest mode lets owners approve or decline proposed changes field by field. Kiln works with GitHub repositories and hosts that redeploy on push, including Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Vercel, and GitHub Pages. A REST API and kiln-mcp support scoped, sanitized edits by scripts and agents; optional AI assistance uses an API key supplied by the user. Site content remains plain HTML in the customer's repository, even after leaving Kiln. Self-hosted costs nothing; Kiln Cloud is $4.99 a month, and Fully managed is $14.99 a month.