Drupal vs Strapi

The first thing to settle is which login paths your identity provider must cover, because Strapi and Drupal divide them differently. In Strapi, SSO applies only to administrator login to the admin panel through an identity provider such as Microsoft Azure Active Directory. It supports auto-registration, a default role for new administrators and an optional local login lock-out that disables email and password sign-in once SSO is working. End-user authentication for the public application is handled separately by the Users and Permissions plugin, so customers or members who sign in through your front end do not pass through that SSO setup at all. Confirm whether Strapi SSO is available on your plan (the self-hosted pricing page lists it as an add-on for Growth and included in Enterprise) before you design around it.

Drupal handles both groups in one site. The contributed *samlauth* module lets a Drupal site act as a SAML service provider, and its latest stable release, 8.x-3.14, supports Drupal 10.3 and later and Drupal 11. The contributed *OpenID Connect* module lets external OpenID Connect providers authenticate users and creates accounts on first sign-in, with built-in clients for generic OAuth 2.0, GitHub, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook and Okta. Editors and end users therefore share one authentication layer, and role mapping decides what each person can do. Check which modules your Drupal version and your identity provider both support, and whether first-sign-in account creation matches your provisioning rules.

Test each login path in your own environment before go-live. For Strapi, sign in as an administrator through the identity provider, confirm the default role assigned to new accounts, and verify that the local lock-out blocks password sign-in as intended. Separately, test an end-user sign-up and sign-in against the Users and Permissions configuration. For Drupal, test SAML and OpenID Connect logins with an editor account, an end user and a user who should be denied, and confirm that group or claim mapping lands each person in the correct role. Write down the result of each path, since auditors and your own security team will ask for that evidence.

The running cost of either platform is mostly people and hosting, not licenses, because neither Drupal nor the Strapi Community Edition charges a license fee. Drupal is GPL-2.0-or-later with no paid edition of Drupal itself, and the Strapi Community Edition is MIT Expat licensed. Separate one-time costs (discovery, build, theming, content migration, integrations such as SAML or OpenID Connect sign-in) from recurring costs (web and database hosting, any separate front-end hosting, plan fees, module or plugin maintenance, patching and upgrades). For Drupal, the recurring skill cost is PHP and Drupal theming, plus Drupal's contributed module maintenance. For Strapi, it is Node.js operations plus a separate front-end framework team, because Strapi only serves content over its APIs and does not render pages.

Strapi's recurring fees depend on the features you need, not on the base software. Per Strapi's self-hosted pricing page, Growth is listed at 45 US dollars per month including 3 users, with 15 dollars per extra user, and Enterprise is custom priced. SSO for the admin panel is an add-on on Growth and included in Enterprise, while audit logs and review workflows require Enterprise. Ask the vendor to confirm current figures, the seat count you need for editors and administrators, and whether Strapi's admin-panel SSO covers your identity provider, since end-user authentication is handled separately. On the Drupal side, check the cost of contributed modules you rely on, including whether an SAML or OIDC module needs a paid integration partner to configure.

Upgrade timing is a recurring cost driver for Drupal. Drupal 10 reaches end of life on December 9, 2026, with no new Drupal 10 releases after that date, and Drupal 12 is scheduled for the week of December 7, 2026, according to the Drupal core release schedule. A site still on Drupal 10 will need planned work before its support ends, and Drupal 11 requires PHP 8.3 or later while Drupal 12 requires PHP 8.5 or later. Retainers are the common way to cover monitoring, security patching and upgrades. Ask any implementation partner for a written quote that separates one-time build and migration work from a recurring support tier, names the hosting components and who pays for them, lists the modules and Strapi plan features in scope, states the Drupal or Strapi version targets and response windows, and says what happens at the next major upgrade.

A Drupal build is mostly configuration and integration work that starts before any theme is written. The team models content types, fields, taxonomies and view modes first, then configures the editorial side: roles, workflows, text formats and the content moderation settings that decide who can publish. Module selection comes next, because every contributed module adds maintenance it will need through each upgrade, so the list should be short and reviewed against the Drupal version you plan to run. Identity setup is its own workstream. Contributed options such as the SAML Authentication module and the OpenID Connect module each need attribute mapping, role assignment on first sign-in and a test plan for logout and session expiry. The most common overrun is content model churn: editors request new fields after the theme is half built, and each change ripples into templates, views and migrated test content. Fix the model in writing before theming starts.

A Strapi build splits the work across two codebases. The back end covers content types, components, lifecycle logic and the API permissions that a Users and Permissions role grants to each public or authenticated route, which is where data exposure mistakes usually happen. A separate front end then has to be built, hosted and tested, with its own rendering, caching and build pipeline. Preview is the usual gap: editors expect to see draft content in context, and that requires a preview URL and token scheme agreed with the front-end team, not a feature assumed to exist. Deployment pipelines need to cover database migrations, environment-specific settings and Node.js version management, since Strapi 5 runs only on Active or Maintenance LTS Node.js versions and the chosen version has to be pinned and tested before each upgrade. Upgrade planning is the other frequent overrun. Teams still on v4 should confirm their timeline against the v4 end-of-life date, and any v4 to v5 move needs a database backup, because downgrading is not supported.

Before signing a fixed-scope agreement, ask the vendor to write down the content model, the list of contributed modules or Strapi plugins with their maintenance status, the identity provider and the test cases for login, role mapping and logout. For a Strapi build, confirm which features need the Enterprise plan, such as audit logs and review workflows, and whether SSO is in the quote as the Growth add-on or the Enterprise tier. Confirm who owns the front end, the preview integration, the Node.js and Drupal upgrade path, and the number of content model change requests included before work is billed separately. Ask whether the agreement covers hosting setup inside your own cloud account and a handover of runbooks, since those items are where projects typically run long.