For a small business, WordPress hosting is cheaper to start and cheaper to keep: entry managed WordPress plans run roughly $28–$35 a month, while the Drupal-specialist host Acquia starts its self-service Cloud Platform at $148 a month. The software itself costs nothing either way — Drupal core and every contributed module on Drupal.org ship under the GPL v2 or later, per Drupal's licensing page, and WordPress is licensed the same way, so every dollar of difference is hosting and labour. That gap is a market effect more than a technical one. Where a host sells both CMSes on identical hardware, the price is identical — which means the real question for a small business is not "which CMS is cheaper to host" but "which hosting tier does my chosen CMS push me onto, and what happens in year two".
Table of Contents
- The same host, the same price: proof the CMS is not the line item
- What entry managed WordPress actually costs
- Why Drupal pushes you up a tier
- The renewal trap that costs more than the CMS choice
- Why the market prices them differently
- Choosing on cost, honestly
- Frequently Asked Questions
The same host, the same price: proof the CMS is not the line item
Pantheon sells a single Basic plan that runs either WordPress or Drupal at the same cost — $55/month billed monthly or $500/year prepaid, about $41–42 a month, with a 35,000 monthly visit cap and 20GB of storage. One plan, two CMSes, one price.
That is the cleanest like-for-like evidence available: managed hosting is priced on traffic, storage and support, not on which application you install. A Drupal site serving 20,000 visits a month consumes roughly what a WordPress site serving 20,000 visits consumes. So when you see Drupal hosting quoted at four times the WordPress figure, you are usually looking at a different product — an enterprise platform with compliance, staging workflows and account management attached — rather than a surcharge for Drupal.
What entry managed WordPress actually costs
Two hosts define the mainstream floor. Kinsta's Single 35k plan lists $35/month monthly or about $30/month prepaid annually ($350/year) for one site and 35,000 estimated monthly visits. WP Engine's entry plan lists $28/month billed annually, roughly $35 monthly, for one site, 25,000 visits, 10GB storage and 75GB bandwidth. The number that matters more than the headline price is the overage rate, because a small business that gets one good press mention blows through a visit cap.
Kinsta bills extra traffic at $0.50 per 1,000 visits and keeps the site up rather than suspending it. WP Engine's overage pricing is $2 per 1,000 — four times as much. Run the arithmetic on a spike. An extra 50,000 visits in a month costs $25 at Kinsta and $100 at WP Engine. The cheaper sticker price is the more expensive plan the moment your traffic is unpredictable.
Why Drupal pushes you up a tier
Drupal 11 raised its baseline. Per Drupal.org's own requirements announcement, it needs PHP 8.3 and MySQL 8.0, MariaDB 10.6, PostgreSQL 16 or SQLite 3.45. The PHP requirements page sets a 64MB PHP memory minimum, with 128–256MB typical in production, and about 1GB of RAM so that Composer — the dependency manager Drupal uses to install and update modules — can run at all. Composer is the quiet budget item.
A cheap shared plan may serve a Drupal site fine and then fail during an update, because resolving dependencies is memory-hungry work that happens on the server. If you cannot run Composer, you cannot patch the site without moving the whole build process somewhere else. This is also where the cheap-on-paper Drupal platforms get caught. Platform.sh lists its smallest production plan, Essential, at €22/month with 0.65 vCPU and 0.65GB RAM, with its Upsun model at €9 per project per month plus metered resources. That RAM figure sits below Drupal's own production guidance, so the advertised entry price is not the price of a plan you should actually run a business site on.
The renewal trap that costs more than the CMS choice
Shared hosting is the floor for both platforms, and it is where the real money is lost. SiteGround's StartUp plan advertises $2.99/month on a 12-month prepaid term and states that it "renews at $17.99/mo" — year two costs roughly six times year one.
That is a bigger swing than any WordPress-versus-Drupal difference at the entry level. A business that budgets $36 for hosting and gets a $216 bill has mispriced its site by more than the gap between Kinsta and Pantheon. Things worth checking before you sign anything:.
- The renewal rate, not the promotional rate — ask for it in writing if the page buries it.
- The overage rate per 1,000 visits, and whether overages throttle, suspend or simply bill.
- The PHP memory limit and available RAM, if you are running Drupal.
- Whether backups, staging and a CDN are included or sold separately.
- The term length required to get the advertised price, and whether you pay it all up front.
Why the market prices them differently
The supply of cheap plans follows the install base. W3Techs' CMS overview for November 2026 puts WordPress at 58.1% of sites with a known CMS — 39.4% of all websites — against Drupal at roughly 0.6%. Hundreds of hosts compete for WordPress customers, which is exactly why a $28 managed plan exists.
Nobody competes that hard for 0.6% of the market. Drupal's share climbs to 6.7% of the top 10,000 sites, per W3Techs' Drupal and WordPress comparison, and that explains the shape of its hosting market. Acquia — founded by Drupal's creator — starts self-service at $148/month for its Personal tier and sells its Standard, Plus, Premium and Elite tiers as annual, quote-only subscriptions. Quote-only pricing is a signal about who the product is for.
Choosing on cost, honestly
If your site is a brochure, a blog, a small shop or a lead-generation page, managed WordPress at $28–$35 a month is the lower-cost path, and the plentiful supply of hosts means you can leave one for another without a migration project. If something about your requirements genuinely points to Drupal — complex content modelling, multisite with shared editorial workflow, granular permissions across many editor roles — Pantheon's $500/year Basic plan is the evidence that you can host it for around $42 a month rather than $148.
You pay the enterprise price when you need the enterprise platform, not when you choose the CMS. Budget the labour separately in both cases. The licence is free on both sides, so a small business comparing quotes should ask what each figure includes in developer hours, because that is the line that actually differs between a WordPress build and a Drupal one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Drupal cost more to license than WordPress?
No. Drupal core and every contributed module and theme on Drupal.org are released under the GNU GPL v2 or later and are free for commercial use, as Drupal.org's licensing page states. WordPress uses the same licence family, so neither charges a software fee.
Can I run Drupal on a $3-a-month shared plan?
Often it will serve pages, but Drupal 11 expects PHP 8.3, a 64MB PHP memory minimum (128–256MB in production) and about 1GB of RAM for Composer to run. Without that headroom, updates fail even when the site loads.
What happens if I exceed my plan's visit limit?
It depends on the host, and the difference is large. Kinsta bills $0.50 per 1,000 extra visits and keeps the site online instead of suspending it; WP Engine charges $2 per 1,000 on the same kind of entry plan.
