Most enterprise CMS decisions are made by people who will be gone before the consequences land. That's not cynicism. That's the business model your vendor is counting on.
When you sign a proprietary CMS contract, you're not just buying software. You're handing over your code, your data, and your future options — in exchange for things being easy on day one. That trade looks great when you sign. It looks very different in year four.
The CFO. The fee isn't the real cost. The real cost is leaving — your content and integrations are locked inside their system. So you don't leave. You renew, at whatever price they set. With Drupal there's no licence fee and nothing to escape from.
Legal and compliance. Your data sits where they decide. Breaches surface when they choose to tell you. In the EU, “we trust the vendor” doesn't survive an audit. With Drupal: your cloud, your region, public security disclosures. You can evidence it.
The board. The company behind your platform can be acquired, pivoted or shut down, and you get a deadline to migrate off. Open source has no single vendor to fail.
The AI roadmap. AI rewards clean, structured, machine-readable content, not pretty pages. Most editors store yours as visual layout, so every AI project starts with an expensive extraction.
So here's the reframe. Drupal isn't the “developer's choice”. That label is how vendors keep this technical instead of strategic. It's the ownership choice: you own the code and the data, it runs in your region, and no renewal email rewrites your roadmap.
The question was never which CMS has the nicer demo. In ten years, do you want to own your platform, or explain to the board why you rented it?