Drupal Developer Survey 2025 Results
The 2025 Drupal Developer Survey results are finally here!
The Drupal Developer Survey is a global project that identifies key trends and sentiment among the Drupal development community. Our key goal is to provide essential information to Drupal service providers, tool developers, and the Drupal Association to help guide them on strategic decisions. Also, it’s really interesting to see how other Drupal developers experience the project and approach their work.
Started back in 2018 by Jeff Geerling and Chris Urban, the survey is now organised by me - Mike Richardson at Ironstar - with a tremendous amount of support from an international team of translators and contributors.
Translations
As you’ll see later in this survey, only 28% of Drupal developers speak English as their first language. While nearly everyone speaks some English, I think it’s important to provide as much access and opportunity for non-English speakers to participate in Drupal and provide their perspective through this survey.
This is why I’m so incredibly grateful to the volunteers who dedicate so much of their time to translate the survey. This year we were able to make the survey available in a dozen languages: English, German, French, Japanese, Icelandic, Traditional Chinese, Malayalam, Telugu, Polish, Indonesian, Spanish, and Russian.
Which languages the survey is available in, depends solely on whether or not we have a volunteer able to devote the time to translation. If you don’t see your language here, it’s simply because we didn’t have a volunteer who could do that work. So, our unending thanks to:
- Jimmy Cann (jimmycann) - Japanese
- Chris Wu (amourow) - Traditional Chinese
- Nicolas Loye (nicoloye) - French
- Niklas Franke (heroicnick) - German
- Hilmar Hallbjörnsson (drupalviking) - Icelandic
- Elvis Moreta (roberto_araya) - Spanish
- Roberto Araya - Spanish
- Tomasz Rogalski (tomrog) - Polish
- Anto Jose (antojose) - Malayalam
- Vinmayi Swamy (vinmayiswamy) - Telugu
- Suryanto Rachmat (suryanto) - Indonesian
- Andrey Simonov (skipper-vp) - Russian
Who responded?
In 2025, we had 753 responses from 58 different countries, compared to 648 responses from 65 different countries in 2024. It’s been great to see more engagement in the survey this year than last year!
Top 20 Responding Countries - 2025 vs 2024
Looking at the top 20 responding countries, we saw significantly more engagement in the US, UK, and Belgium. This helped offset a drop in responses from some other countries with large Drupal communities, including Australia, India, and Japan.
We’re incredibly grateful for the effort our translators make every year to have this survey accessible to more people in more countries. We know from previous years that making a survey available in someone’s native language greatly increases the chances that we receive more responses from that country.
Almost 65% of Drupal Developers Speak English at Work
I make this point every year, and will continue to do so, but that means that although the vast majority of Drupal resources are in English, there are a lot of us who don’t use English primarily at work and may struggle to consume those resources.
90% of Drupal Developers are at least Proficient in English
This year we added a new question to explore proficiency in English. I thought this might lend more weight to my tired old argument that we need more non-English resources in the Drupal ecosystem, but in fact this has gone in the other direction.
72% of all respondents are at least “Native” in English, while in total 90% are Proficient or above. This indicates a great level of English proficiency in the Drupal community and might argue against investing precious resources in translation and non-English resources.
We need more younger developers
In 2025, Drupal again struggled to reach a younger audience. There is only a single respondent less than 21 years old. In addition, compared to 2024, we had 59 respondents aged 21 to 29, but only 44 in 2025. This is despite the fact that we had 106 more responses overall.
There is a lot of really exciting stuff happening with Drupal these days. Drupal CMS, and the related improvements around things like Experience Builder, AI, Marketplace are very exciting. I believe those things will help Drupal grow and reach more users, but for now adoption appears to be falling and we aren’t reaching younger developers.
Average Salaries
This year for the first time, we asked people how much their salary was. We went to great lengths to ensure that everyone understood this question was optional, since it’s pretty personal. 11% of respondents chose “I’d rather not say”.
Of course, this looks at a global view for a survey that is heavily representative of US and EU residents, so let’s break this down by geographic region.
Average Salaries by Economic Region
I tried to group respondents in to a loose affiliation where their economic circumstances are similar. Admittedly, this isn’t perfect but I think it still serves as a useful demonstration.
We’ll continue to ask this question in future years, and it will be interesting to see how it changes over time.
Drupal’s growth in Asia appears to have stalled
One of the most interesting stats from 2024 was that nearly 50% of all new Drupal developers came from Asia or the Asia Pacific region, with 29% from Japan alone. This was measured by looking at developers with less than 3 years experience.
In 2025, we see a much more even distribution of new users and the growth in Asia disappears almost completely. The pie chart above shows users with less than 3 years experience, for a total of 45 new developers.
When looking at developers with less than 1 year, we have just 11 respondents. One from Japan, and the rest from either the US or Europe.
Feelings About Drupal
We asked how responders feel about the future of the Drupal project, which could be either Positive, Negative or Not Sure.
In 2024, the third option was “No opinion”, while this year we changed this to “I’m Not Sure” and made the question optional. I feel this better captures true sentiment since “No opinion” and “Not Sure” are not equivalent.
So, while 64% saying they feel Positive is a reduction from 80% in 2024, the gap has mostly shifted to the Not Sure category in 2025. The actual Negative sentiment improved slightly by 1%.
We’ll have to wait for next year’s results to see how this looks, and we’ll keep the question consistent this time!
Platforms and Tooling
Drupal devs dislike Sitecore the most
In previous years, we simply asked if you used other CMS solutions. This year, we’ve changed that question (and others) so it asks for your impression of those solutions if you’ve used them.
We tried to keep this basic with a simple “Would you recommend it?” question, and the results are very interesting.
In this chart, in green, you can see how many responders to the survey have used this tool and recommend it, vs those who have used it but aren’t certain (yellow), and those who have used it and do not recommend it (red). Finally, there’s all those people who have never used it.
For me, the most interesting takeaways in this are:
- Shopify and Laravel are pretty popular and almost universally recommended.
- Wordpress is, of course, super popular, but while the majority of users wouldn’t recommend it, there’s still a large portion who would.
- Sitecore, AEM, Kentico, and Umbraco are very widely not recommended.
In a ringing endorsement, 85% of Laravel users would recommend it. While the user base of some CMS solutions isn’t statistically significant enough to draw firm conclusions, it is certainly interesting that only 28% of Wordpress users would recommend it!
(Almost) Everybody loves DDEV
Most of the charges we share from now on will follow this sort of format since we’re getting into the tools or products that people use and how they feel about them. I’m really liking the new way this question is framed since it gives us so much more insight.
For example, in this chart we can see that not only does DDEV have almost universal adoption within the Drupal community, it is widely loved and recommended.
In contrast, although the majority of Drupal Devs have experience using and managing their own LAMP, WAMP or similar local environment solution, the majority of those devs don’t recommend doing it that way.
The takeaway from this is pretty clear: If you’re looking for a tool to help you manage your local Drupal development environments, you can’t go wrong with DDEV. 93% of DDEV users recommend it. The nearest alternative recommendation is Homebrew, with 72%. Lando is towards the back with only 51%.
78% of Drupal Devs Are Using AI
AI adoption continues to grow at a rapid pace. In 2025, 78% of Drupal Devs are using AI to help them build Drupal sites, up from 50% in 2024.
Using the chart above, you can see that nearly all of those users have at least tried ChatGPT, with the majority recommending it. However, we don’t have insight in this chart as to which GPT models they are using.
Claude, Copilot, and Perplexity also stand out as the most recommended tools within their user base, while Grok, Gemini, and PhpStorm’s AI Assistant are less likely to be recommended.
However it’s worth noting that in this chart, compared to others, we see a lot more positive recommendations across all tools. If you’re in the 22% of Drupal devs who aren’t using AI to build Drupal sites, it’s worth noting that almost everyone else recommends that you do.
Debug Tools
Moving on to the tools we use to debug our Drupal sites, we can see that Xdebug is of course extremely popular and widely adopted.
When it comes to APM tools, New Relic wins out, although Blackfire is slightly more widely recommended amongst its smaller user base.
If you aren’t already familiar with and using xdebug and xhprof, they are open source tools and, as you can see here, well recommended by the folks who use them.
Partners and Providers
PaaS Providers
Drupal Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers offer a managed solution for hosting Drupal, where things like backups, deployment pipelines, CDN integrations, and more are done for you. These platforms greatly simplify the complexity of launching and managing Drupal sites.
For the purposes of this survey, we would only consider a Drupal hosting provider as PaaS if they:
- Offered self-service tools like a CLI or UI that allows devs to fully control their Drupal environments
- Did not provide access to underlying infrastructure like servers and networks, so that devs don’t have to worry about how those components operate
- Specifically have support for hosting Drupal, including documentation on how to best configure Drupal for their platform
To our knowledge, only these 6 providers offer this kind of completely managed Drupal hosting service: Acquia, Amazee, Ironstar, Pantheon, Platform.sh and Skpr.
When we put this data together, we noticed something really curious. Both Ironstar and Skpr only have customers within Australia but there were many responses from people outside of those countries who would either recommend or not recommend the provider.
I think this might be because someone would feel they couldn’t recommend something they hadn’t used, and didn’t understand that the “I haven’t used it” answer was the more appropriate choice here. That said, some people who could never have used Ironstar or Skpr still said “Would Recommend”. 🤷♂️
This is likely a problem with all responses to this question, but it would be less noticeable if we had more responses. It’s a shame, because for those responses that were from within Australia, Ironstar and Skpr both had a much more positive sentiment than you see here. Oh well!
Digital Ocean and Hetzner Are The Most Loved Cloud Providers
Next up is Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers. These could also just be known as “cloud providers”. These are infrastructure hosts that don’t specifically provide Drupal capabilities and support, so their users have to take care of themselves. The results is a cheaper hosting bill, but a lot more time and energy spent on building and maintaining the solution.
Sakura Cloud is a popular IaaS provider with almost universal adoption in Japan, so we included them here. But it’s worth noting that they likely fall victim to the same issue that affected Skpr and Ironstar in the previous analysis - lots of people living outside of Japan expressing a positive or negative opinion about Sakura when they probably have never used it.
Among these responses, we see that Azure is the least recommended platform. Only 29% of Azure users would actually recommend it.
Cloudflare Dominates Drupal But Fastly Is Catching Up
Finally, let’s take a look at CDN providers. These services are used to cache content from Drupal sites in servers all over the world. They help web page load times by delivering content closer to the user. This also reduces web server load by reducing the number of hits the origin servers need to handle. Many CDN providers also include advanced security capabilities to help protect websites.
Cloudflare is the undisputed leader in this category, undoubtedly helped by its compelling free tier and ease of use. But Cloudflare, outside of an expensive Enterprise plan, doesn’t support tag-based cache invalidation which is an incredibly powerful feature for any Drupal site, thanks to Drupal’s advanced caching system. Regardless, 81% of Cloudflare users recommend it, which is the highest score out of all CDN providers.
Nearly every Drupal PaaS hosting provider partners with Fastly - including Ironstar - which has a fantastic tag-based invalidation system for all account levels. It came in a close second with 78% of Drupal devs who use Fastly recommending it. Fastly is our recommendation as well.
Amongst the CDN providers who have a statistically significant user base, AWS Cloudfront and Akamai fared the worst. Out of their user based, only 60% would recommend Cloudfront and only 54% would recommend Akamai.
Final Thoughts
In this 2025 version of the survey results summary, we skipped some of the questions that didn’t show any meaningful new information when compared to the 2024 results. Those 2024 results are still available, so we’d encourage you to check out last years Drupal Developer Survey 2024 results.
I again want to thank our translators who did an incredible job, and everyone who helped fill out the survey. I also want to apologise for how long it took to get these results published - with the survey having closed at the end of April. It takes about a full month to put this survey together and analyse all the data which alone takes over a week and it’s just been difficult to find the time.
Given that much of the data doesn’t change from year-to-year, next year we may skip the dev survey and instead run a different survey. Personally I’d love to get more insight into how people feel about their hosting providers (for obvious reasons), or how Drupal users (not developers) experience the project and how it is used in the wild.
But for now, we hope you enjoyed the data and found it useful.
As always, if you have any feedback, or would like to be notified when the next survey becomes available and results are published, you can find us on Twitter/X and LinkedIn. Thanks again!
Mike Richardson is the Managing Director of Ironstar, as well as the Chair of the DrupalAsia Steering Committee, the organising group for DrupalCon Asia (this year in Nara).