Drupal Developer Survey 2024 Results
The results are in for the Drupal Developer Survey 2024!
This survey used to be called the Drupal Local Development Survey, and focused heavily on the sorts of tools people used to build Drupal sites. This year we’ve expanded a little bit and asked a few more questions about the people, so it felt like it made sense to rename it to the Drupal Developer Survey moving forward.
How it began
I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the efforts of Jeff Geerling and Chris Urban, who together ran the Drupal Local Development Survey in 2018, 2019, and 2020. When I first started building tools for Drupal developers I found those survey results really, really helpful. So I was sad when it didn’t take place in 2021 and 2022.
In 2023, I reached out to ask Chris and Jeff if it would be okay for me to carry the idea forward and they were kind enough to let me do that, and the survey now returns again in 2024.
And that’s great because now we can compare some of this data to last year, as well as to 2020 and earlier. It really helps us see some short and long-term trends in the community that I hope you’ll find as interesting as I do.
A big thanks to Chris and Jeff for making all of this possible.
Thanks to our translators
Starting last year, we’ve been making an effort to offer translations of the survey in multiple languages. I wanted to provide a way for non-native English speakers to easily share their perspective with the rest of the community.
This year translations were available in Traditional Chinese, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese. I want to take a moment to really acknowledge and say thank you to the effort made by these fantastic translators.
It takes a fair bit of effort to put together a translation, and so I’m very grateful to Nicolas, Jimmy, Chris, Alvaro, and Niklas for volunteering their time to help translate the survey. If you want to help with a translation next year, please do let me know. The translations definitely give us more reach with folks who aren’t native English speakers.
Who responded?
In 2024, we received an incredible 648 responses from 65 different countries. The United States, France, and India alone accounted for 50% of the responses overall.
Overall we had about 200 fewer responses this year than last year. The new translations this year in German and Spanish definitely saw an increase in responses for those versions. Notably, Japan grew the most with nearly 3 times as many responses this year compared to last year.
While it’s a bit of a shame to see the total number of submissions drop, I think it’s caused in part by the survey being open for less time, and the survey being a little bit longer than in previous years.
But while we have fewer responses overall, I do think the data in those responses is more useful. For the first time, we have insight into who Drupal developers are, and we can start to measure really important trends in future years.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to respond. Let's start checking out the results in detail!
Languages at home and work
We asked developers what language they spoke most fluently. 46% answered English, nearly 12% French, 6% German, and 4% Japanese.
About 13 respondents were the only fluent speakers of their language. For example, there was only one respondent for Thai, Albanian, Amharic, Bahasa Indonesian, Gujarati, and several others. It’s so cool to see these people be part of the global Drupal community and to fill out the survey.
Although many people speak English, only 74% of developers completed the English version of the survey. Which means just over a quarter of respondants completed the survey in their native language, or a language they are more fluent in. That’s about 170 responses to the survey we might not have had without the help of our translators. Without these translations, we might have found that German, French, Spanish, and Japanese communities would have had less of a voice in these results.
Even in places where English is common and well-spoken, we saw a tendency to prefer a translation in another language. For example, of the 63 people who said French was their most fluently spoken language, 52 of them decided to fill out the French survey (the rest filled out the English or Spanish survey).
We speak 43 different languages at work, and nearly a third of all workplaces don’t use English at all.
I put this question in to demonstrate that while the vast majority of Drupal resources are in English, the majority of Drupal users don’t speak English fluently. More than a third of all Drupal workplaces don’t speak English at all. If there are Drupal resources and knowledge that only exist in English, it is inaccessible to a significant part of the Drupal community.
Age and experience
76% of Drupal developers are aged between 30 and 49. 15% are over the age of 50.
No responders were under the age of 21. I know that Drupal has a huge user base in education departments, but the lack of teenage responders seems to reinforce that Drupal isn’t in their classrooms as much as we might like.
Over 63% of Drupal developers had more than 10 years experience. Around 15% have been working with Drupal for less than 5 years.
Where are the new users?
Out of the 55 responders with less than 3 years Drupal experience, nearly 30% are from Japan, followed next by 12% from India.
This would suggest that Drupal is growing fastest in Japan and India.
Employment status
To understand how people are paid to work on Drupal sites, we asked participants about their employment status.
Over half of all respondents are working at a digital agency or studio building Drupal websites for their clients, while a much smaller number are working on sites owned by their employers, such as government employees or corporate employees. Less than 20% of us work client-side.
Drupal sentiment
Nearly 80% of responders feel positive about the future of the Drupal project, while 13% don’t.
Looking at this by country, we see that negative sentiment is stronger in the United States, Australia, the UK, and Canada. However, the general sentiment is still positive overall.
The Drupal Association
The Drupal Association (known in short as 'the DA') run the infrastructure that powers drupal.org, and are responsible for Drupal’s marketing as DrupalCon North America and to an extent DrupalCon Europe and DrupalCon Asia.
We asked people how they felt about the Drupal Association and their work. One sentiment we picked up was that a fair few people didn’t really know about the DA or their work, and those people tended to mark "No opinion". Only a small number of people do not feel positive about the DA’s work.
When looking at the Drupal Association, there’s a lot more uncertainty or “no opinion” answers in this chart. I think this reflects the fact that a lot of people don’t follow the work of the Drupal Association or are unaware of its purpose.
Association Membership by country shows strong membership in the US and UK, as well as Australia, India, Spain and Germany as a percentage of responders.
Events and community
In the past year, about 65% of us have attended some kind of Drupal event, although that still means that for about a third of responders, they haven’t attended any Drupal event in the past 12 months.
Event attendance is down globally - and definitely not just for Drupal - but it is slowly ramping back up so hopefully this will change in the future. If you go to events, consider bringing your friends and coworkers along. If you want there to be a sustainable DrupalCamp or Meetup in your area, you need to go to it and help it grow.
Contribution
80% of respondents contribute to Drupal in some fashion. Which is absolutely fantastic! And while 130 respondents didn’t answer this question, responding to the survey is a still form of contribution so technically everyone’s a contributor!
Financial contribution means being an association member or donating to the project. There’s some discrepancy in the data here, since 46% of respondents said they were Drupal Association members when asked, but here only 23% have said they "make a financial contribution". I suspect maybe the ‘membership’ question was misinterpreted as simply having a drupal.org account.
I thought this graph was interesting because it shows where less contribution happens generally. If you are looking for ways to contribute, valuable areas to get started are mentoring, documentation, and translations.
About the Drupal work
Very few of us have just a single Drupal site that we are responsible for. In fact, nearly a third of us work on more than 10 sites. But the largest slice goes to people managing 2-5 sites, at nearly half.
There were 7 respondents who hadn’t worked on a Drupal site in the past 12 months.
Drupal versions
Keeping in mind that 92% of respondents are working on more than 1 Drupal website, we can now compare the Drupal version usage between the 2023 and 2024 surveys, as a percentage of all responses in each year.
In 2024, we had one Drupal 4 site and six Drupal 5 sites appear in the results. In 2023, those versions were reported at zero. We can see that Drupal 7 and 8 usage is falling, but still nearly half of all these respondents are working on a Drupal 7 site.
It’s great to see that every respondent has at least one Drupal 10 site under their care.
In this chart, across the top 15 countries, we can see which countries are more likely to be running older or newer versions of Drupal.
You can see there’s a small number of Drupal 11 users, especially in Australia. I was pretty happy to see my home country being such early adopters since at the time of writing, Drupal 11 is not released.
Where we use Drupal
98% of respondents use Drupal at work, and 46% use Drupal at home.
As mentioned earlier, a surprisingly small number of people (only 1.4% of respondents) use Drupal at school or university.
Will developers keep using Drupal?
When asked “Do you think you'll still be working with Drupal one year from now?”, the sentiment was much better this year compared to last year.
While 15% of respondents in 2023 were either not expecting to work with Drupal, or unsure, in 2024 that number has nearly halved down to 8%. That’s fantastic to see.
Alternate platforms and frameworks
60% of respondents only use Drupal, and didn’t report using any other framework. That’s compared to 64% last year.
There isn’t much movement here, except a small decrease in Laravel usage (4%) and a small increase in "No-code" builders like Squarespace or Wix with 3%.
Decoupled Drupal
In 2023, 44% of respondents said they had worked on headless Drupal sites. In 2024, that number grew by 3%.
Most people found decoupling to be moderately difficult. Decoupling solutions for Drupal continue to mature and this data matches my own personal expectations based on anecdotal feedback from the community, especially when someone is decoupling for the first time.
Out of the three main API modules, this data would suggest that people find the REST UI module the easiest to work with overall, with two thirds of users reporting it as "Somewhat Easy" or "Moderate". Although there were slightly more users who found JSON:API "Somewhat Easy", there were also more users who found it "Somewhat Difficult".
Although custom endpoints looks promising in terms of ease of use, there were only 9 people using custom endpoints versus 100 using JSON:API, so the data for custom endpoints isn't statistically reliable.
Specific feedback
Lots of people shared their feedback on the decoupling experience, and here are the ones I found most interesting:
I've really enjoyed using Vue.js with Drupal because it allows a flexible hybrid approach...
GraphQL and JSON API too complicated for simple projects
Partial decoupling works well.
Sometimes I love decoupled, sometimes I hate decoupled. Rethink all your assumptions and abandon hope all ye who enter.
It is an exquisite pain
There was quite a bit of negative feedback for Gatsby in the frontend, and the “exquisite pain” feedback above was from a Gatsby user.
But there’s also definitely a sentiment that when used on the right project by a skilled team, it can be very beneficial.
Operating system
In 2023, we asked users to pick a single operating system, but this year we allowed them to pick multiple. So this year-vs-year comparison isn’t as outstanding as it might appear.
There is certainly strong growth in macOS, Arch Linux, and Windows. However, I believe the near doubling in Debian-based usage has a lot to do with people who use Windows with the Linux Subsystem. This year those users could tick both Windows and Linux, whereas last year they had to pick only one.
Windows definitely appears to be gaining significant market share amongst Drupal developers, but I believe many of those will be using the Linux Subsystem so that most of their development environments are Linux-based.
DDEV usage
This expectation that most Windows users are really using the Windows Subsystem for Linux is reinforced by some stats that the DDEV creator and lead maintainer, Randy Fay, was kind enough to share with me.
As you can see above, although Windows accounts for just under a quarter of all DDEV installs, about 85% of those Windows users are actually using WSL. Only 5% of all DDEV installs were using the native Windows binary.
IDE usage
Just as with operating system, in 2023 we only asked for a single IDE selection and received a lot of feedback that people wanted to specify more than one IDE, so in 2024 we allowed exactly that.
This is likely why you can see VS Code usage jump from 36 to 57%, but without any other IDE losing market share. Because of that oversight from last year, the data is a little skewed.
To simplify the graph, we also ignored any IDE used by less than 10 people, which removed Emacs, Netbeans, Notepad++ and a few others from the chart.
Local environment
Local Environment Managers like DDEV and Lando help Drupal users spin up local copies of their Drupal sites quickly and easily. There’s also been a lot of competition in this space and plenty of tools for people to choose from.
DDEV and Lando, two Docker-based solutions, have been the front-runners in tools for a long time, but late last year DDEV became the officially recommended solution for Drupal. Partly for that reason we can see a big increase in DDEV’s usage from 42% last year to 60% this year.
AI tools and how it's used
60% of us use AI, but only 50% of us use it for Drupal development. It did surprise me that there aren’t more people using it, and there were several people who commented that they were actively avoiding using AI.
In my personal experience, and those on my team that use it, is that AI saves us about 10-30% of our time, depending on the task. So it has been well worth incorporating into our workflow.
The main usage is code completion with tools like Copilot and JetBrains AI. Only 3 of us reported adding it to our Drupal sites for end users to access, and only 19 of us use it for deep problem solving and analysis.
Project management
Once again in 2024 we asked respondents what sort of project management methodologies they use. Remembering that 97% of respondents work on more than one Drupal site, it makes sense that lots of people encounter more than one methodology. In fact, 36% of respondents actively use more than one methodology.
"No formal methodology" was an option added in 2024, so we don’t have anything to compare it against. However, it’s worth pointing out that about 20% of the people who chose "No formal methodology" also picked at least one other option, which will reflect that they might have some projects that are managed differently, and some that aren’t managed at all.
What I found most interesting in this data is the increase in Lean usage. "Lean" was not a new addition to the survey, but out of nowhere there are some new reports of people using it. Reports were from all over the world, too. It’ll be interesting to see how that develops next year.
Quality assurance
Our approach to quality assurance suggests a generally high level of maturity in the community. 65% of us are doing code sniffing, 38% are doing automated security testing, and 44% of us are doing accessibility testing which is fantastic.
We re-worked this question this year, which makes a direct comparison to last year difficult. But we can say that peer code reviews grew from 65% to 78%, and code sniffing/static analysis grew from 52% to 65%. We will be able to identify more trends next year.
Profiling tools
Looking at what profiling tools are used to deeply analyse PHP performance in our Drupal sites, we see some curious trends. While xdebug usage grew slightly, the use of profiling tools generally fell in others. Although the sample size is smaller and this may not be statistically significant.
However it may be significant that NewRelic usage dropped 10%. That's quite a lot compared to the other tools out there.
* Note: In 2023 I included xhprof and xdebug in one option, which was silly since they’re different things. That’s why you see 19% of people using xhprof specifically this year.
Security tools
Our adoption of security tools also appears to have dropped in 2024 compared to 2023. For everything except two-factor or single-signon authentication for Drupal logins, we saw less people reporting the use of these tools.
I was at a loss to explain why this might be the case. I didn’t simply want to accept that, as a community, we’re doing less to secure our sites. I expected to see the opposite. But I triple-checked the math here and I do believe it was correct. The differences are small though, so it's very likely this is just an anomaly and next year we won't see this as an emerging trend.
Hosting providers
We can see in this chart that the Drupal Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) providers - Amazee, Platform, and Pantheon - have all gained market share, while Acquia hovered.
In general hosting, AWS lost market share while Azure and Google Cloud both gained.
Closing remarks
We should always look to data to inform our perspective on the world. Sometimes the data contradicts our opinions, and sometimes it reinforces it.
In this case, the data seems to reinforce my own perspective on some key points:
- We are aging, and there are too few graduates and younger people making use of Drupal
- Many of us are doing good work bringing best practices to our projects in terms of CI and Security
- The Drupal Association doesn't get enough recognition for the very hard work that it does
- DDEV usage is expanding rapidly while usage of nearly every other LEM tool is shrinking
When I'm lucky enough to travel and talk to Drupal developers from all over, I do see these same patterns.
The data which surprised me most was the adoption of AI. Only half of us are using AI at work, and only 3% of us are incorporating AI into our Drupal sites. I personally feel like this is a huge missed opportunity. Like or loathe it, the genie is out of the bottle and I think we all have to adapt.
Once again thank you to everyone who took the time to fill out the survey and share your perspective. If you want to review the full data set from 2023 and 2024, you can check out the spreadsheet here.
If you would like to be notified when next years survey becomes available, and when results are published, you can follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn. Until next year!
Mike Richardson is the Managing Director of Ironstar, as well as a lead organiser for DrupalCon Asia (this year in Singapore), and treasurer of the DrupalSouth Steering Committee (DrupalSouth is a three-day Camp-style conference that takes place every year in Australia or New Zealand).