Migration guide

Can you migrate Sitecore to Drupal?

Last updated: July 2026 · By the Replatform Radar team — specialists in pre-migration CMS content audits

Yes — Sitecore to Drupal is a well-trodden migration for organizations moving off an enterprise .NET DXP onto an open-source PHP platform to cut licensing cost and reduce vendor lock-in. Sitecore's item tree, templates, and renderings map onto Drupal's entities, content types/fields, and Twig-based theming plus Views, so the structural translation is workable but genuinely cross-stack (.NET to PHP). The biggest divergence is personalization and marketing automation: Sitecore XP's profiling, personalization, and campaign features have no open-source equivalent and are usually dropped or replaced with separate tools. Expect a full re-platform — new theme, new integrations, and a scripted content migration into Drupal via its Migrate API — rather than any kind of lift-and-shift.

Sitecore is a proprietary .NET digital experience platform built around a hierarchical item tree, where every page and content fragment is an item based on a template, and pages are composed from renderings placed on layouts. Its XP editions add visitor profiling, rules-based personalization, and marketing automation on top of the CMS. Drupal is an open-source PHP CMS built around entities and fields, with content types defining structured content, Views generating dynamic listings, and Twig templates handling presentation. Moving between them crosses both a technology boundary (.NET to PHP) and a licensing model (commercial DXP to free, community-supported core plus contributed modules).

The migration breaks into content, presentation, and experience features. Sitecore templates become Drupal content types with matching fields; the item tree becomes Drupal's entity/menu structure; and renderings and layouts are rebuilt as Twig templates, blocks, and Views. Content is moved with Drupal's Migrate API, typically by exporting Sitecore items (via its Item API, a serialized item dump, or a database extract) and writing migration source plugins that map fields and media. The features that do not survive the move are the DXP-specific ones — XP personalization, profiling, and campaign automation — which are either dropped, rebuilt with Drupal contributed modules and rules, or offloaded to dedicated third-party personalization and marketing platforms.

In your report — not a generic checklist

The Sitecore → Drupal detail, catered to your site

A pre-migration scan produces a report tailored to this exact transfer, covering the parts that decide whether the project goes smoothly:

How Sitecore and Drupal compare across the dimensions that matter for a migration
The field-mapping table — what each Sitecore construct becomes in Drupal
The Sitecore to Drupal-specific gotchas that silently cause data loss, broken links, and ranking drops
Realistic timeline & cost drivers for this migration
Your own site’s findings scored against all of it

Scan my site for this migration →

FAQ

Sitecore to Drupal: frequently asked questions

Why migrate from Sitecore to Drupal?

Mostly to eliminate expensive .NET DXP licensing and reduce vendor lock-in by moving to open-source PHP. Organizations that do not fully use Sitecore XP's personalization and marketing features often find they are paying enterprise DXP prices for CMS functionality Drupal provides at no license cost.

Does Sitecore personalization transfer to Drupal?

No. Sitecore XP profiling, personalization rules, and campaign automation have no Drupal-core equivalent and no export path. Those features are either dropped, rebuilt with contributed modules, or replaced by a dedicated third-party personalization platform — this is the single biggest gap in the migration.

How is Sitecore content migrated into Drupal?

Through Drupal's Migrate API. Teams export Sitecore items via its Item API, a serialized item dump, or a database extract, then write migration source plugins that map Sitecore template fields to Drupal content-type fields and re-import media. It is a scripted, custom pipeline; there is no one-click connector.

Is Sitecore to Drupal a big project?

Yes, it is a full re-platform across both technology and licensing boundaries. Beyond content modeling, you rebuild the entire presentation layer in Twig, re-create listings in Views, re-do integrations, and decide what to do about XP features. It is not a lift-and-shift and should be planned as a ground-up rebuild.