Zend vs drupal (comparison)

Question

We have a project to build a web application that has many features like: google maps integration, item review and rating (something like eBay rating), chatting among users, content search based on content calculated value, integration with Facebook (for login, liking the content, fetch user's friends...etc),batch and real-time notification through SMS and email and many others.

We have two candidates for this zend and drupal, I tried to search a detailed comparison between them without luck; only found high level stuffs.

Our criteria is to use a product which will not require lots of custom development and satisfies most of out needs out of the box, and it should be reliable and easy to maintain and extend in the future.

I would really appreciate if someone can shed some light on zend vs drupal comparison and point me to any useful recent analysis already done in this. 

What are the real strengths of zend ?

Thanks in advance and best regards

 

Answer 1

Drupal is easier to have a project up and running with, it is a fully working web application out of the box. The flexibility of Drupal is pretty good, but be aware that using such a "pre-built application" type of framework tends to make the hard things easy to do, and the easy things hard to do.

Zend Framework, on the other hand offers much more flexibility, but at the cost of having to write things up from scratch yourself.