I joined Lil Engine in July 2021 and started learning about Drupal. As Drupal is emerging day by day and provides much more functionality in website design. The expert team at Lil Engine guided me to start my learning process by undertaking a beginner’s course which helped me understanding basics of Drupal. I started my Drupal journey with Drupal 8. The latest version of Drupal is 9 which is very similar to Drupal 8. 

Drupal 9 released on 3 July 2020. It was released alongside Drupal 8.9 which was supported until November 2021. Drupal 9 provides great benefits and is the advanced version of Drupal. Drupal 9 uses Symfony 4.4.3 and Twig 2.12.0 which are the third-party dependencies and increase your website’s performance making Drupal 9 faster. 

Drupal 9 is easy to upgrade than the older versions of Drupal and is relatively similar to Drupal 8. Its main feature is its backward compatibility which means its compatible with its predecessors i.e. Drupal 8. In addition, it supports responsive images wherein mobiles can display the best-sized images and hence, consume fewer amounts of data. 

Moreover, all the deprecated code from Drupal 8 has been removed in Drupal 9 which allows smooth transition from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9. It is a continuation of the fully tested and stable codebase of Drupal 8. Drupal 9 is more reliable, usable, flexible, easy to maintain and upgrade for developers. 
It has many new themes such as Olivero which is a part of Drupal 9.1 as an experimental theme. It gives a modern look and feel. 

Drupal 9 has multilingual feature which is versatile among its older versions and do not require any re-architecture when updating. The security features include but not limited to database encryption, auto-update and core validation work in partnership with GitHub, prevention of malicious data entry, patching of issues before they're exploited, user access control.

This is not the end of list about benefits of Drupal 9, it offers a lot more. The end-of-life date for Drupal 9 is when Symfony 4 reaches its end of life in November 2023, but it will lead to the release of Drupal 10. Drupal.org provides a lot more information about Drupal 9, its contributed modules, themes and much more.