FYI
someone started a LDAP plugin for modx, but it didn’t come to life (yet). A bounty could sure help this happen
As for Drupal / modx comparison, it depends on your project and except for the LDAP part, I don’t see that modx can’t fit your needs as well as Drupal.
I have worked with both, and as a webdesigner, I have found Drupal is feature centric while MODx is template/content centric. What does it mean ?
For me it’s simple : modx works for me while I feel like I am working for Drupal. Yes, Drupal can implement thousands of features out of the box (some of them quite advanced), but it takes a lot of work to customize the simplest element of design. On top of this, almost every answer to a problem in Drupal is... installing a module. You quickly end up with a hundred modules (I have an extranet with 120...) and as many database tables for a moderately complex website that would have taken no more than 10 modx addons.
Why ? Because modx addons are like a lego kit : one modx addon can solve dozens of problems you face building a website feature. Template workflow is also a big item in favor of modx.
Drupal Themes were meant to make it easy for people with little or no skills to set up a design by installing a theme. But themes have a rigid structure and the templates they contain are fragmented. You don’t get any global view of what you’re doing. For me it’s a big disadvantage as a professionnal : I have never met a client in need of a "standard" look, what they want is to express their identity and singularity through their websites. Yes, you can learn drupal theming and you can achieve what you need but it takes more time (and that equals more costs) and I find it unnecessarily complex.
modx templates are built in such a way that you feel like working with static HTML while enjoying the power of dynamic content. No rigid structure, no php in templates but an easy, coherent and powerful syntax. The power of this approach is even more obvious when you need to control how the output of addons look, since modx addons can use chunks (reusable bit of content) as templates for their output. I call this micro-templating and this give me great power to customize my clients websites.
The main use I have for Drupal is when I need complex features that I don’t have handy with modx, implemented fast for a reasonnable cost, most of the time it means intranets or extranets, where I don’t necessarily need to build a custom template.
Every (uh, almost...) CMS has its benefits and the project requirements are key to choosing the right one. Other factors come into play when you don’t already master a given platform as the learning curve. I think Drupal’s learning curve is steeper than modx’s.
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