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This may be a semantic difference rather than a substantial one, but the Coppola DRACULA is not closer to the plot of Stoker's novel.
The plot of the book (stated rather baldly) is that the Count invades England to spread the taint of vampirism. The key word is "invades."
The 1931 DRACULA tells this story, filtered through the play.
The plot of the Coppola film is: Dracula goes to England to find the reincarnation of his lost love. This plot is dressed up with a lot of incidents borrowed from the novel, as was Fred Saberhagen's riff on stoker, THE DRACULA TAPE. This is why I said before that Coppola's film is really an adaptation of Saberhagen's novel, not Stoker's. (This idea is not original to me.) As if to underline the point, Saberhagen gets co-credit on the official movie-tie in novelization of BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA -- a book that shouldn't even exist if the Coppola film were, as claimed, a completely faithful filmization of its source.
As for keeping the original Harker story, it is nice to see Jonathan (and not Renfield) travel to Transylvania, but the film does not keep the Harker story in any meaningful sense. The book's story (among other things) is about how this young Englishman is psychologically devastated by his experience in Castle Dracula, but under the tutelage of Professor Van Helsing, he overcomes this setback and destroys the monster -- a symbolic rte of passage into manhood, underlined by the fact that he goes on to father a child by Mina.
In the Coppola film, Harker gets his knife into Dracula but doesn't destroy him. That's left to Mina, turning the ending into a silly attempt at romantic tragedy. Like everything else in the film, it retains elements from the book but undermines them in service of its Harlequin romance approach to vampirism.
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