Acquia Digital Experience Platform vs Cascade Server

• The Acquia Cloud Hosting (enterprise) provides a three-server solution. You have a Development, Staging (or UAT), and Production servers with a clear path of deployment straight up the chain. You may use Acquia's own Cloud Hooks, or their web admin UI interface to deploy to any or all of the servers.
• Git is one of the foundation services built-in to the management of the website codebase. Allowing a developer, or well-trained end user (university employee) to easily deploy a tag or branch to any one of the servers, makes it very easy for us to offload the server / account management to the school, while we focus on improving their site.
• Not only does Acquia Cloud provide a multi-datacenter failover disaster recovery solution, but they also maintain a multi-region failover as well, which allows for a fully redundant enviroment to be maintained in two geographic regions. No fear of losing any database changes or form submissions from students.
• Lastly, the onboarding process is constantly being improved, and as I have been a third-party vendor involved in many of our hosting negotiations, I have seen it firsthand. Each enterprise client is assigned a small team of engineers, technical leads, and a pseudo-project-manager to explain the process in layman's terms to the client (university / college for my example), but they also perform a number of code reviews and best-practice analysis of a site prior to launch.

Read full review

• Cascade CMS makes no assumptions about your content. Templates control how the content gets displayed.
• Workflows are intuitive and allow for one or more people to review content before it is published.
• The published site is static (no database connection) which allows for faster page loads and reduced risk of attack.

Read full review

• Responses from tickets aren't always from the same person, and can vary in effectiveness of solving your problem
• While documentation is robust, it can be difficult to find exactly what you need
• Provided forums are not monitored frequently, and are not as useful as they could be

Read full review

• Cascade CMS is not an out-of-the-box pre-built system that you can install, turn on and expect to be serving sites and pages on day one. It's not a blogging system like WordPress, or a drag-and-drop system like SquareSpace (both of which I've used for their own purposes). You need to have someone tasked with management and system administration – and if you implement the on-premise self-hosted version, you ought to have several people. We have the university's IT shop handling infrastructure (server hardware, containers, clustering, operating systems, load-balancing, DNS, database servers, NAS/SAN drives), our Web & Design team managing Cascade CMS (system settings, sites, templates, permissions) and managers coordinating each respective academic unit (A&S, business, education, law, marine science).

Read full review

• Our website isn't a revenue generator, so we don't have specific ROI calculations.
• The new website is helping us move off of a legacy on-prem server environment. The reduction of cost in maintaining those will be beneficial.
• We have had to invest in some training for our developers to learn Drupal.

Read full review

• Initially, ROI was positive - because we completely redesigned the website when we implemented Cascade.
• Over time, the inability to keep up with the latest interactive tools has reduced visitors time on site.
• Also over time, the difficulty of use has led to less buy-in by backend users, leading to outdated pages, little timely information, and lower visitors.

Read full review