Acquia Digital Experience Platform vs Cascade Server

• Easy to manage multiple environments and a team of Site Developers and Site Administrators
• Easy and intuitive to conduct deployments, back-ups, rollbacks of code, databases, and files
• Useful add-ons such as Solr Search, Security, Site Monitoring, Migration tools, etc.
• Excellent and responsive support

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

• Using the platform is not for the faint of heart. It takes some understanding of how a back-end system technology works to be able to get anything done or even know where to go.
• Being able to verify DNS services is not easy to do. A digital market is required to do this with Facebook or Google from time to time but it is hidden from the non-tech user. I need to find a tech expert to do a simple task that is holding up the quality of our digital advertising. This is the way the digital world works and these capabilities need to be exposed and easy to verify by non-tech users quickly without the possibility of disrupting the system.

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

• Acquia has a positive impact on our internal ROI for our own website.
• Most of our clients also see a positive impact on ROI when using Acquia for their web platform. This does change based on the cost of the Acquia instance.
• Acquia allows us to save time and money on client projects, allowing us to increase our margins.

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