Acquia Digital Experience Platform vs Joomla

• 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.

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• Multiple templates assigned on a page-level basis allow fine-grained control of your site design
• Excellent ACL out-of-the-box means you can have a mutli-user website up and running without needing to install anything additional
• Straightforward control panel and useful help features and documentation make it easy for people to manage their own websites

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• 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

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• Updating was never as seamless/easy as it seems to be with Wordpress. Obviously we accounted for this with our own workflow/methods, but I remember whenever we did WordPress updates it always seemed a breeze compared to the time/energy involved with a Joomla update/upgrade.
• For a while (I think this has changed some) Joomla left itself open to attacks when administrators were not as well versed as they should be. There were developer additions that did security checks/audits for you, but the CMS was the subject of a lot of attacks when left in the hands of our clients for a long time (who had changed permissions to make editing easier/convenient). Ideally the CMS would have been more restrictive on some of these things to prevent easy abuse. Obviously this is more the fault of the misinformed/human then the CMS, but it could have been more dummy-proof.
• No native versioning. There are some community extensions that add this functionality, but they pale in comparison to the versioning plugins of other CMS's (WordPress specifically). Again this was some time ago and in our experience, it could have changed by now.

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• 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.

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• Reduces Maintenance Expense - Simple interface saves clients money on site management by allowing inhouse management where desired
• Ease of Updating - Reduces website upgrade expense by allowing template upgrades without the need for redevelopment of content
• Scalability is huge - Client gains entry to an enterprise level web presence with a smaller budget and can grow/add functionality as the budget allows without a redevelopment of the entire site.

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