Likelihood to Recommend It made it super easy to upgrade 300+ Drupal sites to the latest major version in 12 weeks, end to end. It is easy to deploy legal changes and updates to components at scale. Turnkey service to deploy new environments and to clone sites. There are no ecosystem lock-in principles for Customer service/success services and professional services for new approaches.
Read full review LightCMS is perfect for 90% of websites out there. It has all the basic modules like calendars, photo galleries, news/blog, or forms building built in. Small businesses to mid-sized businesses are perfect for LightCMS. We use other solutions when the requierments for the website include a lot of third party integrations or custom modules. As a hosted CMS it has the same limitations as others with server-side development.
Read full review Pros It's fast, no lag time Exceptionally good support. When there's a problem, you reach out to your account manager who either fixes the issue or gets you to the right person. We've had no downtime. Platform is very accessible to those who know how to manage the back end software. Read full review LightCMS provides all the major functionality 90% of sites need. It keeps out of its own way by making these solutions intuitive and simple and not trying to solve every problem for everyone which would over-complicate the tool-set. This is the easiest to use CMS we have ever seen. I tell my client's that if they can make a Facebook post, they can manage their website, and it's true. Their UI is so easy and keeps getting easier to use. Untrained users get it in minutes and are able to manage their sites without our help. LightCMS's code is simple and light-weight. Sites are fast and the CMS doesnt get in the way of performance. You can do almost anything you want (except server-side programming) with LightCMS. So, we can create any design we want and it works great with Light CMS's tokens and editable regions concept (which is also simple to implement.) Constantly upgraded and fixed, the product is 1000x better after 10 years of working with it, but is still simple and not bloated. Read full review Cons Support responds pretty quickly to critical tickets, but they can be slow to respond on non-urgent items. Some of what we experienced may have been related to a newer ticketing system recently implemented. Standard support covers business days/hours but only critical support is available outside those times. We typically schedule our website updates for the weekend or "off" hours when only critical support is available. Read full review While keeping it simple is LightCMS's thing, some of the elements/modules could use deeper options or control for advanced users. Some content, such as calendars, cannot have data exported/imported easily. Support was amazing 10 years ago. We openly talked about how awesome they were... it isn't as good as it once was, but is still way above almost every support of other CMS systems we have used. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We're moving away from Drupal as a platform. Drupal 8 and 9 were simply too overburdened and difficult to maintain compared to other offerings. PHP seems like a dying language so we are currently in the process of migrating all of our Drupal 7 functionality and custom modules to a Python/Django/Wagtail platform. This doesn't mean Acquia isn't a great service, they are professional and top-knotch, but the only way we'd say with them is if I didn't complete the migration.
Read full review Usability It's a great user interface. It's always being updated and I've never noticed a bad update that increased the complexity or reduced
Read full review Support Rating Every time we have had an issue, Acquia support has responded promptly and worked with us as a team to solve the problem. The Acquia support team is global and we have literally had interactions with all of their support offices, yet the experience has been the same - top notch
Read full review Implementation Rating It was implemented when I got there. I don't know how it was prior.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We chose Acquia for a much better UI that gave non-analytical marketers and easy to use tool where they could create their own reports. The campaign side of things also had an easier to use UI as well, that made the targeting of audiences much easier.
Read full review We have looked at hundrends of CMS's and LightCMS is a perfect entry-level system for most of our small to mid sized clients. LightCMS's feature set is less complex than almost every other system and the actual interface is miles ahead of most other CMS systems. It's simply thought out better. It lacks sensibility and an API as well as other advanced features many more expensive or more DIY systems have, but the simplicity makes up for it.
Read full review Scalability The DXP tools can handle millions of requests and can scale automatically to fit your needs. We have clients that use only part of the DXP tools and have a small usage, but even in these cases they see great value in using tools like personalization and CDP.
Read full review Return on Investment Acquia has helped us to stabilize and optimize our website performance, lowering page load times and dramatically decreasing the frequency of issues experienced by end-users. Acquia SOLR search provided a much-improved search experience on our website. Acquia's PCI-compliant hosting has helped us to remain compliant and cyber-secure. We are working to implement Acquia Site Studio and Acquia Personalization now and expect those to improve our operation agility and ability to drive more relevant experiences to our various website visitors. Read full review While I always think the price could be cheaper, LightCMS is incredibly inexpensive if you consider the costs of hosting, support, and upgrading is all included. As part of their partner program, we are able to control client accounts from our master account, making moving between clients easier and supporting them faster which ultimately makes our labor costs better. Read full review ScreenShots