Acquia Digital Experience Platform vs. MadCap Flare

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.

Incentivized

MadCap Flare has its problems, but it serves our team well as an authoring software. This would not be the case if we needed to regularly collaborate on articles, as Flare is prone to conflict issues when another person dares to breathe near an open topic. When working individually, though, it's fine. I'd love to see improvements to design, performance, and stability, but Flare remains one of the best softwares on the market for our needs as an authoring team. MadCap Central is well-suited to internal reviewing when every member is comfortable with Flare (the errors it tends to introduce set aside). SMEs, though, tend to find it hard to use. It's cluttered, some styles don't render, and it just seems like a failed attempt to reproduce Google Docs. I'd love to see improvements there, to help get our SMEs to want to use Central.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Snippets, variables, and conditioning are all good
• Once you set it up, updating Help websites is easy.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The software is often quite buggy, and certain bugs seem to date back nearly a decade and still persist.
• Customizing shortcuts is often an ordeal.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

MadCap Flare is in desperate need of an overall redesign. It relies heavily on dozens and dozens of tiny buttons that contain dozens of nested features. Clicking the wrong button can cause your software to freeze and crash. Building targets can be an absolute mystery, as far as all the files involved. It also has a tendency to freeze and crash. There's typically a huge learning curve for new hires who've never used it--nothing is intuitive.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It was implemented when I got there. I don't know how it was prior.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I wish Google Docs would work for our purposes, but it doesn't have a lot of the technical writing features we need. Using Google Docs would make reviewing and edits much much quicker, but we need MadCap to house all our documents for our Help website.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Saves time by offering a way to sync documents with other teammates.
• Often requires time to troubleshoot random errors or bugs that pop up with seemingly no cause.

Incentivized