Acquia Digital Experience Platform vs MadCap Software

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited for rapid development of applications and sites, ease of maintenance, security enhancements, and ease of patching. Drupal for global enterprise content strategy i.e. industrial robustness. DevOps is there but needs to be easier to integrate with other vendors. In my experience, Acquia Digital Experience Platform doesn't support well data-driven process definition, setup, and management from an application standpoint. In production, we expected the production environment to be separated from the non-production environnement, which was only possible at the logical level and not at the network level.

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Olivier Parriche

IT Manager in charge of Digitalization

La Mutuelle GénéraleInsurance, 1001-5000 employees

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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.

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Verified User

Team Lead in Other

Information Technology & Services Company, 201-500 employees

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Pros

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

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Verified User

Manager in Marketing

Professional Training & Coaching Company, 51-200 employees

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

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Cameron Michael Rhoads

Technical Writer

UnqorkComputer Software, 201-500 employees

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Cons

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.

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Verified User

Executive in Marketing

Computer Software Company, 51-200 employees

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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.

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Verified User

Employee in Other

Computer Software Company, 201-500 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

Yes

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

—

Acquia Digital Experience Platform Editions & Modules

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Additional Pricing Details

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General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Yes

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

$167 per month

MadCap Software Editions & Modules

Edition

MadCap Flare	$1,999¹
MadCap Central	$1,500¹
MadCap AMS	$2,999¹

per year

Additional Pricing Details

Includes a 12-month Platinum-level Maintenance Plan.

Likelihood to Renew

Acquia Digital Experience Platform 9.0

Based on 9 answers

As a Drupal Web Developer, I have not encountered or been exposed to any other hosting solution that could surpass the benefits of having a site hosted on Acquia Cloud. Although, for any side-project or low-cost freelance gigs, I cannot expect that I'll always have the option of recommending Acquia Cloud, and that's okay. While I am at work and trying to help our team gain more exposure to my companies' extensive list of clients, when we have the fortune of adding another Drupal-based client to our roster, getting those clients on Acquia Cloud makes every other aspect of building or modifying their school website that much easier

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Sean Hanford

Senior Drupal Developer/Consultant

EllucianHigher Education, 1001-5000 employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Usability

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

MadCap Software 3.0

Based on 1 answer

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.

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Verified User

Team Lead in Other

Information Technology & Services Company, 201-500 employees

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Support Rating

Acquia Digital Experience Platform 9.1

Based on 1 answer

The team is always there to support any issue. We had an issue around adding more code into the system and they supported us all the way through.

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Automotive Company, 10,001+ employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Alternatives Considered

Acquia [Digital Experience Platform]'s offering is much for extendable, flexible, and scalable. The security is far beyond WP and it is much easier to extend than Magento was. Being able to have access to all these tools at an enterprise level, but still have them remain open source is really a huge advantage in my mind.

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Verified User

Director in Engineering

Marketing & Advertising Company, 51-200 employees

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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.

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Cameron Michael Rhoads

Technical Writer

UnqorkComputer Software, 201-500 employees

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Scalability

Acquia Digital Experience Platform 7.6

Based on 20 answers

We do not use any of the proprietary features from Acquia [Digital Experience Platform], like Site Factory, that enable this. (I am allergic to proprietary.) But Drupal is inherently scaleable via multisite, and things like Single Sign On via contrib modules.

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Maria Greene

Sr. Manager, Web/Technical Lead

Insulet CorporationMedical Device, 1001-5000 employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Return on Investment

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.

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Zach Ettelman

Business Development Strategist

Elevated ThirdMarketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees

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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.

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Verified User

Employee in Other

Computer Software Company, 201-500 employees

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