Acquia Digital Experience Platform vs. Magnolia

Acquia Cloud is well suited for organizations and teams without the ability to support their own hosting, such as on AWS, Digital Ocean, etc. If a team has the ability (and desire) to manage it themselves, I'm not sure I would recommend it. However, if your team needs reliable, hands-off Drupal hosting, I would definitely recommend Acquia Cloud. Once a deployment pipeline is configured, it's very nearly set-and-forget as far as server configuration is concerned

A colleague here being another business. Magnolia is on its way to being a 'good' product but the 6.2 implementation simply isn't there yet (6.2.26 as of this writing). The admincentral UI could use a complete overhaul to be better streamlined for devs and content editors (the two who actually use it).

• 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

• Use of YAML to define content models with code.
• Versatility of defining actions for custom handlers.
• Reloading classes when code is modified in a local dev environment is nice. While it doesn't seem to work when changes extend beyond the method body (i.e., adding methods), it remediates the pain of long startup times.

• the support portal can be hit and miss. sometimes there are very helpful people who get back to you in a timely manner, but more often there's a lot of lag time for the ticket to get picked up and in between responses, which can also be less than helpful.
• it seems like the different departments within acquia (support, management, build teams) don't communicate with each other.
• because features are so dense and granular, sometimes the workflow or how they are connected can be really complex to access.

• As a developer the learning curve is long, you can start developing relatively quickly but getting to know the platform in depth takes time.
• Having a history of modifications not only at the page level but also at the Content Apps level would be very useful.

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.

We have invested a lot of time and energy into tailoring a solution that works for the company.

We think the new features in v6.2 will help us get to the next level

We also don't have the resources to rebuild a website platform from scratch even if we wanted to

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

I see two main pains: 1. A new user need training to be able even to start using the platform, the onboarding is difficult 2. The platform needs a server with a relevant amount of memory to run properly, the dependency on the memory is really high

I gave [it] 7/10 only because of the loading time of pages. Otherwise, I think it deserves an 8. Normally this is not an issue per [se] but considering the rating matrix and as I have been asked to honestly write about it. Yes, the page loading times could be improved.

They are absolutely fabulous and have never dropped the ball in 8 years of us being on the platform. If it wasn't for Drupal 8/9 being unrealistically complicated compared to other offerings like Django/Wagtail we'd be still with Acquia and Drupal.

You always get an answer based on your SLA. But you always get a solution. That's the successfactor in this case. To often i was frustrated about people in a company without even a clue what there product is about or how to solve a problem. Magnolia's Support Team does a very good job and try to help you in most of the cases

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

We use AWS (a variety of services inside AWS) to host our less than mission-critical sites. These are great options for sites that are relatively simple, technically, and/or that can tolerate occasional problems. However, Acquia Digital Experience Platform does provide a level of concierge service that I have appreciated when it comes to running a highly available web application.

Prior to using Magnolia as an enterprise CMS solution, different teams leveraged different website platforms including WordPress, Weebly, and others. While these other platforms may be slightly more user friendly to the content editor, they don't offer nearly the same amount of customization and digital best practices out of the box that are customizable by web development teams like Magnolia does. The other solutions may work better for a quicker/simpler web implementation without technical resources but don't have the depth and breadth of capability and functionality that Magnolia has and fall flat.

Since the beginning of the website rebuild project, our agency gathered our needs and expectations. We also shared several technical or SEO specifications, and they have been able to fully adapt the software to our needs, in order to create a custom interface that we can easy use on a daily-basis.

• It's done a really nice job of allowing us to focus on business-specific needs as opposed to infrastructure/security issues. The platform is rock solid from a support and security standpoint.
• The ability to add automation and levels of personalization without having to break the bank has been a big boost to clients.
• Unfortunately, our adoption of Site Studio was short-lived due to some inherent restrictions that limited the level of customization we were able to do.

• Magnolia has brought about positive impacts. For instance, we need not outsource web design and marketing services because thanks to this software, we can handle most work inhouse
• The software is affordable with no compromises on capabilities and therefore it is gives us value for money.
• The templates makes the whole process easy