Acquia Digital Experience Platform vs. Pantheon

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
The Acquia Digital Experience Platform is an "Open DXP" with its two core pillars being content and data. Built on top of one of the largest open-source content management systems, Drupal, it aims to provide the flexibility and interoperability a modern organization needs. With its customer data platform, it allows organizations to understand who their customers are and deliver personalized experiences. Acquia's DXP offers variety of other tools including digital asset management,…N/A
Pantheon
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Pantheon is a WebOps platform where marketers and developers collaborate to drive results. The vendor states that with Pantheon, site owners maximize their capacity to update website design and functionality, responding to market trends, catering to consumer behavior, and adding real value to the business's bottom line. Today, companies compete on the basis of digital experiences, and the best results emerge from an agile build-test-learn process. Whether it's publishing content,…
$29
per month
Pricing
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformPantheon
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Basic
$29
per month
Performance
$114
per month
Elite
Contact for quote
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformPantheon
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformPantheon
Considered Both Products
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Acquia has a much easier path for procurement through the GSA contract. Pantheon didn't have an avenue to purchase through the GSA, which severely limited our ability to procure their product. Pantheon has a few extra features which Acquia has yet to develop like true …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Acquia provides much more for the investment. The support and services they provide make them the best choice in choosing a platform to host your Drupal sites. Services like Pantheon may have some new tools or cool features. But Acquia always seems to come out with those …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Acquia offers a more robust product suite than Pantheon. Acquia also offers professional services for another level beyond what Pantheon offers. Acquia pricing is typically more expensive than Pantheon, but the extra cost tends to be worth it, given all the support you receive …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
I have used Pantheon for almost as long as I have used Acquia. Many colleges and universities will use sub-sites in Drupal either as a separator for each department, or possibly for targeted marketing campaigns. One of the biggest reason we tend to use Acquia over Pantheon for …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
If you're project requires a multisite architecture with scalable site deployment, and your budget allows, I would recommend Acquia. Acquia pricing sits more on an Enterprise level, so it is overwhelming if you're hosting a smaller site. Pantheon is much more suited for …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
The VPS/cPanel solution is just "raw" LAMP stack hosting, so nothing Drupal-specific and no automatically set-up multiple dev environments with a dashboard to manage them. This is what I [have done] for the last 15 years for my clients. For one client, we evaluated Pantheon, …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
I personally haven't had much experience with other digital hosting platforms, but I have investigated alternatives in other roles. Pantheon has consistently cropped up as another enterprise Drupal hosting solution, and Adobe Experience Manager has been investigated for …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
we have used Pantheon in the past for some use cases but now we prefer Acquia over it the reason being the availability of different products to allow us to provide a complete digital experience. A product like a site factory, Acquia personalization, site studio, etc has really …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Honestly, Pantheon are a great provider too and momentum has a large amount to do with our retention here.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Acquia coupled with their easier interface and 24 x 7 customer service can outweigh its competitors anytime.
Acquia provides a full end to end solution for Drupal websites.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
We stay with Acquia because they offer managed updates to Drupal core. Not everyone does. And, they are experts in supporting Drupal. They can often get a little closer to the developer side of things than other companies. Prices and support are similar for similar services …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
The customer selected Acquia since it had a better support for the US based laws (eg the PCI compliance).
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
I'm still evaluating.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Can't compare apples to grapes. But in terms of "Drupal specific" hosting at enterprise level as a PAAS solution I think Acquia is the only one doing it at this scale.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Compared to other products used, Acquia Digital Experience Platform offers a good balance between configuration flexibility and hosting implementation. Some platforms provide a similar service where it takes away the need to build the hosting yourself, however, they don't allow …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Cost - Acquia provides more granular control of the costs.
Interface - Acquia interface is a bit cleaner, although Patheon may have a few more features.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Acquia is a leader in managed Drupal hosting, knowledge and supporting infrastructure.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Acquia is more fully featured and mature.
Pantheon
Chose Pantheon
Linode is good if you want to keep control of the infrastructure, webservers, etc. However, if you want to forget about it and focus in your website content; Pantheon will make your life much easier. acquia support system is terrible, it is slow and they send outdated …
Chose Pantheon
Pantheon dashboard is leaner and faster. Pantheon cost is lower comparatively.
Chose Pantheon
We use several hosting solutions depending on the client needs or what they were already setup on. Pantheon is very similar to them and offers similar services however one of the main features we use is the Multidev service which allows us to test pieces of work separately and …
Chose Pantheon
Pantheon provides stellar premium hosting for Drupal and WordPress. The platform is highly performant. Support is responsive and knowledgeable. System-enforced best practices improve site stability alongside rock-solid platform reliability. However, Pantheon absolutely charges …
Chose Pantheon
Pantheon's documentation was easier to grasp and I was able to get started and finish my first project on Pantheon relatively faster.
Chose Pantheon
We use whatever platform best suits our clients in terms of use-case and pricing, but Pantheon's UI is preferable to our team, and the platform is generally inline with our typical approach of building distributions from an upstream codebase instead of creating and managing a …
Chose Pantheon
When you compare the cost of the product to the value it provides and time to launch - Pantheon wins the race. While Acquia is nice, it is generally a much more expensive hosting environment with not as many built-in features. OpenShift and Amazon Web Services are great if you …
Chose Pantheon
Acquia is quite an established platform and is a much bigger company than Pantheon. We've been using Acquia for a long time now. But from using both services, I personally like using Pantheon more. It doesn't have a high learning curve. It's easy to configure, install and …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformPantheon
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
8.3
49 Ratings
2% above category average
Pantheon
-
Ratings
Role-based user permissions8.349 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
7.8
41 Ratings
5% below category average
Pantheon
-
Ratings
API7.839 Ratings00 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language7.932 Ratings00 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
7.8
43 Ratings
3% above category average
Pantheon
-
Ratings
WYSIWYG editor7.431 Ratings00 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness7.834 Ratings00 Ratings
Admin section7.842 Ratings00 Ratings
Page templates7.930 Ratings00 Ratings
Library of website themes7.726 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design7.928 Ratings00 Ratings
Publishing workflow8.134 Ratings00 Ratings
Form generator7.824 Ratings00 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
7.5
35 Ratings
6% above category average
Pantheon
-
Ratings
Content taxonomy8.028 Ratings00 Ratings
SEO support6.929 Ratings00 Ratings
Bulk management7.431 Ratings00 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions7.832 Ratings00 Ratings
Community / comment management7.626 Ratings00 Ratings
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Acquia Digital Experience PlatformPantheon
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User Ratings
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformPantheon
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(93 ratings)
8.0
(68 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.8
(11 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
7.7
(2 ratings)
9.6
(29 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(5 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.0
(73 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformPantheon
Likelihood to Recommend
Acquia
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.
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Pantheon
Pantheon is excellent for medium-large websites that require high availability and a managed workflow. It would be inappropriate for small websites because of the cost or for situations where more control of the environment is appropriate. We find it useful because we rarely do anything outside of the Drupal application.
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Pros
Acquia
  • 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
Pantheon
  • Effective use of our codebase deployment and implementation.
  • The dashboard functionality and general stability and security are excellent.
  • The server is quite consistent, and if you need assistance from the support team, they are very quick to respond.
  • Automatic updates let me ensure that my customers have safe websites without increasing my own expense.
  • The team offers excellent assistance and help for chat.
Read full review
Cons
Acquia
  • 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
Pantheon
  • Pricing structure has too large of a jump between Basic and Performance plans
  • Have run into issues with prescribed WP updates not working through dashboard and having to do manually.
  • Pantheon site dashboard occasionally is unavailable (the site is never affected though)
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Acquia
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.
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Pantheon
The environment is stable and we have not had any issues/downtime. The annual cost is reasonable.
Read full review
Usability
Acquia
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
Pantheon
Pantheon is an easy system, especially to the users with previous experience with other similar platform and the interface is clear enough to easily understand how things operates. On the Cloud deployment everything also works effectively and the technical team from Pantheon community are very helpful on providing the necessary assistant to their customers.
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Support Rating
Acquia
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
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Pantheon
Even tier 1 Pantheon chat and ticket support are knowledgeable, competent, and useful. They routinely understand and promptly resolve urgent, complex, and/or unusual issues that other hosts need to escalate to tier 2 or tier 3 support personnel. I honestly can't think of a truly negative or disappointing support experience in the years I've used Pantheon hosting for client websites.
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Implementation Rating
Acquia
It was implemented when I got there. I don't know how it was prior.
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Pantheon
Once the environments were up and running, the implementation was easy to synchronize with latest data prior to switchover.
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Alternatives Considered
Acquia
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
Pantheon
Although it may seem a good fit for a company that needs extra control over the deployment process and development process, for a firm that is mainly concentrating on SEO, it would be an overkill. Pantheon provides that sweet automation that allows us to shed some weight on development and focus on our business activities.
Read full review
Scalability
Acquia
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.
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Pantheon
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Acquia
  • 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
Pantheon
  • Pantheon allows ordinary sites to excel esp if there is consistent development going on behind the scenes.
  • Website management is super easy and the hosting fee gets paid off as you save on developer hours.
  • Expensive for those who are not consistently developing on the platform, there are other options out there at better price points.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Pantheon Screenshots

Screenshot of Find out in seconds if your site is ready to launch. Use Launch Check to get recommendations and discover site issues fast with our report based on over 50 automated checks.Screenshot of Our Developer Dashboard has everything you need to build, launch, and run Drupal and WordPress sites. Interface via SFTP or Git, deploy and scale your sites, and access tools like backups and one-click core updates. Easily add team members and control access.