Acquia Digital Experience Platform vs. Pardot

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

I want to start mentioning some features that make Pardot the best option on the market, I mainly recommend this tool because at present it is necessary that all the tools I use can work together, my use of Salesforce is of vital importance and I have the possibility Being using these two tools that have surprising integration for many people, I feel that it is my duty to recommend Pardot to everyone and I recommend it without thinking twice

• 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

• Pardot enables you to set up different environments via the Pardot Business Unit feature, this is helpful for when decentralization is still needed, but you want all business units working with the same tool.
• Pardot enables you to quickly and easily create automation rules that can clean the database retro-actively.
• Pardot has the ability to have multiple lead scoring models run at the same time.

• 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.

• Email templates and drafts are really confusing. I trained various people to create their own templates, but they consistently got confused between publishing a template or just saving a draft, and where they needed to go back to find it.
• Their help process is broken, at least for our particular use case. Because we have an enterprise license for Salesforce (even though we had a separate license for Pardot) whenever I needed help with something, I'd get stuck down a rabbit hole and couldn't submit a ticket.

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.

As of right now we have not seen any other program that integrates as seamlessly into our Salesforce platform. We have barely scratched the surface of all the features and use cases. It would be irresponsible to make a move to another platform in the near future. We have not come up against any limitations that would prompt a need to switch

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

The system has so many features that it does take a while to get spun up on what they all do and how they interact with each other. Once you dedicate the time to training to reach that crucial level of understanding however, it is easy to creatively apply the varied functionality of the program to address issues that would have previously seemed to mandate the use of another system.

There have been a couple of service incidents over the past few months. I'm not sure if it has to do with Pardot integrating their infrastructure with ExactTarget. However, they responded well with proactive communication and a debrief as to what happened.

Though the make up of MA apps is not built this way today, it would be nice to see them become more real-time. The integration between Salesforce and Pardot is not a true real-time integration. If I modify something in Salesforce, those changes are not automatically reflected in Pardot immediately. There is a delay of about 15 minutes before the systems sync. This delay, although not long, is less than ideal We would love the systems to be integrated real time such that changes are propagated from one system to the other immediately.

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.

Pardot support is tremendous. The knowledge base and in-application targeted help articles and videos are thorough and straightforward. If those don't do it, Pardot has office hours every business day with members of the team available to answer anything. I've called twice and they are incredibly helpful.

The trainers at the Pardot user conference (Elevate and Connections) were very knowledgeable and presented the material well. Again, the content was targeted to more of a new user audience, and was not really relevant for folks who had been using the product for 2+ years.

Pardot's online training touches on all topics briefly and vaguely without much indepth exploration into how a final outcome could look, such as Nurturing Campaigns, Email templates, landing page templates, etc... The only true way to uncover Pardot's full capabilities is to have Front End design and coding experience. Without this key skill set, I would not recommend Pardot to another business.

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

Love the tool, so much easier to see what our visitors are doing, creating campaigns etc. One recommendation about forms in campaigns etc is to make sure the form is not shared between countries. To send out notifications to responsible, you should have one form per country or question.

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.

We moved from Act-On to Pardot almost a year ago. The way Pardot integrates with Salesforce and is able to report on the communications really drew us to change. We enjoyed the customization of the emails and the easier set up of the emails. Both products are similar but as stated, the reporting and processes were positive to my organization. The upside of Act-On is the ability to make lists and learn the system on your own. Pardot requires much more training on the front end.

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.

• We spent several months and lots of money working with a outside integration partner, only to find out the journey we were trying to automate couldn't really be done and was better suited for Marketing Cloud. We ended up cancelling and switching to Marketing Cloud.