Acquia Digital Experience Platform vs Squarespace

• The Acquia Cloud Hosting (enterprise) provides a three-server solution. You have a Development, Staging (or UAT), and Production servers with a clear path of deployment straight up the chain. You may use Acquia's own Cloud Hooks, or their web admin UI interface to deploy to any or all of the servers.
• Git is one of the foundation services built-in to the management of the website codebase. Allowing a developer, or well-trained end user (university employee) to easily deploy a tag or branch to any one of the servers, makes it very easy for us to offload the server / account management to the school, while we focus on improving their site.
• Not only does Acquia Cloud provide a multi-datacenter failover disaster recovery solution, but they also maintain a multi-region failover as well, which allows for a fully redundant enviroment to be maintained in two geographic regions. No fear of losing any database changes or form submissions from students.
• Lastly, the onboarding process is constantly being improved, and as I have been a third-party vendor involved in many of our hosting negotiations, I have seen it firsthand. Each enterprise client is assigned a small team of engineers, technical leads, and a pseudo-project-manager to explain the process in layman's terms to the client (university / college for my example), but they also perform a number of code reviews and best-practice analysis of a site prior to launch.

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• Very robust how-to and troubleshooting guides – if you're trying to do something specific, a quick google search will lead you to a writeup by Squarespace of exactly the issue you're trying to solve. Comparing this to competitors where you're more or less on your own, Squarespace makes you feel confident that you can make any change you'd want.
• Well-designed template sites – you'd have to try very hard to create an ugly site when you've got such robust templates to work with. Plus design fundamentals like ample white space and color palettes are built in to the design process.
• Lots of options – Squarespace has beautifully-designed add-ons that clients ask for (such as adding a dynamic map to their site which shows their shop's location). These options require no jury-rigging and dovetail with the design of the site.
• Unbreakable web design – there is no way to break your site, unlike with competitors where you're trying to cobble together plug-ins to make your site function how you'd want it.

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• Responses from tickets aren't always from the same person, and can vary in effectiveness of solving your problem
• While documentation is robust, it can be difficult to find exactly what you need
• Provided forums are not monitored frequently, and are not as useful as they could be

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• The editing experience is VERY slow. Every time you switch in or out of an editor (page content, styles, etc), Squarespace takes 3-5 seconds to load, which is not a deal-breaker, but definitely annoying.
• There's still no "real" way to set a background color on a given section. You can fake it by using a background image, which works, but what if you want a light background? Squarespace automatically makes the text white for any section, regardless of how bright the background is.
• It's frustrating that Squarespace hasn't implemented some sort of variable system for fonts and colors. If you decide to change fonts or colors, you have to go around and update it in 50 million different places, which is a huge pain.

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• Our website isn't a revenue generator, so we don't have specific ROI calculations.
• The new website is helping us move off of a legacy on-prem server environment. The reduction of cost in maintaining those will be beneficial.
• We have had to invest in some training for our developers to learn Drupal.

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• My clients are very happy with the results they're getting from their websites.
• They don't really manage the sites themselves, so can't really speak to the ease of use for them. However, I find it relatively easy to build good looking sites for them. This in turn makes it economical for them.
• Making changes and updating their sites can be done relatively quickly. We can embed whatever elements they need, like video.
• We can easily manage updates to their on-site SEO.

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