DNN Platform vs. Drupal vs. Square Online

DNN [Platform] is great for organizations of any size who wish to have a robust CMS to manage their site. DNN is not ideal for a small site that is better suited to a super easy to user interface such as Wix. DNN [Platform] is plenty strong enough for enterprises and large entities.

Incentivized

If you want to set up a basic Not For Profit (NFP) Membership system and content base, Word Press is easier than Drupal. However, if you have specific needs that require a fair bit of customisation then Drupal is the best CRM available. If the webmaster is confident with PHP and SQL, Drupal allows a lot of creativity.

Incentivized

If you are having students create websites or information pages about something they are studying in class, this is a great option. The fact that students can spend less time getting situated and learning the app and get right to work researching and creating their pages is great. For middle to high school, this is a fantastic app to use. However, if you want more nuanced analytics or want students to focus on blogging more than webpage building, this is limited.

Incentivized

• Very easy to use CMS - Ease of use is paramount with CMS products to minimise on support calls. Also the template structure of pages ensures that content editors cannot inadvertently corrupt the layout of the page.
• Powerful application framework - The existence of APIs for all functionality within the CMS provides limitless scope in terms of developing bespoke applications which sit within the CMS.
• Commercially supported option available - For larger clients, the comfort factor of having a direct line to the developers of the application is a big selling point.

Incentivized

• Drag and drop functionality is easy to use
• Easy to switch between straight text and HTML content
• Ability to easily have multiple environments so that pages can be built in b/c-stage before they are approved and published
• Solid user experience where it's clear how to navigate the platform

Incentivized

• Drag and drop interface makes it very easy to add all types of content, including images, text, video (and YouTube videos), embeddable applications and more.
• It's very easy to set up navigation features like cascading menus and sticky navigation (where the menu stays put - may depend on the template chosen though).
• A technical backend is fairly straight-forward for setting up a fav icon, 301 redirects, SEO, Google Analytics, etc.

Incentivized

• Out of the box, it has some modules, but not enough unless you do a paid version.
• The support is a bit slow.
• The menuing can be confusing and terms used a bit strange. which makes training difficult.

Incentivized

• This is not an easy CMS to work with if you don't have a good understanding of website development. It isn't "plug-and-play" like Wordpress or Shopify.
• Over time, doing major updates to the system can be taxing, especially if you aren't well-versed enough in doing system updates in line with your "child" theme and code.
• The CMS can become somewhat cumbersome with server resources if not carefully optimized while you build and customize it to your liking.

Incentivized

• Weebly doesn't have a lot of templates to choose from, so if you don't have any experience with CSS or HTML, it's hard to customize your site to an extent.
• Weebly isn't fully SEO friendly. They don't allow you to add H1 tags to pages out of the box.
• You can't create folder structures when it comes to web page URLs. You can put web pages under a main menu dropdown, but they don't allow you to put all sub-menu items in a structured folder (like site.com/folder/page-1 and site.com/folder/page-2).

Incentivized

The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.

Weebly is consistently adding features that line up with our needs. The ease of use makes it the perfect program for us since we have users of multiple age brackets and knowledge of web design. We love that we can give users access to only the pages they are affiliated with

Incentivized

As a team, we found Drupal to be highly customizable and flexible, allowing our development team to go to great lengths to develop desired functionalities. It can be used as a solution for all types of web projects. It comes with a robust admin interface that provides greater flexibility once the user gets acquainted with the system.

Incentivized

Very easy to use and intuitive to design after all of our business needs. From the website and POS system to how we represent ourselves internally and to our customers... Square is second-to-none in helping our business and others in our same boat become the kind of businesses we want to be when it comes to our inventory and sales of these kinds of products.

Incentivized

Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).

Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.

Incentivized

As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.

Incentivized

I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.

The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.

Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%

Incentivized

My experience with Joomla! was over six years ago so a lot could have changed. However, I prefer DNN over Joomla because DNN offers more modules and a better administration user interface.

Incentivized

Drupal can be more complex to learn, but it offers a much wider range of applications. Drupal’s front and backend can be customized from design to functionality to allow for a wide range of uses. If someone wants to create something more complex than a simple site or blog, Drupal can be an amazing asset to have at hand.

Incentivized

Weebly's designs, plugins, and customization options are a little more advanced in some cases than other similar programs. WordPress requires a different level of expertise and knowledge of code, keywording, and plugins, so I wouldn't even compare them. Wix is a little more user-friendly because you can drag and drop your design, which was very convenient for customizing your site. I didn't personally select Weebly, but it is user-friendly and nearly anyone comfortable with a computer could figure it out. Weebly support is also pretty good.

Incentivized

Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.

Incentivized

• DNN helps us win bids on projects through the improvements the community has done over the past few years; we were ready to scrap it all together but it has made great strides
• DNN's community has come back and is actively working to improve and expand the capabilities of the cms
• on a negative note, the confusion between evoq and dnn has caused us headaches

Incentivized

• Given the endless possibilities that Drupal can have, we tend to have great support going on when we get a website launched
• It has become much much faster and easier for us to launch a new project due to reusability
• Configuration management in Drupal helps greatly with CI/CD, saves us costs

• Weebly has allowed our business to create a connection with our customers by offering home decor, cooking and styling tips.
• Weebly gives us the chance to relay information to customers regarding merchandise, current sales and promotions, store hours and locations etc. Which has helped increase business.
• Weebly has given our not very tech savvy business the opportunity to have a website and stay relevant with our competitors.

Incentivized