Drupal vs. Ergonode

Overall, I would give my rating of Drupal a 7/10 because there is an easy user experience for those without a website background but there is some technology work required to build more website capabilities that aren't as user-friendly. Drupal is specifically well suited to update content (like changing Relationship Manager cards when there is employee turnover), post announcements (putting up a holiday banner to let our customers know the dates we will be closed over Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc., and creating a sophisticated website hierarchy of pages (for our firm, several dropdowns depending on if you're looking for personal banking, business banking, investment banking, about us, etc.).

Incentivized

Configured products are generally available in several versions. A furniture set that has multiple finish options or a TV that comes in several sizes and resolutions all have multiple SKUs behind them. Typically, these SKUs are bundled together into one Product ID. With an offline-first, bulk PIM, they usually import all their data through CSV or XLSX files. Different types of products have distinct products quality data. Although. It's inappropriate for small teams with a simple static catalog or for businesses that don’t have access to dedicated technical resources. If your company needs a full-fledged pre-built solution with loads of out-of-the-box analytics or is mainly looking for production of print catalogs, the developer centric, build-it-yourself approach, and extremely limited reporting will be difficult for you.

• It has excellent security features and consistent updates.
• It allows for extensive customization with the integrated themes and core code, especially when you first install it. This allows our dev team to get creative with marketing initiatives.
• There is a large online community of Drupal users that consistently help answer any questions and issues

Incentivized

• For starters, it elegantly manages intricate product affiliations. We sell bicycles of different frame sizes and colors. This results in hundreds of SKUs. However, we do not produce a variety of items. Only one "Bicycle model" product. Next, we take advantage of the Ergonode binding system for attaching simple records for each size and color. When the client chooses “Large, Blue” on the web page. The text, images, pricing and stock of the product, are okay. Those bound records will automatically get this. An alteration to the description of “Bicycle model”. For example, the switch for "material specification" icon. This alteration affects every size and hue. Component graphics and pricing remain individual, so there’s nothing lost. It entails no copying by hand and risk, and total consistency.
• Moreover, it enforces the business rules by offering smart workflows that seem natural. Think about our product approval procedure. When a product manager selects an option for “Ready for Review,” Ergonode does not just change a status. When the data contains a specific claim of “Dermatologically Tested”, it automatically routes the product to a specific person in the legal department. If there is no such claim, then the workflow bypasses the legal step and automatically sends it to the marketing team. In order to decide which path to follow, the system checks the content of the product record. To summarize, human error has been taken out of process compliance and we can all sleep easy knowing no product will go live unless it gets the proper validations for its attributes.
• Thirdly, its event-driven character makes our PIM an animated product data hub. As soon as one fact gets changed – price altered, image replaced, translation done, etc. – Ergonode sends out a signal to the whole digital universe. It has been implemented into our e-commerce search engine. When a merchandiser fixes a typo of a brand name in Ergonode, we fire a tiny event deep down into our search index in a matter of seconds. The changes show up on the live site immediately not in hours, days, or anything else.

• Security and new release notifications are a hassle as they happen too often
• Allowing them to write PHP modules is a big advantage, but sometimes integrating them is a small challenge due to the version the developer is working on.
• Steep learning curve, but worth it

Incentivized

• It takes a lot of effort to learn Database modeling. The flexibility of Ergonode allows for a complete recreation of your own attribute taxonomy, category tree and relation system from scratch. For example, let’s say you decided to make a key property of your product a simple text field and not a select. You'll come to wish otherwise later but you have data in there and you have concepts that are built on it.
• Operational reporting and data quality analytics are absent from the Ergonode application’s core open-source product. Even though the Ergonode software stores and shares data well, it provides little in the way for native systems to assess how ‘healthy’ that data is. How can I find out that “What percentage of my products do not have key images? Which categories have the most number of uninformed attributes? This requires writing custom database queries or building independent dashboard applications. When a software system claims to be the one source of truth, the fact that it doesn’t allow you to easily audit and measure that truth within the system itself is a real gap.
• The business language of a modern app is often intelligible to its business users in the way that the engineers can understand. Because they are powerful and capable in specific domains, it is no surprise to hear the system talk about bindings, inheritance through segments, and event-driven workflows. This is not how merchandisers, catalogue managers, or marketing people communicate. This is a layer of abstraction that the user has to pass through every time they perform common tasks in business. When you discuss automation in this way, the business users will only enter basic data points, nothing further than that. They are afraid to trigger the automation that will violate some logical rules they do not understand as it is.

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.

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

One of the most important things to look for in product information management tool is that it is effective. PIMsystems is a SaaS (software as a service) online software solution, which organically manages data and improves productivity. In effect, it is the winner of the G2 for PIM systems. The core interface was designed to avoid complicating things. While the solution is designed for class codes, you cannot enable class codes on your site to use the solution. The steep initial learning curve and conceptual barrier costs the game a point. In addition, this vast flexibility actually requires you to make very specific architectural decisions in advance, and this is not user-friendly to configure or change. The basic framework that offers it is similar to that of spreadsheet logic

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

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

Undoubtedly, Akeneo has mature capabilities with complete PIM capabilities. The building's architecture, while well reinforced, is more traditional, more fat, more monolithic. Although customization was easy, users had to follow the system’s guidelines. Pimcore can also be described as very powerful. However, it is a DXP with a PIM module, not a PIM. It seemed to be a choice that was overly engineered. The decision for Ergonode was driven by its contemporary design. This means that it has API-first and built on microservices. Other PIMs are systems you must adapt to. In other words, they have a rigid data model. Accordingly, our complex business logic could exactly model the data. We could integrate it into our customized technology stack as a live engine.

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

• 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

• Positive ROI considers efficiency in operation and speed. The company shortened time to market for new products by 40% as well as, due to accurate central data, decreased customer service tickets relating to data by 25%. The organization’s income is also affected by this.
• The initial costs and technical challenges are negative impacts. We had to spend quite a lot on special engineer and DevOps resources to implement, customize and bare-metal host this platform to get this ROI. The growing complexity will increase the time to break-even.