Drupal vs. Higher Logic Thrive

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Drupal
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Drupal is a free, open-source content management system written in PHP that competes primarily with Joomla and Plone. The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features such as account and menu management, RSS feeds, page layout customization, and system administration.N/A
Higher Logic Thrive
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
Higher Logic Thrive is a private community platform that empowers members, customers, support and product teams to create and manage meaningful, engaging online communities. The solution is designed to keep users coming back. They can find support, best practices, peer-to-peer connections, resources, events, and networking, all in one destination.N/A
Pricing
DrupalHigher Logic Thrive
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DrupalHigher Logic Thrive
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeRequired
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DrupalHigher Logic Thrive
Considered Both Products
Drupal

No answer on this topic

Higher Logic Thrive
Chose Higher Logic Thrive
Higher Logic had an integration with iMIS, which was the CRM of choice at the time. It also interfaced well with our server infrastructure and technology for single sign-on development. Overall, the features of Higher Logic were more comprehensive than those of its competitor, …
Top Pros

No answers on this topic

Top Cons

No answers on this topic

Features
DrupalHigher Logic Thrive
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Drupal
10.0
65 Ratings
22% above category average
Higher Logic Thrive
-
Ratings
Role-based user permissions10.065 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Drupal
9.5
62 Ratings
21% above category average
Higher Logic Thrive
-
Ratings
API9.158 Ratings00 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language10.053 Ratings00 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Drupal
9.4
68 Ratings
21% above category average
Higher Logic Thrive
-
Ratings
WYSIWYG editor9.161 Ratings00 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness9.166 Ratings00 Ratings
Admin section9.568 Ratings00 Ratings
Page templates9.567 Ratings00 Ratings
Library of website themes8.758 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design10.063 Ratings00 Ratings
Publishing workflow9.167 Ratings00 Ratings
Form generator10.063 Ratings00 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Drupal
9.5
67 Ratings
26% above category average
Higher Logic Thrive
-
Ratings
Content taxonomy10.063 Ratings00 Ratings
SEO support10.062 Ratings00 Ratings
Bulk management10.059 Ratings00 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions8.761 Ratings00 Ratings
Community / comment management9.161 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DrupalHigher Logic Thrive
Small Businesses
Divi
Divi
Score 9.8 out of 10
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Image Relay
Image Relay
Score 9.5 out of 10
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
PowerDMS by NEOGOV
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Tridion
Tridion
Score 9.0 out of 10
Discord
Discord
Score 8.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DrupalHigher Logic Thrive
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(77 ratings)
7.5
(17 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(18 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(9 ratings)
7.0
(2 ratings)
Availability
9.7
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.9
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
5.0
(4 ratings)
9.8
(2 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
6.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
5.1
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DrupalHigher Logic Thrive
Likelihood to Recommend
Drupal.org
Well, I'm definitely biased, I've been working with Drupal for 12+ years, and I can say it's appropriate for any size/scale of a project, whether it's a small catalog website or a huge corporation. If I want to dial it down to a specific use case, Drupal is best what most customers/clients that have high-security standards, and need to have extensive editorial experience and control over their website's architecture. Due to its core design, Drupal can connect with each part of its own and any external third-party resources quite easily. For a less-suited scenario, I might say that if you don't have enough budget to get proper work done, sometimes just using WordPress with a pre-designed theme might sound better to you, but if you have the budget and the time, always go with Drupal
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Higher Logic
Higher Logic works very well for our business purposes. We can very easily create new communities when we need to (and this is often!). Our association isn't as concerned with driving engagement, but the tools Higher Logic provides allows us to take a closer look at the engagement level of our committee members when needed
Read full review
Pros
Drupal.org
  • Content Types... these are amazing. Whereas a more simplistic CMS like Wordpress will basically allow you to make posts and build pages, Drupal 8 gives you the ability to define different types of content that behave differently, and are served up differently in different areas of the website.
  • Extensibility... it scales, ohhhh does it scale. They've really figured out server-side caching, and it makes all the difference. Once a page has been cached, it's available instantly to all users worldwide; and when coupled with AWS, global redundancy and localization mean that no matter where you're accessing the site, it always loads fast and crisp.
  • Workflows... you have the ability to define very specific roles and/or user-based editorial workflows, allowing for as many touchpoints and reviews between content creation and publication as you'll require.
Read full review
Higher Logic
  • Higher Logic product managers are probably some of the best in the industry. They know their products and aren't pushy in trying to sell them to you. Don't get me wrong, they do try to sell you a product, but they understand that not everyone who is tasked with learning more is also a decision maker. That doesn't stop them from being professional and thorough in their demonstrations or explanation of fees.
  • Their technical support is top notch. Not only do they work to resolve issues, they also work with you to help you with non-issues. Our initial redesign was done by an agency that worked with HL directly to set up the new site. When I was tasked with a mini-redesign this year, HL technical support offered me a lot of insight on how to best do this using just my skills and HL.
  • They offer training on their platforms to ensure your success as an administrator. There is no cost and you can either go to their onsite two days "boot camp" or you can access a plethora of training videos and webinars through their online users' community.
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Cons
Drupal.org
  • 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
Read full review
Higher Logic
  • Reporting is copious but you cannot build your own reports so you may have lots of information in several different reports and have to pick and choose across several to combine manually. Exporting functionality is there but there are some reports that are only a screen shot and you cannot export them.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Drupal.org
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.
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Higher Logic
They are a great company that offer great products - primarily their community. As they continue to grow and expand their offerings, I believe they will increase the number of products that offer and in turn grow their client base. We use their community, activity synch, and volunteer manager currently.
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Usability
Drupal.org
It's a great CMS platform and there are a ton of plugins to add some serious functionality, but the security updates are too complex to implement and considering the complexity of the platform, security updates are a must. I don't want my site breached because they make it too difficult to keep it up to date.
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Higher Logic
The software is not that simple to use when you have to get volunteers involved in the content assembly process. The content management system that is native to Higher Logic could improve to make the task of training volunteers far easier. Given its simplicity, it is hard for the system to rival more developed websites that use advanced CMS software.
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Reliability and Availability
Drupal.org
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).
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Higher Logic
No answers on this topic
Performance
Drupal.org
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.
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Higher Logic
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Drupal.org
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.
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Higher Logic
Higher Logic's support is sub-par at best. It can be difficult to get in contact with anyone from the support team, and when you do, it seems as if they don't want to talk to you and don't even have the answers to your questions. Within the past few months, we've contacted them twice and both times have been very disappointing. The first time was to let them know there was an inconsistency between the analytics report and the heat map. They basically said that they already knew about the problem but didn't have any set plans to fix it because they were working on other "more important" things. The second time was for a conference call to go over some additional features that we wanted to implement. And the lady we spoke with seemed very disgusted to have to speak with us and then rushed us off the phone because she had another call.
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In-Person Training
Drupal.org
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.
Read full review
Higher Logic
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Drupal.org
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.
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Higher Logic
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Drupal.org
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%
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Higher Logic
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Drupal.org
Drupal is community-backed making it more accessible and growing at a faster rate than Sitefinity which is a proprietary product built on .NET. Drupal is PHP-based using some but not all Symphony codebase. Updates for Drupal are frequent and so are feature adds.
Read full review
Higher Logic
We are just in the early stages of looking into HubSpot Service Hub to determine if it will be a viable replacement for Higher Logic Community. We have other uses for the ServiceHub so there is an appeal to have it be a "one stop shop" for us. The big question however is how it will stack up to Higher Logic for the online communities. Candidly, while Higher Logic may be tough to beat in this area, it is something we will be looking closely at in the next 12 months.
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Scalability
Drupal.org
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.
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Higher Logic
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Drupal.org
  • Drupal has allowed us to build up a library of code and base sites we can reuse to save time which has increased our efficiency and thus had a positive financial impact.
  • Drupal has allowed us to take on projects we otherwise would not have been able to, having a further impact.
  • Drupal has allowed us to build great solutions for our clients which give them an excellent ROI.
Read full review
Higher Logic
  • Understanding preferences-- Higher Logic helps us tap in to how our members want to hear from us.
  • Data collection-- Since we started using Higher Logic the amount of data we get from our members has increased greatly.
  • Consolidation of tools-- Higher Logic replaced 2 or 3 additional SAAS options being utilized by us. This helped save money!
Read full review
ScreenShots

Higher Logic Thrive Screenshots

Screenshot of Higher Logic Thrive Community logged in view
Bring members together 24/7. Discussions, Q&A, events, and engagement tools like automation and a mobile app – Higher Logic Thrive Community provides everything you need to bring members back from wherever they are.Screenshot of Higher Logic Thrive Community logged out view
Your value proposition shines on the logged out view of Higher Logic Thrive Community. Use this valuable space to remind members and prospects about the important work your association does.Screenshot of Target groups
Tailor every email or automated campaign with dynamic content, segmentation, and personalization. Integrations with your AMS or online community make adding contacts and creating compound distribution lists a breeze.Screenshot of Message designer
Save time with pre-built email templates and automated campaigns based on nearly two decades of association experience.Screenshot of Reports
Refine your programs with data. Gain insight from email interactions and web tracking so you can refine your offerings and prove ROI.Screenshot of Engagement scoring
See how engaged your members are so you can be sure you are providing value.