Drupal vs. OnBoard Board Management Software

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

OnBoard is an adaptable platform that could be used for most meetings. It works perfectly to build an agenda and packet for board and committee meetings. It allows for easy RSVP to ensure a quorum at meetings. All users are able to easily view the packet and can even make notations of points they want to discuss during the meeting. OnBoard doesn't work well for detailed documents such as spreadsheets. Our company has a strategic plan and we cannot use OnBoard for that committee meeting. The size of the spreadsheet simply doesn't function well within OnBoard and isn't easily navigable. The same is true of certain financial spreadsheets.

• 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

• Secure board materials - the administrator can control what board members see what materials.
• Contact information - email and mailing addresses are readily available.
• Board terms - term lengths for every board member is tracked through the system.
• Meeting feedback - simple surveys are sent immediately after a meeting to get feedback from meeting attendees for future planning.

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

• Currently, you cannot block an entire group from a topic; you need to block attendees individually.
• it would be nice to indent a section by using tabbing.
• the added button for "save changes" in each section tends to slow down progress; edits used to be saved automatically and tended to be faster.

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.

I couldn't imagine us doing our business without OnBoard [Board Management]. It has become the way we communicate with our Board and run our meetings. Frankly, I have no desire to go back even when we are meeting in person to paper binders for each board member. It truly has been a blessing coming out of COVID for us.

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

OnBoard Board Management Software appears to be very user friendly. The layout allows for easy access to a number of areas via the left side of the page. Admins are able to customized the main page so that the most vital information is available to users when they log in. Setting permissions is easy.

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 haven't needed to contact OnBoard customer support many times because it's user-friendly and functions as it's supposed to/sold. On the occasions I've contacted customer support, they have promptly answered the phone or my email. In one instance, a board member couldn't access OnBoard prior to a board meeting and customer support was able to resolve the issue in the 10 minutes prior to the meeting. In another instance, a board member wasn't able to get the system to recognize all answers to a completed survey which prevented a compilation of results. Customer support viewed the member's screen and ran an error log to figure out the issue.

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

Implementation was easy and I was able to do it alone without OnBoard customer support, although customer support assistance was offered and available. The platform is very user-friendly and doesn't require assistance to implement in my opinion. The biggest hurdle is getting invitees to access the invitation email and set up their login.

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

OnBoard is more user-friendly. It is very easy to navigate from an administrator's standpoint as well as for the end-user. I received compliments on a regular basis from our board members and how grateful they are that it is so easy to use. They also love having the Resources where all of our important documents are located. Other tools that I have used were very clunky and hard to navigate and the cost was greater higher.

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

• 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

• It's helped maintain board and committee involvement in the nonprofit since the start of COVID
• It has allowed our meetings to go virtual with little effect on workflow
• It allows us to better track needed association materials than we have in the past

Incentivized