Drupal vs. RebelMouse

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

If you have a lot of clients whom have a strong social media presence, then RebelMouse would be a good option for you. It helps streamline all of your social media posts, so that everyone can be on the same page. Pretty cool stuff. It's even good for your own company (we played with it for a while). I would highly recommend anybody looking to create consistency in their social media campaigns to use RebelMouse

Incentivized

• 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

• RebelMouse is actually open to almost any concept of building your layout. They offer a number of templates as well as the ability to use your own custom layout. Since I'm picky with that kind of stuff, that really appeals to me.
• Hosting is super simple. Like, it's as simple as signing up and creating as many sites as you would like with unlimited bandwidth and either a custom URL – which is something I really appreciate.
• The platform was built for marketing, It takes all these different approaches of reaching people and makes them easier to use simultaneously all in one feed. Super cool stuff.

Incentivized

• 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

• Initially setting up automation is confusing, and not easily explained through their site – especially if you want to streamline everything in your feed. In a nutshell they need to walk you through some things when you're starting up, and they just don't do that.
• There's a lack of intuitive design that can also be confusing to people just starting out. Took me a while to shift through some tabs before I found my footing in the program – and i'm fairly tech savvy!
• The company's website isn't exactly intuitive, and can turn away customers. Some people in my work have even visited the site and walked away from it actually confused as to what the service provides. Poor user interface on that part.

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.

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

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

There's really not a program like RebelMouse, at least not in my experience. This program has helped us immensely with our social media presence (as I've been praising in this review). I would highly recommend it. If there's a better program out there, I have yet to hear about it

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 us stay consistent with our social media branding – which in return, creates buzz on the internet for us
• It has expanded our capabilities with our social media manager, now we can improve on our analytics
• It has streamlined our workload, which makes things a TON easier on our social media manager, because everything's in one place.

Incentivized