Drupal vs. Zoho Campaigns

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

It is well suited in scenarios:

1. Well-defined static list with proper info.
2. Not building email templates from scratch
3. Litmus testing involved
4. Easy to use simple automation journeys involved

Not well-suited scenarios:

1. Complex Customer journeys
2. Dynamic content involved
3. Integration with other products other than the ZOHO suite
4. Testing API limits

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

• The best thing about this software is its integration with G-suite.
• It's user interface is so easy that any user can learn it quickly. And it is very easy to operate.
• It helps users to engage subscribers via various social media platforms.
• It allows users to compare various email campaigns.

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

• Zoho should start by throwing this tool in the trash and then recreate it from scratch. There are so many flaws I would be here all year trying to list them all. Start by the fact that creating templates is an absolute nightmare. You'll find over and over again that something that should be easily executed can't be done. It is NOT a plug and play program. Everything is trial and error.
• The reporting SUCKS bad. It gives you basics, but if you want any real insights... I have to export all my data into my own spreadsheets to compare results from multiple campaigns.
• Customer service is B.A.D. You'll spend HOURS upon HOURS with a tech support team that knows less than you. The only time anything gets accomplished is when you work with a programmer. BUT, you'll seriously waste 1-2 hours explaining a problem to someone who is only taking notes. You'll get so frustrated when they try to show you how they think it works and you respond with... "I know how this works because I have used it for a year - the problem is that it stopped working the way it always did before. They will argue with you. You will respond accordingly. They will close tickets without resolution. Speaking of tickets, you'll never get one. They say they will take care of it and a week later you will follow-up and no one will have any idea what is going on. You'll start from scratch and be even more frustrated. You will learn to "fix" it on your own or deal with it, broken.
• After two years, I'm still not sure if my emails even make it to an inbox. When asked, you'll be told that you need to write better subject lines. I call bull****. Don't rely on this product to deliver your email. And don't question Zoho, as it will always be your fault.
• You can't use this tool to send to ANY group email addresses. You can't even override the system. I have a lot of clients that use info@xxx.com or sales@xxx.com, etc. and I have to send them personal emails since this will not allow them to be sent. They say it is to protect them from getting blacklisted. I call bull**** again.
• The templates offered by the system are crap - unless you only send holiday emails. Not a large selection of just generic templates. You'll be pulling your hair out trying to use their builder to create your own. In the end, you'll end up sending emails with nothing "pretty" about them.

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.

Because I am a single user organization and the subscription is free for up to 3 users.

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

Zoho Campaigns is a powerful email sending tool. Zoho Campaigns is highly user-friendly and intuitive software. Complex email marketing tasks are simplified by Zoho Campaigns. Best part of Zoho Campaigns is that when you upload the email addresses it verifies that emails are valid or not. I have never seen this feature except in Zoho Campaigns.

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

Zoho Campaigns is not for beginners to email marketing, but it’s an excellent choice for those who want to send out a lot of emails with few restrictions and great reporting. It’s a no-brainer if you’re already a Zoho user, as Campaigns is included in Zoho One subscriptions and integrates nicely with other Zoho apps.

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 allows us to communicate with all our customers or lists together or individually, and to track how successful our campaigns are.
• Customer Service is a target area of why we use Zoho Campaigns, and it meets our needs greatly.
• To date we have not really measured the ROI or impact that Zoho Campaigns has on our marketing efforts but with this product it certainly has the means to do such.

Incentivized