Item: Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Acquia Digital Experience Platform

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Acquia built and hosts the websites for our university library system -- at least 8 libraries under one umbrella. I QA'ed for the build team, and I maintain and enhance the site subsequent to build and launch. I use the Cloud Platform dashboard and the Cloud IDE, in conjunction with Github, to manage the configuration of the front end, while others are in charge of content.

Pros and Cons

Pros

the site is powerful
you can get very granular with configuration and content
layout is very simple to execute, but it doesn't look simple on the front. it's simple to execute complicated things
almost endlessly customizable with modules

Cons

the support portal can be hit and miss. sometimes there are very helpful people who get back to you in a timely manner, but more often there's a lot of lag time for the ticket to get picked up and in between responses, which can also be less than helpful.
it seems like the different departments within acquia (support, management, build teams) don't communicate with each other.
because features are so dense and granular, sometimes the workflow or how they are connected can be really complex to access.

Return on Investment

being able to give the content editors more independence because of the role permissions
making the site a lot more responsive to our changing needs
as well as making it more responsive to different mobile device viewports

Scalability

We have 2 sites under the main domain (this is considered a multi-site with config split) and several sub-sites, so I don't know that we've really given the scalability a true run for its money, but so far, so good.

Alternatives Considered

Cascade CMS

The documentation that both Acquia and Drupal provide are vastly and immediately noticeably superior to Cascade. The customizability of the platform with drupal modules means that enhancements can be made very easily instead of painfully and by digging into a language there's very little documentation for. We still have to google for answers with Acquia/Drupal, but at least answers exist and it's fairly likely that someone else has also experienced the problem. And there are many communities for support as well.

Key Insights

Do you think Acquia Digital Experience Platform delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Acquia Digital Experience Platform's feature set?

Yes

Did Acquia Digital Experience Platform live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Acquia Digital Experience Platform go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Acquia Digital Experience Platform again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

You are able to create almost anything you want, and make almost endless customizations with drupal modules. This is I think the strongest feature of Acquia.

The biggest drawbacks are the inherent complexity - with great customizability comes great complexity-- and the unreliability of the support.

I think that once you truly grasp and are comfortable with the workflows, it will be a very smooth and logical process, but that takes concentrated effort because of the complexity. But, changes on the front end are instantaneous and cascading. It's a tradeoff, which is expected, you just have to be prepared for that.

Acquia Digital Experience Platform Feature Ratings

Comments

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with great complexity comes great complexity

Software Version

Modules Used