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

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

If you use Drupal as your CMS, Acquia makes a lot of sense as a hosting partner. Acquia Support, Technical Account Management (TAM) teams, and Acquia Professional Services all understand Drupal, in addition to Acquia. Also, Acquia has a network of Drupal development partners and introduced us to a great partner. We leverage Acquia for hosting 2 websites, one which is very simple and one that is quite complex. The simple website can be maintained fairly automatically through Acquia's RA (Remote Administration) branch, which handles Drupal core module updates, security patches, and some other updates seamlessly. We use a 3-tiered environment and GitHub with the more complex site and Acquia provides the tools and support to ensure that everything is working well. I do wish that their admin UI had a little more detail on visits and views and better reporting on database and file storage, but requests to support and meetings with our Account Manager fill these gaps.

Pros and Cons

Administering SSL certificates.
Backing-up databases.
Scheduling jobs.

Admin UI reporting details on visits and views.
Better transparency into database and file storage and optimizing each.
Monitoring and alerting (new relic integration is nice, but native capabilities would be great).

Return on Investment

Acquia has helped us to stabilize and optimize our website performance, lowering page load times and dramatically decreasing the frequency of issues experienced by end-users.
Acquia SOLR search provided a much-improved search experience on our website.
Acquia's PCI-compliant hosting has helped us to remain compliant and cyber-secure.
We are working to implement Acquia Site Studio and Acquia Personalization now and expect those to improve our operation agility and ability to drive more relevant experiences to our various website visitors.

Time to Market

We have not used Acquia to deploy content across digital channels.

Scalability

Scaling up hosting for a given site is very easy, but on the legacy cloud architecture, the file storage is combined across sites/applications in the non-prod environments and similarly in the production environments. I think the new Acquia Cloud Next platform is much more flexible, but we aren't on that yet.

Alternatives Considered

WordPress, WordPress VIP, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio, WP Engine and MediaValet

Acquia Personalization integrates well with Drupal CMS and is more straightforward to implement than Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio (Personalization). WordPress as a CMS hosted on WP Engine is useful, but much more limited than Drupal CMS hosted on Acquia WordPress VIP was less robust than Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Acquia.

Key Insights

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

Yes

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

Yes

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

Yes

Did implementation of Acquia Digital Experience Platform go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Acquia Digital Experience Platform again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Decibel by Medallia, Siteimprove, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio

Likelihood to Recommend

If you use Drupal CMS, whether a simple or complex site, Acquia seems like a great partner. If you are considering moving to Acquia and Drupal, I would probably only go this route if you have Drupal development support. While the simple sites are easily maintained through Acquia's RA branch, I think that there are cheaper options for basic sites. Acquia is strong at supporting Drupal hosting, but since there will likely be a separate development team, it creates a bit of a challenge when something goes wrong to figure out if it is an Acquia problem (typically not) or a development problem (usually the case for our issues).

Acquia is a great partner for hosting and supporting Drupal-based websites and experiences!

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Acquia Digital Experience Platform