Item: Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Rating: 9
Author: Mohammed Arshad

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Acquia cloud for hosting drupal sites of small to large sizes. We use other products like site studio for design and personalization for building a personalized experience for users. Acquia cloud provides an easy interface for managing the sites from deployment to taking backup and it saves lots of time for the team to focus on the actual work.

Pros and Cons

Easy to manage deployment and automatic backups
Great support team that is happy to help on any issue specially on critical issues
Regular updates about sites and service on Acquia during maintenance
Account manager support to always make sure how the site is performing

The Acquia personalization does not have clear documentation, It is a bit difficult to find what you are looking for in the documentation
The product should have a sandbox account for developers to learn and recommend it to their customers
Site studio a has very less option to customise, as we came across few scenarios where we needed to alter the behaviour of site studio component but could not find any documentation about it.

Return on Investment

Helped building personalised experience
Better development productivity
Helped with high availability

Time to Market

Since we started using Acquia cloud we are able to focus on actual work without worrying about deployment as tools like Acquia pipeline allowed us to implement continuous integration resulting in more productivity and better quality delivery.
We have been using site studio which allowed us to design and change a part of the application's look and feel very quickly In some cases we have trained customers as well to use this and build their own page. Having all these Acquia products in place we are able to provide customers with a complete digital experience.

Scalability

Acquia cloud is pretty scalable as in one of the scenarios we came across during the high traffic time Acquia support easily scaled the infrastructure requirements to support it which was really good helping us to be available during those times. Acquia personalization as well can cover a large range of use cases to deliver a personalized experience.

Alternatives Considered

Pantheon

we have used Pantheon in the past for some use cases but now we prefer Acquia over it the reason being the availability of different products to allow us to provide a complete digital experience. A product like a site factory, Acquia personalization, site studio, etc has really made a big impact on the overall experience.

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?

Yes

Would you buy Acquia Digital Experience Platform again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Apache Solr, Azure App Service, Enterprise Single Sign-On Manager

Likelihood to Recommend

I believe for hosting a drupal application, especially a large application I would recommend using the Acquia platform, Also Acquia provides a list of products that covers the complete digital experience like personalization and site factory for managing multisite.
I would say for small sites it may not be useful to use such a vast eco system of tools.

How Acquia Digital Experience Platform helps us to be more scalable and productive

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Acquia Digital Experience Platform