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Acquia Digital Experience Platform vs. Pantheon

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Acquia Digital Experience Platform

    Score7.9 out of 10
    N/AThe Acquia Digital Experience Platform is an "Open DXP" with its two core pillars being content and data. Built on top of one of the largest open-source content management systems, Drupal, it aims to provide the flexibility and interoperability a modern organization needs. With its customer data platform, it allows organizations to understand who their customers are and deliver personalized experiences. Acquia's DXP offers variety of other tools including digital asset management,…N/A

    Pantheon

    Score8.6 out of 10
    N/APantheon is a WebOps platform where marketers and developers collaborate to drive results. The vendor states that with Pantheon, site owners maximize their capacity to update website design and functionality, responding to market trends, catering to consumer behavior, and adding real value to the business's bottom line. Today, companies compete on the basis of digital experiences, and the best results emerge from an agile build-test-learn process. Whether it's publishing content,…

    $29

    per month

    Pricing
    Acquia Digital Experience PlatformPantheon
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Basic
    $29
    per month
    Performance
    $114
    per month
    Elite
    Contact for quote
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Acquia Digital Experience PlatformPantheon
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Acquia Digital Experience PlatformPantheon
    Considered Both Products
    Acquia
    Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    Honestly, Pantheon are a great provider too and momentum has a large amount to do with our retention here.
    Incentivized
    Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    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 …
    Incentivized
    Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    I personally haven't had much experience with other digital hosting platforms, but I have investigated alternatives in other roles. Pantheon has consistently cropped up as another enterprise Drupal hosting solution, and Adobe Experience Manager has been investigated for …
    Incentivized
    Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    The VPS/cPanel solution is just "raw" LAMP stack hosting, so nothing Drupal-specific and no automatically set-up multiple dev environments with a dashboard to manage them. This is what I [have done] for the last 15 years for my clients. For one client, we evaluated Pantheon, …
    Incentivized
    Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    If you're project requires a multisite architecture with scalable site deployment, and your budget allows, I would recommend Acquia. Acquia pricing sits more on an Enterprise level, so it is overwhelming if you're hosting a smaller site. Pantheon is much more suited for …
    Incentivized
    Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    I have used Pantheon for almost as long as I have used Acquia. Many colleges and universities will use sub-sites in Drupal either as a separator for each department, or possibly for targeted marketing campaigns. One of the biggest reason we tend to use Acquia over Pantheon for …
    Incentivized
    Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    Acquia offers a more robust product suite than Pantheon. Acquia also offers professional services for another level beyond what Pantheon offers. Acquia pricing is typically more expensive than Pantheon, but the extra cost tends to be worth it, given all the support you receive …
    Incentivized
    Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    Acquia provides much more for the investment. The support and services they provide make them the best choice in choosing a platform to host your Drupal sites. Services like Pantheon may have some new tools or cool features. But Acquia always seems to come out with those …
    Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    Acquia has a much easier path for procurement through the GSA contract. Pantheon didn't have an avenue to purchase through the GSA, which severely limited our ability to procure their product. Pantheon has a few extra features which Acquia has yet to develop like true …
    Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    We stay with Acquia because they offer managed updates to Drupal core. Not everyone does. And, they are experts in supporting Drupal. They can often get a little closer to the developer side of things than other companies. Prices and support are similar for similar services …
    Incentivized
    Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    The customer selected Acquia since it had a better support for the US based laws (eg the PCI compliance).
    Incentivized
    Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    Acquia coupled with their easier interface and 24 x 7 customer service can outweigh its competitors anytime.
    Acquia provides a full end to end solution for Drupal websites.
    Incentivized
    Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    I'm still evaluating.
    Incentivized
    Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    Can't compare apples to grapes. But in terms of "Drupal specific" hosting at enterprise level as a PAAS solution I think Acquia is the only one doing it at this scale.
    Incentivized
    Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    Compared to other products used, Acquia Digital Experience Platform offers a good balance between configuration flexibility and hosting implementation. Some platforms provide a similar service where it takes away the need to build the hosting yourself, however, they don't allow …
    Incentivized
    Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    Cost - Acquia provides more granular control of the costs.
    Interface - Acquia interface is a bit cleaner, although Patheon may have a few more features.
    Incentivized
    Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    Acquia is a leader in managed Drupal hosting, knowledge and supporting infrastructure.
    Incentivized
    Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    Acquia is more fully featured and mature.
    Pantheon
    Chose Pantheon
    Acquia was terrible. We use DigitalOcean for some all-purpose computing needs and Platform.sh for an application that does more computing and high-throughput processing where we do not want page views (API calls) to count against our usage.
    Incentivized
    Chose Pantheon
    We use several hosting solutions depending on the client needs or what they were already setup on. Pantheon is very similar to them and offers similar services however one of the main features we use is the Multidev service which allows us to test pieces of work separately and …
    Incentivized
    Chose Pantheon
    Pantheon dashboard is leaner and faster. Pantheon cost is lower comparatively.
    Incentivized
    Chose Pantheon
    Linode is good if you want to keep control of the infrastructure, webservers, etc. However, if you want to forget about it and focus in your website content; Pantheon will make your life much easier. acquia support system is terrible, it is slow and they send outdated …
    Incentivized
    Chose Pantheon
    Pantheon provides stellar premium hosting for Drupal and WordPress. The platform is highly performant. Support is responsive and knowledgeable. System-enforced best practices improve site stability alongside rock-solid platform reliability. However, Pantheon absolutely charges …
    Incentivized
    Chose Pantheon
    Pantheon's documentation was easier to grasp and I was able to get started and finish my first project on Pantheon relatively faster.
    Incentivized
    Chose Pantheon
    We use whatever platform best suits our clients in terms of use-case and pricing, but Pantheon's UI is preferable to our team, and the platform is generally inline with our typical approach of building distributions from an upstream codebase instead of creating and managing a …
    Incentivized
    Chose Pantheon
    When you compare the cost of the product to the value it provides and time to launch - Pantheon wins the race. While Acquia is nice, it is generally a much more expensive hosting environment with not as many built-in features. OpenShift and Amazon Web Services are great if you …
    Incentivized
    Chose Pantheon
    Acquia is quite an established platform and is a much bigger company than Pantheon. We've been using Acquia for a long time now. But from using both services, I personally like using Pantheon more. It doesn't have a high learning curve. It's easy to configure, install and …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    97%
    Would buy again
    74 Answers
    97%
    Would buy again
    59 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    94%
    Delivers good value for the price
    64 Answers
    96%
    Delivers good value for the price
    55 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    73 Answers
    98%
    Happy with the feature set
    60 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    48 Answers
    98%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    54 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    90%
    Implementation went as expected
    53 Answers
    93%
    Implementation went as expected
    55 Answers
    Features
    Acquia Digital Experience PlatformPantheon
    Security
    Comparison of Security features of Acquia Digital Experience Platform and Pantheon
    Feature
    Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    8.0
    49 Ratings
    3% below category average
    Pantheon
    -
    Ratings
    Role-based user permissions8.049 Ratings00 Ratings
    Platform & Infrastructure
    Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Acquia Digital Experience Platform and Pantheon
    Feature
    Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    7.7
    41 Ratings
    8% below category average
    Pantheon
    -
    Ratings
    API7.839 Ratings00 Ratings
    Internationalization / multi-language7.632 Ratings00 Ratings
    Web Content Creation
    Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Acquia Digital Experience Platform and Pantheon
    Feature
    Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    7.9
    43 Ratings
    4% above category average
    Pantheon
    -
    Ratings
    WYSIWYG editor7.331 Ratings00 Ratings
    Code quality / cleanliness8.134 Ratings00 Ratings
    Admin section7.942 Ratings00 Ratings
    Page templates8.030 Ratings00 Ratings
    Library of website themes8.226 Ratings00 Ratings
    Mobile optimization / responsive design7.828 Ratings00 Ratings
    Publishing workflow7.934 Ratings00 Ratings
    Form generator7.924 Ratings00 Ratings
    Web Content Management
    Comparison of Web Content Management features of Acquia Digital Experience Platform and Pantheon
    Feature
    Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    7.0
    35 Ratings
    3% below category average
    Pantheon
    -
    Ratings
    Content taxonomy7.728 Ratings00 Ratings
    SEO support6.029 Ratings00 Ratings
    Bulk management6.931 Ratings00 Ratings
    Availability / breadth of extensions7.432 Ratings00 Ratings
    Community / comment management7.226 Ratings00 Ratings
    User Ratings
    Acquia Digital Experience PlatformPantheon
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.4
    (93 ratings)
    8.0
    (68 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.9
    (11 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    7.7
    (2 ratings)
    9.8
    (29 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.0
    (5 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.3
    (73 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Acquia Digital Experience PlatformPantheon
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Acquia
    No answers on this topic
    Pantheon
    Pantheon is excellent for medium-large websites that require high availability and a managed workflow. It would be inappropriate for small websites because of the cost or for situations where more control of the environment is appropriate. We find it useful because we rarely do anything outside of the Drupal application.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Acquia
    • It's fast, no lag time
    • Exceptionally good support. When there's a problem, you reach out to your account manager who either fixes the issue or gets you to the right person. We've had no downtime.
    • Platform is very accessible to those who know how to manage the back end software.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pantheon
    • Effective use of our codebase deployment and implementation.
    • The dashboard functionality and general stability and security are excellent.
    • The server is quite consistent, and if you need assistance from the support team, they are very quick to respond.
    • Automatic updates let me ensure that my customers have safe websites without increasing my own expense.
    • The team offers excellent assistance and help for chat.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Acquia
    • Support responds pretty quickly to critical tickets, but they can be slow to respond on non-urgent items. Some of what we experienced may have been related to a newer ticketing system recently implemented.
    • Standard support covers business days/hours but only critical support is available outside those times. We typically schedule our website updates for the weekend or "off" hours when only critical support is available.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pantheon
    • Pricing structure has too large of a jump between Basic and Performance plans
    • Have run into issues with prescribed WP updates not working through dashboard and having to do manually.
    • Pantheon site dashboard occasionally is unavailable (the site is never affected though)
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Acquia
    We rated our renewal likelihood an 8 because Acquia DXP delivers solid reliability, strong enterprise security, and an infrastructure built specifically for Drupal that takes the burden off our internal hosting management. The developer tooling and cloud stability are exceptional. The only factors keeping it from a 10 are the premium licensing costs and the learning curve for non-technical users, which requires ongoing budget justification during annual renewal discussions.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pantheon
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    Acquia
    No answers on this topic
    Pantheon
    Pantheon is an easy system, especially to the users with previous experience with other similar platform and the interface is clear enough to easily understand how things operates. On the Cloud deployment everything also works effectively and the technical team from Pantheon community are very helpful on providing the necessary assistant to their customers.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Acquia
    No answers on this topic
    Pantheon
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    Acquia
    No answers on this topic
    Pantheon
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Acquia
    We chose Acquia for a much better UI that gave non-analytical marketers and easy to use tool where they could create their own reports. The campaign side of things also had an easier to use UI as well, that made the targeting of audiences much easier.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pantheon
    Although it may seem a good fit for a company that needs extra control over the deployment process and development process, for a firm that is mainly concentrating on SEO, it would be an overkill. Pantheon provides that sweet automation that allows us to shed some weight on development and focus on our business activities.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Acquia
    The DXP tools can handle millions of requests and can scale automatically to fit your needs. We have clients that use only part of the DXP tools and have a small usage, but even in these cases they see great value in using tools like personalization and CDP.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pantheon
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Acquia
    No answers on this topic
    Pantheon
    • Pantheon allows ordinary sites to excel esp if there is consistent development going on behind the scenes.
    • Website management is super easy and the hosting fee gets paid off as you save on developer hours.
    • Expensive for those who are not consistently developing on the platform, there are other options out there at better price points.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Pantheon Screenshots

    Screenshot of Find out in seconds if your site is ready to launch. Use Launch Check to get recommendations and discover site issues fast with our report based on over 50 automated checks.Screenshot of Our Developer Dashboard has everything you need to build, launch, and run Drupal and WordPress sites. Interface via SFTP or Git, deploy and scale your sites, and access tools like backups and one-click core updates. Easily add team members and control access.