Pantheon vs. Platform.sh

Great Cloud-based coordination platform which offers the team excellent capabilities on easy workflow management, multiple project activity tracking and easy to monitor all the project assets from one desk. Pantheon offers the best content management tools, strategic on development project life cycle management is excellent and the reporting features with Pantheon are effective and useful real-time data analytical capability.

Incentivized

In our organisation we are the only team that uses Platform.sh to host any site. This was a cost effective way for us as we were using Acquia Cloud earlier for these websites. We mostly use Platform.sh for those sites which are always in development as it is simpler and faster to handle these operations in Platform.sh. Then we do a lift and shift to Acquia as we move more towards the go live and post production maintenance side.

Incentivized

• 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

• As this is a PaaS it mitigates the complexities of a Cloud infrastructure like Acquia
• We are easily able to integrate our sites with different technologies like Python and Rest
• Helps us in providing Continuous Development cloud deployment hosting solution

Incentivized

• 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

• Platform.sh is not for beginners in my opinion. It has a good amount of learning curve in my opinion.
• As this is a PaaS, teams habituated with cloud infrastructure may miss the server side support from their cloud teams. I believe you will have to work on server bugs more on your own.
• During normal maintenance periods, integrations may fail if you are working on your sites in that time, in my experience.

Incentivized

The environment is stable and we have not had any issues/downtime. The annual cost is reasonable.

Incentivized

Monitoring of project development is very easy using a dashboard with its integration capability, showing all processes in a single screen which is easy to use and also easy to navigate through. A powerful tool that allows testing to be carried on without the user noticing any changes to the system and a highly interactive tool for groups and project members.

Incentivized

Even tier 1 Pantheon chat and ticket support are knowledgeable, competent, and useful. They routinely understand and promptly resolve urgent, complex, and/or unusual issues that other hosts need to escalate to tier 2 or tier 3 support personnel. I honestly can't think of a truly negative or disappointing support experience in the years I've used Pantheon hosting for client websites.

Incentivized

Once the environments were up and running, the implementation was easy to synchronize with latest data prior to switchover.

Incentivized

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

In our team we use Platform.sh mostly while sites are in developmental phase. Then we do a lift and shift to either Acquia or AWS depending on the type of sites we have. Platform.sh is really cost effective and more fluid in terms of Continuous Development hence the usage. After said development is done, we generally lift and shift to Acquia for more content heavy sites and to AWS for more transaction oriented sites.

Incentivized

• 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

• Continuous development for sites in build has been fluid
• Platform.sh is really cost effective when comparing to AWS or Acquia Cloud
• On the other side, lack of server side support demands a big learning curve from its users in my opinion.

Incentivized