Acquia Digital Experience Platform vs. Salesforce Lightning Platform

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
The 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
Salesforce Lightning Platform
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
Salesforce Platform is designed for building and deploying scalable cloud applications with managed hardware provisioning and app stacks. It provides out-of-the-box tools and services to automate business processes, integrate with external apps, and provide responsive layouts and more.
$25
Per User Per Month
Pricing
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformSalesforce Lightning Platform
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Starter
$25.00
Per User Per Month
Plus
$100.00
Per User Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformSalesforce Lightning Platform
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformSalesforce Lightning Platform
Considered Both Products
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Frankly, I think it was just good luck that we had a developer who trusted the platform and recommended we use it!
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Much easier, less costly, and more value for the money. The support for the Acquia tools platform and operation are outstanding. Acquia has been a partner rather than a vendor.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Acquia Digital Experience Platform provides all the above features incorporated in your package.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Honestly, pantheon are a great provider too and momentum has a large amount to do with our retention here.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
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.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Platform.sh is cheap and relatively easy to configure. The challenge they have when it comes to competing with Acquia is that they aren't a Drupal centric service, and don't have the same bench of Drupal products to offer, and don't have turnkey Drupal pipelines and support …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Very convenient because it's a suite of products built to work together and Drupal is open-source. The AWS products are very similar, but I really appreciate the Cloud IDE.
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 …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
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 …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Drupal is Wordpress on crack. And using Acquia Digital Experience Platform is like using a managed Wordpress site: Most of the installation and maintenance is done for you.
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 …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
The customer selected Acquia since it had a better support for the US based laws (eg the PCI compliance).
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.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
The flexibility aspect of Acquia Site Studio is unmatched and Wordpress does not provide it on a large scale. The ability to perform bulk operations and security are also the factors in favour of Acquia Digital Experience Platform as compared to Wordpress. They also offer …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Although Acquia Digital Experience Platform is an Enterprise solution like the others, it stands from competition because it relies on Drupal's Open Source community and is one of the first Cloud-native solutions so they're building on experience.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Acquia is the go-to platform for hosting drupal sites.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Acquia Cloud is more of a hands-off approach to Drupal hosting - get the code on the server and that's basically it. AWS on the other hand requires more specialized server and networking knowledge to support a site. Our company wants to focus on content deliver and not on being …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
I'm still evaluating.
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.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Actually, Acquia Digital Experience Platform did not stack up against them, rather it was a great combination to implementing and configuring CloudFlare, the next generation Content Delivery Network (CDN) and different caching Architecture to embed with the Drupal Platform such …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
We had some limitations with another provider: for example, multisite was not possible. We did not encounter any particular constraints with Acquia Cloud.
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 …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Compared to the Adobe product, Acquia is 10 points ahead in flexibility and ease of deployment, and site support.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Acquia offers a much better page builder and personalization tool as native features than WordPress. Translation management is also a good feature from Drupal/Acquia, that is not managed well on Wordpress.
Salesforce Lightning Platform
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
Salesforce Lightning Platform provides a more sales-focused CRM. It allows the sales force of an organization to be able to stay organized and can pull necessary reports to get a better understanding on how the business is performing regarding sales and customer activity. …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
I have only used Salesforce Lightning Platform for crm purposes
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
Salesforce stands out purely for its enterprise pedigree. No other competitor out there knows Enterprise business as well as Salesforce does. It is levels about the rest of the competition in terms of managing heavy processing requirements of a large enterprise. I did not have …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
Compared to Sage CRM, Salesforce Lightning Platform is leaps and bounds ahead. Sage CRM feels outdated and very slow compared to Salesforce Lightning Platform. There is a lot more ability to integrate Salesforce Lightning Platform with other APIs and systems. There is more of …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
I have been using Salesforce for two years now. Ans I have not used any other platform before similar on this. I find Salesforce very easy to use and this really makes your job much easier and faster. Its features are easy to understand and use and I am glad I have learned …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
We have always been a Salesforce shop, but have grown with the App Cloud platform as it's evolved. We eventually moved to lightning based on the streamlined interface and increased ease of use for our employees. So far we are happy with the results. Would definitely recommend …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
Salesforce, while more expensive, provides faster support, higher scalability options, and an increased opportunity to change any details whether it's about user permissions management, custom field or object creation, or an integration of another application. What really sets …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
Salesforce has more functionality as a CRM platform. The major disadvantage is the ability to integrate with Microsoft products. Ability to integrate with Microsoft is the best part about 356 given that it is a Microsoft product. Even though the price is more expensive, it …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
We were previously using an older version prior to it becoming Salesforce Lightning Platform so we were well adverse on the advantages of using a CRM, to begin with. It made sense to convert to Salesforce Lightning Platform after we were given a free trial of the platform. …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
It offers way more functionalities and the interface/design can be fully customized to best support your companies needs.
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
NA - I've only used [Salesforce Lightning Platform (formerly Salesforce App Cloud)] in my tenure as a CSM
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
I think Salesforce has the most powerful developer engine - I have yet to need a module that I couldn't create (maybe with help). I probably could have made the others work but Salesforce, in my opinion, made it the easiest. Salesforce is reliable and established as well so …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
I would love to switch back to Service Cloud as it was much, much more intuitive and fast. I would even take Salesforce Classic over Lightning. It at least wasn't this slow.
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
I used a program formerly known as "CP." I considered it somewhat outdated, and it does not have any of the modern features that the Salesforce Lightning Platform (formerly Salesforce App Cloud) has. I consider the Salesforce Lightning Platform (formerly Salesforce App Cloud) …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
I use both. SF is the constant through the organization and I receive leads into SF and pass on opportunities through SF.
SL is better for internal processes within business dev.
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
Salesforce is the premeire product. Period. The others are cheaper and less capable, they may fulfill your organisation's needs but you will always be looking at Salesforce with wishful eyes. If you are a company that needs to bootstrap then spend the time to evaluate your …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
Microsoft is pretty limited in functionality compared to Salesforce. Most folks coming into your organization are going to have some level of Salesforce experience but will most likely not have experience with Dynamics. Dynamics doesn't connect as well to other platforms.
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
I believe the only reason we didn't choose Monday.com is because we're just a bit bigger (company size- 75 people) than what Monday.com handles. We also are in San Francisco, and Salesforce pretty much owns this entire city. I was also not part of the selection process of the …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
There is a reason why the Salesforce Lightning Platform is the market leader for all things related to customer relationship management. While Close is somewhat user-friendly, it pales in comparison to all the features, bells, and whistles that the Salesforce Lightning Platform …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
We originally used spreadsheets when we first started. That worked fine until we started growing by over 100% year over year. We were able to upload all of our previous accounts in Salesforce Classic once it was called for. However, Salesforce Classic soon became redundant and …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
We needed a product that would allow for easy and dynamic reports for potential and new clients. Account Managers use other products as well to monitor the client's success and Salesforce allows for seamless integration to other platforms. This serves as a one-stop-shop for all …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
We currently use the two together, along with Hubspot sales. Salesforce is our primary CRM and where we track and manage account and contact information.
Salesforce is much more flexible and intuitive - everything is where you would expect it to be.
Hubspot reporting is …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
I think that the Lightning platform is not as clean and doesn't integrate that well. Whenever I was logged out, it was such a treck to have to log back in and I never actually knew if my activity was being saved or actually being tracked. Personally, Lightning is not my …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
Close and Salesforce are two very different beasts. Close is much more user friendly but lacks the ability to serve complex infrastructures and hierarchies provided by Salesforce. Close is much simpler and faster--great for high volume but will not provide you with rich, …
Features
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformSalesforce Lightning Platform
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
8.0
Ratings
3% below category average
Salesforce Lightning Platform
-
Ratings
Role-based user permissions8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
7.7
Ratings
8% below category average
Salesforce Lightning Platform
-
Ratings
API7.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language7.60 Ratings00 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
7.9
Ratings
4% above category average
Salesforce Lightning Platform
-
Ratings
WYSIWYG editor7.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness8.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Admin section7.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Page templates8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Library of website themes8.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design7.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Publishing workflow7.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Form generator7.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
7.0
Ratings
3% below category average
Salesforce Lightning Platform
-
Ratings
Content taxonomy7.70 Ratings00 Ratings
SEO support6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Bulk management6.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions7.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Community / comment management7.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
-
Ratings
Salesforce Lightning Platform
7.5
Ratings
6% below category average
Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings5.90 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Platform management overhead00 Ratings7.20 Ratings
Workflow engine capability00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Platform access control00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Services-enabled integration00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Development environment creation00 Ratings7.30 Ratings
Development environment replication00 Ratings7.40 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings7.30 Ratings
Issue recovery00 Ratings6.30 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings7.90 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformSalesforce Lightning Platform
Small Businesses
Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
Score 8.6 out of 10
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformSalesforce Lightning Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(0 ratings)
6.7
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.9
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.7
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.1
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformSalesforce Lightning Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
It made it super easy to upgrade 300+ Drupal sites to the latest major version in 12 weeks, end to end. It is easy to deploy legal changes and updates to components at scale. Turnkey service to deploy new environments and to clone sites. There are no ecosystem lock-in principles for Customer service/success services and professional services for new approaches.
Read full review
We use Salesforce Lightning Platform in everyday business as sales coordinators. By using this tool, we are able to send new requests to clients and communicate regarding pending proposals in real-time. This also tool holds many of our client accounts where we are able to monitor their sales and revenue.
Read full review
Pros
  • Acquia keeps the site up and available. I don't think we've had a second of downtime caused by Acquia.
  • Their administration UI makes it pretty easy to manage the websites at a high level. Check stats, change key configuration values, backup code and databases, manage SSL, create support tickets and manage development teams (users).
  • Their support team can do performance reviews of your website and give you tips for improving performance.
Read full review
  • Reporting and Dashboards are thorough and can show a wealth of important data to inform and scale processes. It's helpful in a high volume sales cycle to be able to quickly identify weak points in performance and productivity so that adjustments can be made.
  • Highly customizable. We are able to customize just about everything which allows us to track very specific things and in theory create better efficiency.
  • Parent/Child account hierarchy exists which is helpful.
  • Contact records can be associated with multiple accounts and opportunities. This, in theory, should minimize duplicates and mismanagement of contacts.
  • Console helps a lot with data nesting. Having a fairly comprehensive look at an account without searching through various tabs and sections speeds up an otherwise cumbersome platform.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
  • Can be cumbersome: takes multiple clicks to get where you need to go
  • Lightning is slower than original Salesforce, and it is very noticeable
  • The UI change means sometimes I can't find what I need, so I have to switch back to the Classic version to find it
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
We're moving away from Drupal as a platform. Drupal 8 and 9 were simply too overburdened and difficult to maintain compared to other offerings. PHP seems like a dying language so we are currently in the process of migrating all of our Drupal 7 functionality and custom modules to a Python/Django/Wagtail platform. This doesn't mean Acquia isn't a great service, they are professional and top-knotch, but the only way we'd say with them is if I didn't complete the migration.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Usability
It's a great user interface. It's always being updated and I've never noticed a bad update that increased the complexity or reduced
Read full review
UI can be quite complex, but the more that is required will bring more complexity. Can handle complexity and variety very well, but makes ground-level views harder when not knowing full extent of functionality. Finding new functionalities can be difficult to pinpoint on some pages
Read full review
Support Rating
Every time we have had an issue, Acquia support has responded promptly and worked with us as a team to solve the problem. The Acquia support team is global and we have literally had interactions with all of their support offices, yet the experience has been the same - top notch
Read full review
Salesforce's support is top-notch. They have subject-matter experts that are accessible at all times to address needs as they come up. They let you know in advance when there are system updates and enhancements so that you are prepared for upcoming changes. I've never had an issue that wasn't addressed immediately when reaching out for support.
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Implementation Rating
It was implemented when I got there. I don't know how it was prior.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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.
Read full review
We were previously using an older version prior to it becoming Salesforce Lightning Platform so we were well adverse on the advantages of using a CRM, to begin with. It made sense to convert to Salesforce Lightning Platform after we were given a free trial of the platform. Certain reps were chosen to experiment with it and from there a decision was made to move forward. We've been customers ever since.
Read full review
Scalability
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.
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No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • A reliable platform = happy user base!
  • Ours is a non-profit service, we are happy that people appreciate and recommend the site for its content.
  • FLEXspace.org rapidly grew to over 6,000 users from 1,400 educational institutions across 75 countries - it is a joy to watch educators contributing content and sharing ideas.
Read full review
  • Better visibility of Accounts and Contacts interactions makes it easier to maintain during employee transitions.
  • Tracking of current jobs and relating them to past jobs is very useful.
  • More efficient use of Sales Reps time.
  • Sales Managers have good visibility into how their people are working.
Read full review
ScreenShots