Adobe Business Catalyst (Discontinued) vs. Drupal

The service provision is good the accounts customer service is poor so I would struggle to give BC a better than average review, if only they could offer customers a better accounts service then the value would be much higher.

We developed a corporate website using Drupal, which features a large number of static pages and several dynamic functions, including a contact us form, location finder, and job posting. We utilized Drupal with some customization to achieve the desired functionalities. We have also worked on e-commerce sites using Drupal, and there is a scope for improvements, specifically in cataloging.

Incentivized

• The Web Apps element of Business Catalyst is unique among hosted CMS systems. It helps us solve unique challenges without involving heavy-duty programmers.
• As a Hosted CMS, it has a lot of great features without a ton of cost or liability being taken on which is important to us.
• BC has a growing developer community and has made significant upgrades over the past few years, which don't end up costing us more, and would be very expensive or time consuming in a traditional CMS
• Our client's like that it is from "Adobe" and that it has Dreamweaver integration. This provides them with a level of comfort that helps us sell the project.

Incentivized

• Content Types... these are amazing. Whereas a more simplistic CMS like Wordpress will basically allow you to make posts and build pages, Drupal 8 gives you the ability to define different types of content that behave differently, and are served up differently in different areas of the website.
• Extensibility... it scales, ohhhh does it scale. They've really figured out server-side caching, and it makes all the difference. Once a page has been cached, it's available instantly to all users worldwide; and when coupled with AWS, global redundancy and localization mean that no matter where you're accessing the site, it always loads fast and crisp.
• Workflows... you have the ability to define very specific roles and/or user-based editorial workflows, allowing for as many touchpoints and reviews between content creation and publication as you'll require.

Incentivized

• I love web apps but it can be time consuming to get the bulk import file just right the first time
• Support is good, but the effort to research can be massive for unusual issues
• Metadata on blog posts and pages can require lots of content editing at a slow pace

Incentivized

• Security and new release notifications are a hassle as they happen too often
• Allowing them to write PHP modules is a big advantage, but sometimes integrating them is a small challenge due to the version the developer is working on.
• Steep learning curve, but worth it

Incentivized

Actually with Business Catalyst there is no renewal; once you are a partner, you are a partner for as long as you like. It is an investment in your business not simply a product you purchase...and as an investment in partnership with Adobe, both are committed to each other's success.

I really like Drupal, and besides the one major issue with not being able to update from version 6 to version 7 and I am happy to continuing using it. Hopefully as time goes on they will make it easier to upgrade or provide better tools for mid-level web designers like myself to build out new sites without the help of expensive 3rd party's.

Overall it is a "plug and play" interface. The majority of the work is done in other software interfaces. Managing billing, user roles and custom reports are all that you need to manage in the actual BC user interface. For my business this is an incredible benefit as I have to leave my preferred software less.

Incentivized

It has a very steep learning curve. When starting with Drupal, the functionality and setup have to be learned, which is complex in comparison to tools like WordPress. Drupal is more powerful and can create a wider range of applications, but it definitely has a learning curve. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to make a dynamic web application bigger than the scale of a WordPress blog.

Incentivized

very few issues with availability

Incentivized

Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).

Very few issues

Incentivized

Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.

Incentivized

The support provided by Adobe is excellent. Though the knowledge base, forums, blogs and online chat questions most all answers can be found. In the event that you are unable to find an answer or you have a unique situation simply post a question to the forums. These forums are regularly monitored by Adobe and its users.

As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.

Incentivized

I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.

bcgurus.com kiyuco

Incentivized

The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.

Pretty easy to do

Incentivized

Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%

Incentivized

I would say that all things considered Adobe Business Catalyst is an excellent product. It does have some short-comings, but it is fantastic all around. It has a nice way of tying everything in your digital presence together nicely. If you do not have a ton of money to spend on a company website, and want things like e-mail marketing, analytics, a reliable web-site, then this is probably a very real option that should be considered. If you want a website that can grow with your company, this is also a great possibility. For smaller companies with less technical resources, I don't know if you could ask for a much better all in one solution. If you want something that can be completely customized, then there are better options out there, but they will be more expensive and require more technical knowledge to use well.

Incentivized

Drupal's capabilities outpace WordPress by miles. Drupal is more customizable, scales better for larger companies and has advanced content types. If you own a small business or work at a startup company, I would recommend WordPress but if your firm is trying to scale and you have more than 50 employees I would recommend Drupal.

Incentivized

It's easy to build small sites or large sites and there is lots of templating.

Incentivized

Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.

Incentivized

• Surprisingly enough and despite having a second, less expensive hosting solution, a majority of our clients prefer to use the Adobe Business Catalyst solution. We are then able to enjoy the commissions that are returned as we sign up new customers for annual contracts.
• Being able to store and utilize data that comes from web form submissions has been very helpful in customer retention since we became a partner in 2011. Since that time, we have only lost two clients. That's 3 times better than our other hosting solution.
• Our largest negative impact has come from having only one choice in SSLs. For example, we had a great client in a local and growing bank. We spent 2 months getting the web site built to their specifications and we were very clear on the SSL situation. However, once the site went live, problems arose. In the past they had submitted their site to search engines with their secure URL and that was all that was indexed. Then when their customers searched for their site and clicked on the secure URL, it either showed that the site could not be found OR it said that they were entering to a site with an unverified SSL. People would then call the bank and complain. We then had to quickly move their site to another solution costing us days of re-development time and resources.

Incentivized

• Drupal helped us launch a creative, marketing- and product-focused website with custom coding integrations tailored to our goals.
• Drupal allows us to rely on secure and consistently updated core code.
• Drupal's code taxing on the server does start to get a bit heavy as you go along with customizations, so at some point, we decided to stop. We want to ensure our Google Page Score remains high, including paying close attention to page load speed.

Incentivized