We separate fact from fiction and let you reach your own conclusions

To compare the products of Acquia, Pantheon has a dedicated page on its website, that claims which are often not only misleading but straight out false. Acquia has some of the best and optimised Drupal solutions, which will be proved in this article. You should always have your own conclusions, but through this article we try to set out the facts straight.

So, Let’s begin from the most basics: Drupal

Commitment to Drupal

From the day one, Drupal remains at the core of what the company does, as the creator of Drupal Dries Buytaert co-founded Acquia. In fact, when we look into the development and support for Drupal, we can see that Acquia is the number one contributor to the open-source content management system, in 2020 - 2021, Acquia contributed 17.7x more code to Drupal than Pantheon.

When the question arises of supporting major Drupal versions, when they are generally available or after their end of life. Acquia are planning to offer extended support for Drupal 7, which is going to its end of life on 05 January 2025. Pantheon offers the same, but there's always a catch, that’s it only offers extended support to sites running on PHP 8.0 or PHP 8.1. Whereas Drupal 7, support the latest versions of PHP, and many of the contrib modules won’t support higher versions of PHP than PHP 7.4, as of now. That caveat requires a PHP upgrade if the organisation is running on PHP 7.4. But Acquia, on the other hand offers free PHP 7.4 extended support until April of 2025 for Drupal 7 sites.

Acquia vs Pantheon: Where Acquia and Pantheon go head-to-head

Drupal is at the core of Acquia, not even a single doubt about it, but what are the differences in both the platforms?

Hosting performance

In order to satisfy the higher web traffic needs, growth, and performance goals, Acquia offers a 99.99% service-level agreement (SLA) uptime. Pantheon lists theirs SLA uptime also to be 99.99%, but here is the other catch, that this SLA uptime is enjoyed only by their “Elite” hosting tier users. Additionally, they only offer a 99.95% SLS uptime, unless the users purchase their multi-zone fail over add-on. A guaranteed SLA uptime indicates that how reliable the provider is and whether one should invest in it. On the other hand, Acquia offers multi-zone availability to all of its users at no additional charge.

Pantheon and Acquia offer multi-zone fail over for elite sites, while providing disaster recovery services to everyone. These resilient solutions ensure your digital experiences function as intended and are backed up in case of a disaster, ensuring continuous website availability.

With more than 40 points of presence (POPs), Pantheon's Global CDN provides an advanced CDN for an extra cost. With more than 65 POPs, Acquia's Platform CDN is a sophisticated CDN solution. For an extra fee, Acquia Edge offers more than 200 POPs. Increased POPs guarantee availability by granting access to the site to additional technical professionals. Organizations require a reliable supplier to offer features and solutions that continuously support their platform because a sub-par platform is unacceptable.

Organizations require tools in order to provide a compelling digital experience, regardless of performance. Which elements of the solutions are most crucial?

Security

Given the growing amount of security risks, organizations need to give security top priority when it comes to their digital experiences. Customers are reassured that they are not endangering themselves or their data when they have a secure experience. A wide range of compliance solutions, such as FedRAMP, HIPAA, SOC1, SOC 2, PCI, and GDPR, are provided by Acquia Cloud Platform. Compliance accreditations and industry standards must be met by enterprises.

Advanced web access firewalls (WAF) are among the advanced security products that Acquia Edge Security provides. Pantheon has a limited WAF but no more sophisticated security features, such as reputation scanning. Because a WAF defends online applications against a range of application-layer assaults, the differences in WAF offerings are important. Your experience won't be shielded from sophisticated attacks by a rudimentary WAF.

Security consists of several distinct elements. Just two of such components are WAF and compliance. See our comparison table for a comprehensive evaluation of security features.

Developer tools

Developer tools mean a shorter set-up time, less maintenance, and more efficiency and agility.

With automated DevOps tools like Acquia Code Studio, Acquia Cloud IDE, and Acquia Cloud Actions, a part of Acquia Cloud Platform, Acquia offers an end-to-end web platform optimized for Drupal development. Code Studio streamlines and expedites users' workflows for Drupal development.

Development teams can eliminate the hassle of maintaining intricate tool chains and integrations by utilizing an integrated tool set. A ready-to-use, cloud-based development environment that comes preconfigured is called Cloud IDE (OOTB). With Cloud Actions, you can reliably automate deployment operations and enhance shared code governance without the need for manual activities, coding, or command line interfaces. Acquia coordinates with GitLab to streamline every stage of the development process.

Code Studio offers a comprehensive suite of tools for developers, including issue management tools, Cloud IDE for building experiences, preconfigured debugging tools, and testing pipelines. It also provides OOTB pipelines, audit dependencies, vulnerabilities, and code quality tests. Users can visually review code changes, post comments, and assign approvers. Once approved, code changes can be merged and moved to the final stage of deployment. Cloud Actions performs common DevOps tasks automatically from the Cloud Platform UI.

In contrast, Pantheon lacks an end-to-end web platform and necessitates numerous tool and service connections in order to facilitate a smooth DevOps workflow. For the build stage, the company provides LocalDev, which has a complicated setup but ends in June. Pantheon provides version control and upstreams during the deployment phase. Developers are forced to either finish the task on their own or create solutions to support them if there are no solutions available at any of the five stages of the development workflow.

With Acquia's developer tools, users can break down development silos and establish a comprehensive, end-to-end DevOps workflow. Acquia helps companies accelerate time to market by providing streamlined and effective methods at every stage of the DevOps workflow. With security testing and governance tools, users may reduce risk. A comprehensive testing suite optimized by Drupal experts with best practices incorporated in right out of the box can help users improve code quality. The best part is that everything is linked with Cloud Platform, so you may use Drupal apps hosted by Acquia right away.

Multisite

Selecting the right platform for a multi-site digital experience is crucial. Acquia offers three approaches to managing multiple sites with Custom Upstream. Drupal multi-site is a CMS that allows users to manage multiple websites from a single installation, allowing for efficient creation and management while leveraging Drupal's flexibility and scalability.

Acquia Site Factory is a centralized platform that facilitates the swift creation, administration, and updating of a portfolio of sites. It represents the next method for managing a multi-site experience. In addition to having integrated single sign-on (SSO) functionality, it streamlines governance by allowing users to be managed from a single, centralized dashboard.

Acquia is our third multisite management solution. With a comprehensive toolkit that lets teams plan, build, test, review, and deploy from a single, customizable process, Code Studio speeds up production. Code Studio can offer centralized code governance across numerous sites that don't adhere to the same structure, code-bases, or, in certain situations, architectures by using a Composer-based process.

Pantheon Custom Upstreams is a unique solution for managing multiple websites using a Git workflow. Users can create their own custom upstreams by configuring a Drupal installation with desired modules, themes, and settings. This differs from Code Studio's Composer-based workflow, which relies on semantic version. Pantheon's approach is marketed as a utopia for managing numerous sites, but it only offers one solution. Acquia, on the other hand, believes in tailoring solutions to each customer's unique needs, rather than a "one-size-fits-all" approach. They aim to provide a tailored solution that works best for each individual.

Marketing tools

Multiple teams contribute to digital experiences, reducing requests for developers. Empowering marketing teams to update and create content saves time and resources. Acquia Site Studio is a low-code tool for building and updating pages. Pantheon doesn't offer tools for marketing or marketers, but discusses Drupal's value in enabling marketing teams. Both solutions save time and resources for organizations.

Customer support

Your organization can empower teams with advanced security and low-code tools, but solutions cannot support themselves. They need support for Drupal, their solution, and their application. Vendors should provide excellent customer support to help organizations bounce back quickly and return to peak performance in case of mistakes.

Drupal expertise is crucial for organizations delivering a Drupal experience. Acquia has over 150 Drupal experts, while Pantheon offers this as an add-on to their diamond-level support package. Pantheon offers solution support, but emergency on-call support is only available at platinum and diamond levels. Acquia's on-call experts are available to everyone, and their average response time for critical tickets is 3.5 minutes globally. Pantheon offers 24/7 chat support with its Silver package, but users have found the company's support services lacking.

Acquia and Pantheon offer professional services for organizations to complete development work without in-house support, but at a cost. Acquia provides a technical account manager (TAM) for support and development needs, but it comes with a price tag. Pantheon does not mention a TAM offering in its documentation. Application support is another form of support, but Acquia does not offer it.

When choosing a candidate to fulfil the demands of your company's digital experience, customer service is a crucial consideration. Indeed, there are others who contend that when it comes to digital support, it truly may make or break your experience. The expertise and experience of your technical staff will determine the extent of help your company need, but support is something that everyone needs occasionally.

Pricing

Pricing can be perplexing and raise a lot of concerns. How much does the solution cost? Why does it cost so much? Alternatively, why is it so inexpensive? For what exactly am I paying? For what do I not pray? Furthermore, and maybe most importantly, Does the value justify the price?

But costs aren't just about the amount you pay; other important factors include support, implementation time, and customization. Pantheon provides a list of its options, but you must speak with a company representative in order to get the enterprise-grade service.

Acquia offers simple packages that scale to meet traffic and feature needs, ensuring they build a customized solution that meets all team goals. Although pricing is not listed, the team is happy to meet with clients to create a customized package and quote a price based on their specific needs.

The question focuses on whether the cost-effectiveness of Acquia solutions outweighs the benefits. While Acquia solutions are more expensive than Pantheon, organizations can still benefit from better hosting performance, Drupal knowledge, and marketing solutions. In summary, organizations can choose between Acquia and Pantheon based on cost.

Acquia, the premier Drupal company, offers a platform solution with built-in performance features that meet customer needs. They provide state-of-the-art solutions, including Drupal hosting, cloud dev environments, and low-code marketing tools, empowering organizations to deliver exceptional digital experiences. Acquia was named a leader in the Gartner DXP Magic Quadrant and Forrester Agile CMS Wave reports, while Pantheon did not rank in either. Acquia's reputation as a trusted leader is not the only factor when choosing a hosting provider; value is also determined by the value teams find in their solutions.

When choosing a hosting solution, organizations should consider not only price but also how the solution can enhance their terms and provide exceptional digital experiences. It's crucial to evaluate whether the value is worth the cost when considering a new hosting solution.

A customer-first focus

Acquia and Pantheon are not fully comparable, but they are customer-centric companies that prioritize the best fit for their users. Acquia offers optimized Drupal solutions, allowing users to showcase their benefits. For further inquiries, users can contact their respective customer support teams or contact the company. Both companies are equipped to provide tailored solutions for their users.