Acquia vs. Pantheon: Why Pantheon is the superior choice for innovative teams

Streamline your digital experience with Pantheon’s unmatched speed, reliability, and flexibility
Learn more
Drupal cms logo

Let's break it down by feature

Pantheon helps web teams accelerate innovation, drive higher performance, and maintain exceptional security while reducing operational headaches. While Acquia offers certain features, Pantheon delivers agility, scalability, and comprehensive support for modern web teams to thrive.

FeaturePantheonACQUIA
Multisite Support

Flexible governance with upstreams for site management, allowing site-specific innovation and staged update rollouts.

Site Factory’s monolithic multisite requires one size fits all features and high-risk global releases.

CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK (CDN)

Vertically integrated CDN for all sites, including CMS aware caching that allows fresh content to appear immediately.

Whitelabel solution requires manual configuration and custom development to integrate with Drupal.

INTEGRATION WITH PARTNERS

Focuses on integration with best-of-breed solutions without vendor lock-in.

Mixed bag of legacy DXP suite and exclusive whitelabeled partner solutions.

WEBOPS METHODOLOGY

Native GitHub integration and branch based development for every project with no constraints on parallel work.

Limited set of environments and lack of turnkey workflow.

CUSTOMER SUCCESS

24/7 live support from expert WordPress and Drupal developers available by chat, email and phone.

Significant brain drain as support and engineering orgs have been offshored.

OPEN SOURCE CMS

24/7 live support from expert WordPress and Drupal developers available by chat, email and phone.

Significant brain drain as support and engineering orgs have been offshored.

Why choose Pantheon over Acquia?

Scalability

Serverless Infrastructure

Your websites should perform at peak capacity whether it’s planned campaigns or unexpected surges. Acquia’s Cloud Next infrastructure sticks your sites on a shared Kubernetes cluster with fixed capacity. Pantheon isolates all workloads and allows them to scale on demand.

Agile Digital Marketing Icon

Agile Development

Multidev delivers cloud environments for every branch, allowing parallel workstreams to move at their own pace. Environments on Acquia require a support ticket (or sometimes a purchase order), blocking dev work, accepting testing, and forcing teams to shuffle to get releases out.

Multisite? No More

Pantheon uniquely supports Drupal at large scale, allowing many sites to share a common codebase without the risks of a monolithic instance. Acquia’s Site Factory forces customers to deploy anything to every site all at once, increasing risk, reducing velocity, and smothering innovation.

WordPress & Drupal logos with support headset icon

The Best of the Open Web

Pantheon supports WordPress and now NextJS in addition to Drupal, enabling the full value of open source and future-proofing diverse web portfolios. Acquia is pivoting Drupal from DXP to SaaS with Acquia Source, a proprietary fork of Drupal that blocks customers from leveraging community contributed

Promoting Inclusivity Icon

Superior Support

Pantheon is known for its responsive, world-class support that solves issues quickly without trying to upsell additional services. Acquia’s support reputation has faltered, with reports of delayed responses and upsell-focused interactions.

Improve site performance

Predictable Pricing

Customers with annual contracts on Pantheon never see a surprise “overage” invoice, and our model is based on unique visitors to align with your success. Acquia meters individual pageviews, including those from search crawlers and AI agents, meaning next month's bill could be anyone’s guess. 

Join the many teams switching from Acquia to Pantheon

Pantheon is the preferred platform for teams of all sizes, ranging from enterprise-level institutions to small, agile teams, who are looking to escape from Acquia's limitations.

By migrating to Pantheon, I got my life back. The burden of manual processes and slow support responses was lifted. For UCLA Health, solving this problem meant regaining control and efficiency.” 

 

Paul Babin, web Systems Manager

An image of a person being rescued by the Pantheon-branded balloon from a deflated hot air balloon.
Perforce logo on white

We felt that Acquia’s Site Factory was going in the direction of almost WordPress-like solutions that didn’t fit our developer-centric process. We needed more help with our day-to-day code management and solutions.

Jeremy Pieper, Web Development Manager at Perforce

We didn’t have Multidev on Acquia, and sometimes we had problems with content getting erased. Now on Pantheon, we have a more agile process for the team to set up environments without impacting our weekly sprints and releases. It’s super helpful!”

Jennifer hagedorn, Web content analyst

Experience the Pantheon difference

The Pantheon platform is tailored for Drupal, providing unmatched speed, reliability, and flexibility.

Ready to elevate your digital strategy with Pantheon? Talk to one of our experts and discover how Pantheon can help you deliver faster, smarter, and more secure websites without the hassle.

Contact Us Watch the demo