Elevate Your Digital Workflow With Acquia Source
Recently, Acquia announced updates to its Digital Experience Platform (DXP). Updates center around enhancing content management, optimization, and insights capabilities. The key theme of these updates is the acceleration of development velocity and improved data-driven intelligence for marketers.
As an Acquia Elite partner, we were granted an early access preview of one of these innovations, Acquia Source powered by Drupal CMS. Acquia Source is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution to streamline building and managing enterprise-grade digital experiences faster, smarter, and with less overhead. It offers several exciting features, including:
- A new platform interface to self-service site creation and manage design systems and users
- An updated, user-friendly CMS with integrated Experience Builder for content creation and site building
- Out-of-the-box DXP integration to generate, manage, and optimize content and experiences
Acquia Source is a low-code site building solution rooted in Drupal’s Experience Builder, offering Next.js integration, Open API, DAM integration, and server side rendering of JS.
Comparing Acquia Source and Acquia Cloud Platform
For brands, there are a number of things to consider when exploring development projects with Acquia Source. Let’s take a look at a few key differences between Acquia Source and Acquia Cloud Platform.
Acquia Source
Acquia Source offers a SaaS solution for building and managing websites with Drupal’s core capabilities, simplifying the development process. It is ideal for teams that need a user-friendly, low-maintenance platform for building and managing websites, particularly those with less technical expertise. However, it does still require users to have solid front-end development skills, though there are plans to make it more marketer-friendly in 2026.
Acquia Source gives users the power of Drupal without the complexity and overhead that building a custom Drupal site from scratch can bring. With Acquia Source, there’s no installation or initial site set-up to perform. Users can immediately start building websites, giving them the freedom to build and launch through a self-service interface without custom code or deployments. This saves teams time spent setting up and configuring the platform for a new website build.
What makes Acquia Source different from standard Drupal is how sites are built and managed. Acquia Source encourages a “page-first” mindset rather than relying on traditional Drupal content types. This approach gives content creators the flexibility to build pages by curating the components and content they want to use, rather than trying to fit content into a fixed structure. Components and content can be saved as a ‘template’ that can be dropped onto a page and customized.
Acquia Source does this by enforcing some restrictions over traditional Drupal sites. Site builders can’t use community contributed modules (the Drupal community’s way to expand Drupal’s functionality) or write custom modules to build their site. The platform restricts the use of community modules to those hand-selected by Acquia. This is done to make the Acquia Source platform more secure, scalable, and performant.
All together, these features enable straight-forward website development, reduced maintenance overhead, and simplified content management.
What’s a scenario when a team would want to use Acquia Source?
Acquia Source is a viable option when a marketing team needs a platform to quickly create and manage landing pages and microsites with a consistent brand experience.
Imagine that a marketing team at a small- to medium-sized enterprise needs to spin up branded campaign landing pages to tease an upcoming product launch. These pages are intended to get customers excited about the new product and capture information from those interested in learning more. The company wants to create excitement around the product, and the marketing team needs to be nimble in creating new pages for different campaigns.
Content creators can choose from existing components on other pages as a starting point and then use the drag-and-drop interface to customize as needed for each campaign. If the team needs to create a new component for a page, that can be done by someone knowledgeable with React components without making a code commit.
Acquia Cloud Platform
Acquia Cloud Platform is a fully managed, Platform as a Service (PaaS) hosting solution that is optimized for Drupal. It provides a secure and performant Drupal hosting environment with tools for development, staging, and production environments. With Acquia Cloud Platform, custom code opportunities are endless, making it suitable for organizations that need a scalable, secure, and reliable Drupal hosting environment with comprehensive support.
When an organization chooses Acquia Cloud Platform for their digital transformation, they typically will need a partner like Bounteous to help design, launch, and manage their Acquia Cloud Platform instance.
What’s a scenario when a team would want to use Acquia Cloud Platform?
Acquia Cloud Platform would best suit a large enterprise with strict security and performance requirements that needs a platform that can handle high traffic and complex Drupal setups. These are still exceptional products, just different tools for different needs.
Where traditional Drupal hosting provided by Acquia Cloud Platform requires developers to manage code, modules, and infrastructure, Acquia Source offers a fully managed SaaS solution with no code deployments or server maintenance required by the customer. Site configuration, component building, and content creation all happen entirely in the browser, rather than through custom themes or modules. Acquia Source is ideal for smaller teams who want the power of Drupal and have simpler use cases that may not require the complexity of traditional Drupal development workflows.
Accelerate Your Digital Projects With Acquia Source
Acquia Source enables teams to do things quickly. Users can create nimble websites using an empty site template, Acquia’s default, or a create-your-own, custom option. The product also supports collaboration – users can invite team members or clients with specific access levels, providing transparency and a single source of truth for design elements.
When asked what he thinks about Acquia Source, Bounteous’ SVP of Marketing Jon Meck said: “We love tools that empower individuals to be more successful at their jobs. Acquia is making significant strides to increase how current developers with Drupal experience can get basic tasks and routine content creation done more quickly. The more people using Acquia and Drupal, the better. If these innovations make it easier for people to choose and support Drupal and/or Acquia implementations, we’re big fans of that.”
Teams are able to maintain a centralized collection of styles and components in Experience Builder. This is what makes it easier to build websites with Acquia Source, reducing the need for IT or partner support during the build process.
Do you think Acquia Source would be a good fit for your organization’s needs?
