Creating new content, adding new messaging and being truly agile has never been so important for digital brands. Digital publishers need to keep pace with their customers’ demands and stay ahead of competitors, and a key way to do that is to tell stories with compelling content.
Historically, when marketing teams needed to make a change to their pages, some development needed to occur — greatly reducing the speed and agility. Now, there are a variety of different solutions which all allow marketing teams to build pages quickly and easily (without needing to get developers involved).
When it comes to choosing a solution there are several options on the market, but for Drupal it pretty much comes down to two options: Paragraphs or Acquia Site Studio.
What do Paragraphs and Site Studio do?
Both have been created with the principal aim to make creating rich web experiences faster and easier. They allow site builders to make things cleaner and can give more editing power to the end-users. And both offer drag-and-drop controls for managing content flow and layouts.
What’s the best option?
Well, that depends on your situation. Both are pretty great and a huge step-up for Drupal’s functionality. Let’s look at them both.
| Features | Paragraphs | Acquia Site Studio |
|---|---|---|
| Easily configure components and layouts | ✓* | ✓ |
| Drag and drop interface | ✓* | ✓ |
| Author controls | ✓* | ✓ |
| Customisable with other Drupal API's | ✓ | ✓ |
| Switch between layouts without losing content | ✓* | ✓ |
| Non-tech users able to build landing pages and edit | ✓ | ✓ |
| Styling UI provided | x | ✓ |
|
Structured and unstructured content |
✓ | ✓ |
|
Out of the box branding functionality with Style Guide Manager (SGM) |
x | ✓ |
|
Full WYSIWYG Visual Page Builder |
x | ✓ |
|
Requires and API licence |
x | ✓ |
(* requires configuration)
As you can see, there are some subtle differences.
Acquia Site Studio has coupled design and styling into its code, making it more of an out-of-the-box experience. Of course, SGM functionality can be built into Paragraphs, but that’s an additional overhead.
When deciding on what solution to adopt, it comes down to understanding what the clients needs are and how best to remedy.
For instance, we’re in the process of helping a global consumer health company manage their complex web estate, comprising hundreds of websites and 23 brands, each with unique identities. And their key objective?
‘Publish content to a marketing driven schedule, not one driven by technology’
That meant multiple languages and local brand activation. So for this situation, we chose Acquia Site Studio, and I’m pleased to say it’s gone fantastically well. Website No. 358 rolled-out last week, ahead of schedule and five times faster than traditional tech.
The power of low-code was absolutely essential in the success of this project, as was the ability to get more many brand teams (and their partners) involved quickly.
You can see for yourself how we did it in this two minute video.
Conclusion
Both Paragraphs and Acquia Site Studio offer similar features and are very good at what they do. The main differences come down to Acquia Site Studio’s out-of-the-box (OOTB) experience and the team that continues to develop the product.
All clients want flexibility in their design systems and the ability to create landing pages gives that freedom for rapid go-to-market campaigns.
For enterprise clients with multiple sites and complex web estates then Acquia Site Studio is the proven model, especially if time to market is a priority. And Site Studio’s recent addition of their Visual Page Builder tool is most welcome.
But it’s really about choosing the right agency with the best skill-set for the challenge. Both Paragraphs and Site Studio continue to evolve so get in contact and we’ll find the right solution for you.
