Acquia
Acquia is a digital experience platform (DXP) built around open-source Drupal, offering cloud hosting, a multi-site "Site Factory" product, and marketing and personalization tools for large organizations running content-heavy websites.
Definition
Acquia is a digital experience platform (DXP) built around open-source Drupal, offering cloud hosting, a multi-site "Site Factory" product, and marketing and personalization tools for large organizations running content-heavy websites.
Overview
Acquia was founded by Dries Buytaert, the original creator of Drupal, to provide enterprise-grade hosting, support, and tooling around the open-source Drupal content-management system. Where raw Drupal is a flexible but self-managed CMS, Acquia packages it with managed cloud infrastructure, automated scaling, security patching, and developer tooling aimed at organizations — universities, media companies, and government agencies among them — that run many large, content-heavy sites. A signature Acquia product, Site Factory, lets a single organization manage hundreds or thousands of individual Drupal sites from one central platform, sharing code and configuration while still allowing each site its own content and branding. Over time Acquia broadened beyond pure hosting into a fuller digital experience platform, adding marketing automation, personalization, and customer data tools that sit alongside the CMS layer, competing in the same DXP space as products like Adobe Experience Cloud. Because Drupal itself is open source, organizations can technically self-host without Acquia, but many enterprises pay for Acquia's managed cloud, support, and Site Factory tooling specifically to offload the operational burden of running Drupal at scale — much as businesses pay for managed WordPress hosting, or opt for a headless content platform like Contentful, rather than operating their own CMS servers.
Key Features
- Managed cloud hosting purpose-built for Drupal websites
- Site Factory for centrally managing large numbers of Drupal sites
- Automated scaling, patching, and security updates
- Marketing automation and personalization tools
- Customer data platform capabilities for unified visitor profiles
- Developer tooling for Drupal continuous integration and deployment