Business Catalyst vs Drupal Comparison

Question

Have a client with 3 sites on Business Catalyst and they have been using BC for over 5 years. They are the Australian subsidiary of a multi-national organisation and head office is looking to standardise worldwide on Drupal. The Australian CEO has asked for help in developing a comparison of Business Catalyst to Drupal so that she can counter the head office move. They have no internal resources to maintain the website and have always engaged our services for website maintenance, updates, SEO, etc. The industry this business is in is highly government regulated. Only one of the sites uses eCommerce and this is handled by us and an external logistics company. On a second site the visitor can request information (already packaged)  which we post as the client cannot see the names/addresses (due to government regulations).  As a result, email marketing is not possible.
Was wondering if anyone has some real recent comparative information please as opposed to what can be read on the internet. In particular I would be looking for information on maintenance, updates, security, plugins, ease of use ......
Thanks
Geoff

Answer 1

Hey Geoff,
You could spend hours on this but the critical difference outside of features, scope of what you can do etc because that is really dependent on the exact needs of the project etc. If you feel you can do what they need to do in BC as well as drupal then your looking at the core factors:
- A BC system that has its system closed off for better security, PCI compliance validation and high security features. To achieve the same in Drupal will be extra cost and there will be the constant cost and development that they would have to pay more on to achieve similar.
- Support - Adobe run the servers on Amazon using some of the latest tech, resources, monitoring etc there is. They do this, they support both the hardware and the software side of it and that is factored into the yearly costs that they would be paying. For Drupal they would have to pay the server fee's, people to support them, hardware maintenance, the software and so on. You can always turn to Adobe for support on the site, Drupal may have some basic support but not as much.
- Updates: BC is seamless and backwards compatible. There is a bug Adobe fix it, not you or the client, with Drupal that is something someone will need to do, any custom work on Drupal when there is an update needs to be re-done or maintained, any changes to code that will be needed to be able to support the update will need to be done. Any security breaches that come out because it is open source will need to be action right away. BC does not suffer from that same issue because it is closed off system but if there are updates and fixes that need to be done - They do it. And again that is part of the monthly cost - For a big Drupal site and this being important thats cost on top.
- All in one features. You very may well get SSL certificates, site hosting, Email Campaigns, plugins all under the cost of what BC charge but that will be several different bills each month/year VS BC which is a one of to one company and thus easier to manage.
- Integrations. Yep you may get better email campaigns with mail chimp but you have to setup and maintain the API connections between your drupal site and BC etc.
People like things like Drupal because your not restricted, But as you start to factor in all this - the costs start adding up and the internal work to maintain and handle a site takes up time.
With BC you can focus on the SEO, Digital marketing etc more, You either have to pay more or have more staff to handle that and maintain the website.