We don't strand the people who trusted us. Every comparison here puts our fully hosted, self-healing Drupal service beside one competitor's, so you can see exactly what continuity buys you. Each detail page tells you plainly who that vendor fits, and what choosing them costs you in freedom and continuity. One line per vendor below, six things that decide it, and the detail pages carry the receipts.
One line reads across every vendor, and the line for Hosted BOA – our fully hosted Drupal service, run on the open-source stack behind everything we run – is the same in every comparison: you get a hardened stack where crashed services restart on their own, traffic storms are shed before they bite, and updates land unattended, with files and database backed up every 6 hours and kept 90 days on every hosted plan; Drupal multisite and isolated multi-tenant instances are both first-class; security releases patched typically the same day you add Managed for your site code; and, unlike a closed hosting cloud, you can leave to your own servers and keep the whole stack: the exit freedom a rented cloud can't offer.
Zero-config where others make you work: Valkey (the open Redis-class cache) just works, nothing to do; New Relic monitoring is one licence key in a control file; Composer and Drush are ready to use. And the depth is there when you want it: all 12 PHP versions, from legacy 5.6 and 7.0 to the latest 8.5, switch per site or globally.
They enforce a workflow; we don't. A closed platform prescribes how you must work: its pipeline, its toolchain, its dashboard. Here nothing is enforced, only recommended: manage your sites as you see fit, through Ægir's panel (the open-source control panel that manages fleets of Drupal sites), through git and Composer, or entirely by hand over secure FTP (FTPS), with no git and no Composer required. We provide the tools and the depth of control. How you use them stays your call.
The specialist standard is depth, not a CMS count: real strength in the platforms that share one benchmark, which is open source, self-owned, fast, cleanly structured and built for the long haul. For ~30 years we've backed the ones that meet it and refused the ones that don't: Pressflow 6, the high-performance Drupal 6 fork, and Drupal 7 through the latest Drupal and Drupal CMS – with Backdrop, the Drupal 7 continuity path, first-class too – and Grav, the flat-file CMS behind our own docs.
The right vendor depends on your workload. If you need turnkey preview environments, compliance attestations, a managed global CDN edge or Kubernetes autoscaling, the detail page names the vendor that delivers it, and shows what the switch costs you.
Out of scope by design: we don't carry third-party compliance attestations, turnkey preview environments, Kubernetes-style horizontal autoscaling, or the reach of a large staffed enterprise support organisation. WordPress and polyglot workloads sit outside our lane on purpose. That focus is deliberate: we go deep where it counts instead of spreading thin across everything. Where one of those boundaries decides it for a vendor, its page names it and points you the right way.
The dated receipts behind these lines – Acquia dropped Drupal 7 platform support after November 2025; Pantheon's free Drupal 7 long-term-support ends 2027-01-05 – are stated in full, with sources, on the why page and the vendor pages.
Ready to move? What this continuity costs on our servers is on the hosted plans, and an evaluation lane is open at contact. And if you ever leave, the exit is real: the whole stack under your plan is open source and yours to keep running. That guarantee lives on the sovereignty page. If you're running bare Ægir today, the open-source control panel underneath our Drupal hosting, your upgrade path is the armoured comparison, and the product is documented in full at docs.boa.io.