Drupal as a Service (Buzzr vs Drupal Gardens)

Hi Chris,
Thanks for the info re: DG. I've just completed the Drupal Gardens Essentials course on http://www.lynda.com by Tom Geller and I'm really impressed with the power of the Theme Builder. I see that Acquia's Dev Cloud is a sponsor of the CT Drupal Camp at Yale this Saturday, will any Acquia rep's be there if I have more questions?

Thanks again. Phil.....

Hi Phil,

I'm the co-founder of Buzzr. Here are a few comparative notes that you might find of interest.

If you watch our videos at http://www.buzzr.com/videos-how-to-make-great-websites, you'll see we've streamlined Drupal to make it much more user friendly for end users who don't know anything about Drupal. Our testing with clients unfamiliar with Drupal indicates that those who try DG and Buzzr find Buzzr much easier to use. And that's important if you are creating a site that at the end of the day, you will be expecting a non-technical client or co-worker to run. You can read a comparison to regular Drupal about half way down on this page: http://www.buzzr.com/drupal-multisite-edition.

Unlike DG, you can also add modules to Buzzr, in some cases. As a private label client, or at the Gold level as a regular subscriber, we will work with you to include Drupal modules or customize the platform to your specific needs. We have many happy customers who received custom solutions. Here's a recent Case Study about a church group in the U.K. that created a Buzzr site allowing 30,000 churches to rate and review more than 40 charitable programs vying for their tens of millions of volunteer hours and billion pounds of financial contributions. http://bit.ly/pRu87G This client had us create and add a multi-part ratiings module, which you can see at http://www.communityfranchising.net

Buzzr also offers "Quickstarts" -- essentially install profiles, combined with sample content and a theme -- in various verticals, such as non-profit, church, legal, medical, retail, etc. -- to make it even faster to get started creating a new website. And, if you become a Buzzr Partner, and subscribe to our private label edition, you can create your own Quickstarts, that can be instantly cloned, exclusively for your special use cases.

The Buzzr private label partner product caters just to professional website developers and designers. http://www.buzzr.com/resell-websites-for-small-organizations Our private label edition lets you use your own brand name and brand URL, without Buzzr branding. We even can set you up with credit card check-out for your clients.

We have clients using our customized solutions all over the world, including South Africa, Canada and the U.K. In a couple of weeks, we'll release another Case Study about one of our U.S. private label client, Footsteps Marketing, http://www.footstepsmarketing.net/ , which is the major website builder for the hundreds of independent Ace Hardware stores around the country. They handle marketing for more than 100 Ace Hardware locations representing $225 million in revenue. Footsteps has transitioned from a traditional Drupal website provider to a private label Buzzr client, in large part because our Quickstart feature allows them to instantly clone a variety of templated Ace Hardware sites ; and, we were able to accommodate their need to integrate custom modules into the hosted platform, such as a Coupon builder and a multi-location map.

We plan to migrate to D7 toward the end of 2011. We started before Drupal Gardens and use a wide variety of modules, some of which need to still have their tires kicked a bit more in D7 before feel we can safely offer a stable product to our existing customers. We aren't able to exclude the less stable modules because we started with D6, not D7, almost a year before DG was announced and we already have clients relying on all our features. The many modules we've contributed to the community, such as Simple Views, Form Builder and Views Gallery, have been deployed on more than 100,000 sites. http://bit.ly/nCEHtQ

Here is our latest feature list: http://www.buzzr.com/features-for-small-business-websites. It includes a simple e-commerce solution; calendar; music players/hosting; and many other features not currently on DG. But likewise, DG has features that we don't offer and since it's native Drupal, it hasn't slimmed down the configuration options that can make Drupal wonderful but also so difficult. Our main distinction is that our features have been streamlined for the ease of use. For example, I think you'll really like our theme tool, which is built on the Sweaver module. (Unlike DG, our theme tool is open source and included with your site if you choose to export it.)

As to our pedigree, Karen Steveson, our lead developer, is the maintainer of CCK and Calendar. Lullabot, our co-owner, has been doing major enterprise Drupal sites longer than anyone.

We aren't free. Sites start at $7.95 a month. http://www.buzzr.com/website-subscription-plans In less than two weeks, we'll be switching to a free two-week trial without a credit card; right now, we offer a money back guarantee for the first month. Creating and hosting our platform is expensive and as a self-funded operation, we can't afford to lose a fortune running free sites. We offer a premium product for a fair price. We think companies like Ning.com, which shut down almost 300,000 free social sites when they could no longer sustain millions of dollars in annual losses, offer a cautionary tale about being too aggressive with free offerings.

Running our hosted platform is all that Buzzr does. We don't offer other Drupal services, like cloud hosting or enterprise site consulting. We are exclusively focused just on serving the needs of our platform's clients. We know everyone is paying, so we offer very personalized, very fast customer service.

For more info, feel free to write me at ed@buzzr.com We love giving screen share demos of our private label or multi-site solutions.

Best,

Ed