How do Drupal 7 and Drupal Gardens differ?

• General

If you know Drupal, you may wonder what benefits and features Drupal Gardens adds.  Basically, Drupal Gardens gives you additional tools to create Drupal 7 sites much faster, and the Drupal Gardens team actively manages your sites so you can ignore the drudgery of maintaining and operating them.     

Drupal Gardens is built on top of Drupal 7 to give you the best possible Drupal 7 experience by combining:

• Stock Drupal 7 + many popular Drupal 7 modules pre-installed so you can get started fast, and the list of new modules and functionality is always growing.

• A collection of user experience enhancements to make Drupal easier but not hide Drupal power - e.g., full access to JavaScript, unfiltered HTML, custom content types, etc.

• High-availability software-as-a-service (SaaS) hosting and monitoring infrastructure across multiple web servers with Varnish caching and replicated database servers.  Every site is automatically backed up daily.  A random sample of sites are daily restored to test servers and verified to ensure the integrity of backups.  All of this is based on the same Acquia Managed Cloud infrastructure that powers and protectes some of the largest and most active Drupal sites in the world.  With Drupal Gardens you can stop worrying about site speed, site traffic, disk space, uptime, and backups.

• A 24x7 operations team that keeps your site tested and up to date with all relevant Drupal core and contrib module updates and security patches so you can relax knowing your site is secure and up-to-date.

• Point-and-click theme styling in the browser via the Drupal Gardens’ ThemeBuilder, including extensive font libraries from Monotype and Typekit and the ability to add custom CSS

• Multi-site management panel so you can see all of your sites at a glance and manage their domains

• Library of beautiful, flexible themes that range from richly-styled themes to bare-bones base themes that can be dramatically altered to anything you can imagine.  See some example sites.

• Single sign-on so you (and your users) can use the same account across many sites

• Duplicate a site or theme as needed with a click

• Professional Drupal support and how-to guidance (even for custom CSS)  provided by Acquia support

• No vendor lock-in. If you need a module that Drupal Gardens doesn't yet provide, just export your site and host it yourself, and add any module you need.

• Get started for free!