Differences between aGov and GovCMS

Hi Konstantin,

Thanks for raising this. As tweeted by our Product Manager to your question, we've been actively looking into how we can highlight these differences on the project page.

We'll be sure to update the information as soon as we can.

+ 1
On aGov project page it seems easy to understand : govcms is forked of agov 7.2 to include acquia cloud factory and the live project is agov that have a new branch 7.3 and on going project in Drupal8

https://www.drupal.org/project/agov

aGov 7.x-2

aGov 7.x-2 was refined to meet the specific requirements of the govCMS platform in conjunction with the Department of Finance. This version of aGov was subsequently forked as the foundation of the govCMS distribution.

While govCMS contains modules specific to being hosted on Acquia Cloud Site Factory, aGov 2 is designed for government users who require a choice of hosting platform, full access to the code base, the flexibility to customise functionality and integration with third party systems.

aGov 7.x-3

Currently in Alpha release, aGov 3 is a full redesign of the user interface to comply with policies being developed by the Australian Government's Digital Transformation Office, and to provide a more modern approach to front end development.

This includes:

Redesigned and rebuilt base them based on Zen 6.
Auto-generated styleguides for a responsive preview each aGov design component
Replacement of the existing WCAG validator, with HTML Code Sniffer
Replacing many of the hard-coded features with default configuration for more flexibility
Moving custom modules out into their own projects
Administration theme tweaks
aGov for Drupal 8

The Alpha release is now available for download below. Read Ben Dougherty's blog post on what's new in the release, and the work yet to come before it's production-ready.

But there is nothing stopping people using GovCMS on other hosting platforms and customising it.

I still find the distinction confusing.

Is it that GovCMS is kind of like an LTS version and aGov is a bit more progressive?

I find the tweet mentioned in #1 to be a bit strange also.
I don't understand why a comparison between 2 very similar products would not be helpful.

It is not uncommon for government clients or management within my own office to ask about the difference between the 2 solutions and which one should be used in certain circumstances and I'm still not satisfied that I can give them an accurate answer.

My understanding is aGov and GovCMS are now independently maintained and will have different release cycles. It is probably better to consider GovCMS an SaaS and/or PaaS solution, which consists of not only the distribution but also services like DDoS protection and CDN.

Yeah, after some more investigation I think "Is it that GovCMS is kind of like an LTS version and aGov is a bit more progressive?" is fairly accurate way to put it, with the caveat that they are forked so features in aGov may not necessarily ever end up in GovCMS and vice-versa.

The way I see it is that if a site owner requires or specifically wants the GovCMS platform then use GovCMS, otherwise use aGov.

@Jason Guo has the differences in terms of Drupal distributions pretty much spot on. They're two separate distributions, independently maintained with different release cycles. @rooby, I wouldn't say they can be easily compared in the way you're doing as they have different goals and audiences.

The other thing to note is that the term govCMS covers many more things than just a Drupal distribution:

• The govCMS distribution (this project)
• The SaaS platform which takes care of every facet of site protection, management, security etc
• The PaaS platform which allows agencies with niche or specific functionality the ability to continue using without affecting the SaaS platform
• The govCMS deed, partner network and delivery methods

So in the most minimal sense, any user or organisation can take the govCMS Drupal distribution and use it for whatever purposes they wish. This goes all the way up to full utilisation of the govCMS program, the support network present within, automatically included security, DDoS mitigation, content sharing APIs etc.

I'm hoping this issue can be put to bed now so I'm going to close it and direct traffic towards the information site https://www.govcms.gov.au/