Governed Content, Any Front End: Why Acquia Partnered With Vercel

Do we prioritize developer freedom or content control? That is the question many enterprises are asking when they need to modernize their digital experience.

We do not think teams should have to pick.

Underneath that decision is a question about how IT and marketing work together. Developers want to build with modern tools and own the architecture. Marketers need a governed place to publish content that stays on brand and compliant. Both needs are reasonable. For years, though, the technology made them compete, and whichever team won the platform decision set the terms for the other.

When the content layer is governed and the frontend is open, developer freedom and content control become compatible. That is the idea behind the technology alliance Acquia recently announced with Vercel. Acquia governs the content and the digital experience. Customers choose where their frontend runs, on Acquia or on Vercel.

Why composable teams no longer have to choose between developer freedom and content control

Enterprises moving to a composable stack have usually faced a hard choice. A traditional Drupal build gives content teams visual editing, structured content, and enterprise governance, but frontend developers end up working inside a backend-driven stack. A headless, developer-first CMS hands engineering teams the frontend, but content teams lose the structure and controls they rely on.

Many of our customers and prospects already run frontends on Vercel. They do not want to replace it to adopt Acquia, and they should not have to. With this partnership, marketers keep a governed place to create and publish, and developers keep the tools and workflow they already know.

How Acquia and Vercel work together with Drupal Canvas?

With a headless approach, Acquia runs the governed content layer, and the frontend runs where the customer wants it, on Acquia Front End Hosting or on Vercel. JSON:API and GraphQL are built into Drupal, so it can feed any frontend, and both companies support joint customers.

The connection between the two layers is Drupal Canvas, an open source project built by the Drupal community. The Drupal Canvas headless SDK is framework-agnostic, with an adapter for Next.js and support for frameworks including Nuxt, Astro, and TanStack Start. In practice:

• Acquia Cloud Platform hosts and manages the Drupal backend, and Vercel hosts the headless frontend.
• Developers scaffold a working frontend with a single command, npx @drupal-canvas/create, then connect it to Canvas for live preview and deploy to Vercel.
• Marketers edit visually inside Drupal, using Drupal structured content, and see their changes in the live frontend.
• One Drupal instance can serve as the system of record for both a traditional site and a headless frontend, without duplicating the content model.
  
  The integration is available on Acquia Source CMS and Acquia Cloud Platform.

Open source at both layers: Drupal and Next.js

Open source is the clearest value Acquia and Vercel share. Teams moving to a composable stack often worry that they are trading one vendor lock-in for several. Here, the two layers that matter most are open. Content lives in Drupal, the open source CMS created by Acquia Co-founder Dries Buytaert. The frontend runs on Next.js, the open source framework created and maintained by Vercel. The customer owns that code and can take either layer elsewhere if their strategy changes.

That openness matters beyond the engineering team. Security teams can inspect the code, which helps in regulated industry and public sector reviews. Government and education buyers can meet open source requirements at both layers. And large Drupal and Next.js communities give teams a bigger pool of developers and systems integrators to draw on.

How JAKALA uses Drupal and Vercel together?

JAKALA works across both platforms as a longtime Acquia partner and a Vercel Gold Solutions Partner. 

“Our clients kept asking for Drupal’s governance with the frameworks their developers already use,” said Ray Saltini, Senior Director, CX Solutions and Partnerships at JAKALA. 

“JAKALA pushed to bring Drupal back into the headless conversation and helped bring the Acquia and Vercel teams together to make that possible. Now Drupal is a first-class option for headless delivery, and we can offer clients best-of-breed solutions on both sides of the stack.”

Where to start

If your team is weighing a composable approach, or already runs a frontend on Vercel, talk with an Acquia expert about Drupal Canvas and Vercel. Developers can go straight to the Drupal Canvas documentation and start building.