Site Factory is built using Drupal. However, it provides additional tools and services to help you focus on building sites, instead of how to build sites.
The following list explains some of the differences between Site Factory and a stock Drupal website:
Hosting and monitoring - Site Factory provides a high-availability hosting and monitoring infrastructure across multiple web servers, with Varnish® caching and replicated database servers. An operations team is on call 24/7 to test your site and keep it up-to-date with all the relevant updates and security patches. All of this is based on the same Cloud Platform Enterprise infrastructure that powers and protects some of the largest and most active Drupal sites in the world. With Site Factory, you can stop worrying about site speed, site traffic, disk space, up-time, and backups.
Single sign-on, multisite management - Instead of signing in to multiple websites, if they’re on Site Factory, sign in once to Site Factory to sign in to all of them. This helps users reduce the number of accounts and passwords they have to keep track of, and it allows Site Factory website administrators to view and manage all of their websites from a single interface.
Acquia Support - Site Factory provides you with access to Acquia Support, providing you with professional Drupal support and how-to guidance, even for custom CSS. Accounts are also entitled to support tickets, where they can have one-on-one private Support conversations.
Open software-as-a-service (SaaS) - There’s no vendor lock-in with Site Factory. If you decide that you want to move your website to another hosting service, or even host it yourself, you can export your website at any time.