Adobe Experience Manager vs Drupal vs Liferay Digital Experience Platform comparison

Liferay Digital Experience ...

Read 37 Drupal reviews

1,044 Views
706 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Read 44 Liferay Digital Experience Platform reviews

1,241 Views
874 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Adobe Experience Manager

Liferay Digital Experience ...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Adobe Experience Manager, Drupal, and Liferay Digital Experience Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Wordpress, Microsoft, Adobe and others in Web Content Management.

To learn more, read our detailed Web Content Management Report (Updated: March 2025).

Download the complete report

Web Content Management

March 2025

Helped 850,028 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Web Content Management category, the mindshare of Adobe Experience Manager is 13.0%, down from 14.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Drupal is 6.4%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Liferay Digital Experience Platform is 8.7%, up from 8.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Content Management

Featured Reviews

Thomas Becker

Managing Partner(Austria) at a integrator with 11-50 employees

Impressive integration of customer behavior with an easy setup and okay support

I've worked with all major content management systems. Currently, I work with the leaders such as Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, and Acquia Working with big companies, I help them either consider setting up a new content management system or address issues they might have with their existing…

The best features are its extensibility and plug-ability. It has a very good authentication/authorization system.

it_user628050

Senior Drupal developer at a non-profit with 51-200 employees

The learning curve is the thing that scares most people away from using Drupal. With Drupal Version 8, it has taken a more standardized way by teaming up with the Symfony framework. This, however, is a double-edged sword. It takes you a step further away from the typical front-end developers that had found their gem in Drupal Versions 6 and 7. By its procedural nature, they were able to build semi-complex websites without any real programming and object oriented programming knowledge. Everything below Drupal 8 was aimed at being a procedural application where you can make changes by using hooks they provide in their code (a small amount were Object Oriented, but most people would never touch this). This allows for an easy way to modify existing pages for the non-programmers who know how to write scripts a little. But these hooks are very specific to Drupal itself (hence the steep learning curve) and aren’t very intuitive if you look at PHP frameworks/applications as a whole. The documentation on how to do things as a complete novice is only subpar in both Drupal 7 & 8. By now there are plenty how-to tutorials on how to do things in Drupal 7 luckily. With Drupal 8 they decided to use Symphony2 as the base framework for the system. This allows for best practices in that framework to be used and allow the vast community of symphony2 programmers to make a switch to Drupal since it leans closer to home than the procedural approach from the previous version. Almost everything is now Object Oriented and the amount of hooks (the old procedural approach) has been pushed back to a minimum. This makes it more difficult for the previously mentioned non-programmers. They are now looking at a huge time-investment to learn OO Programming to get started in Drupal 8. I believe this is the reason why Drupal 8 is making such a slow start compared to Drupal 6 & 7. It’s a good product but they made it so much harder for the people who can write basic PHP scripts. The main area of improvement would be better/more documentation and tutorials on how to do things in Drupal 8 at this moment. It’s a leap of faith for the non-programmers out there and some of them just completely thrown off by it. This is what incites projects like https://backdropcms.org/ where they fork Drupal 7 to keep it going after it reaches EOL.

Offers integration capabilities that are very easy to use

Bhavin Panchani

Chief Executive Officer at IGNEK

My company has 20 people who work on the product. I know that my company has around seven customers who use the tool. I recommend the product depending on the use cases of the person who wants to buy it. If your use case is to develop a public site, customer portal, self-service, or intranet, I would say that you should go for the Liferay Digital Experience Platform. If your use cases are related to e-commerce, you need to evaluate your use cases against Liferay Digital Experience Platform, and you can use it if you find it to be a good fit. Otherwise, you should search for other platforms.

More Adobe Experience Manager pros

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The integration of customer behavior and website setup is impressive."

"I like the profiling and segmentation."

"I've used several CMS tools, but Adobe Experience Manager is feature-rich, especially for web security and content management. It's more efficient to manage content on Adobe Experience Manager, and you can do a lot with it, such as updating content at any time, and on any platform, even from mobile or tablet. Adobe Experience Manager is still getting updated daily, and it's the best CMS tool in the market for me. I like that you can manage assets in Adobe Experience Manager. I also like that the solution has an analytics dashboard that shows you where the traffic comes from, how many clicks come from a specific location, the number of clicks and impressions, etc. Adobe Experience Manager can be accessed by other teams, for example, the digital media department of my company, so the solution can be used and updated per each team's requirement. Adobe Experience Manager is more than just a web developer tool, as it also allows visibility tracking and has other uses. I also like that the GUI for Adobe Experience Manager is straightforward and catchy. It has separate folders and icons, so using Adobe Experience Manager isn't tough. The solution is straightforward to use and handle."

"The most valuable features of Adobe Experience Manager include its capability to manage content and create reusable fragments."

"It's a complete package. You don't need to look elsewhere for digital marketing."

"Easy to work with the solution."

"The integration of customer behavior and website setup is impressive."

"It is easy to learn. You don't need to be an advanced Java developer."

"You can build websites on it very quickly."

"We use a part of the solution called Acquia. The personalization portion of this is the most valuable aspect fo the solution."

"It is good for big projects."

"The feature I find most valuable is that Drupal is a framework and not only a CMS."

"Manageability is very good and probably the most valuable part of a tool of this type. There is a little more of a learning curve than you have with a simple tool, but a business user can learn to manage the system as an administrator very easily."

"The look and feel and the user interface are great."

"I think that it could be interesting to expand the eCommerce capabilities to the B2C sector."

"We chose Liferay because it is open-source and that we can make any number of users apply, register into the system and use the system, as opposed to other solutions where the cost is based on user licenses. This is one of the most attractive features."

"It allows us to arrange and develop new ideas, then incorporate them into the portal. We can create a one stop information center, so people can access the information from one window."

"The integration capabilities of the product are super easy to use."

"The solution is easy to install."

"The web/mobile/portal integration was one of the features that we found most valuable, primarily because it reduced our development time."

Cons

"Adobe Experience Manager's pricing could be improved."

"Programming model could be improved, it's a monolithic solution."

"A little bit of background knowledge of coding and website structure is required."

"The latest trend is to render everything in the client-side framework. For example, SPA or single page application. This is a feature that needs improvement. The cloud deployment pipeline needs to be improved as well."

"The licenses are very expensive."

"In comparison to other CMS products, Adobe Experience Manager is missing some capabilities such as proper versioning or a better versioning system and backend connectivity. If something is deleted in AEM, the user cannot recover it. You have to call technical support, and they will need to recover the whole instance. So, it's really difficult. For example, if you delete a page, you cannot recover it. There should be an option to recover it. In AEM, you have to go to the previous state of the instance itself or the virtual machine, and you have to restore everything, which is not good."

"I haven't seen any areas for improvement in Adobe Experience Manager as it's a full-fledged CMS tool, and Adobe is already working on enhancements for the solution. Adobe is working to make Adobe Experience Manager more valuable and easier to use for any user, even non-technical ones, through multiple components and templates. Day by day, Adobe provides the latest update to Adobe Experience Manager, and if my team needs any particular change, it just needs to be reported to the Adobe team. As Adobe Experience Manager has a broad scope and a lot of use cases and features, it's a solution that requires some time and effort from you in terms of learning, especially if you're implementing it for different clients, which could be an area for improvement."

"Adobe Experience Manager could improve by allowing the reuse of components like a progress bar across multiple pages to make the development process more efficient."

More Adobe Experience Manager cons

"I think the support needs to improve, as well as the integration with tracking and analytics systems."

"Digital experience features like target, segmentation, and campaign management have a long way to go."

"It is a little bit simplified."

"The user experience in designing layouts should be much easier or much more helpful."

"It could have better built-in integration with a wider variety of extensions out-of-the-box."

"The plugins should be more affordable."

"The documentation provided needs to be more detailed. It's sometimes hard to develop things because the documentation is so sparse."

"The integration and configuration need to be simplified."

"Social area and capabilities need improvement."

"It could be improved in terms of adding filters to some of the rules. Therefore, you can retain how long a document would need to stay in an archive."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Users have to pay a yearly licensing fee to use the solution, which is highly-priced."

"There's a free trial for one month for Adobe Experience Manager, which you can use for learning purposes, then, after the trial period, you'll need to purchase the license. Adobe offers a few plans for Adobe Experience Manager, but I'm unaware of how much my company is paying."

"It's a costly solution. I would rate the price at two out of five on a scale from one to five, where one is the most expensive and five is the most competitive."

"It's really costly."

"I would like to see better pricing."

"It is a bit expensive."

"It's an open-source structure. Other costs are for professional services to integrate Liferay to other existing systems."

"Licensing costs can be very expensive."

"Their pricing model should be modified to include per user options instead of just servers/cores, etc."

"The product is neither cheap nor expensive. What Liferay Digital Experience Platform offers at its current price can be considered something that is worth the money."

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Comparison Review

it_user8925

Developer with 51-200 employees

Aug 23, 2013

Jive vs Sharepoint vs Drupal Commons

At Mediacurrent we often get requests to compare Drupal to other platforms used for intranet sites and social business platforms (like https://dev.twitter.com/ for example). This is often referred to as “Social Business Software”, which has grown in popularity in recent years. I decided to do a…

What do you like most about Adobe Experience Manager?

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

39%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

16%

Government

16%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

14%

Educational Organization

10%

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

It is easy to learn. You don't need to be an advanced Java developer.

What needs improvement with Adobe Experience Manager?

While there are many aspects that could be improved, discussing them would require more time. The licensing model is ...

What is your primary use case for Adobe Experience Manager?

I've worked with all major content management systems. Currently, I work with the leaders such as Adobe Experience Ma...

What is the best feature of Liferay?

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

A tricky question because it'd depend on what your focus will be on Liferay as a digital experience platform. I mean...

Is Liferay suitable for complete beginners?

A non-developer here, and frankly, a little bit of a tech beginner in general. My company branched out into digital e...

What is Liferay’s capacity for backup?

Yes, I think you can trust the cloud feature of Liferay pretty well. It gives you the option to back up your data as...

Adobe CQ5 vs Adobe Experience Manager

Comparisons

Compared 15% of the time

OpenText Extended ECM vs Adobe Experience Manager

Compared 9% of the time

OpenText TeamSite vs Adobe Experience Manager

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle Content Management vs Adobe Experience Manager

Compared 8% of the time

OpenText Documentum vs Adobe Experience Manager

Compared 4% of the time

More Adobe Experience Manager Competitors

SharePoint vs Drupal

Compared 13% of the time

Ibexa DXP vs Drupal

Compared 12% of the time

WordPress vs Drupal

Compared 10% of the time

Atlassian Confluence vs Drupal

Compared 7% of the time

Magnolia CMS vs Drupal

Compared 7% of the time

More Drupal Competitors

Strapi vs Liferay Digital Experience Platform

Compared 12% of the time

SharePoint vs Liferay Digital Experience Platform

Compared 12% of the time

WordPress vs Liferay Digital Experience Platform

Compared 10% of the time

Oracle WebCenter vs Liferay Digital Experience Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Atlassian Confluence vs Liferay Digital Experience Platform

Compared 6% of the time

More Liferay Digital Experience Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Download Adobe Experience Manager product report

Adobe Experience Manager

April 2025

Download Drupal product report

April 2025

Liferay Digital Experience Platform

April 2025

Liferay Digital Experience Platform report

Download Liferay Digital Experience Platform product report

Also Known As

Adobe Day CQ5, Ektron Social Marketing, Episerver Content Cloud

No data available

Liferay DXP

Overview

Adobe Communique 5 (Adobe CQ5), currently manifested as Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), is a web-based content management system which is developed to help businesses in offering high-end digital experience to their customers.

Adobe

Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications

Liferay is a top-ranking digital experience platform used by companies in industries such as financial services, manufacturing, and energy and utilities. This product allows companies to initiate highly personalized digital experiences through mobile, social, and web. Organizations can use Liferay DXP for customer, partner, supplier, or employee portals, as well as integrational platforms, taking advantage of the platform's many customization options to suit their needs completely. The Liferay Experience Cloud offers companies the ability to use the Liferay DXP to build their own digital experiences, as well as to use it as a fully managed cloud platform, including options for self-management and self-hosting.

Liferay Digital Experience Platform Features

Liferay Digital Experience Platform provides various features in the following categories:

Identity management and access control (application security): These features include identity management support, user management, service access policies, and personal data management.
Platform services: Clustering and performance monitoring, auditing and optimization, back-end APIs, dynamic virtual hosting, site and search administration, and single-page applications.

Integration and interoperability: The features in this category include integration framework, developer studio, front-end toolkits, IntelliJ IDEA Plugin, Liferay connected services (LCS), Liferay marketplace and workspace, and Blade CLI.
Collaboration and social: Blogs, knowledge base, social networking, wiki, forums, message boards, calendar, AlloyEditor, inline image editor, and polls, among other features.
Forms, workflow, and business process automation: Features include forms, validation, field library, various types of form entries, data provider integration, and several other features.
Content management: Vast array of features for companies to take advantage of when preparing and publishing different types of content, including text and images.
Experience management: The features in the experience management category include building pages through fragments and editors for them, various widgets, as well as templates for pages, and SEO-friendly updates.
Segmentation and personalization: These features are designed for the full personalization of the platform in order to reach different types of customers and appeal to their individual needs regarding the company that is using Liferay.
Multichannel support: The features in multichannel support include APIs, adaptive media, and responsive design, providing companies with the ability to apply Liferay's full customization to their digital experience platform's design and function.
Search: Liferay Digital Experience Platforms provide various features for search integrations, multi-language search, and options for filtering and sorting.
Analytics and optimization: A crucial part of every digital experience platform is the analytics option for companies to monitor the data of their users and, based on it, improve their approach. That is why Liferay Digital Experience Platform provides five different analytics features.
Cloud capability: To provide companies with the best possible experience, Liferay offers various features regarding the proper operation of the platforms, including real-time alerts, monitoring, and options for backup and restoration.

Liferay Digital Experience Platform Benefits

Liferay Digital Experience Platform offers the following benefits:

Creation of custom solutions
Simplification of IT management
Unity of disparate systems
Developer freedom.

Reviews from Real Users

According to a Communications head at a university, Liferay is a secure platform and the interface is user-friendly, with a great look and feel.

Preeti S., Senior Manager - Cloud Transformation at a computer software company, remarks that she's seenmultiple projects where Enterprise portals are implemented using Liferay, confirming the popularity and vast user base of this digital experience platform.

Liferay

Sample Customers

Metra

BMJ, The Economist, New Republic, SpaceX, Lush, Danone, Tesla Motors, Peugeot, Stanford Law, Harvard, Oxford University, MIT Media Lab, The Beatles, MTV UK, The Weather Channel, NBC, BBC, grammy.com, Mus_e du Louvre, Whitehouse.gov, London.gov.uk, Gouvernment.fr, New Zealand Government, The Prince of Wales, British Council, NYC Metropolitan Transport Authority, Gatwick Obviously

Adidas, Carrefour, Cisco Systems, Danone, Fujitsu, Lufthansa Flight Training, Siemens, Société Générale and the United Nations