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Adobe Experience Manager vs Liferay Digital Experience Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Adobe Experience Manager
Ranking in Web Content Management
1st
Ranking in Digital Experience Platforms (DXP)
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Content Management (3rd), Enterprise Social Software (4th)
Liferay Digital Experience ...
Ranking in Web Content Management
6th
Ranking in Digital Experience Platforms (DXP)
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) (3rd), AI Customer Experience Personalization (30th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Web Content Management category, the mindshare of Adobe Experience Manager is 8.9%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Liferay Digital Experience Platform is 5.2%, down from 9.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Adobe Experience Manager8.9%
Liferay Digital Experience Platform5.2%
Other85.9%
Web Content Management
 

Featured Reviews

Hilax Chamberlain - PeerSpot reviewer
Digital Marketing Manager at Ford Motor Company
Centralized content management has unified our digital channels and delivers consistent experiences
Adobe Experience Manager offers enterprise-level digital assets management and very robust customization, brand value consistency, and omnichannel delivery. It saves development and maintenance time. The digital asset management and omnichannel delivery features have benefited my team by managing our digital assets, ensuring brand consistency, and enabling us to deliver customized content easily to our clients. Organizing and obtaining information from results is beneficial. Strengthening our online experience as a brand is valuable. Easy integration with other Adobe services improves productivity and provides a smooth experience. Adobe Experience Manager has positively impacted my organization by enabling component and page reuse, which reduces application size. It saves manual effort for maintaining all applications, improves traffic, and ensures consistency across all our applications. It provides better security, scalability, and makes our applications more robust.
PR
E-Governance Head at Creant Technologies
Optimizing digital presence with customizable design and seamless integration
The main benefits that Liferay Digital Experience Platform brings to the table are numerous. First is rapid application development and many features. Features such as content management and document management make your life easy; workflow management is also present. Workflow can be designed and derived. Form development and everything is very smooth and easy to deliver to the end customer, and you can find many features in one box. You have blogs, wikis, and everything with out-of-box functionality. My experience with actionable insights is positive; they help in refining content strategies. The content creation is helpful. For external content creation, I use headless CMS APIs for Liferay Digital Experience Platform, and headless APIs for content creation are also available. My thoughts on the integration capabilities are that integration is seamless. You have headless APIs where you can integrate seamlessly with any other application such as LDAP or SSO, or you can also integrate with different external systems. You have an SAP connector; everything is available. Liferay Digital Experience Platform's open source flexibility has helped in customizing functionalities for the specific needs of my customers as it is a highly flexible application that can be optimized. My advice for other organizations considering Liferay Digital Experience Platform is that if it's available, we need to improve on the performance, which is currently what we are seeing. Otherwise, earlier Service Builder was acceptable. On a scale of 1-10, I rate Liferay Digital Experience Platform a 9.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Ease of use for content authors and tight integration with Adobe Marketing Cloud Products like Target, Analytics, Campaign; a complete solution for organizational digital marketing needs."
"It is a first-in-class product."
"I've used several CMS tools, but Adobe Experience Manager is feature-rich, especially for web security and content management."
"I like the profiling and segmentation."
"Using Adobe Experience Manager has positively impacted our organization by improving our efficiency significantly."
"If you want to use content in a mobile application and you want the content in some other application, you can simply expose it from the CMS to different clients or different systems. It's easy. On top of that, the technology underlying AEM is open-source and is very powerful like Apache Sling and JCR."
"It is easy to learn. You don't need to be an advanced Java developer."
"The cost can be high, but for large websites with a lot of dynamic data like e-commerce, or for clients looking for user-data based campaigning, the solution can be very efficient in the long-term."
"I think that it could be interesting to expand the eCommerce capabilities to the B2C sector."
"The most valuable feature is management and permissions according to user, role, and group."
"If you are looking for a complete portal solution with security and ease of set-up, then go for it."
"The product has helped our members and communities to freely connect, share knowledge, develop initiatives and share expertise in a secure environment."
"Liferay was mainly selected by me due to its collaboration and the digital features that help to make the digital platforms very strong for the customers."
"For me, the most important features are scalability, architecture, the fact that it's Java-based, includes a CMS, and provides audience targeting tools."
"Considering the overall drive towards providing a digital experience to clients, to provide a connected experience, federated touchpoints, dynamic personalization, customer context and interactions, the product has evolved very strongly from just being a horizontal portal system into a digital experience platform."
"It allows us to arrange and develop new ideas, then incorporate them into the portal, creating a one stop information center so people can access the information from one window."
 

Cons

"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."
"The licensing plus implementation and maintenance cost is very expensive, making it not suitable for small organizations, and the setup is very complex."
"The programming model could be improved, it's a monolithic solution and that's what we don't like."
"The licensing model is opaque, and technical support could be improved, especially for smaller companies."
"Last but not least, Adobe AEM TCO (total cost of ownership) is very high with return on investment is slow (ROI is not necessarily low), which is why Adobe's focus is mostly large companies with deep pocket"
"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."
"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."
"The pricing and setup cost for Adobe Experience Manager is a bit higher compared to different content management tools."
"For new installations, the setup is simple; but again migrations for the old version are a nightmare."
"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."
"Support provided for the Enterprise Edition is really poor."
"Liferay does currently lack a good integrated analytics package, automation, and filtering."
"I would like to see better documentation. Updates in the documentation do not follow updates in the code and functionality."
"As it is open source, it has lots of features and it is constantly updating. Therefore, bugs also keep coming."
"Staging and LARs export/import features. This is always a pain in Liferay with many errors caused mostly by some inconsistent data in the database."
"The documentation provided needs to be more detailed; it's sometimes hard to develop things because the documentation is so sparse."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Users have to pay a yearly licensing fee to use the solution, which is highly-priced."
"It's really costly."
"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 an open-source structure. Other costs are for professional services to integrate Liferay to other existing systems."
"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."
"It is a bit expensive."
"Licensing costs can be very expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise24
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise23
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Adobe Experience Manager?
I find the drag-and-drop form builder in Adobe Experience Manager to be mostly intuitive, especially for basic forms, but it has some quirks when things get complex. You can drag fields, text, drop...
What is your primary use case for Adobe Experience Manager?
I have been using Adobe Experience Manager for over three years, focusing on building scalable content solutions, managing workflow, and implementing AEM Forms for enterprise use cases. My main use...
What advice do you have for others considering Adobe Experience Manager?
In our setup, Adobe Experience Manager integrates with tools such as Adobe Analytics for tracking user behavior, Adobe Target for personalization, and backend APIs for CRM systems for handling form...
What is the best feature of Liferay?
A tricky question because it'd depend on what your focus will be on Liferay as a digital experience platform. I mean, if for me the experience management is the best feature, for someone with diff...
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 experience a bit later than we should have but picking Liferay as a DXP was one o...
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 well as restore it and that's pretty vital for any digital experience platform....
 

Also Known As

Adobe Day CQ5, Ektron Social Marketing, Episerver Content Cloud, Adobe CQ5
Liferay DXP
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Metra
Adidas, Carrefour, Cisco Systems, Danone, Fujitsu, Lufthansa Flight Training, Siemens, Société Générale and the United Nations
Find out what your peers are saying about Adobe Experience Manager vs. Liferay Digital Experience Platform and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,915 professionals have used our research since 2012.