No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Drupal vs HCL Connections 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

Drupal
Ranking in Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals)
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
Web Content Management (5th)
HCL Connections
Ranking in Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals)
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Social Software (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) category, the mindshare of Drupal is 18.3%, up from 15.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HCL Connections is 6.0%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Drupal18.3%
HCL Connections6.0%
Other75.7%
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals)
 

Featured Reviews

it_user982032 - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
A good product that helps me to manage complex digital solutions
My advice to others would be that Drupal is not only a CMS, you need to learn the Drupal fundamentals before to start the project. Drupal is a handy tool whenever you work on a digital infrastructure broad project and not only a simple website. So if you have a big project, you can use Drupal. But if you have a small website, like a blog or simple website, my advice would be not to use Drupal, because Drupal is too complex and the cost to maintain the platform can be too high, related to the value of your website, for example. If you have a website with a big product catalog, for example, in many languages and in many countries in the world, then Drupal is good. But if you have a simple website, like a portfolio or five page-website, you can use many other technologies that'd be simple to maintain and implement. On a scale from one to 10, I will rate Drupal an eight. In the next release, I would like to see basic page buttons and better integration with the analytics platform. A drag and drop function to create simple pages will also be handy. For example, if a customer wants to create a landing page, it should be easy for him or her to do so. I would also like to see better translation management.
Hasnain Zahid - PeerSpot reviewer
Talent acquisition & development specialist at Software Productivity Strategists, Inc. (SPS)
A stable tool useful to manage marketing-related activities
Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten. Sometimes, the portal hangs because I find that if I am on a web page, I have to log out, and then I have to log in to the portal again. Since I see that the portal hangs at times, I have to move from one side of the portal to the next, making me feel that some things are scattered in the product. I attended a meeting with IBM recently, and they are improving a few of the things, in my opinion. The concerns that I have related to the product are being improved since I think many other users have reported issues similar to the ones I faced.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We use a part of the solution called Acquia, and the personalization portion of this is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"Drupal always rises above for a large scale contributor base, general security, and lack of vulnerabilities."
"The site was built on Drupal in three hours."
"You can build websites on it very quickly."
"The most valuable are the security features and a wide array of available modules, or extensions, that can be used to add functionality to a Drupal website."
"The open source nature of Drupal, being free to extend or alter it is massively important for us."
"In the end, you’ll have a solid CMS platform with which to work."
"Drupal 8 has an architecture that will scale well and better than previous versions, especially given big pipe."
"Our own ROI was within nine months, and we directly benefited from more knowledge sharing (and avoiding re-inventing the wheel) and shorter meetings."
"It has really changed the way people work: File sharing, getting away from shared drives, being able to set up communities for information, and empowering business units to leverage support for their business units."
"The platform allows in a very easy way to create community and start collaborating."
"It's easy to use for both developers and end users."
"The most valuable features of this solution are that it provides a space for team collaboration, sharing, security, and a standard language within the company."
"Communities and activities are very useful for team collaboration and project level communication."
"The most important feature of IBM Connections is that it is a Social Collaboration suite covering nearly all aspects of modern enterprise communication and collaboration."
"Some of the valuable features in this product are: Profiles – It is easy to find people with similar tech skills and reach out to them internally for a project requirement, and project managers find it easy to know who in the organization possesses a skill that matches the requirement."
 

Cons

"The documentation on how to do things as a complete novice is only subpar in both Drupal 7 and 8."
"The GUI is still not as intuitive as WordPress."
"However, when you want to add a permission to a user role, something as simple as that checkbox, forces a config push, which annoys me."
"Drupal community and forums are not as easy and straightforward as Wordpress, the number of areas covered by existing plugins should be larger, and it is resource hungry compared to Wordpress."
"There were some stability issues, i.e., only with the new version, the main changes are not stable."
"The version upgrading process is very painful. Moving to a new Drupal version involves much more than building and configuring the new site."
"My advice would be not to use Drupal, because Drupal is too complex and the cost to maintain the platform can be too high, related to the value of your website, for example."
"As with most if not all web technologies, theres always an initial learning curve that can seem daunting."
"When we went from 1,000 users to 2,000 users, we hit some problems and then it required a lot of retuning and reconfiguration."
"Support needs improvement. The product seems to be released with a lot of bugs."
"For once, I would like to see better support for files."
"The different Features (Blog, Wiki, Forum, ...) do not behave equally e.g. how they handle files or links."
"Technical support is hit-and-miss. In general, the support staff is willing, but there is a large range of capabilities among them, from mediocre to excellent."
"Their testing, when they release new packs, is not where it should be. Their technical support suffers because of it."
"The mobile, Outlook, and desktop Plug-ins associated with this product need to be improved."
"The platform is too dispersive and rigid. It should improve in usability and user interface customization by the user (personalized menu, communities to keep close at hand, always available files, and so on)."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would like to see better pricing."
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) solutions are best for your needs.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user8925 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
10%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
Construction Company
20%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Performing Arts
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What needs improvement with HCL Connections?
The support is an area where the product can improve. My company faces some support-related issues because whenever we create or generate a ticket, it takes two days for the product's support team ...
What is your primary use case for HCL Connections?
I use HCL Connections for marketing purposes. The IBM product in our company already provides us with direct links to the marketing and HR sides.
 

Also Known As

No data available
IBM Connections, Lotus Connections
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Yamato Financial Co. Ltd., University of Zurich, Gwinnett County Public Schools, Royal Boskalis Westminster N.V., Telus, Rabobank, Christian Brothers Services, Grupo Financiero Banorte, The Loft Group, Dow Water & Process Solutions, JGC Corporation, College of Medicine, Swansea University, solvito GmbH, Loft Group, Hamm-Reno Group GmbH, Geno SA
Find out what your peers are saying about Drupal vs. HCL Connections and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.