Drupal vs Liferay Digital Experience Platform comparison

Drupal and Liferay are both solutions in the Web Content Management category. Drupal is ranked #5, while Liferay is ranked #6 with an average rating of 9.0. Drupal holds a 8.0% mindshare in WCM, compared to Liferay’s 4.7% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Drupal users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of Liferay users who would recommend it.

Drupal

Read 37 Drupal reviews

3,378 Views
2,534 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Liferay Digital Experience ...

Read 45 Liferay Digital Experience Platform reviews

3,178 Views
1,557 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Drupal

Liferay Digital Experience ...

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Executive Summary

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

Find out in this report how the two Web Content Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Drupal vs. Liferay Digital Experience Platform Report (Updated: April 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Drupal vs. Liferay Digital Experience Platform

April 2026

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Helped 886,664 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:

Categories and Ranking

Drupal

Ranking in Web Content Management

5th

Ranking in Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals)

4th

Average Rating

8.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Liferay Digital Experience ...

Ranking in Web Content Management

6th

Ranking in Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals)

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (2nd), AI Customer Experience Personalization (32nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Web Content Management category, the mindshare of Drupal is 8.0%, up from 6.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Liferay Digital Experience Platform is 4.7%, down from 9.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Content Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Drupal	8.0%
Liferay Digital Experience Platform	4.7%
Other	87.3%

Web Content Management

Q&A Highlights

Avigail Sugarman

Community Manager at PeerSpot (formerly IT Central Station)

Aug 21, 2014

Drupal vs. Liferay: Which one is better? Pros and Cons?

I have not used Drupal, but with my experience these are the points you need to answer to choose: 1- Are you a java OR a PHP developer (that is if you are going to do some custom development) ? 2- Do you just need a Content Management System OR an advanced CMS with some custom requirements ? 3- Last one is, do you need "Personalization OR Customization" ?

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Featured Reviews

it_user982032

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.

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PratyushRaj

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Drupal 8 has an architecture that will scale well and better than previous versions, especially given big pipe."

"You can build websites on it very quickly."

"Drupal’s extensible nature allows me to easily integrate with third-party hosted systems and pull or push data to those systems."

"The velocity of its extensibility and prototyping is a valuable feature."

"But it is worth it if you require an enterprise level web platform with great scalability, support, and security."

"Its ability to style the article module is the most valuable feature, as it gives the developer the flexibility to show the articles the way he or she wants."

"Drupal is an open source content management system which provides an easy installation process, a good range of modules for features' expansion, as well as a supportive community that will help resolve issues that you face with Drupal."

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

More Drupal pros

"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."

"For me, the most important features are scalability, architecture, the fact that it's Java-based, includes a CMS, and provides audience targeting tools."

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

"Customers liked this portal software platform because Open Source platform with no stack agenda can run in any existing infrastructure with low cost of adoption and offers over 70 out-of-the-box bundled features with an open API architecture that allows you to maximize aggregation and back-end integration."

"All the features that are provided by Liferay are very useful, such as Web Content, Document Library and Media, Roles, Permissioning, Resources, Organizations, Users, Sites, Custom Fields, Plugins, and so on."

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

"You can create and manage dozens of sites with a single installation of Liferay, without a single line of Java code."

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

More Liferay Digital Experience Platform pros

Cons

"The documentation on how to do things as a complete novice is only subpar in both Drupal 7 and 8."

"Overall business friendliness of the product: Digital experience features like target segmentation and campaign management have a long way to go."

"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."

"Drupal 8 can be somewhat complex to set up because of the supporting technologies that should be installed, such as Composer, Drush, and Drupal Console."

"Sometimes, you just have to read the code to understand how it works or how to use an API, which is not the best way to learn for everyone."

"Unfortunately, with Drupal, there is a number of learning paradigms that you have to discover, which can make it difficult to understand as a newcomer."

"Modifying the themes (colors, dimensions, and pictures) could be easier."

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

More Drupal cons

"The plugins should be more affordable."

"Liferay is a phenomenal product with deficient marketing."

"There are several areas that need improvement: The core code base needs refactoring."

"Liferay requires more room to provide ease of use for the content contributors."

"Documentation for the newly launched version is not up to the mark."

"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."

"The loading speed could be improved."

"Its SSL-based client authentication support needs to be improved."

More Liferay Digital Experience Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would like to see better pricing."

"It is a bit expensive."

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

"Licensing costs can be very expensive."

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

"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…

Read full review

Answers from the Community

Avigail Sugarman

Community Manager at PeerSpot (formerly IT Central Station)

Aug 21, 2014

Drupal vs. Liferay: Which one is better? Pros and Cons?

2 out of 7 answers

it_user100569

Vice President

Jun 12, 2014

Hello, I haven't used either one of these enterprise social software tools, so I don't have any comments to share. Thanks, Ann

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Sanjeev_Gupta

Principal Consultant at Digital Web Advisors Pvt Ltd

Jun 12, 2014

I wouldn't really compare the two - they both cater to different set of requirements / use cases. While Drupal is Web Content Management (WCM) tool and is good fit for small to medium size interactive or social web solution requirement. Liferay on the other hand is an Enterprise Portal software (it also has WCM as part of it's offering). It would fit in better where your requirements are more toward sharing personalized information to users / exposing several application to users though a common interface.

Read full answer

See all 7 answers

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Government

12%

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

Construction Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	15
Midsize Enterprise	13
Large Enterprise	11

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	20
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	23

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

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...

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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...

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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....

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Comparisons

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Compared 9% of the time

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Tridion the Intelligent Content Platform (CMS & CCMS) vs Drupal

Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

Atlassian Confluence vs Liferay Digital Experience Platform

Compared 3% of the time

Sitefinity vs Liferay Digital Experience Platform

Compared 3% of the time

Squiz Digital Experience Platform vs Liferay Digital Experience Platform

Compared 3% of the time

More Liferay Digital Experience Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Drupal

April 2026

Download Drupal product report

Buyer's Guide

Liferay Digital Experience Platform

April 2026

Liferay Digital Experience Platform report

Download Liferay Digital Experience Platform product report

Also Known As

No data available

Liferay DXP

Overview

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

Drupal

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

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

Buyer's Guide

Drupal vs. Liferay Digital Experience Platform

April 2026

Free Report: Drupal vs. Liferay Digital Experience Platform

Find out what your peers are saying about Drupal vs. Liferay Digital Experience Platform and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.

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