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Drupal 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

Drupal
Ranking in Web Content Management
5th
Ranking in Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals)
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
37
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)
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (3rd), AI Customer Experience Personalization (22nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Web Content Management category, the mindshare of Drupal is 9.5%, up from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Liferay Digital Experience Platform is 5.2%, down from 8.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Drupal9.5%
Liferay Digital Experience Platform5.2%
Other85.3%
Web Content Management
 

Q&A Highlights

AS
Community Manager at PeerSpot (formerly IT Central Station)
Aug 21, 2014
 

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.
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

"Drupal 8 has an architecture that will scale well and better than previous versions, especially given big pipe."
"With over 23,000 contributed modules, there’s a high chance that any feature you want has already been built, and is available for you to use at no cost."
"Previously, I have used a variety of solutions, including the custom ones, and I switched solutions because Drupal provides all the features that I need."
"At Appnovation Technologies we leverage Drupal’s out of the box features and functionality in order to speed up development and delivery time for our clients."
"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."
"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."
"Significantly less time spent on production issues and maintaining existing functionality, translating into significantly more time adding new and enhanced functionality."
"Because of Drupal, we now have the ability to provide our customers with multilingual, multi-regional content to an extent that would not have been possible otherwise."
"The product has helped our members and communities to freely connect, share knowledge, develop initiatives and share expertise in a secure environment."
"Compared to other platforms the initial setup is not very complex."
"If you need something that is scalable, that needs broader functionality, and you need to develop your own services, then this is an excellent solution."
"It’s fast, easy, scalable, and stable with a competitive price."
"If you are looking for a complete portal solution with security and ease of set-up, then go for it."
"Liferay Digital Experience Platform has helped us optimize our digital presence and deliver rapid application development, every customer is happy, and they are giving us repeat orders for whatever we have delivered on Liferay Digital Experience Platform."
"Liferay provides a vast range of features with minimal license costs, which makes it better than the others."
"Liferay is highly scalable and more complex than Drupal."
 

Cons

"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."
"It needs better and more themes available for download, like you have in WordPress."
"We had some stability issues."
"I think the support needs to improve, as well as the integration with tracking and analytics systems."
"The main complaints of the clients or newcomers to Drupal are about the UX of the admin interface."
"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."
"The documentation on how to do things as a complete novice is only subpar in both Drupal 7 and 8."
"The development license might be too costly for small to medium-sized businesses."
"Liferay does currently lack a good integrated analytics package, automation, and filtering."
"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 current version is good, but one problem is with objects where the load takes much time if the records are increasing."
"Setup was not straightforward. The Community Edition was a bit complicated and they should fix the code."
"The integration and configuration need to be simplified."
"We found it difficult to upload documents. It seemed unnecessarily complex."
"There are several areas that need improvement: The core code base needs refactoring."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would like to see better pricing."
"Licensing costs can be very expensive."
"It is a bit 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."
"It's an open-source structure. Other costs are for professional services to integrate Liferay to other existing systems."
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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…
 

Answers from the Community

AS
Community Manager at PeerSpot (formerly IT Central Station)
Aug 21, 2014
Aug 21, 2014
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" ?
2 out of 7 answers
it_user100569 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
SG
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.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
10%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
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 Business20
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise23
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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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

No data available
Liferay DXP
 

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
Adidas, Carrefour, Cisco Systems, Danone, Fujitsu, Lufthansa Flight Training, Siemens, Société Générale and the United Nations
Find out what your peers are saying about Drupal vs. Liferay Digital Experience Platform and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,099 professionals have used our research since 2012.