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Drupal vs Liferay Digital Experience Platform comparison

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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)
4th
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)
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (3rd), AI Customer Experience Personalization (27th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Web Content Management category, the mindshare of Drupal is 9.2%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Liferay Digital Experience Platform is 5.4%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Drupal9.2%
Liferay Digital Experience Platform5.4%
Other85.4%
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

"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."
"Drupal is one of the most robust content management systems."
"We use a part of the solution called Acquia, and the personalization portion of this is the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"In the end, you’ll have a solid CMS platform with which to work."
"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."
"Drupal’s extensible nature allows me to easily integrate with third-party hosted systems and pull or push data to those systems."
"Its scalability, content management practices, security and the community are valuable features."
"Use Drupal if expandability is a must or if you are building a large website with various kinds of functionality."
"I usually see this platform as a Swiss Army Knife for building new features."
"It has a built-in WCMS (web content management system) and provides the ability to develop complex portlet-based web applications, which is valuable because it is Java/Java EE-based and open source."
"The look and feel and the user interface are great."
"Big benefit is in relation to cost; there are a lot of out of box things and on the other side it has got an elastic platform for further improvements."
"Architecture is so good that you can fit many organizational structures into Liferay."
"It’s fast, easy, scalable, and stable with a competitive price."
"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."
"Liferay has a CMS, role-based permissions, and hierarchy-of-organization community management which provides lots of features for intranet and enterprise applications."
 

Cons

"It needs a shorter learning curve."
"It needs better and more themes available for download, like you have in WordPress."
"Admin Interface: You'll often hear that Drupal has a pretty high learning curve."
"It is a little bit simplified."
"The modules need to be improved."
"There were some stability issues, i.e., only with the new version, the main changes are not stable."
"For specific use cases, there are bugs with its DB Query UI tables (Drupal Views)."
"It has to improve the speed of the admin section. Sometimes you will get stuck while updating the configurations, especially because it uses AJAX in the interface."
"I would like to see better documentation. Updates in the documentation do not follow updates in the code and functionality."
"Documentation for the newly launched version is not up to the mark."
"The development license might be too costly for small to medium-sized businesses."
"Liferay needs a better web content search engine."
"Licensing costs can be very expensive."
"There are still some parts where Liferay can improve: Document library: Allow you to view and preview all popular types of files Auditing capability"
"The integration and configuration need to be simplified."
"There are a lot of possibilities for improvement in several areas."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would like to see better pricing."
"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."
"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."
"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
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
9%
Outsourcing 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: September 2026.
918,970 professionals have used our research since 2012.