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HCL Connections 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

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 (9th)
Liferay Digital Experience ...
Ranking in Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals)
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Web Content Management (6th), Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (3rd), AI Customer Experience Personalization (27th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) category, the mindshare of HCL Connections is 5.8%, up from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Liferay Digital Experience Platform is 14.0%, down from 19.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Liferay Digital Experience Platform14.0%
HCL Connections5.8%
Other80.2%
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals)
 

Featured Reviews

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.
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

"The ease of use has definitely improved the way my organization functions."
"The blogs became the main source of information for the organisation and establishing dialogue."
"Connections has assisted our business area with our Knowledge Management initiative, providing us with a tool that the staff can use to quickly find the information needed to process their day-to-day tasks and assist our customers, and it has also been valuable as a collaboration tool within our area that encourages our reps to participate within the community to ask questions and share their expertise."
"With IBM connections cloud you are able to get the users active in the solution from day one and start developing Social Solutions that deliver real business outcomes!"
"All the features above improve collaboration among employees."
"Marketing has created a community open to all internal employees where it has centralized all marketing content (brochures, presentations, communications)."
"We used lots of products like wordpress to blog, docuwiki as wiki, bugtracker, todo apps and so on, but Connections delivers all of it integrated in one solution."
"IBM Connections is a great product, with new functionality each year."
"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."
"It allows us to arrange and develop new ideas, then incorporate them into the portal. We can create a one stop information center, so people can access the information from one window."
"Liferay has a CMS, role-based permissions, and hierarchy-of-organization community management which provides lots of features for intranet and enterprise applications."
"Initial setup is as easy as downloading, unpacking and starting."
"You can create and manage dozens of sites with a single installation of Liferay, without a single line of Java code."
"For me, the most important features are scalability, architecture, the fact that it's Java-based, includes a CMS, and provides audience targeting tools."
"Flexibility to fit our business requirements under many different scenarios, from simple public web sites to customer or distributor portal solutions and intranets."
"The look and feel and the user interface are great."
 

Cons

"Their testing, when they release new packs, is not where it should be. Their technical support suffers because of it."
"The setup was extremely complex; a little less than what it may have been in the past."
"Generally, I believe IBM are addressing all of these issues but progress seems very slow."
"We've had a few issues, but overall the stability has been pretty good."
"Communities, File sharing and keeping up to date via the Connections activity stream."
"For most of my users, the consistent feedback has been about how difficult it is to use and how the interface is poorly designed."
"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."
"The support is an area where the product can improve...If you are having an issue on a Monday, the support personnel will contact you next Monday."
"Major upgrades switch the Liferay framework core structure dramatically in EVERY occasion."
"The plugins should be more affordable."
"Licensing costs can be very expensive."
"Documentation needs improvement."
"We tried the 'eat your own dog food' approach and used Liferay for our company's website, but Liferay just isn't meant to build websites."
"Liferay needs a better web content search engine."
"Liferay does currently lack a good integrated analytics package, automation, and filtering."
"Liferay is a very stable product (except for version 7, as it is relatively new)."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"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."
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
18%
Construction Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Performing Arts
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
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 Business22
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise23
 

Questions from the Community

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.
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

IBM Connections, Lotus Connections
Liferay DXP
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Adidas, Carrefour, Cisco Systems, Danone, Fujitsu, Lufthansa Flight Training, Siemens, Société Générale and the United Nations
Find out what your peers are saying about HCL Connections vs. Liferay Digital Experience Platform and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,287 professionals have used our research since 2012.