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HCL Connections 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

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 (15th)
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) (2nd), AI Customer Experience Personalization (30th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) category, the mindshare of HCL Connections is 5.7%, up from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Liferay Digital Experience Platform is 14.6%, down from 22.5% 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 Platform14.6%
HCL Connections5.7%
Other79.7%
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 integration of all tools delivered by the platform itself is the most valuable feature of this product, in addition to its ability to integrate with already available default infrastructure tools within the company (like central directories (LDAP’s), load balancer infra or HTTP infra, which is already in place)."
"Fully integrated solution, love the social element of Profiles, Files and Activities all securely accessed on Mobile !"
"Basically, Connections saves me time, lots of it."
"The possibility to share files in a unified way helps our organization."
"IBM Connections is a great product, with new functionality each year."
"Marketing has created a community open to all internal employees where it has centralized all marketing content (brochures, presentations, communications)."
"This is a great set of tools that is easy to adapt to different teams."
"Sharing knowledge on IBM Connections will give you access to tap into all the knowledge that is accessible in your organization across the world."
"Considering the overall drive towards providing a digital experience to clients, to provide a connected experience, federated touchpoints, dynamic personalization, customer context and interactions, the product has evolved very strongly from just being a horizontal portal system into a digital experience platform."
"This product is very secure, robust, and highly scalable."
"Liferay is very quick and easy to set up, whether you are using the built-in database or an external database."
"All the portlets and widgets are plugins, which provides flexibility to add or modify in multiple ways."
"If your company has an overall future for growth, then Liferay is a good choice as it is an enterprise solution."
"As of now, the technology is up-to-date and fulfills all essential requirements."
"It has increased communication between the departments and their employees."
"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."
 

Cons

"For once, I would like to see better support for files."
"We've had a few issues, but overall the stability has been pretty good."
"The inclusion of a file plugin for Windows Explorer would make it easier to use."
"For our Knowledge Management initiative, it would benefit to have capabilities within the tool to have one single source of information that allows access to the information needed based on the user’s role within the organization."
"Deployment can be a little complex, but a lot of this relates to the network, corporate LDAP, and security requirements."
"The administration part of the product could be increased."
"The mobile, Outlook, and desktop Plug-ins associated with this product need to be improved."
"We hear complaints from our users that Connections, and other IBM products, are not intuitive."
"The integration and configuration need to be simplified."
"The development license might be too costly for small to medium-sized businesses."
"Support provided for the Enterprise Edition is really poor."
"The loading speed could be improved."
"If you are a basic web developer or you have a very small organization, I don't think I would work with it."
"There are a lot of possibilities for improvement in several areas."
"Licensing costs can be very expensive."
"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."
 

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."
"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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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
11%
Performing Arts
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

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: April 2026.
893,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.