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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 (12th)
Liferay Digital Experience ...
Ranking in Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals)
4th
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 (25th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) category, the mindshare of HCL Connections is 6.2%, up from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Liferay Digital Experience Platform is 14.4%, down from 22.1% 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 Platform14.4%
HCL Connections6.2%
Other79.4%
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 most important feature of IBM Connections is that it is a Social Collaboration suite covering nearly all aspects of modern enterprise communication and collaboration."
"Some of the valuable features in this product are: Profiles – It is easy to find people with similar tech skills and reach out to them internally for a project requirement, and project managers find it easy to know who in the organization possesses a skill that matches the requirement."
"The Files feature has really changed the way we do business."
"For us, the most valuable feature is really the threaded conversations, because we don't get a threaded conversation with other tools."
"The ability to search the content, make every content searchable and the ability to share with the external parties are the most important features."
"Our own ROI was within nine months, and we directly benefited from more knowledge sharing (and avoiding re-inventing the wheel) and shorter meetings."
"The most valuable feature is the Activity flow that is used to catch new activities."
"Marketing has created a community open to all internal employees where it has centralized all marketing content (brochures, presentations, communications)."
"The integration capabilities of the product are super easy to use."
"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."
"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 enables you to stay with latest technologies with each version release."
"All the portlets and widgets are plugins, which provides flexibility to add or modify in multiple ways."
"The solution is easy to install."
"It is just awesome; you should experience DXP."
"Liferay is a good product and can reduce time and cost on project implementation."
 

Cons

"When your activity becomes really big, it can become unreliable and very slow."
"Mac users currently only have File Sync support and no plugins are available for Linux desktop users, leaving these users heavily dependent of the web user interface."
"Support needs improvement. The product seems to be released with a lot of bugs."
"With the Connections desktop plugin, right now, when we copy files over, we have to do it individually and create our folder structure; we can't just copy our folders over and have them all exist."
"Our users would like to see more document management capabilities in the base IBM Connections package (without having to install extended components). Users also prefer using a traditional folder structure for organizing content and are not used to tags (might be a learning curve or resistance to change)."
"The setup was complex. Integrations were an issue and several things went wrong such as identification, credentials etc."
"For instance, when you open a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, you just get a copy of it; you can't put it up again."
"The improvement's are could be more flexibility to manage files and to have a sync file area more intuitive and which respects the characteristics of other similar solutions."
"Liferay is a very stable product (except for version 7, as it is relatively new)."
"I would like to see better documentation. Updates in the documentation do not follow updates in the code and functionality."
"The front-end technologies need improvement."
"The documentation provided needs to be more detailed. It's sometimes hard to develop things because the documentation is so sparse."
"Documentation needs improvement."
"The development license might be too costly for small to medium-sized businesses."
"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."
"Yes we faced many issues during production deployment and specially performance tuning and best suppoprt architecture."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Licensing costs can be very expensive."
"It is a bit expensive."
"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."
"Their pricing model should be modified to include per user options instead of just servers/cores, etc."
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
18%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Performing Arts
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
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: June 2026.
903,067 professionals have used our research since 2012.