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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 (11th)
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 (22nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) category, the mindshare of HCL Connections is 6.0%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Liferay Digital Experience Platform is 14.2%, down from 21.1% 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 Platform14.2%
HCL Connections6.0%
Other79.8%
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."
"The most valuable feature is the Activity flow that is used to catch new activities."
"For example, you can really collaborate in multiple channels, using Connections, so whether it's cognitive collaboration, or file or content collaboration, it makes it much easier."
"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)."
"This is where I go, first thing, to do my work."
"Sharing knowledge on IBM Connections will give you access to tap into all the knowledge that is accessible in your organization across the world."
"One thing that I really have to give to IBM is that they do have a really good vision on what they are trying to accomplish and they're taking the product to that point."
"Our productivity has increased by using IBM Connections."
"Liferay was a great choice."
"Compared to other big players in portal platforms, Liferay's pricing is very competitive, and remember, the latest version of Liferay is not just a portal framework, but it is a digital experience platform which offers way more."
"Architecture is so good that you can fit many organizational structures into Liferay."
"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."
"CMS lets business users create and manage web content while maintaining revisions, and Liferay enables users to be independent of developers and to manage content within the portal."
"This product is very secure, robust, and highly scalable."
"All the portlets and widgets are plugins, which provides flexibility to add or modify in multiple ways."
"Liferay provides a vast range of features with minimal license costs, which makes it better than the others."
 

Cons

"For once, I would like to see better support for files."
"Development of more customized widgets as per the organization’s requirement is one area, which if improved, will attract even those employees who don't use this product often."
"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."
"It's a complicated setup, but then again it's built for enterprise and volumes."
"Generally, I believe IBM are addressing all of these issues but progress seems very slow."
"For most of my users, the consistent feedback has been about how difficult it is to use and how the interface is poorly designed."
"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."
"It is complex. The way IBM sets up its product, you can never find one thing in one place."
"I would like to see better documentation. Updates in the documentation do not follow updates in the code and functionality."
"As for now, Liferay DXP was just released, so there are many issues."
"I would like to see it require fewer configurations from the properties file, and provide more GUI options to configure changes."
"The loading speed could be improved."
"It could have better built-in integration with a wider variety of extensions out-of-the-box."
"There are a lot of possibilities for improvement in several areas."
"Liferay requires more room to provide ease of use for the content contributors."
"It lacks true multi-tenant support."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
19%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Performing Arts
7%
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 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: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.