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Joomla 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

Joomla
Ranking in Web Content Management
17th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Liferay Digital Experience ...
Ranking in Web Content Management
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) (3rd), Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (2nd), AI Customer Experience Personalization (32nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Web Content Management category, the mindshare of Joomla is 2.1%, down from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Liferay Digital Experience Platform is 4.7%, down from 9.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Liferay Digital Experience Platform4.7%
Joomla2.1%
Other93.2%
Web Content Management
 

Featured Reviews

JS
Techvangelist & CEO at IT Guru Solutions, Inc.
One of the most robust, stable, secure, feature-rich CMSs on the market
I would like to see more back-end admin power pulled into the front-end, therefore the admins will not have to use the back-end as much, especially for the menu manager, user manager, etc. versus using third-party extensions to achieve this. As it is today, it often ends up introducing some potentially serious security concerns. When I turn over a Joomla site, editing content is easy for most folks (i.e., changing the Contact Us or About Us pages). However, when it comes time for them to edit menus and navigation to add a new page or article into the menu somewhere, it starts to get a little complex for many users to build these menu items, especially when there are multiple menus being used in different positions. I also would like to see the same sorting and attributes available through the web browser on the JED (sorting by free or commercial license, sort by rating, popularity, etc.) within the back-end Joomla Web Installer when browsing extensions. I would also like to see the Joomla security bulletins pulled into the admin back-end with better publishing of known extension issues, especially for ones we have installed. Therefore, if we do not have them installed, we never see those bulletins. If we do, then pertinent messages showing up like "there are X number of extension updates available" can pushed upfront and center like updates and security notice usually are.
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

"One of the most robust, stable, secure, feature-rich CMSs on the market."
"Joomla is one of the most popular CMSs today."
"This CMS lets you create an own website within minutes, no matter if the user has knowledge in coding."
"Despite some limitations, Joomla stands out from the crowd and manages to retain its position in the market."
"No useful review content was provided."
"With a fairly small learning curve for the end user who wants the basics, Joomla is one of the most robust, stable, secure, feature-rich CMSs on the market."
"The speed in which you can take a CMS and make it a full-blown shopping cart with analytics tracking, SEO, user accounts, security, and ease of use through a robust framework of modules and plugins to enhance and promote-related content is about as turnkey as it gets with Joomla."
"Simplicity and security are basic elements to build a website quickly and safely, and with JoomShaper it was for me even easier."
"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."
"It's an enterprise-level solution that is ready to use almost immediately and users can immediately share and collaborate once they've installed the application."
"For me, the most important features are scalability, architecture, the fact that it's Java-based, includes a CMS, and provides audience targeting tools."
"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."
"As of now, the technology is up-to-date and fulfills all essential requirements."
"Architecture is so good that you can fit many organizational structures into Liferay."
"It is a wonderful open-source product that has many out-of-the-box features."
"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."
 

Cons

"Joomla itself seems to be secure, but many add-ons are badly written and allow LFI, RFI, SQL injection and XSS attacks."
"Web applications created in Joomla eat up a lot of server resources."
"When it comes time for them to edit menus and navigation to add a new page or article into the menu somewhere, it starts to get a little complex for many users to build these menu items, especially when there are multiple menus being used in different positions."
"I would like to see the same sorting and attributes available through the web browser on the JED (sorting by free or commercial license, sort by rating, popularity, etc.) within the back-end Joomla Web Installer when browsing extensions."
"Customizing components is not so easy."
"I would like to see more back-end admin power pulled into the front-end, therefore the admins will not have to use the back-end as much, especially for the menu manager, user manager, etc. versus using third-party extensions to achieve this."
"With even basic Joomla, it requires a course."
"Liferay needs a better web content search engine."
"Liferay requires more room to provide ease of use for the content contributors."
"Liferay is a very stable product (except for version 7, as it is relatively new)."
"Staging and LARs export/import features. This is always a pain in Liferay with many errors caused mostly by some inconsistent data in the database."
"The development license might be too costly for small to medium-sized businesses."
"Support provided for the Enterprise Edition is really poor."
"There are a lot of possibilities for improvement in several areas."
"Liferay does currently lack a good integrated analytics package, automation, and filtering."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Joomla is open source, therefore free. Only hosting, the time to build it along with the training time is your startup cost."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Government
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Media Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise23
 

Questions from the Community

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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

Artisan Web and Print, HLVC Design, Media A-Team Inc, Holdingbay - Tristan Bailey, Molehill Web Works, Sysgen Media, Pappy Productions, Inc., Turn To The ProsPB Web Development, LC Publishing - LambCottage Foundation
Adidas, Carrefour, Cisco Systems, Danone, Fujitsu, Lufthansa Flight Training, Siemens, Société Générale and the United Nations
Find out what your peers are saying about Joomla vs. Liferay Digital Experience Platform and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
889,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.