No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Drupal 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

Drupal
Ranking in Web Content Management
5th
Ranking in Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals)
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Liferay Digital Experience ...
Ranking in Web Content Management
6th
Ranking in Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals)
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (2nd), AI Customer Experience Personalization (30th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Web Content Management category, the mindshare of Drupal is 9.2%, up from 6.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Liferay Digital Experience Platform is 5.2%, down from 9.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Drupal9.2%
Liferay Digital Experience Platform5.2%
Other85.6%
Web Content Management
 

Q&A Highlights

AS
Community Manager at PeerSpot (formerly IT Central Station)
Aug 21, 2014
 

Featured Reviews

it_user982032 - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
A good product that helps me to manage complex digital solutions
My advice to others would be that Drupal is not only a CMS, you need to learn the Drupal fundamentals before to start the project. Drupal is a handy tool whenever you work on a digital infrastructure broad project and not only a simple website. So if you have a big project, you can use Drupal. But if you have a small website, like a blog or simple website, my advice would be not to use Drupal, because Drupal is too complex and the cost to maintain the platform can be too high, related to the value of your website, for example. If you have a website with a big product catalog, for example, in many languages and in many countries in the world, then Drupal is good. But if you have a simple website, like a portfolio or five page-website, you can use many other technologies that'd be simple to maintain and implement. On a scale from one to 10, I will rate Drupal an eight. In the next release, I would like to see basic page buttons and better integration with the analytics platform. A drag and drop function to create simple pages will also be handy. For example, if a customer wants to create a landing page, it should be easy for him or her to do so. I would also like to see better translation management.
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

"You can build websites on it very quickly."
"Views, terms, panels, and entity conception. It is a very useful and fast solution to build successful web applications."
"It is good for big projects."
"Being a community based product, the relationship with the product itself is providing back to the community."
"Drupal 8 has an architecture that will scale well and better than previous versions, especially given big pipe."
"The velocity of its extensibility and prototyping is a valuable feature."
"We use a part of the solution called Acquia. The personalization portion of this is the most valuable aspect fo the solution."
"If you need an open-source, scalable and secure CMS, then go for Drupal."
"It is a wonderful open-source product that has many out-of-the-box features."
"Liferay enables you to stay with latest technologies with each version release."
"The most valuable feature is management and permissions according to user, role, and group."
"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."
"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."
"It’s fast, easy, scalable, and stable with a competitive price."
"For me, the most important features are scalability, architecture, the fact that it's Java-based, includes a CMS, and provides audience targeting tools."
"Architecture is so good that you can fit many organizational structures into Liferay."
 

Cons

"However, when you want to add a permission to a user role, something as simple as that checkbox, forces a config push, which annoys me."
"There were some stability issues, i.e., only with the new version, the main changes are not stable."
"Modifying the themes (colors, dimensions, and pictures) could be easier."
"There are not enough Drupal developers to satisfy demand."
"Drupal 8 is only 1.5 years old. It has stability issues, but not major ones."
"My advice would be not to use Drupal, because Drupal is too complex and the cost to maintain the platform can be too high, related to the value of your website, for example."
"The initial setup was very complex, due to the lack of proper documentation."
"We had some stability issues."
"Liferay does currently lack a good integrated analytics package, automation, and filtering."
"However, it is not very strong yet to be used for completely marketing-oriented implementations."
"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."
"The documentation could be better."
"The integration and configuration need to be simplified."
"The front-end technologies need improvement."
"The integration and configuration need to be simplified."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would like to see better pricing."
"Their pricing model should be modified to include per user options instead of just servers/cores, etc."
"It is a bit expensive."
"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."
"Licensing costs can be very expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Content Management solutions are best for your needs.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user8925 - PeerSpot reviewer
Developer with 51-200 employees
Aug 23, 2013
Jive vs Sharepoint vs Drupal Commons
At Mediacurrent we often get requests to compare Drupal to other platforms used for intranet sites and social business platforms (like https://dev.twitter.com/ for example). This is often referred to as “Social Business Software”, which has grown in popularity in recent years. I decided to do a…
 

Answers from the Community

AS
Community Manager at PeerSpot (formerly IT Central Station)
Aug 21, 2014
Aug 21, 2014
I have not used Drupal, but with my experience these are the points you need to answer to choose: 1- Are you a java OR a PHP developer (that is if you are going to do some custom development) ? 2- Do you just need a Content Management System OR an advanced CMS with some custom requirements ? 3- Last one is, do you need "Personalization OR Customization" ?
2 out of 7 answers
it_user100569 - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President
Jun 12, 2014
Hello, I haven't used either one of these enterprise social software tools, so I don't have any comments to share. Thanks, Ann
SG
Principal Consultant at Digital Web Advisors Pvt Ltd
Jun 12, 2014
I wouldn't really compare the two - they both cater to different set of requirements / use cases. While Drupal is Web Content Management (WCM) tool and is good fit for small to medium size interactive or social web solution requirement. Liferay on the other hand is an Enterprise Portal software (it also has WCM as part of it's offering). It would fit in better where your requirements are more toward sharing personalized information to users / exposing several application to users though a common interface.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
12%
Construction Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
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 Business15
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise23
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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

BMJ, The Economist, New Republic, SpaceX, Lush, Danone, Tesla Motors, Peugeot, Stanford Law, Harvard, Oxford University, MIT Media Lab, The Beatles, MTV UK, The Weather Channel, NBC, BBC, grammy.com, Mus_e du Louvre, Whitehouse.gov, London.gov.uk, Gouvernment.fr, New Zealand Government, The Prince of Wales, British Council, NYC Metropolitan Transport Authority, Gatwick Obviously
Adidas, Carrefour, Cisco Systems, Danone, Fujitsu, Lufthansa Flight Training, Siemens, Société Générale and the United Nations
Find out what your peers are saying about Drupal vs. Liferay Digital Experience Platform and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.