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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)
3rd
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)
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (3rd), AI Customer Experience Personalization (22nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Web Content Management category, the mindshare of Drupal is 9.5%, up from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Liferay Digital Experience Platform is 5.2%, down from 8.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Drupal9.5%
Liferay Digital Experience Platform5.2%
Other85.3%
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

"Drupal is one of the most robust content management systems."
"You can build websites on it very quickly."
"The open source nature of Drupal, being free to extend or alter it is massively important for us."
"Drupal CMS helped in the realization of content-rich web sites that combine article presentation with sophisticated, back-end admin functionality."
"If you need an open-source, scalable and secure CMS, then go for Drupal."
"The best things about Drupal are its extensibility and plug-ability."
"It is good for big projects."
"Being a community based product, the relationship with the product itself is providing back to the community."
"Liferay provides a vast range of features with minimal license costs, which makes it better than the others."
"Initial setup is as easy as downloading, unpacking and starting."
"It has increased communication between the departments and their employees."
"Liferay is very quick and easy to set up, whether you are using the built-in database or an external database."
"I think that it could be interesting to expand the eCommerce capabilities to the B2C sector."
"The integration capabilities of the product are super easy to use."
"The product has helped our members and communities to freely connect, share knowledge, develop initiatives and share expertise in a secure environment."
"Liferay is highly scalable and more complex than Drupal."
 

Cons

"Modifying the themes (colors, dimensions, and pictures) could be easier."
"I think Drupal has to improve the UX for some administrative pages, such as the modules list page."
"The version upgrading process is very painful. Moving to a new Drupal version involves much more than building and configuring the new site."
"Unfortunately, with Drupal, there is a number of learning paradigms that you have to discover, which can make it difficult to understand as a newcomer."
"Overall business friendliness of the product: Digital experience features like target segmentation and campaign management have a long way to go."
"The GUI is still not as intuitive as WordPress."
"Sometimes, you just have to read the code to understand how it works or how to use an API, which is not the best way to learn for everyone."
"It is a little bit simplified."
"The documentation provided needs to be more detailed. It's sometimes hard to develop things because the documentation is so sparse."
"There are a lot of possibilities for improvement in several areas."
"Major upgrades switch the Liferay framework core structure dramatically in EVERY occasion."
"If you are a basic web developer or you have a very small organization, I don't think I would work with it."
"However, it is not very strong yet to be used for completely marketing-oriented implementations."
"It lacks true multi-tenant support."
"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."
"There are several areas that need improvement: The core code base needs refactoring."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would like to see better pricing."
"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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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
Construction Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
10%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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
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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

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: August 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.