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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 (15th)
Liferay Digital Experience ...
Ranking in Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals)
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Web Content Management (6th), Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (2nd), AI Customer Experience Personalization (30th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) category, the mindshare of HCL Connections is 5.7%, up from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Liferay Digital Experience Platform is 14.6%, down from 22.5% 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 Platform14.6%
HCL Connections5.7%
Other79.7%
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

"Connections, with its file sharing and lightweight document management capabilities, has helped us reduce the volume of email and network file usage."
"For us, the most valuable feature is really the threaded conversations, because we don't get a threaded conversation with other tools."
"We used lots of products like wordpress to blog, docuwiki as wiki, bugtracker, todo apps and so on, but Connections delivers all of it integrated in one solution."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten...Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"The blogs became the main source of information for the organisation and establishing dialogue."
"The most valuable features of this solution are that it provides a space for team collaboration, sharing, security, and a standard language within the company."
"The search and incidental discovery of content are really key, as is the ability to share and, when necessary, un-share."
"IBM Connections Cloud gives us the opportunity to put files in one location for the people to get access to."
"Liferay provides a vast range of features with minimal license costs, which makes it better than the others."
"It allows us to arrange and develop new ideas, then incorporate them into the portal, creating a one stop information center so people can access the information from one window."
"The web/mobile/portal integration was one of the features that we found most valuable, primarily because it reduced our development time."
"Flexibility to fit our business requirements under many different scenarios, from simple public web sites to customer or distributor portal solutions and intranets."
"It has helped our client to quickly set up websites for their external clients."
"Liferay enables you to stay with latest technologies with each version release."
"You can create and manage dozens of sites with a single installation of Liferay, without a single line of Java code."
"Compared to other platforms the initial setup is not very complex."
 

Cons

"The setup was extremely complex; a little less than what it may have been in the past."
"The platform is too dispersive and rigid. It should improve in usability and user interface customization by the user (personalized menu, communities to keep close at hand, always available files, and so on)."
"When your activity becomes really big, it can become unreliable and very slow."
"The file plugin for Mac need some improvement."
"I have found the wiki to be lacking in functionality."
"The perfect software doesn't exist, but I think Connections is really a good piece of software with few things lacking."
"Deployment can be a little complex, but a lot of this relates to the network, corporate LDAP, and security requirements."
"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."
"There are a lot of possibilities for improvement in several areas."
"Liferay is a very stable product (except for version 7, as it is relatively new)."
"If you are a basic web developer or you have a very small organization, I don't think I would work with it."
"It lacks true multi-tenant support."
"Liferay needs a better web content search engine."
"The plugins should be more affordable."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Licensing costs can be very 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 is a bit expensive."
"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
Manufacturing Company
11%
Performing Arts
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
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 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: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.