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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 (14th)
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 (23rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) category, the mindshare of HCL Connections is 6.0%, up from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Liferay Digital Experience Platform is 14.5%, down from 22.6% 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 Platform14.5%
HCL Connections6.0%
Other79.5%
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

"IBM Connections is born for collaboration and one of the easiest steps is starting a community with a set of great collaborative, built-in applications and starting to collaborate over a project."
"The most valuable feature is the Activity flow that is used to catch new activities."
"IBM Connections provides a single solution that offers profiles, communities, file sharing, wikis, blogs, surveys, activities, bookmarks, forums, ideation, activity streams and events."
"The most valuable feature is Files, because we are working together with our accounting department in different countries."
"Some of the valuable features in this product are: Profiles – It is easy to find people with similar tech skills and reach out to them internally for a project requirement, and project managers find it easy to know who in the organization possesses a skill that matches the requirement."
"Our own ROI was within nine months, and we directly benefited from more knowledge sharing (and avoiding re-inventing the wheel) and shorter meetings."
"Especially in a distributed organisation like us, it helps to enhance collaboration and gain faster business results."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten...Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"I think that it could be interesting to expand the eCommerce capabilities to the B2C sector."
"Liferay was a great choice."
"From enterprise intranet website requirements to a public facing website that receives heavy traffic, Liferay passes all tests and checks off your requirements."
"The integration capabilities of the product are super easy to use."
"The web/mobile/portal integration was one of the features that we found most valuable, primarily because it reduced our development time."
"We chose Liferay because it is open-source and that we can make any number of users apply, register into the system and use the system, as opposed to other solutions where the cost is based on user licenses. This is one of the most attractive features."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"It would be helpful to have more interfacing of all the IBM platforms."
"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."
"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)."
"The mobile, Outlook, and desktop Plug-ins associated with this product need to be improved."
"I have found the wiki to be lacking in functionality."
"While connection supports @named.user messaging and #tag.labels, the collaborative interaction UXP could be updated to a more streamlined approach for posts, file-share and threaded conversations such as that which is provided by newer teamwork offerings (e.g., Slack)."
"The installation process is a bit complex."
"We've had a few issues, but overall the stability has been pretty good."
"The development license might be too costly for small to medium-sized businesses."
"As for now, Liferay DXP was just released, so there are many issues."
"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."
"As it is open source, it has lots of features and it is constantly updating. Therefore, bugs also keep coming."
"Major upgrades switch the Liferay framework core structure dramatically in EVERY occasion."
"Social areas and capabilities need improvement."
"The documentation could be better."
"There are a lot of possibilities for improvement in several areas."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It's an open-source structure. Other costs are for professional services to integrate Liferay to other existing systems."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
18%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Performing Arts
8%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
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: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.