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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 (11th)
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 (22nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) category, the mindshare of HCL Connections is 6.0%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Liferay Digital Experience Platform is 14.2%, down from 21.1% 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 Platform14.2%
HCL Connections6.0%
Other79.8%
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

"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten...Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"IBM Connections is a good product with many functions."
"The ease of use has definitely improved the way my organization functions."
"The search and incidental discovery of content are really key, as is the ability to share and, when necessary, un-share."
"Marketing has created a community open to all internal employees where it has centralized all marketing content (brochures, presentations, communications)."
"File sharing is the number one feature, as I can have a document or whatever live file I want everywhere, following me like a private cloud."
"The blogs became the main source of information for the organisation and establishing dialogue."
"The Files feature has really changed the way we do business."
"Customers liked this portal software platform because Open Source platform with no stack agenda can run in any existing infrastructure with low cost of adoption and offers over 70 out-of-the-box bundled features with an open API architecture that allows you to maximize aggregation and back-end integration."
"The web/mobile/portal integration was one of the features that we found most valuable, primarily because it reduced our development time."
"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."
"Liferay was a great choice."
"If you need something that is scalable, that needs broader functionality, and you need to develop your own services, then this is an excellent solution."
"The most valuable feature is management and permissions according to user, role, and group."
"We like Likeray because it's a secure platform."
"If your company has an overall future for growth, then Liferay is a good choice as it is an enterprise solution."
 

Cons

"Movies with high resolution after uploaded in the community had bad quality, were unreadable, or we couldn’t upload files in AVI or WMV."
"The installation process is a bit complex."
"Level 1 sometimes seems as if they are part of a call center."
"Generally, I believe IBM are addressing all of these issues but progress seems very slow."
"The product has a pretty flat structure for communities; they are in principle a long list."
"The mobile, Outlook, and desktop Plug-ins associated with this product need to be improved."
"For us in the IBM Connections Cloud, we would like to use the capability for instant messages, but we need to have the groups sync up to the cloud from the on-premise, which it doesn't do at this point of time."
"We hear complaints from our users that Connections, and other IBM products, are not intuitive."
"Its SSL-based client authentication support needs to be improved."
"The plugins should be more affordable."
"Although it has been improving, I cannot shake the feeling that it was released too early."
"I would like to see it require fewer configurations from the properties file, and provide more GUI options to configure changes."
"I would like to see better documentation. Updates in the documentation do not follow updates in the code and functionality."
"The current version is good, but one problem is with objects where the load takes much time if the records are increasing."
"The development license might be too costly for small to medium-sized businesses."
"It could have better built-in integration with a wider variety of extensions out-of-the-box."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"Licensing costs can be very 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."
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
20%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Performing Arts
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 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: August 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.