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HCL Connections vs Liferay Digital Experience Platform comparison

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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 (13th)
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) (3rd), AI Customer Experience Personalization (24th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) category, the mindshare of HCL Connections is 6.0%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Liferay Digital Experience Platform is 13.9%, down from 19.4% 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 Platform13.9%
HCL Connections6.0%
Other80.1%
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 Pink means a new way of collaboration, like you have never seen before."
"Having all features and tools together in one environment is great and gives the users a lot of possibilities to work in the way that they want to."
"Our productivity has increased by using IBM Connections."
"Communities are a popular way of combining blogs, wikis, files, and activities centered on a common objective or subject which proves popular and increases collaboration across people and teams."
"The most valuable feature is Files, because we are working together with our accounting department in different countries."
"The most valuable feature is the Activity flow that is used to catch new activities."
"The search and incidental discovery of content are really key, as is the ability to share and, when necessary, un-share."
"Especially in a distributed organisation like us, it helps to enhance collaboration and gain faster business results."
"If your company has an overall future for growth, then Liferay is a good choice as it is an enterprise solution."
"It has increased communication between the departments and their employees."
"Manageability is very good and probably the most valuable part of a tool of this type. There is a little more of a learning curve than you have with a simple tool, but a business user can learn to manage the system as an administrator very easily."
"Liferay enables you to stay with latest technologies with each version release."
"We like Likeray because it's a secure platform."
"As of now, the technology is up-to-date and fulfills all essential requirements."
"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."
"For me, the most important features are scalability, architecture, the fact that it's Java-based, includes a CMS, and provides audience targeting tools."
 

Cons

"The improvement's are could be more flexibility to manage files and to have a sync file area more intuitive and which respects the characteristics of other similar solutions."
"Deployment can be a little complex, but a lot of this relates to the network, corporate LDAP, and security requirements."
"We've had some load time and performance issues with concurrent users. The page was just not coming up."
"When we went from 1,000 users to 2,000 users, we hit some problems and then it required a lot of retuning and reconfiguration."
"Initial setup was complex."
"Mac users currently only have File Sync support and no plugins are available for Linux desktop users, leaving these users heavily dependent of the web user interface."
"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 mobile, Outlook, and desktop Plug-ins associated with this product need to be improved."
"The documentation provided needs to be more detailed. It's sometimes hard to develop things because the documentation is so sparse."
"However, it is not very strong yet to be used for completely marketing-oriented implementations."
"It could have better built-in integration with a wider variety of extensions out-of-the-box."
"I would like to see it require fewer configurations from the properties file, and provide more GUI options to configure changes."
"Major upgrades switch the Liferay framework core structure dramatically in EVERY occasion."
"Liferay does currently lack a good integrated analytics package, automation, and filtering."
"Documentation for the newly launched version is not up to the mark."
"Setup was not straightforward. The Community Edition was a bit complicated and they should fix the code."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"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
Outsourcing Company
18%
Construction Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Performing Arts
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
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: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.