You need a CMS (Content Management System) to create, edit, collaborate, publish, and store digital content. Liferay can help you in both ECM (Enterprise Content Management) and WCM (Web Content Management) as it is a good option for catering personalized experiences to your clients. Liferay and Drupal both compete in the CMS domain for building and managing websites, online applications, and portals.
While Liferay has a strong presence in the enterprise market; Drupal’s strength lies in enabling developers to build highly customized websites and web applications with ease.
Why do businesses prefer Liferay?
Liferay is a robust open-source web application that offers a number of features ideal for website and portal development. Liferay can simplify the user experience and can be seamlessly customized to meet business needs.
The Limitations of Drupal for Businesses
Drupal has been accused of not providing adequate support to online businesses. Drupal users are not getting adequate support from the company itself, security of the website is also being compromised. Unlike other community support, the Drupal community is also not very supportive of the users.
The open-source platform which was once known for its great support towards creating great digital experience has now turned into a security concern for website administrators. The chances of data theft are high for Drupal users.
Three exclusive Drupal disadvantages:
- Not for non-technical users
You cannot manage Drupal on your own without a developer’s assistance. Though a large number of modules and plug-ins are present in Drupal without a developer’s help you cannot move a step ahead. Most of these modules don’t come free and are also expensive. Hence, one cannot gain the maximum potential of Drupal being a non-technical user.
- Drupalisms
‘Drupalisms’ is a term famous in the world of Drupal. It means the way Drupal works or the development method of Drupal. Being an expert in PHP, CMS, or HTML codes does not make anyone an expert in Drupal. Implementing and customizing Drupal needs an experienced developer and for this complexity, Drupal’s CMS market share has decreased from 6.1% in 2011 to 1.8% in 2023, a 4.3% decrease in the last 10 years.
- Hard to Scale & Customize
Drupal does not have too many modules present for customization purposes. With flexibility and scalability-wise also Drupal is not a great CMS (Content Management System) choice. Apart from these, Drupal is also not very cost-effective as highly specialized technical knowledge is required to use it to build a website.
Although Drupal is a sophisticated CMS, it has some drawbacks such as it cannot handle too much server load. Furthermore, the need for expert developers to set up a CMS system with Drupal makes it both time-consuming and costly.
Liferay: The best substitute for Drupal!
Liferay is a more secure option compared to Drupal and it is moreover an enterprise solution while Drupal is only a developer framework. An enterprise solution can provide you with much more advantages than a framework.
- Better Enterprise-Level Features
Liferay provides out-of-the-box enterprise-level features for content management, document management, social networking, workflow automation, and much more.
On the other hand, Drupal needs to integrate additional modules to work with similar capabilities just like Liferay.
- High-level of Security
Security wise Liferay is better than Drupal. Being a popular CMS, Liferay has become more prone to attacks from hackers. It is for this reason that the Liferay administrators work to keep it more secure than Drupal.
- Better User Experience
Liferay is more focused than Drupal on providing a better-personalized User Experience. Liferay has several user experience-focused features like user segmentation, customized dashboards, and drag-and-drop page creation that help in building intranets, extranets, and community portals.
But Drupal is more into general website development rather than user experience and it needs additional modules for creating a better and customized user experience.
- Community Support
Although Community Support is available for both Liferay and Drupal; the Liferay community is more active in comparison to Drupal. While Liferay community support provides seamless access to developers’ community and timely bug fixes; Drupal’s community support relies on third-party vendors.
- Highly Scalable Architecture
Liferay is capable of handling high volumes of web traffic and large-scale deployments due to its highly scalable architecture.
Drupal, which is capable of handling the normal capacity of web traffic, may need to infuse more optimization efforts for scaling enterprise requirements.
- Multi-Language Support
Offering built-in multi-lingual support is one of the specialized features of Liferay. Liferay enables websites to reach a wider audience with its multilingual content support. For organizations targeting global audiences in diverse regions, Liferay is the ideal solution due to its built-in multi-language support.
Multilingual support is also available with Drupal but it needs the support of additional modules to provide this support.
- Excellent Integration Support
Liferay integrates better with other applications and systems. Liferay has features like API (Application Programming Interface), SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), and pre-built connectors that can help you to seamlessly integrate with CRM, ERP, and other enterprise applications.
For Drupal to compete with Liferay, custom development is required to provide similar integration advantages.
Hence, when you need a powerful and feature-rich CMS (Content Management System) platform – Liferay is the best option.
Why use Liferay DXP Cloud over Drupal?
Liferay DXP Cloud offers a wide range of features beyond content management, such as collaboration tools, customer data management, personalization, and integration capabilities.
Liferay DXP Cloud offers extensive security features and compliance certifications, making it suitable for organizations with strict security requirements. It provides role-based access control, fine-grained permission management, and support for compliance standards like GDPR and HIPAA. If data security and compliance are crucial for the business, Liferay DXP Cloud provides a robust security framework.
These are the points that indicate Liferay DXP Cloud is more scalable and reliable than Drupal as a Digital Experience Platform.
Conclusion
Every organization has unique business needs, and to choose the best CMS platform, you must make sure its features align with your business goals. With Liferay, you can tailor your solutions to help reach your target audience seamlessly. It is an easy-to-use CMS tool even for non-technical users compared to Drupal. The presence of pre-built features and an intuitive user interface has made Liferay a better CMS option than Drupal. Liferay’s enterprise-grade tools, mobile support, and social collaboration tools are better than Drupal’s. Considering these points, if you migrate to Liferay from Drupal; it can provide you with better CMS options.
Youngsoft has expertise in providing excellent quality Liferay services that can support you with installation, migration, and customization. We have specialization in on-site and off-site project management and execution, custom portlet development, and other services.
About Us:
Founded in 1996, in Michigan, Youngsoft Inc. is an information technology company specializing in IT consulting, and staffing. For almost 3 decades, the company has delivered cutting-edge tech solutions like AEM, Liferay, Business Intelligence, and more to a global clientele. With a futuristic vision, Youngsoft has spearheaded innovations in Healthcare IT solutions and implemented Industry 4.0 in a Box program, a flagship IIoT initiative in partnership with AWS (Amazon Web Services).
Reach out to us to know more about migration from Drupal to Liferay in more detail!
