Liferay Digital Experience Platform Reviews

There are different angles to this question.

• As a developer, I like the simple and easy method of customization and development of new modules (portlets).
• As a business owner, I like the security it offers along with ready-to-use features it provides.
• Liferay is shipped with more than 50 portlets that include forum, wiki, blogs, and calendar-like modules that make collaboration very easy. It has a very organized, clean, and ‘usable’ control (admin) panel.
• Liferay’s UI, along with the control panel, is very powerful and helps to manage the content on the portal.
• Liferay is a product that has been released with beautiful thinking behind it. When there was no portal to support drag and drop for content placement on pages, Liferay had its head held high with such features that made the user experience better.

With Liferay, setting up an enterprise portal is very quick and easy. Its faster development methodology helps us to customize Liferay to our needs.

For our organization, we have designed modules which help us with employee information, trainings, meeting room booking, performance evaluation, exit process, on-boarding, recruitment, and 360 feedback.

Technology trends change so quickly that a product has to continuously evolve and improve what it offers. There was a time when Liferay’s documentation was not up to the mark. However, the release of new versions and the setup of dev.liferay.com brought fantastic documentation for developers, administrators, and business stakeholders.

There are still some parts where Liferay can improve:

• Document library: Allow you to view and preview all popular types of files
• Auditing capability

I have used Liferay for more than seven years.

Liferay Enterprise Edition releases are very stable. They keep a list of known issues just like any other software. There were very rare incidents when my team faced a bug in the product and we had to approach Liferay for a resolution.

We have not had any scalability issues so far. One Liferay node is capable of handling a large number of users and a document base.

When it comes to very heavy loads, Liferay nodes can be clustered using simple configurations. With the configurations, we can do many other optimizations to make Liferay quicker, lightweight, and secure.

There is a huge list of case studies that support Liferay’s scalability. We can understand how much Liferay can scale by looking at the Tata Sky portal which is a Liferay deployment and handles massive traffic daily.

There are multiple levels of technical support depending on your client or whether you have purchased a package. I find them very responsive and prompt in resolving the queries.

Apart from the technical support from Liferay, the developer community is also very active and responsive. Users can also put their issues/requests/suggestions to Liferay JIRA as well.

Previous to Liferay, I knew of WordPress and Joomla!, which people use to write their websites with little content.

When I came across Liferay, I got to see the out-of-the-box portlets and the way I can just put things in the deploy folder.

I can use the hot-deploy feature to create a site with very little configuration and place it on as many sites as I wanted.

I immediately switched to Liferay because of what it offered.

I got a chance to compare Liferay with other portals and tools like IBM WebSphere, SharePoint, GateIn, etc. I found Liferay’s development and deployment faster, along with its capability and offerings of the in-built portlets.

For new users, Liferay has very simple steps: Download the bundle and extract it.

If you don’t have Java, install Java and run bundled Tomcat. In a minute or two, you will have your server ready to be used.

Of course, no production level deployment will be using these steps. But Liferay provides a very comprehensive configuration file named "portal-ext.properties". It allows configurations for almost everything, such as database, sharing, sites, and clustering.

Liferay releases its portal as Community and Enterprise Edition. Like any other open source software, Liferay has a pricing model with levels of support for the Enterprise Edition. There are two levels of support with minor differences: Gold and Platinum.

For most of my proposals, I provided a separate sheet that includes other recommended tools. These recommendations were sometimes from the client based on their previous implementations.

For most of the client’s requirements, Liferay was a clear win because of its out-of-the-box features, portlets, and the depth and type of customization it can do.

From enterprise intranet website requirements to a public facing website that receives heavy traffic, Liferay passes all tests and checks off your requirements.

Using Liferay Portal, you do not just get open source and bring down the cost of software, but you also get total implementation time decreased as well.

Liferay has a large and responsible community to support you throughout your implementation.

The features I find valuable are its integration points with other systems and scalability. This is important because the portal (Liferay) is an addition to the current J2EE Framework. That being said, it lends itself to roll all processing (Spring batch) into the Liferay Tomcat bundle. This process can be done in reverse order to ensure performance.

For integration points using simple plugins with SAP, you can create your own secure service bus for information. If you would like to convert your Liferay platform to a presentation layer for CRM, you can leverage Dynamic MS CRM or SugarCRM with ease using plugins or a Java framework.

Our organization benefited by the automated client setup and an easy CMS setup.

Major upgrades switch the Liferay framework core structure dramatically in EVERY occasion. However, there were only subtle changes from the last minor upgrade to the major upgrade.

I used this product for two years where I currently work. In my former job, I used it for six years.

I have encountered stability issues during the upgrade process from 5.2 EE to 6.1.XX EE. There are always issues with Social Office.

We had no scalability issues.

The technical support need was moderate as the tool lends itself to be customized away from the (out-of-the box) OOB portal product. Liferay does not always support these custom components.

We used ColdFusion for a previous project for a CMS portal.

The installation was simple on a Linux-based operating system. It was complex with Windows Servers, but we still managed.

We recommend never leveraging static components when developing licensing requirements because the operating system layer and its environment will always change to fit support costs.

We did not evaluate alternative solutions.

Make sure you understand what you want the product to do. If your company has an overall future for growth, then Liferay is a good choice as it is an enterprise solution.

• Support OSGi Framework
• Excellent Content management system
• Administrative functions through the control panel
• Elastic search

These features are valuable because they all are basic requirements for all portals and have been achieved easily with the Liferay DXP portal.

You

Very important changes are OSGi modularization for existing portlets and new modules. It change the way of development and make life easy for developers

I have been playing liferay from last 9 years and palyed almost all the version and have seen many pros and cons across versions.

Yes we faced many issues during production deployment and specially performance tuning and best suppoprt architecture.

Yes as this is open source so don't see its big hurdle here.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

10/10

Technical support is very nice for the EE customers.

I did not previously use a different solution.

If its first time then you will definatly struggle but later on it would be very easy if you understand the structure.

It should maintain a competitive price in the open source market.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

It is just awesome; you should experience DXP. I am blogging many useful solution on www.liferaysolution.com

• CMS lets business users to create and manage web content by business users, while maintaining revisions. Liferay enables users to be independent of developers and to be able to manage content within the portal.
• Roles and permissions management gives developers the ability to build persona- and preference-based functionality within the portal.
• Document library
• Plugins, workflows and rules provide flexibility to customize the portal.

• A self-service portal for customers
• An online community to share and get knowledge
• A portal for distributing manuals.

• Ability to create content
• A cloud offering

I have used Liferay for approximately five years.

Liferay is a very stable product (except for version 7, as it is relatively new).

We have no issues with scalability.

Technical support is very good.

We started using Liferay directly. There was no previous solution.

Setup was straightforward.

It is very affordable and licensing is similar to Red Hat Linux, where we pay only for the support.

We evaluated Adobe Experience Manager and WebSphere Portal v6.

Have a complete understanding of out-of-the-box features as Liferay makes most of the functionality required available without any customization.

Aggregation and personalization (think dashboards) are the really unique selling points of a portal. If you don't need those, you don't need a portal and there will be other libraries or frameworks that are better suited to solve your problem.

We are not really using it ourselves.

The easy, straightforward cases are usually the only ones that are documented. Once you need to do something a little more advanced, you usually won't find any examples and will have to resort to looking through the code to find a place where they do something similar and figure out how it works by stepping through that in a debugger.

They also really like to create new libraries to do stuff (AlloyUI, Metal.js, Senna.js, etc.) instead of seeing what is already available and trying to adapt that for portal use (and possibly committing that back). And lastly, we've run in to a lot of bugs that tend to come back in every version. Things get fixed in one version and after upgrading you run into the same bug again.

I have about 8 years of experience with the product. I've worked with late 5.x versions up until the 7/DXP version now. I'm also a Liferay Highlighted blogger (https://web.liferay.com/web/fimez/blog) and I presented at Liferay Devcon last year.

We didn't encounter any real stability issues, only regressions and bugs.

We didn't encounter any real scalability issues, only regressions and bugs.

Technical support is better than most.

We previously used Sun Java System Portal Server. We switched because Sun Portal just plain sucked.

Initial setup is as easy as downloading, unpacking and starting. No hassle.

Always use the Enterprise Edition, as it isn't worth your own time to try and hunt down bugs in the Community Edition, and there are lots of bugs/regressions.

We looked at JBoss Portal and Pluto.

Only use it when you really need a portal and don't use it as an application framework. In that case, it only complicates your development and performance needlessly.

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. It wasn't easy/simple enough for normal web content editors to add or change content. It is also hard for our designers to create cutting edge designs that can be easily integrated into Liferay as a theme.

The most valuable feature is management and permissions according to user, role, and group.

There are several areas that need improvement:

• The core code base needs refactoring. It’s very hard to understand it when trying to do customizations.
• They could remove the business logic from the UI (JSPs) and stop using scriptlets in JSPs.
• Data integrity should be at the database level (normalization/foreign keys) and not at the application level.
• Also, they need to upgrade third party libraries (e.g., Spring) to the newest versions. Liferay is stuck on Spring 3.2, while Spring 4.3.x is the last version and they are working on a 5.0 framework.
• Use Java Config instead of XML config.
• Add support for JBoss EAP domain mode
• Source code sharing in SVN/git still needs to be revisited

I’ve used Liferay for more than 1 year.

Yes, we did have issues with stability.

Yes, we encountered scalability issues.

Initial setup was complex compared to IBM WebSphere.

I recommend going with the CE version.

We evaluated IBM WebSphere portal, but found WebSphere to be overkill for our project.

I would emphasize using Liferay’s OOTB features so you don’t build something that already exists.

Also, make sure you actually need the features it provides.

We like Likeray because it's a secure platform.

The look and feel and the user interface are great.

PHP offers more plugins than Liferay. The plugins should be more affordable.

Liferay needs to offer more in terms of updates and development. WordPress is constantly offering new updates and new features; I hardly see that with Liferay — although, it could be because we don't have an enterprise license.

Also, an e-commerce plugin tool would be a nice feature. 

We have been using Liferay for at least three years.

Compared to WordPress, I hardly experience any issues or bugs.

For us, the initial setup was very complex — It's in Java. In Malaysia, there are not a lot of Java writers or developers.

Licensing costs can be very expensive.

I would recommend Liferay to another company, but the price cannot be overlooked. Maintaining a license can be a hefty investment.

Due to the licensing and plugin costs, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

• Overall modularity in architecture
• OOTB support for SPA
• Enhancements in marketing experience: user segmentation, targeting, analytics, single customer view, enhanced UI, and content management capabilities

Considering the overall drive towards providing a digital experience to clients, to provide a connected experience, federated touchpoints, dynamic personalization, customer context and interactions, the product has evolved very strongly from just being a horizontal portal system into a digital experience platform. Newer modular architecture and in-built SPA experience is rightly following the current trends in the market.

Aspects of Campaign management and audience targeting is fast maturing, where the experience tracked in online channels are feeding into the offline journeys and influencing the content promoted from that channel and vice versa the learnings from offline channels like (email) through composite campaign tracking and optimizations cycles gives newer areas of segmentation which can be fed back to online channels for a omni-potent personalization and content targeting approach.

Other competitor product lines are absorbing the complete cycle of this fast changing dynamic offering management coaxed with 360 view of customer to fuel in some of the immersive experience offering, this is a space where Liferay DXP still need to venture and explore the scenarios on how the current great abilities of campaign and audience management can be tied back to such situations and provide a complete online-offline personalization experience which is consistent, trackable and ever evolving with customer view feedback to strike that right winning content user is looking to convert.

On further note to explain DAM and the abilities on the same, it’s again a space which has several flavours of existence. DAM within a Portal or CMS system is just good for the marketers who want to have an integrated platform to manage medium volumes of simplistic assets for web journey authoring, but as we unfold this obvious world of things, there is an abyss of requirements features which can be offered to become an Enterprise DAM offering, to name few will be ability to transform assets (especially media assets) based on bandwidth, renditions, panoramic view generations, mixed media assets, video trackings and recommendations, asset monetization along with further maturing into copyright management spiralling into Information rights management within these systems. (this is just one quick example to pick within the Enterprise DAM abilities)

Other competitors in this space has started to carve out variations of DAM for small to large scale enterprise implementations and have started to offer their product lines as distinctive offerings , small to mid scale DAM (implicit within the portals, CMS platform), large scale standalone variation of the offering as standalone enterprise DAM, Renditions and Transformation Management Advance Media Management Systems and Cloud DAM offering best of breed solutions between features of a DAM and a MAM (Media Asset Management) solutions. These variations helps customer make the right choice from the offerings available and strike the right balancing cord to decide what will be the best fit in their ecosystem. DAM offering from Liferay is still an experience which falls into the first variation of offering (small to mid-scale DAM offering) from within platform which need to scale into larger aspects of Enterprise DAM so as to be competing strongly with similar offerings in market by other niche DAM as well as Enterprise Experience players.

I have used the product for 10 months.

This one is a major release from the previous one with lots of changes at the API level and at the environment level, so a certain level of issues with stability are observed with existing plugins, some APIs, hooks and audience targeting.

We haven’t yet encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 3.5 out of 5.

We switched because of the cost, flexibility with Liferay, and ease of use.

Initial setup was very easy. You just unzip the package and you are set to go.

Licensing follows the dual licensing model and the Community edition is completely open source (with LGPL). The Enterprise edition follows EULA licensing. Please read carefully to understand the intellectual property-specific constraints.

Before choosing, we also evaluated Drupal (open source) and Adobe AEM (proprietary).

This is a great product for small- and mid-scale implementations and for the enterprises who are starting on their digital journey. It has a great story to tell right from being horizontal portal development platform to a digital experience platform. However, it is not very strong yet to be used for completely marketing-oriented implementations. It is okay to use for a pre-customer journey and presents a very strong case for a post-customer journey.