Liferay Digital Experience Platform Reviews

The ability to control web content within a structured version system and its unique capability to receive extension modules and plugins. The extension power makes this software a great ally for building new systems.

I usually see this platform as a Swiss Army Knife for building new features. I also see it as a starting point for assembling new systems from modules and apps, just like we do when playing with Lego blocks.

Support for Java 8 and OSGi are also extremely attractive capabilities.

Information and content are the key elements. Using Liferay to control our web content allows us to have a centralized information hub.

We can discuss, contribute, and review pieces of content as it evolves with time. All this occurs while the platform enforces the correct workflow, and allows web content, media, and file distribution in a consistent manner.

The content management features are simple to understand and make collaboration easy.

On the development side, the platform acts as a great framework which makes engineering processes and projects faster.

Lots of common features are implemented in Liferay. Implementing new functionality might just be a matter of organizing services provided by the platform.

Building specific logic is also trivial. The ability to receive OSGi modules is natural in this version.

Although it has been improving, I cannot shake the feeling that it was released too early. It came with several problems, and new releases came extremely fast to correct the previous ones. Now, in its GA3, the differences are noticeable between the general release and the master source code.

The correction of issues take too long to arrive, unless a license is acquired, which seems a bit odd for an open-source project.

The bottom line is that it is too early for general adoption, as a GA4 is clearly needed.

A second issue would be around documentation. For some time, this has been one of my main complaints around Liferay. The learning curve seems to be high as the platform is immense and extremely flexible. Thus, it is only natural that some complexity is involved in using it to its full potential.

However, the documentation for developers is incomplete and there is a strong reliance on GitHub.

The previous version even had a great book to support developers. We can see that the development documentation in the web site is evolving, but it still has formatting issues and has a long way to go to reflect the greatness of the project.

Any developer familiar with the platform and with its source knows that there is a hidden power that is still to be documented.

I have used this since its release in 2016 (Liferay 7), and for two additional years in its previous versions.

I have ten years of experience as a developer using the frameworks that come with Liferay and several of the supporting libraries.

We had some stability issues, but only in upgrades. However, I would say this is changing as the product matures.

Liferay 7 is changing a lot with time, and they put a lot of effort to avoid breaking code.

The last big change, from Liferay 6 to 7, was properly documented and migration was simple enough. Minor upgrades have caused issues though.

Nevertheless, I need to say that most issues I encountered were already corrected and I have never found stability problems in running servers.

We have not had any scalability issues.

Support definitely takes their time in looking into issues and helping users. Information about bugs is publicly available and engineers can see how the bug fixing process is going. The community is active in several open channels where advice can be found for development and for administration alike.

Liferay brings with it several frameworks that are beautifully organized. (Hibernate, Struts, Spring.) That is why this is tricky to explain.

As an engineer, the ability to use the frameworks you like is a great plus. But after a while, one may notice that using Liferay, as an intermediary for some services, is much simpler. They do a great job in providing extension points and tools like the Blade CLI and Service Builder.

The simplicity of the overall development process is a major advantage that comes with consistency. The learning curve is quite high, but I would say it is definitely worth it.

The setup is pretty simple and it is aligned with practices we see every day in web systems deployment.

There are options around its licenses that are worth some evaluation, especially if you don’t have experts available to provide you with the due support.

Liferay can be quite complicated under all those great features and some projects require extensive customization that demands some degree of expertise.

However, if the project is simple and only composed by assembling and organizing apps, it might not be worth paying for a license, except in those cases when access to restricted apps is needed.

Several content management platforms are available in the market, such as Adobe and, in simpler scenarios, WordPress.

However, being open source is a great advantage if you are looking for extending the existing solution and customizing it for specific scenarios.

Furthermore, the solid stack of frameworks and modern UI technologies is something unique in Liferay.

Being based on OSGi and supporting extension through OSGi is almost too good to be true. With OSGi, we are even able to make hot deployable modules and patches without any significant effort while controlling the dependencies with Gradle in a way that only OSGi can support.

If your goal is to develop a new system, start small and use the knowledge you already have to leverage the frameworks and libraries that come with Liferay.

Modularity is the key with Liferay, and small modules will build big systems. If you come from old versions, with time, start transitioning to OSGi instead of the old Liferay plugins. OSGi offers a greater flexibility with a consistency that is not seen in the old formats.

If you are new to Liferay, I would advise going straight to the modular approach and learn Liferay’s conventions to apply them to your code. They are simple and will help you when you have to compare your solution to some similar functionality in Liferay.

If you are looking for information, I would recommend having a copy of the book "Liferay in Action". It is definitely outdated, but the concepts are needed to understand Liferay.

If you are new to modularity, I would recommend the book "Java Application Architecture: Modularity Patterns with Examples Using OSGi".

API programming and asset publishing are the most important features.

Documentation is an issue and needs to be improved. Asset publishing can be a bit complicated, but once you have some running, it gets easier.

I have been using Liferay since 2012, starting with Liferay 6.1.

The earlier version, 6.1, had performance issues. These were solved from 6.2 and up.

I have not had any scalability issues so far. It is easy to cluster, if your application has a heavy load.

I have never used technical support. The documentation online could be improved (https://dev.liferay.com/). The Liferay developer community is very active, useful, and responsive.

Liferay is very quick and easy to set up, whether you are using the built-in database or an external database.

I just say "go ahead" and try it out. It is very easy to install and you can have it running in a few minutes after downloading and extracting.

I think that it could be interesting to expand the eCommerce capabilities to the B2C sector.

Social areas and capabilities need improvement. If you compare this product with Jive or other standard social business platforms, Liferay has room to improve in terms of reusability, functions, and capabilities. Jive and other leading social business company platforms all have a lot of add-ons. Liferay could add some social add-ons.

Compared to other platforms the initial setup is not very complex.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

Liferay is a good product and can reduce time and cost on project implementation. Liferay opens the door for most problems of our customers. If you have digital problems in your organizations, Liferay already solves more than 80% of them.

Most of my Liferay experience is working on projects to solve other organizations’ problems and meet their requirements. With one of our projects, I used Liferay as a document management solution. With Liferay, users are happy with its ability to manage digital documents.

I would like to see an improvement on the Ecommerce platform.

We have used this solution for over five years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I have experience on enterprise and community versions with HA implementations for less than five servers. So far, I did not face any scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 9/10.

We used Microsoft SharePoint and IBM WebSphere. They are not straightforward and have a complex user experience as a developer.

The setup is straightforward.

The solution has a good ROI.

The solution is inexpensive.

I suggest getting this product. It is easy to use and has a big impact to reduce implementation time. It is not just a product solution. It also has excellent features as a development platform.

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. These features enable us to extend Liferay functionality and allow us to customize the out-of-the-box features of Portal to meet our customers’ requirements.

We are using it for projects to provide quick turnaround for our clients' requests. Liferay has a powerful feature for the hot deployment of plugins, and service builders for easily creating tables using Sprint, Hibernate, JPA, etc.

I would like to see them arrange more symposiums in India, because most of the resources who work on Liferay are from India, more than any other country.

I'd like for them to have more interactive sessions, training or face-to-face meetings with the Liferay core team for Developers, so that we can have our questions/clarifications clarified directly with them, rather than asking over a webinar session, through forums, through support tickets, etc.

I have been using Liferay for the past 10+ years now and I love to work with it.

I have not encountered any serious stability issues, but if we come across anything, we get great support from Liferay as a patch.

The portal is very easy in terms of adding more nodes to a cluster.

Technical support is 9/10.

I have used two other portal servers. I really did not like the way they allowed admins to do administrative actions. Liferay is easy to understand and complete the admin actions through the control panel with meaningful names and a short description about what each module does.

Initial setup is straightforward and I did not find it difficult. Liferay has great online documentation, which gives us more confidence in achieving anything with it.

It is a budget-friendly solution and less expensive than any other portal servers available on the market.

Go with this product, because there is great support from the company, rich forum support and online documentation, and the source code allows you to make changes on your own with an LGPL license from vendor.

I headed up the Accenture Global Portal Practice from 2011 to 2016. I led the delivery of enterprise portals for our customers. Customers liked this portal software platform because:

• No VC funding
• Open Source platform with no stack agenda
• Can run in any existing infrastructure with low cost of adoption
• Over 70 OOTB bundled features
• Open API Architecture allows you to maximize aggregation and back-end integration
• Multi-channel experiences with Liferay themes
• Audience targeting
• In VM Micro-services platform
• OSGi modularized reusable components
• Elasticssearch
• Liferay Experience Language (Lexicon). Fluid, extensible, built on Bootstrap 3, and written in Saas. Keeping is simple, consistent, and efficient
• Business process enabled forms

There are multiple examples of how it improved our business. It allows, from the user perspective, a single look and feel, as well as a consistent user experience.

• The documentation can be more detailed and better structured. A lot of the information is very often obtained by posting questions to the community or reaching out to Liferay support.
• It lacks true multi-tenant support.
• Liferay is missing features that would seamlessly integrate with cloud features such as auto-scaling, the ability to isolate a tenant to a specific instance, and cloud integrated notifications.

I have used this product for five years.

Stability is very dependent on architecture and testing. Proper architecture and testing directly relates to the stability of the product. This includes error handling design.

Scalability is also very dependent on the architecture and proper performance testing. Using portal farms enable linear scalability. Proper performance testing allows the elimination of bottlenecks.

Technical support was excellent.

As a portal practice, we are vendor agnostic.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Pricing and licensing are competitive.

Do a Proof of Concept (PoC).

You can create and manage dozens of sites with a single installation of Liferay, without a single line of Java code. Liferay has an excellent website concepts model, with a clear separation between content, applications, users, themes, layouts, etc.

We use Liferay on our modern-look, mobile-ready website and we also use it on out intranet. We use it on our customers projects, and they love Liferay's flexibility

Liferay is a phenomenal product with deficient marketing. More OOTB examples are needed to allow the user to faster realize it's full potential. We also need better translations. Some of the multi-lingual functionality can be improved.

We are using Liferay on and off since 2007, but we've chosen to standardize on this product around 2012.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability since 6.1

We've had no issues with scalability but we never had any project with more than 500 users (up to 2015). The benchmarks published by Liferay, however, look very promising on this matter.

I've been using mostly the Community Edition, but for customers with critical apps/sites I think the Enterprise Edition is good value.

I'm currently not a user of the official tech support but the forums and the web is full of useful information. When that fails, we can always look into the source code t understand what might be going wrong.

Yes, we used several PHP site management products but, when comparing to Liferay, they lack coherence and simplicity in the content management functions. As for integration and scalability, Liferay beats them all easily.

The initial setup is very easy but the OOTB themes are poor, when comparedto modern web design. If you register on the Marketplace you can download some very moderns themes and use them in your websites.

We have in-house expertise.

We have been using Liferay for our websites and intranet, and its difficult to calculate the ROI for that. But, since we adopted Liferay we have the ability to change contents and apps much faster, and that is invaluable , nowadays.

While we're not using the subscription services, we are aware that Liferay has very competitive pricing, when compared to the competition.

We had experience with Drupal, Joomla and other PHP platforms and we evaluated Sharepoint also.

We also evaluated Alfresco, but we decided that Alfresco and Liferay are not competitors. Instead, they both play very well together, for complex situations involving ECM, BPM and Web apps.

Liferay's social collaboration and the OSGi framework are valuable features.

We are using it to create the customer experience platform.

There should be less documentation about the differences and migration from the older versions is a must.

I am using Liferay for more than two years and the Liferay Digital Experience Platform(DXP) for around six months.

For fresh installations, no significant issues have been noted. However, there are major issues when migrating from older versions.

There were no scalability issues as of now.

Since Liferay DXP is relatively new, the support is also improving mainly, in terms of helping migration.

Liferay was mainly selected by me due to its collaboration and the digital features that help to make the digital platforms very strong for the customers.

For new installations, the setup is simple; but again migrations for the old version are a nightmare.

Liferay has some good licensing options, i.e., on the user-basis and server-basis. Thus, it works out good options based on your needs.

Before selecting Liferay in 2014, I evaluated the Oracle WebLogic Portal, the JBoss Portal, and the IBM WebSphere Portal.

Identify the business problems due to which you are looking for a digital platform, then compare the product features with those business problems, in order to make a wiser decision.

It is, still, maturing as a platform.