Liferay Digital Experience Platform Reviews

The most valuable features are role-based permissions, organization management, and the scalability of many third-party integrations.

Liferay has a CMS, role-based permissions, and hierarchy-of-organization community management which provides lots of features for intranet and enterprise applications. It also provides tools for mobile development.

The API documentation could be improved, as well as the debugging tools.

I’ve used Liferay for more than 6 years.

We had a number of issues with stability, but we found solutions from the community or in patches for the enterprise edition.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We didn’t use any other solutions.

The initial setup was quite easy.

We evaluated WebSphere before choosing Liferay.

For normal sites, we can use other available options, such as PHP. But Liferay is good for enterprise and large-scale systems, especially role and hierarchy management systems, or when you have multi-site requirements.

We have developed some outlets to manage some specific requirements for public administration and we use this solution to assist.

The solution is easy to install.

There's a lot of plugins. It's an enterprise-level solution that is ready to use almost immediately and users can immediately share and collaborate once they've installed the application.

It's one of the best platforms I've used.

The documentation provided needs to be more detailed. It's sometimes hard to develop things because the documentation is so sparse.

The forums should have more content and cover more areas of the solution. It's also not so easy to navigate through it.

I like to participate on some of Liferay's symposiums in Italy. We've found the company to be managing the architecture in Italy quite well, and we've been quite satisfied with them.

I've also worked on Tableau, which is a social platform. Tableau is quite lightweight and easy to use, but the community is smaller. Liferay has a big community at the moment.

The initial setup is straightforward. We found it to be quite easy to install, and very quick.

Liferay is an expensive solution.

The solution is quite expensive, and, in the Italian market, it may be a barrier to entry for many companies.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's a good platform that's easy to install and easy to start to use. It's also easy to customize if you are only going to customize some CSR. Although I've never tested it, I know now that it's possible to have access to more direct APIs.

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".

The most loved Liferay DXP feature launched is modularity. The modular approach to implementation helps to add enhancements easily.

The collaboration feature of Liferay is a very nice feature that can help to create a website quickly and easily, even by a non-technical person.

Apart from these, I also like the security features provided by Liferay.

Liferay can be used by a non-technical person with minimal training. A content publisher can easily update and add the content. This makes updates available faster for users.

Documentation for the newly launched version is not up to the mark. It would really be a great help for developers if they were to get proper documentation of the features.

I have used Liferay since 2007.

Stability is very well maintained by Liferay. Whenever they fix any issues, they publish it to the community, so we can apply a patch to make it more stable.

Liferay has provided proper guidance for making scalable enterprise solutions. One node of Liferay offers support for an extensive number of users. If the load is growing, we can easily add a node by making cluster environments.

Liferay provides multiple levels of support for their users. When we raise any support ticket, we get a prompt and quick response from their support staff.

I have used Plone, but went ahead with Liferay due to the availability of vast out-of-the-box features.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

Liferay provides a vast range of features with minimal license costs, which makes it better than the others.

Utilize its modularization feature to its best, to make it an easily extendible and scalable enterprise solution.

Definitely CMS. Tons of features are available for content management:

• Structures
• Templates
• Application display templates
• Asset publisher
• Staging
• Page management

These features have become well evolved over time.

It is very easy to pitch Liferay to any client. This is due to the wide array of functionalities it has and in terms of what it has to offer.

Liferay always delivers as follows:

• Setting up an intranet portal
• Making some public facing website
• Creating a collaboration platform

Documentation needs improvement. But this too has evolved over time and is still a work in progress.

I have been using Liferay for more than eight years.

Every major version has some stability issues, but that is the case in every product. Liferay has undergone a major overhaul in its DXP release, which has introduced some stability issues. From my experience, these issues will cease to exist after one or two minor releases.

We have not had any scalability issues.

Support is fair enough. I have seen that the technical support varies based on the region where you purchased the product.

For example, technical support in Europe and the Americas is very, very good. These regions have very good technical folks.

We didn’t have anything before Liferay. I had analyzed JBoss Portal in 2008, but I then went ahead with Liferay and I have never turned back.

The setup is fairly simple. You can set it up by the time your coffee is brewed.

Compared to other big players in portal platforms, Liferay's pricing is very competitive. And remember, the latest version of Liferay is not just a portal framework, but it is a digital experience platform which offers way more.

I evaluated JBoss Portal in 2008, but I then went ahead with Liferay

Go ahead with Liferay DXP. There is a lot of expertise in the market with this product. It is arguably the best Java-based portal platform out there.

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.

We only use it for internal, departmental websites. It helped us migrate our company’s EA website from SharePoint to Liferay.

It has increased communication between the departments and their employees.

We found it difficult to upload documents. It seemed unnecessarily complex.

I have used this solution for three years.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

Unfortunately, our company only allowed certain individuals to access Liferay technical support. For any kind of technical issue or training, we had to go through our fellow employees.

I would recommend that more employees get access to Liferay technical support. I would have found that very helpful.

My company was using SharePoint. I am not sure why the switch was made.

The setup was complex. Most people didn’t understand how to convert their SharePoint site to the Liferay platform. Many of them still hadn’t been converted when I left the company.

Line up technical support from Liferay with your company employees from the beginning of the implementation.

• Web content management system: Enables non-technical staff to add/update content that is approved by content approvers in a workflow. Staff is trained to create new sites.
• Integration platform: Integrates existing applications so that users are able to access content in one place.

It has helped our client to quickly set up websites for their external clients.

I am having a hard time getting through the security scans. I wish there were documentation to create some settings that would prevent scanning for each language when you are using a particular language.

I have used this solution for three years.

We have not yet had stability issues.

We have not yet had scalability issues.

We are a consulting company. Based on our clients' requirements, we have used various CMS products, such as Mura CMS, Drupal, and SharePoint.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We are using the Community Edition, so I cannot say anything about this subject.

For content management, we have used Mura which is a ColdFusion based CMS, Drupal, and SharePoint.

If possible, go for the enterprise version as they will have more support.