Liferay Digital Experience Platform Reviews

Student and staff facing self-serve portal with customized relevant data based on user's affiliation with the university.

Current management decided not to convert our student portal (Liferay 6.1) to Liferay DXP.  Instead, we opted for an in-house developed solution coded with Java and Aurelia with centralized data libraries accessible via APIs, Web Services, etc.  This provided our developers the unlimited ability to customize a lightweight solution which integrates with our SIS and other business/web applications. 

The web/mobile/portal integration was one of the features that we found most valuable, primarily because it reduced our development time.

Since we did not implement the product, I do not have a suggestion for improvement. 

Their pricing model should be modified to include per user options instead of just servers/cores, etc.

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.

It has a built-in WCMS (web content management system) and provides the ability to develop complex portlet-based web applications. That's valuable because it is Java/Java EE-based and open source.

The documentation could be better.

I have used Liferay for three years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

Setup was easy and straightforward.

Hire developers with a high level of expertise with Liferay Portal.

• 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.

• Flexibility to fit our business requirements under many different scenarios, from simple public web sites to customer or distributor portal solutions and intranets.
• As a J2EE and open source platform, this product allow us to extend its out-of-the-box features such as CMS, sites management, permissions, workflows, security system, mobile framework, etc. We can do this in a well-defined way by using custom plugins developed in Java with standard tools and J2EE specifications.
• Full support for enterprise systems integrations. Liferay allows us to integrate with our company systems, for instance, IAM, EIP, Web Services. It creates custom plugins or uses the OOTB integrations, like Siteminder, LDAP, CAS, SAML, and Amazon S3.
• Flexibility about the ecosystem, as you can choose between many configurations and products for Liferay installation. For example, Database (Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL Server), App Servers (Tomcat, JBoss, WebSphere, WebLogic), according to its certificated and supported compatibility matrix.

A good example in my organization (insurance sector) is that we can implement public, customer, and distributor portals for many countries with different requirements, in many different languages (including Greek or Arabic, flipping the full page reading).

Business people can manage the web content/pages and targeted campaigns including SEO for different user segments. This is possible by implementing custom components to guide the final clients through the purchase funnel to buy insurance policies. It can also provide customer tools, such as accident party reporting, and capture new leads to send them to the CRM system.

In our company, each country can have different backend solutions for CRM, IAM, quotation engines, etc. All these combinations are well supported by Liferay as a front-end solution including responsive design, tracking actions, analytics, etc.

Another good point was the acceleration around the built solutions. We created a reusable internal marketplace to share "Functional Assets" defined by the business, with many countries, adapting a few things like translations.

With this approach, any country is able to launch new features on their web sites with less cost, by just reusing the functional assets from other countries where they want to generate new opportunities.

• Business centricity with more tools relating to SEO and content targeting, for instance, cookie management to collect web data, etc.
• Staging and LARs export/import features. This is always a pain in Liferay with many errors caused mostly by some inconsistent data in the database. It should be improved for sure, because this is a very interesting feature for business people, and currently, it is very hard to use it.
• Provide official Docker images as a production distributable solution. The trend is to go to PaaS based solutions as container platforms, and Liferay doesn't provide this kind of option OOTB.
• Architecture based in distributed/remote micro-services with containers. The idea of "break the monolith" at the application layer using OSGi is OK, but it's still running in a unique JVM as a whole. I think it is still a monolithic approach.
• Liferay Connecting Service (LCS) needs to improve to support the elastic licensing and be ready for container support. It needs some UI improvements, such as server management or subscription to environment options which have certain limitations.
• Official training should be improved, by creating upgraded short courses for people who already know Liferay technology.
• The official certification lost interest for me personally, since people can buy the exam answers on the Internet. I think Liferay should fight against this practice, because I cannot trust people who have a Liferay certificate, and it reduces the value of my own efforts to obtain the certification.

I was working with Liferay solutions for 14 years, using all Enterprise versions of the product from older ones, previous Enterprise Edition releases, to the latest DXP version.

As with any product, there are stability issues at times. However, working side by side with the official support, we minimized any risk to reduce the business impact as much as possible.

We haven't yet encountered any scalability issues, except in previous versions, such as v6.2. When we used the search index replication over 6GB of size with two nodes, it was too heavy to move in between the cluster and it failed. It gave us, as a result, a corrupt index and lost results in searches.

I would give the technical support a rating 10/10. It is effective against bugs, with engineers replying to tickets very quickly. In the resolution, they provide you with patches in order to resolve issues as soon as possible.

You can count on different levels of support, according your requirements and budget.

I am not aware of any previous solutions in my current company. I worked with WordPress and Drupal, and I switched to Liferay for the integration capabilities using Java standards and flexibility.

Installation is easy, but preparing it for production mode is a bit more complex. I've found a lot of people in the market who can install Liferay, but the real problem is not the installation itself. The issue is to install it correctly and tune the product well by doing load tests and fine tuning Liferay and the JVM.

Another very important factor is to follow best practices in your development. My experience says that 90% of the performance issues came from the custom developments, where developers do not follow the recommendations and best practices, or use the product in a bad way.

For this reason, my company wrote a Liferay Best Practices book to share with any internal or external developers. We implemented a certification process to ensure stability, best practices, software quality, architecture, and security guidelines in order to avoid production issues.

DXP subscription is cheaper than other products on the market.

The license/subscription is associated to the number of Liferay instances, CPU cores, and level of support (Gold, Platinum).

I recommend that you talk with your Liferay Account Manager and establish a plan according your needs.

We evaluated Oracle Portal, WordPress, and Drupal.

Find professionals with real expertise in Liferay in the different areas of developers and operations to avoid common mistakes. They should have experience in at least two real production implementations.

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).

• Scalable
• Easily integrates with other ecosystems
• Fast
• User-friendly
• Speedy development

As it is open source, it has lots of features and it is constantly updating. Therefore, bugs also keep coming. More quality improvement is required.

I have used this product for the last seven years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Technical support was good.

We previously deployed WebLogic, but we moved to Liferay because it offered a range of out-of-box features. It was also faster than WebLogic.

The setup was easy.

Pricing is less expensive and structured in comparison to other paid portals.

As mentioned earlier, we used WebLogic.

It’s fast, easy, scalable, and stable with a competitive price. Go for it.

The very first and important feature of Liferay is that it is open-source and can be extended as per the requirements.

I would like to mention about the Hooks/Ext plugins that I have extensively used to adapt Liferay as the solution, in order to reach the business requirements.

The document library, built-in Kaleo Workflow engine, and CMS (Content Management System) are very useful features.

They can be modified/extended at any level.

Overall, it provides easy scalability and integration with the third-party system/APIs like OAuth, social media, and Salesforce. In turn, it provides a great benefit by reducing development time and effort.

As mentioned above, we have done social media integration for SSO (LinkedIn, Facebook) easily. We have integrated with Salesforce CRM and we used the Liferay CMS feature for authoring and publishing content in a flawless way.

The Liferay document library provided a smooth way to manage assets and documents, even for large volumes.

It could have better stability and performance tuning.

Support provided for the Enterprise Edition is really poor. The support is poor because of the delayed response and less-technology support provided.

Sometimes, the customer needs more troubleshooting from the vendor, especially in the initial period, i.e., while setting up the development platform or deployment environment.

I have not only used this solution, but I have also done development with Liferay for around three years.

We did encounter stability issues. The initial version of 6.2 had stability issues. Later, with the advance builds, it became better.

There were no scalability issues.

The technical support is really poor. But we did not face many issues, as it is an open-source product.

Initially, we were using the IBM WebSphere Portal. However, we switched over to Liferay because of its lower licensing costs, obviously.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The setup process is well documented in the official site. But the development curve is steeper and the documentation could be better.

Liferay has both the Community and Enterprise Editions. The Community Edition is free and we have used it too. The Enterprise Edition comes with a few extra features. This should be actually driven by the requirements.

We evaluated Alfresco (open source software) and Adobe Experience Manager, as alternatives. However, we have used the latter as well, for some other project.

It is a wonderful open-source product that has many out-of-the-box features. However, the initial learning is important and the curve is steeper.

Someone has to learn about the Liferay Portlets, Ext, Hooks, Themes, Layout, and make use of the knowledge properly for actual implementation.

It has great support for the different Java frameworks such as the Spring Web MVC framework, Java collections framework (JCF), and the front-end frameworks, namely Angular. Make your choice as you wish.