Liferay Digital Experience Platform Reviews

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.

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.

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.