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".

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.

• Security: Authentication is just plug-and-play. Almost all types of mechanisms under the sun seem to be supported and a few could be used from a marketplace app.
• Authorization: With roles and permission, it is very fine grained to the data-level. The best part is that it provides easy APIs to use for custom apps, the way we want it.
• Themes: We can change practically anything of the look and feel of the portal. Customization is also pretty easy. The framework helps us to keep things separate from Liferay’s code base and yet achieve the desired results.
• Sites, Page and Content Creation: This was a breeze. This was as if I were creating a Word file on my file system and writing content to the Word file. We used it heavily. Not only that, we could bring our content live with ease by embedding JavaScript.
• Collaboration Features: Sharing and collaborating on Wikis and documents became much better by version 6.2, much to our relief.
• Hooks: We did some heavy customizations. Most of the customizations were plug-and-play with hooks. This is a really handy feature for developers.
• I have used other portals, but they don’t let you meddle with the portal. Liferay is different because it lets you do what you want to do with the portal.

Before Liferay, we had a lot of different sites. These included local setups for different purposes, and for same purposes, but with different locations.

We were having a hard time collaborating through external services like email, network-drives, and Google Drive.

Most of the time, the content history could not be tracked. This meant that we would have to check emails for approvals for a specific content and notifications etc.

But with Liferay, not only was collaboration streamlined, all audits are now in place, thanks to an easy Kaleo workflow.

The site-feature also makes it easier for bringing up another site within a day for a demo or other collaborations. Permissions can be set location wise and themes can be customized according to the user logged-in and by location.

• Theme for mobile
• Loading less files on mobile with rules
• Accessing Liferay as an app on mobile: The Liferay mobile SDK might solve this.
• Pricing
• Modularization of apps would help: Even if we don't need a particular feature, it still gets deployed with Liferay. Liferay 7.0 will solve it, hopefully.

I have used this solution for five years.

Issues were encountered with version 6.1 EE and the start of version 6.2 EE.

We did not encounter any scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 8/10.

The initial setup was quite straightforward with the bundled application. Just deploy and restart the server. For cloud, there were some extra settings, but it still was quite straightforward.

There are different licenses for production, development, and backup. Pricing has gone up after version 6.2. The development license might be too costly for small to medium-sized businesses.

We evaluated SharePoint.

The EE version is much more secure than the CE version.

Lately, the CE version has become a little unstable and fixes mostly come quite late in the version cycle.

Keeping that in mind, if you are looking for a complete portal solution with security and ease of set-up, then go for it.

Even for hosting multiple sites, this could be much better. But make sure that the pricing fits your bill.

This product has large a number of out-of-the-box features for collaboration, social integration, audience targeting, and personalization.

This product built a capability to provide enterprise based solution to the client with more agility and flexibility.

Liferay requires more room to provide ease of use for the content contributors.

I have used this product for over seven years.

Stability was an issue at some point of time when the higher versions were released. However, Liferay rectified it quickly and provided the patch releases to make it more stable.

We had no scalability issues.

I rarely required any technical support apart from the patch releases.

The setup was straightforward. It comes with a bundle and provides a setup wizard for the initial setup.

Choose the best option for your business.

We looked at Joomla!, Drupal, and Adobe CQ5. We felt that they covered more in the content management area, instead of in the enterprise solutions.

If you need to build enterprise solutions with digital experience, then this product fulfills all the requirements from customization, custom development, integration, and configuration.

I really value the out-of-the-box features (portlets/application), OSGi modularity (in the last version), and tools for developers.

We needed to rewrite a legacy application written from scratch with much less developer resources. Liferay was a great choice. It had a big learning curve in advance, but it had great results in the end.

I would like to see better documentation. Updates in the documentation do not follow updates in the code and functionality.

I have used it since version 5.2, in 2008.

There were some scalability issues. Finding a good infrastructure setup is not an easy task. Some scalability issues can arise when changing database engines, since Liferay supports different databases.

I didn't use technical support.

It might sound trivial, but plan all the project phases, in terms of infrastructure and performance testing, well.

Liferay starting from DXP redesign the full software architecture using OSGI (actually since 6.2 is integrated but just for small integration points). With this new design, they gain the possibility to updates released version more frequently and also "components by components." From a point of view of a developer this is a great improvement by the way after first general available release. Liferay also released public documentation, allowing developers build custom plugin and general customization. This documentation gets outdated in different parts after some new release (GA2 ,etc).

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.

I like most of out-of-the-box features, especially the control panel features.

There is no need to develop from scratch. The framework is ready for development. It provides multi-tenancy and is easy to integrate with other applications.

The front-end technologies need improvement.

I have used Liferay for eight years.

We did not encounter many problems with stability.

We did not need to make any changes to support our work for a long time.

I would give technical support a rating of 3.5-4/5.

We traditionally build applications from scratch. This makes basic setup, such as user management, organization, roles, and permissions easier. It is easy to extend or customize out-of-the-box features.

It is easy to set up for any environment. Instructions are available over the internet.

I did not get a chance to work with sales.

We did not really evaluate other options.

Liferay, Version 7, gives OSGI implementation. This is the future of Java technologies. Liferay enables you to stay with latest technologies with each version release.