Liferay Digital Experience Platform Reviews

• 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.

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.

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.

• Portlet development technology promotes re-usability of code (one portlet can be used in many portals).
• Very powerful product for Intranet solutions.
• Multi-instance capability.
• Document management and its permission system is very powerful.

It helps develop intranet solutions with code re-usability; once you develop a portlet, you can use it for any number of different solutions.

Its marketplace provides many out-of-the-box functionalities.

Architecture is so good that you can fit many organizational structures into Liferay.

• Documentation
• Mobility
• Theme development is tough for UI guys. A UI guy needs to learn to work with Liferay.

I have been using Liferay 6.2 for the last two years and Liferay Digital Experience Platform for the last three to four months.

As for now, Liferay DXP was just released, so there are many issues. Things don't work as mentioned in the documentation. It will get stable in the next releases. Liferay 6.2 was quite a stable version.

We haven’t had any scalability issues.

I rate technical support 8/10.

I was not previously using any other solutions.

Initial setup is not very complex, but you need to follow the exact steps they suggest and it’s not that easy.

No advice as of now.

Check your requirements and license costs. If you are going with a licensed version, try to map your functionalities with Liferay. Then decide whether you need Liferay or not.

• CMS lets business users to create and manage web content by business users, while maintaining revisions. Liferay enables users to be independent of developers and to be able to manage content within the portal.
• Roles and permissions management gives developers the ability to build persona- and preference-based functionality within the portal.
• Document library
• Plugins, workflows and rules provide flexibility to customize the portal.

• A self-service portal for customers
• An online community to share and get knowledge
• A portal for distributing manuals.

• Ability to create content
• A cloud offering

I have used Liferay for approximately five years.

Liferay is a very stable product (except for version 7, as it is relatively new).

We have no issues with scalability.

Technical support is very good.

We started using Liferay directly. There was no previous solution.

Setup was straightforward.

It is very affordable and licensing is similar to Red Hat Linux, where we pay only for the support.

We evaluated Adobe Experience Manager and WebSphere Portal v6.

Have a complete understanding of out-of-the-box features as Liferay makes most of the functionality required available without any customization.

• Social networking
• Document sharing

We get better communication between team members and faster access to documents.

There is always is something to improve. I welcome improving the DMS camp and more easy collaboration with Microsoft Active Directory.

I have used Liferay for three years.

We have not had stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

I didn’t use technical support.

I used more Microsoft solutions and Liferay is a more complex, “all in one” solution.

Setup was not straightforward. The Community Edition was a bit complicated and they should fix the code.

I use the GNU license.

I chose between Liferay, Drupal and Microsoft products.

Liferay is highly scalable and more complex than Drupal. For the same quality, you need more Microsoft solutions, so more servers and more capacity.