Liferay Digital Experience Platform Reviews

All of the following features are important to us:

• Content Management System
• Document Management System
• Workflow Engine
• Roles and permissions for authorization and authentication
• Forums, blogs, and chat
• Responsive UI

They are all in high demand, and we have implemented them for our customers.

We use the Workflow Engine for managing the approval process. We have used blogs and discussion forums for information exchange between the employees, and as a chatting platform within the organization.

The loading speed could be improved.

I have been using Liferay Digital Experience Platform for about 10 years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We received very good technical support. For the Enterprise Edition versions, there is exclusive support. For the Community Edition versions, there are a lot of forums available.

Before using Liferay Digital Experience Platform, we used WordPress. Liferay is far more secure and robust.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

The Community Edition versions are open source and freely available.

Pricing for Enterprise Edition versions can be obtained by requesting a quote from Liferay.

We evaluated both WordPress and Drupal before deciding on Liferay.

This product is very secure, robust, and highly scalable. It can also be customized to almost any extent.

I think that it could be interesting to expand the eCommerce capabilities to the B2C sector.

Social areas and capabilities need improvement. If you compare this product with Jive or other standard social business platforms, Liferay has room to improve in terms of reusability, functions, and capabilities. Jive and other leading social business company platforms all have a lot of add-ons. Liferay could add some social add-ons.

Compared to other platforms the initial setup is not very complex.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

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.

• 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.

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.

The most valuable feature is management and permissions according to user, role, and group.

There are several areas that need improvement:

• The core code base needs refactoring. It’s very hard to understand it when trying to do customizations.
• They could remove the business logic from the UI (JSPs) and stop using scriptlets in JSPs.
• Data integrity should be at the database level (normalization/foreign keys) and not at the application level.
• Also, they need to upgrade third party libraries (e.g., Spring) to the newest versions. Liferay is stuck on Spring 3.2, while Spring 4.3.x is the last version and they are working on a 5.0 framework.
• Use Java Config instead of XML config.
• Add support for JBoss EAP domain mode
• Source code sharing in SVN/git still needs to be revisited

I’ve used Liferay for more than 1 year.

Yes, we did have issues with stability.

Yes, we encountered scalability issues.

Initial setup was complex compared to IBM WebSphere.

I recommend going with the CE version.

We evaluated IBM WebSphere portal, but found WebSphere to be overkill for our project.

I would emphasize using Liferay’s OOTB features so you don’t build something that already exists.

Also, make sure you actually need the features it provides.

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).

For me, the most important features are scalability, architecture, the fact that it's Java-based, includes a CMS, and provides audience targeting tools. The newest Liferay "Screens" feature is very interesting too.

We develop advanced web solutions based on Liferay with lower development costs and fewer team members.

Liferay needs a better web content search engine.

I've been using Liferay since 5.2.x version in 2009.

We have stability issues only when the developers don't follow the Liferay guidelines and best practices.

I didn't have any issues with scalability.

Liferay has good technical support with a high level of product knowledge.

I’ve tested several options over the years: PHPnuke, PostNuke, Joomla, WordPress, Drupal. But none of them have as many built-in features as Liferay.

Liferay bundles make the initial setup is very easy. Just execute a bundled Tomcat package with a Liferay installation within.

It’s a good idea to subscribe to Liferay support. They have good product knowledge and solve problems quickly.

We tried Drupal, but it doesn't have as many built-in features as Liferay.

My advice is that if you want to extend the product, don't recreate existing functionalities or libraries. Just follow the guidelines and best practices.