What is Liferay?

Liferay inc. is an open-source company that provides paid professional service to users of its software. It provides a central platform (commonly referred to as a portal) where you can manage and publish web content. 

A portal is different from a normal website, because it pulls together information and applications from multiple sources into one website where users have access to specific content based on their roles.

Usually, each information source gets its section on the page for displaying information (a portlet). Then, users can personalize their dashboard by configuring which ones to display.

Portals provide a way for enterprises and organizations to exhibit a consistent experience with access control and procedures for multiple applications and databases, which otherwise would have been different web entities at various URLs.

Common use cases are intranets, customer/partner portals and integration platforms.

What makes Liferay special

Some features of Liferay which have made it so popular among business are mentioned below:

Flexible enterprise integration framework. Its central presentation layer allows administrators, users, and developers to integrate various services from back end applications.

Liferay Secure Single Sign On. It can integrate all different systems for the end-users and make it accessible through the portal by logging in using the Secure Single Sign On.

User personalization. With the permissions of the administrator, the user can personalize his website pages. He can add and remove content from his website. The user can keep his website private or make it public as well.

Rules engine integration. Liferay allows ‘Contextual Personalization’ based on the location of the end-users and their activities.

Role-based content delivery. one URL but different content for different roles.

Dynamic drag and drop interface. Easy customization for those responsible for maintaining the websites.

Performance monitoring. Liferay offers advanced analytical dashboards to help you understand the performance of your website. Dashboard functionalities can be extended with apps in the marketplace.

Extend your Liferay with apps in the marketplace. The marketplace offers apps that can add more features like communication centres and much more, but a lot of apps are only available for the paid version of Liferay. See the marketplace.

Security. Liferay is less susceptible to exploits and vulnerabilities because of advanced algorithms like DES, MD5 en RSA. 

Product innovation. A common phrase about the positive aspects of Liferay is that they are a leader in introducing new capabilities. Some examples are friendly URLs and mobile and social support.

When organizations choose Liferay

Liferay can be an overkill for your organization as it requires expert knowledge. If your organization only needs a CMS with vertical scaling, you’re probably better off using Drupal. But here are some situations where Liferay could potentially be the better option:

Need for centralization. Several teams working in your organization and you want to bring all your end-user touchpoints to one central platform. Support team needs a way for customers to submit issues. Marketing needs to customize the website. All needs to be done from the same platform.

High emphasis on user personalization. In case, you have several different user groups that each require content access depending on their role.

Security. The security standards are higher because of advanced algorithms like DES, MD5 en RSA. Also, Liferay is not as popular as WordPress or Shopify and therefore becomes a less interesting target for hackers. 

Is Liferay right for you? Feel free to talk to one of our consultants about the needs of your organization and we can assist you in making the best decision.

The different Liferay editions

Liferay Enterprise Edition (DXP)

The paid edition is called the enterprise edition (EE) or Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and is available upon request. It includes vendor support which enables you to do feature requests and benefit from ticket support to help with bugs related to the platform. According to Capterra, Liferay DXP starts from approximately 23,500$ per year, making it out of reach for small to medium sized businesses. But there’s an alternative.

Liferay Community Edition (CE or Portal)

The free, open-source edition is called the community edition (CE) or Liferay Portal and is downloadable here. Almost all features are identical to the paid version except the ability to download premium apps in the marketplace and of course the vendor support. Also, Liferay Portal (currently 7.3)  is always a few versions ahead of DXP (currently 7.2). New features are released in the community edition first and later added to the enterprise edition. 

Tip: To ensure smooth Liferay upgrades, we recommend using CE to your advantage by testing new features in CE before they become integrated in the DXP edition.

Find Liferay’s introduction video to Liferay DXP below.