Liferay vs Alfresco

[Sven Werlen, modifié il y a 13 années.]

Hi all,

Is there anywhere a comparison between Liferay and Alfresco?
Alfresco introduced many new features that can be compared to what Liferay portal provides:
* Alfresco WCM & Surf
* Alfresco Share

I love Liferay and how easy you can build new public/private sites. We used Alfresco in combination to Liferay in certain circumstances (mainly because of CIFS & MS Office integration) and developed several portlets for viewing documents from Alfresco on the portal. However, we never considered using Alfresco for wikis, forums, etc...

Now, we are confronted to some customers which already have Alfresco and ask us why they should Liferay and not just Alfresco Share or WCM.

Has anyone experienced both and can share advantages/disadvantages with me?

Thx

[Koen Cleynhens, modifié il y a 13 années.]

Nice question.

I need the same kind of information.

It should not be so difficult for experiences users with both Liferay/Alfresco knowledge to give the correct arguments for which task to use Alfresco, and which not.

[Ramesh Vijayaraghavan, modifié il y a 13 années.]

Alfresco is more content management tool and would be effective if that is the feature that the client would like to see. Liferay does not have strong content management capabilities, In fact in 605, the document library has performance issues if the number of documents are more than 2000-3000 and also I have seen some permission issues to the folders as well.

If there are some features in Liferay that the clients like, then Liferay-Alfresco integration is an option, if the client does not really care, then stay with Alfresco.

Ultimately, use the right tool for the right job.

[Sven Werlen, modifié il y a 13 années.]

My experience is quite different.

First, we never faced performance issues with Liferay. One of our customers has more than 7000 documents that members shared. This customer is still using Liferay 5.2.3, but it would surprise me that 6.x handles documents much differently.

In terms of WCM, my impression is that Liferay is much more flexible and intuitive than Alfresco. Creating a new page can be done in a few clicks: choose a layout, drag-and-drop applications, configure applications. I might be wrong but I've not seen anything similar in Alfresco yet.

Moreover, Liferay is based on standards (portlets) and Alfresco not (dashlet). And applications are not always compatible with the others (Alfresco RM cannot really be used with Alfresco, but rather with Share).

We use Alfresco as document repository for its additional functionalities (CIFS, rules, RM, office plugins, etc...) but never as front-end for a website. We rather use a portlet to present Alfresco documents in a transparent way in Liferay.

[Armaz Mellati, modifié il y a 13 années.]

Thanks for your input.
I wonder however how does the search work when you have documents in Alfresco and other content in Liferay ? Is it possible to get a seamless integration there ?

Regards
Armaz Mellati

[Sven Werlen, modifié il y a 12 années.]

With federated search engines (like Constellio), search can handle it.

It depends on what you're trying to achieve.
We are using Alfresco portlets as view to a specific folder in Alfresco (read-only). Documents are stored in Alfresco by processes (BPMS).

I tested CMIS integration but it's not really usable.
Liferay document management tends to improve (webdav integration). I've seen some community members working on CFIS, too.

[Abhishek Saxena, modifié il y a 12 années.]

Comparison with features is a bit tough however choosing product which would fit your requirements will depend on how well have you defined your requirements

My take is If you need the more of portal capabilities with decent CMS support liferay is the best option , if you are going content heavy with little or no requirement of portal capabilities go for Alfresco.
Liferay Rocks , it leverages you with best of portal capabilities and decent CMS , if you know how to use velocity and customize according to your needs it would suffice purpose of most of the web sites.,JS and cool CSS would do rest of the remaining job or there are many front end tech which LR supports.
use SOLR indexing to enhance CMS search etc etc.

Alfresco plays its part when you are content heavy or need some cool content types , alfresco can be integrated with LR there are many Wiki articles for the integration

LR rocks

[Paul Allain, modifié il y a 6 années.]

Even as of 2017 Liferay is buggy beyond reason and the CE version is getting worst with every release. Shame there are no other open source alternatives. I would move away from liferay in a flash if there was one. Yes that's how annoyed I am with this product.