Why I need a portal ? I can develop anything

There is a big difference between Liferay Platform, and any other framework/Web Application.

In general, Developers can develop anything, but the question is how long it will take them to do that and how much you will spend on development, maintenance, support...also the quality of the code is not always guaranteed.

With liferay, we make that work for our clients. we have hundreds of the best developers around the world to create liferay platform with all the underlying integration, complex services and hundreds of out of the box features (content management system, document management system, integration platform, identity management, collaboration, campaign manager, audience targeting, single customer view… and much more) so that our clients can concentrate only on the business side of the platform.

Instead of spending years to develop a website with integrated services, you can spend months or even weeks to have a fully functional website.

Moreover, with liferay we support our clients in all the development/production phases to make sure they are always have a stable environment with the latest security updates and up to date with all the new technologies. Which mean for example if a new collaboration technology/portlet standard/ content management feature show up, our clients will find this option/standard available in future releases, integrated ready to use with their current environment.

Liferay is a hot deployable environment, which mean at the runtime, you can add any new application/themes/customization...without any downtime or interruption for the service. In any developed web application, you will always ask for downtime for any change and it will involve a team of developers/admins to do that for you. Moreover, With Liferay Platform, we offer the staging feature where you can have 2 separate environments, one for staging and the other for production, and create all your pages/contents on the staging one, test it, and with a click of a button you can move all what you did to the production environment with no need to involve technical people.

Also With Liferay, you can use any J2EE framework to develop your integration with external/internal systems. For the back-end service layer, you can use a frameworks like Spring, Struts and Liferay service builder, or you can simply use JSP or JSF pages if you don’t have a complex service layer. Moreover, if desired, you can use any JavaScript framework: AngularJS, NodeJS, EXTJs, BackboneJs, etc. We give the freedom to our clients to choose what they want based on their needs.