Editions of Liferay

Liferay ships in two different editions: Liferay Portal Community Edition (CE) and Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition (EE). CE is the same Liferay Portal that has been available for years: frequently updated and bursting with the latest features, the Community Edition of Liferay Portal is offered for free under the Lesser GNU public license, an open source license. This license gives you the flexibility to link Liferay with your own code in your portlet, theme, hook, layout, Ext, or web plugins, no matter what license you use for your code. If, however, you modify Liferay directly, those modifications need to be released as open source. This is really the best of both worlds: you have the freedom to do what you want with your code if you use plugins, but if you modify Liferay directly, the community receives the benefits of any enhancements that you've made.

Liferay Portal EE is a supported version of Liferay Portal for the enterprise. Hardened for security and designed to be rock solid stable, EE is offered with a subscription and support package, allowing organizations to build their portals on a stable version of the product that is offered over an extended period of time.

Because the release cycle for EE is longer than that for CE, each enterprise release is supported for 4 years. All bug fixes in Liferay Portal are backported to your version of Liferay for the duration of your subscription. This gives organizations the peace of mind that comes from knowing that their Liferay-powered web sites are stable and will run for years to come, enabling them to build their sites on a proven, stable platform. Additionally, Liferay offers training and consulting on the Enterprise Edition to ensure long-term support and stability for our clients.