Liferay vs. Joomla vs. Drupal

[J L Weis, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

I've been asked this questions before, and I must admit, my response was a bit floundering.

Why Liferay? or Why not Drupal, Joomla, blah, blah?

My strongest reply is that it 1. easier to deploy, 2. easier for developers, 4. more customizable, 5. doesn't have a stupid made-up name, 6. uses the jedi force, 7. has been recommended by technicians that I trust and admire, and finally, 8. it meets ALL my web app requirements.

But I am interested in hearing from the experts. Of course you could point me to the marketing garble that you have on your site. But I'd prefer the response came from you. Why have you chosen Liferay over the rest?

As a budding Liferay evangelist, your response will strengthen my allegiance.

Oh, unrelated, what did happen to "Project Looking Glass"?

[Victor Zorin, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

J, from my point of view, major strength is that liferay is an enterprise level system which is built on top of and supports set of widely accepted industry standards, with one of the being Sun Java Portlet Specification.
Such approach shall provide peace of mind for business people for multiple reasons, some of the are cost-related:
- there is a growing number of compatible systems (which support same standards); i.e. your applications can be migrated to other platforms without major development effort
- there is a wider range of people that are able to develop and support your applications, even without detailed knowledge of liferay

Another one, specific to you J. Imagine, when in 2 years time your WM business reaches Fortune 1000 level - you would not have to worry about your business platform, as from day 1it is already of an enterprise class.

And I think you've made a interesting observation about names, there is something in it.

[J L Weis, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

Hey Victor. Thanks for the reply. I am looking forward to our continuing relationship in many ways. In the end, this thread might help out the Liferay Marketing Team. We oughtta request some form of tangible credit for this. Ha Ha.

What is your take on this discussion my Liferay friends. Why is Liferay better than the rest? Again, I am not looking for a scrubbed marketing brochure. I am hoping that you'll provide your personal opinion on why Liferay is ahead of the rest.

http://www.liferay.com/web/raymond.auge/profile
http://www.liferay.com/web/ziggy/profile
http://www.liferay.com/web/aarti/profile
http://www.liferay.com/web/jonasxyuan/profile
http://www.liferay.com/web/bsener/profile
http://www.liferay.com/web/ronald.sarayudej/profile
http://www.liferay.com/web/amos.fong/profile
http://www.liferay.com/web/bryan.cheung/profile
http://www.liferay.com/web/scott.lee/profile
http://www.liferay.com/web/lorgarn/profile
http://www.liferay.com/web/nathan.cavanaugh/profile
http://www.liferay.com/web/starkhydra/profile
http://www.liferay.com/web/brian.kim/profile
http://www.liferay.com/web/aperezymadrid/profile
http://www.liferay.com/web/mpoznecki/profile
http://www.liferay.com/web/32141/profile
http://www.liferay.com/web/livcis/profile

Any other Jedi Council! Please reply.

[J L Weis, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

HEY. Why is Liferay NOT listed on wikipedia's list of "comparison of web application frameworks" http://tr.im/rUm2

[Yongming Duan, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

vs. Elgg

[J L Weis, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

Yongming. What is your opinion? How does Elgg compare to Liferay?

[delang j, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

i had been using joomla and liferay before and i must admit that liferay the easiest to learn, use, customize.

the most feature i love about liferay is within one liferay bundle u can build many portals.

[J L Weis, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

Hey Liferay.

Does anyone in marketing and sales have a simple marketing table that compares Liferay with other top Web Application Systems?

J

[Jorge Ferrer, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

Hi JL,

I've used Drupal and Joomla in a couple of personal projects and I'd say that each has its own strenghts. Joomla is quick to get something up and running but muy experience with the available extensions and the extension API is quite bad. For me Drupal is nicer, and its extension modules are quite good. If you need a small-medium dynamic site is certainly a good option, specially if you need to deploy it in a hosting environment.

Where I think Liferay excels is when your site grows larger, when you need to start doing customizations or both. I've seen several Drupal projects grow into multiple sites and ending up with 5 or more Drupal installations to power different sites. Such scenario quickly becomes a maintenance nightmare. With Liferay you can easily have not 5 but hundreths or thousands of sites in one installation, and creating a new one is just a click away.

Liferay also excels when integrating applications, because it provides a very solid framework based on standards with a flexible user and permission system. That's quite hard to find in the PHP world. Another argument for many people that I talk with is the fact that there are many more integration libraries in enterprise Java than there is in the PHP world.

I hope that helps.

[Josh Asbury, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

Hi JL -

I have worked with Joomla and Drupal on a few projects, and while they have their merits, I always turn back to Liferay. Joomla "gets the job done" for a single site, but the different extensions (of varying quality) can quickly turn into a maintenance nightmare. Drupal feels more solid to me, but it has a pretty steep learning curve that turns many users off.

To me, Liferay's core strengths as compared to Drupal and Joomla are:
1. Easy to use
2. Multiple site management
3. Customization through the SDK
4. Excellent enterprise-grade software

[Claudio Patricio Rifo, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

I have use both drupal and joomla, and both of them are also great tools.
Joomla and Drupal, both based on php and mysql, both are really easy to install and get a site running on minutes.
Joomla always 1 install for 1 site, while drupal can use a 1 install for X site, it's not quite easy as Liferay.

I got to use liferay, because i was looking for something as joomla or drupal, with multi-organization, multi-site, multi-everithing. but even more for dummy's than drupal. Then i found liferay.

Now, i belive that liferay can still learn something's from joomla and drupal. For instance, i really miss the print as pdf, send to email, etc.. buttons... i was abble to put them in liferay ussing the openoffice module, but still can get them on all Portles as default (And dont answer me that i must change some code, becasuse i belive that such feature must be a core one).

But Liferay also got a lot of things that i belive shoud be core features on Joomla, things such as comments on everithing, Multi-Everithing install, and more important, a really good granular ACL.

Even that now i have sopt using joomla from a while and become a big fan of liferay, there are a lot of things to improve. Specially documentation. Every time i search portlets itś a mess figuring out What are they for:

For instance, WOL -> World of liferay.
As a Beginner, who knows what that means??, (now i do, and really use it)

Scopes of the search engine (I finally got to a post of SOLR where i reallised, that default search engine indexes files on library)

Also, one thing nore to improve.... OUT OF THE BOX INSTALLATION ON MAJOR APPLICATION SERVERS
NOT ONE LINE OF CODE TO INSTALL ON JBOSS OR WEBPSHERE..... and if is nesesary, please document all the options.

Finally (I was getting of the main topic).
I shoose liferay over any other tool becasue:
1.- Multi-everithing
2.- Amazing look out of the box
3.- Amazing functionallity out of the box
4.- Top of the line use new technologies (Next year i'll be probably triying out Liferay conected to our new ERP)

Thanks for your time, hope this is usefull.
PD: Zorry for my english.

[Lisa Simpson, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

I've used all 3 at one time or another. I evaluate open-source products on a few criteria:

• Size of Development Community
• Longevity of the Development Community
• Stability of Platform
• Ease of Use
• Security
• Ease of Administration

Size and Longevity are all about equal on all 3. Stablilty seems about equal.

Security -

JOOMLA - security is getting better, but IMHO, still not where it needs to be for "enterprise". Ok for JoeBob & BettySue's House of Widgets but definitely not a Fortune500 kind of app.

Drupal - Same

Liferay - has some issues but easily correctable. Still JVM security is better than PHP, out of the box.

Ease of Use -

JOOMLA - not so easy for end users to grasp and "run with" on their own

Drupal - probably slightly better than Joomla

Liferay - first training class I ever did for end users - total time 30 minutes... They've been managing their own community ever since.

Ease of Administration -

JOOMLA - adding and removing components can be a bit tricky especially since some of the components can step on each other

Drupal - haven't had a lot of experience with this recently and I hear that they just changed a lot, so I'll keep my comments to myself here

Liferay - This is one area where Liferay could really really really use some improvement. Compared to some of the better PHP-base apps like SMF, WordPress, ZenCart, etc. Liferay's administrative functions are just almost stone-age. Control panel based upgrades, backups, scheduling, intuitive interface, etc. Given the choice between training my IT staff and training my end-users, I'd rather train my IT staff.

[Michael Wang, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

When we disscussing projects with clients,they also asked whats the different among the Liferay vs. Joomla vs. Drupal , but mostly they are decided to using Liferay ,esp when they are considering their current business model and future systems integrations.Liferay is much more Powerful...


BUT, Regarding Liferay Portal vs. IBM Portal vs. EBA Portal , can anyone give some suggestions ?

[Lisa Simpson, modificado 14 Anos atrás.]

Once you get out of PHP-land, there's not that much difference. The dividing lines are in what portlets are available out of the box and how much you want to spend. The rest is about who on staff has skills to administer what or who feels up for a new challenge. For me, I go back all the way to BEA Weblogic some years back before Oracle bought them. But Tomcat, JBOSS, Oracle's Application Server, SunONE, and others have been in and out of my life.

I know a lot of IT peeps who get one tool and then try to do everything in the world with that one tool. The old adage about everything looking like a nail when all you have is a hammer..... I really like Liferay. IF you want the good, the bad, and in some cases, the old and outdated, check that thread out. I'm a bit of a loner in being a Liferay advocate. I'm also a realist and I know that Liferay isn't always going to be the perfect choice for every shop and every combination of technologies on the planet. There are going to be times when you *should* pick something else.

Once you start to talk about integration, I think a lot of it depends on what will play well with your other systems. Since I have no idea what else you have to integrate with, you'll have to judge that for yourself. If you're a heavy Oracle Shop, then run Oracle's Application server. I say that simply because it will likely integrate easier with your existing applications. Oracle's stuff is exceptional in this regard. So if you're running Oracle Reports, Oracle Financial, etc. it will all just sort of "suck" right into the App server without a lot of tweaking and tinkering. In that regard, Oracle is slick as snot on a doorknob. You will, however, have to pay dearly for the privileged. Then the question becomes, is it worth it right now? Will it be worth it in the next 3 to 5 years? Will the cost of EE and custom development in Liferay be equal to or greater than the cost of Oracle? If the answer to that is yes, then you should pick Oracle. The same applies to SunOne or any other application/portal server.

The other consideration is the presence of some "must have" feature in one platform that isn't present in the others. Does IBM do something for you that no other application server do? Or EBA? Or eXo? or Weblogic? or Websphere? or some other product? Then, by all means, choose that.

However, it sounds like your customer isn't currently running a lot of "heavy iron" applications. If they've been running Joomla or Drupal, I can almost guarantee that they're not using a lot of enterprise level software. That being the case, Liferay is quite likely the most bang for the buck. And it will grow well with them over time. The 5.3 release is looking especially promising.

[V S, modificado 13 Anos atrás.]

Hi, I am fully agree with the view of Lisa Simpson. All available tools are better then each other in some aspects but best one is that which one perfectly suit with your requirement, existing environment and compatible with your existing application(s).