Liferay Enterprise vs. Liferay Community: What are the differences?

Veriday / November 18th, 2015

6 min read

Liferay is the most innovative, fully functional open source portal product available in the market. Leading companies and organizations worldwide are using Liferay’s portal software for their business solutions. For a look into Liferay’s customer base, check out this article on who is using this technology.

Liferay offers two different editions: Liferay Portal Community Edition (CE) and Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition (EE). So, what is the main difference? Below we will discuss the main differences and use cases for both editions.

Liferay Enterprise Edition (EE)

Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition is the commercial version of Liferay’s portal technologies. The Enterprise Edition is a paid portal, which provides an enterprise license from Liferay with ongoing feature updates and full service support. Liferay EE is the ideal choice for small and large enterprises, performance, or security critical applications.

Liferay EE is all about innovative technologies. Created for the Enterprise, Liferay EE provides a virtual space where you can centralize, share, and collaborate. Liferay EE has a wide range of functionalities which covers your business needs, and can also be customized where needed. Hardened for security and designed to be rock solid stable, Liferay Enterprise 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.

A Liferay Portal Enterprise Subscription provides customers with access to professionally supported software, online services and additional access to features and services within the Liferay ecosystem. With an Enterprise subscription, you receive direct access to engineering-grade technical support, security and bug fixes, training and support tools, as well as additional features within Liferay.

To check out more information on the Liferay Enterprise Edition, or learn about its features, click here.

Liferay Community Edition (CE)

Liferay Community Edition is the standard, free community version of Liferay. Liferay CE is mostly used for smaller, less critical deployments. The main difference between the two is that the Community Edition is free and is distributed “as is”. Liferay Community is available to the public and all users have access to source code in order to add to or customize the application as needed. The Liferay CE Edition provides you the flexibility to link Liferay with your own code in your portlet, theme, hook, layout, and Extension or web plugins, no matter what license you use for your code.

The Liferay Community Edition is for those who don’t need or want to commit to a Liferay subscription but still want access to the latest features and updates at no additional cost.

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It can be difficult to determine which edition is best for your business’ particular needs. The edition that is best fit for your organization depends entirely on what tasks and goals you are looking to accomplish with your portal technology. Drop us a line and we’d be happy to discuss which edition would help you meet your needs.