Liferay Alternatives for Portals and Websites: 5 Options Compared

Key Takeaways

• Liferay DXP runs customer, partner and employee portals, B2B storefronts and public websites on one Java platform, so the right Liferay alternatives hinge on which of those jobs you're moving.
• For portals and intranets, portal-first tools like Salesforce, SharePoint and Jahia fit better than a website CMS, and keeping Liferay for a portal that works is a fair call.
• Since DXP 2025.Q3, Liferay runs on Jakarta EE, so custom code built on the older javax packages has to be modified, the kind of Java upkeep that pushes marketing sites off the platform.
• Every option connects to AI assistants, and the useful difference is who each connection serves, a developer editing config files or a marketer prompting under their own role.

Shopping for Liferay alternatives usually means shopping for two things at once. Liferay DXP sells itself as one platform for portals, intranets, B2B commerce and websites, which is why it's hard to leave, since the customer portal your service team depends on and the regional sites your brand team keeps waiting on are two different problems sharing one Java stack.

So split the decision before you shortlist anything. If the portal or the intranet is what you're replacing, look at portal-first tools, or keep Liferay if the portal works. If it's the public websites, move them to a CMS your marketers can run without a Java developer in the loop, which is the job we built Content.One for.

Liferay does three jobs, so name the one you're replacing

Portals are where Liferay has historically been strongest. Its enterprise portals page names Hewlett Packard Enterprise running a partner portal for 170,000 partner organizations and 600,000 users, and Škoda Auto running an intranet for 40,000 employees. Logged-in experiences like those lean on single sign-on, roles and links into your CRM and ERP, so they're the hardest part of any Liferay migration to move.

B2B commerce, with account-specific catalogs, negotiated pricing and order management, is the second job, and this list leaves it out, so give ordering an evaluation of its own.

The third job is public websites, the campaign pages, regional sites and microsites, and while Liferay has a drag-and-drop page builder for them, a landing page there shares a release cycle and an upgrade path with the portal next to it, which is usually where the frustration starts.

Every Liferay upgrade is a Java project, and website teams feel it first

Liferay DXP is built from OSGi modules (self-contained Java components you can add, remove or replace), so anything custom on it, from portlets (the boxed mini-applications a portal page is made of) to themes and integrations, is code your team owns. Liferay's upgrade guide has you update every plugin, module and theme, migrate your configurations and then upgrade the database, because new releases often change its schema.

The latest example came with DXP 2025.Q3, when Liferay moved to Jakarta EE, the renamed version of enterprise Java, so custom code still using the old javax packages has to be modified, dependencies included, before it runs on newer releases. Liferay is making moves to help with an upgrade tool for the dependencies it ships, but third-party libraries still need replacing with their Jakarta versions.

Liferay's SaaS and PaaS subscriptions take hosting off your hands, and teams delay for fair reasons, like a portal integration nobody wants to reopen, but meanwhile every campaign page needing a developer waits in the portal's queue.

1. Content.One, for getting your websites off portal upkeep

Content.One (formerly Zesty.io) is the CMS we build for organizations running many websites across regions, brands or chapters, which makes it a home for your public sites while the portal stays put.

Here's how it works.

You hand us the move. Our On-Demand Developers become part of your team, full-time or part-time, on contracts of six to twelve months, and carry your public sites off the Java portal stack themselves, which means no outside migration partner. After launch, they handle patches and bug fixes right away, over Slack or Teams.

Acting as The Salvation Army's full development arm, our engineers folded five CMS platforms into one and ran releases, integrations and monitoring, and Andrew Dobney there reports traffic up 50% between April and July, with location searches doubled.

Then your marketers build by prompt. Through our MCP server, a marketer can point Claude, Gemini or another MCP-compatible assistant at a brief and get back a page with your brand guidelines applied in about one to two minutes, or have it sketch a content model with fields and placeholder content, and the assistant never goes past that marketer's role.

Regional sites stay connected without being identical. Federated multisite lets headquarters publish once to every regional site, while local teams translate, localize or override their copy and the corporate-approved components stay locked.

The controls a portal team expects come along too, with approval workflows routed by role, region, locale or content type, an immutable audit log of edits, approvals, deploys and rollbacks that even admins can't alter, and custom roles that narrow down to a single field, entry, section or site, SSO included.

Our plans are quote-based, billed by seats and connected domains, and everything under a connected domain is included. We aren't a portal platform or a commerce engine, though, so customer logins and account dashboards belong with options 3 to 5.

2. Adobe Experience Manager, if you'd rather stay on Java

AEM is the nearest like-for-like if your developers want to keep their Java skills, since it's also built from OSGi bundles and Adobe's SDK documentation ships a Java API jar to build against, though no code ports across. You'd still trade one Java platform's upkeep for another's, so quote-based AEM fits best when the problem is the vendor or the authoring tools, and our AEM alternative guide covers why teams leave it.

3. Salesforce, if your portal users already live in your CRM

If your portal's customers and partners already have accounts and cases in Salesforce, a Salesforce portal puts their logins on those records. Its Service Cloud pricing page lists Help Center, Authenticated Portal and Customer Community licenses as add-ons, priced by sales as of October 2026, and the trade is Salesforce admin skills for Java ones, with marketing pages still needing a website CMS.

4. Microsoft SharePoint, for an intranet inside Microsoft 365

For an employee intranet, the Liferay vs SharePoint question often comes down to licensing you already pay for. Microsoft's plan comparison includes communication and team sites, versioned document libraries and Microsoft Lists in every business plan, from $7.00 per user per month, paid yearly, on Microsoft 365 Business Basic (up to 300 users, October 2026). It's an intranet tool, not a customer portal, so external logins need another home.

5. Jahia, if you want portals and websites on one Java platform

Jahia suits teams that like Liferay's model, one open-source Java platform running portals and websites together. Its pricing page shows two plans, Enterprise CMS and Enterprise DXP, on-premises or in Jahia's cloud, both with portal management, access control and multisite management and no published prices. The stack is Java, React and GraphQL, so your developers keep their main language, but it's still one Java DXP swapped for another, upgrades included.

Liferay alternatives side by side

Sources are each vendor's own pricing pages and documentation, accurate as of October 2026.

Unless one platform covers every job you're replacing, expect to pick one row for the websites and a different one for the portal.

Every option connects to AI assistants, but not for the same person

All six support Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard AI assistants use to operate other software, so ask how mature each connection is and who it's for.

Liferay's server arrived in DXP 2026.Q3 as a release feature (finished, but hidden behind a flag for a limited time) that's off by default, per its MCP documentation, and the AI client acts with the requesting user's permissions. Setup is a JSON config file for tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Desktop or the Gemini CLI, which makes it a developer's job.

Elsewhere, Adobe lists a production AEM MCP server and Salesforce announced its hosted servers as generally available in April 2026, while Microsoft's Work IQ MCP for SharePoint is still in preview, and Jahia's MCP module has community status.

Ours, generally available since June 15, 2026, is set up for marketers, with every assistant action held to the same roles your editors work under and logged, since audit logs are among the server's tools.

How to choose between Liferay competitors

Name the job your renewal is about first, since a portal on CRM data, a Microsoft intranet and a plan to stay on Java each point to a different row.

For the websites, ask each vendor in the demo who runs the migration and who on your team can publish a new regional page the day after go-live without a developer. A site-by-site move with a redirect map for every old URL protects your search traffic (our CMS migration guide has the steps), and one federated platform running 100+ sites shows the regional side afterward.

Keep the portal where it works, and give the websites to a platform your marketers can run on their own. Drop your domain into launch.content.one and you'll get a Content.One instance pre-configured from the Liferay-built site you run today, so you can judge us on your own pages before any migration starts.

FAQ

Is Liferay a CMS or a portal?

Both. Liferay DXP lists a headless CMS, a page builder and digital asset management alongside its portal and intranet features, and its free open-source edition is still called Liferay Portal Community Edition.

How much does Liferay cost?

Liferay pricing isn't published. The quote page routes you to a sales engineer for a customized quote on SaaS, PaaS or self-hosted, and technical account management and managed services are sold as add-ons on top of the subscription.

Is Liferay DXP free?

No, DXP is a paid subscription, and some features are only available in DXP. Liferay Portal Community Edition is free to download, and since April 2025 it ships once a year, aligned with DXP's long-term support releases.

Is Liferay low code?

Partly. Liferay markets low-code tools for building apps and workflows without code, but themes, portlets and integrations are still Java and front-end development, and those are the pieces every upgrade has to carry forward.

When does a Liferay version reach end of life?

Liferay says its long-term support (LTS) releases carry a combined five years of premium and limited support, with a new LTS every fourth quarterly release (2026.Q1 was scheduled for March 18, 2026), so check which release you're on before planning a migration around a deadline.

Who are Liferay's main competitors?

On the DXP side, buyers usually compare Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, Jahia, Magnolia, Kentico and Progress Sitefinity, while portal and intranet buyers end up weighing Salesforce and SharePoint.