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In the ever changing world of enterprise IT, our commitment to innovation, value, and service gives you the assurance that Liferay will meet or exceed your expectations today, and remain a critical part of your future strategic growth. Liferay is compatible with a wide range of infrastructure and enterprise applications, and can provide a seamless experience with your existing investments.

For the past several years, Liferay has had the fastest-growing Java-based portal and compared to sharepoint, we believe that liferay is a better choice for your business because:

    1 - rich out-of-the-box (OOTB) functionality compared to sharepoint: core portal, content management, collaboration, social, mobile, security, responsive design, mobile SDK and more.

    2 -  Liferay has the lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to Microsoft sharepoint. Downloading it and getting it running takes a matter of minutes. And the savings continue through development costs, operational costs, and training/support costs (from the perspective of infrastructure, developers, administrators, and end users). Moreover, All portal products typically need extensions and/or additions to deliver requisite functionality – with Liferay you can simply do more within a specific budget

    3 -  Liferay is a mature Enterprise Open Source (fully supported) product while sharepoint is a closed source. please check the below white paper for the benefits of open source vs closed source: http://opensourceconference.co.uk/files/2014/03/Open-vs.-Closed-Source.pdf

    4 - Liferay’s hook and extension plugin model allows you to tailor product behavior to your needs without rewriting from scratch and without creating "upgrade". With sharepoint, if an OOTB feature meets 80% of your need, then getting the remaining 20% might be difficult and expensive, or worse, you may need to live with the limitations or recreate the functionality from scratch.

   5 -  Liferay offers you a full choice of application servers, databases, and operating systems to run on, thereby allowing you to leverage your infrastructure and skills investment while with sharepoint you don't have any choice, you are locked with Microsoft and .net framework.

   6 - As an open source portal, Liferay community members are extremely active with increased contributions to forums, wiki posts, blogs, code contributions and activity in special projects teams. The community contributes greatly to the product functionality as well as product information/support.

    7 - Liferay’s open architecture and its open source nature help you avoid lock-in to a single proprietary vendor as what is happening with sharepoint as you get lock with microsoft. Liferay adheres to several specifications including JSR-168 (Java Portlet Specification v1.0), JSR-286 (Java Portlet Specification v2.0), JSR-170 (Java Content Repository Specification), JSR-127 (JavaServer Faces), WSRP 1.0, WSRP 2.0, WebDAV , SAML , and more. it runs in any IT environment, cutting down on costs and leveraging your existing investments of hardware, software, and staff:

Application servers:

 Liferay: GlassFish JBoss, Tcat , tcServer, Tomcat, Weblogic, WebSphere,..
 Sharepoint: Embedded; requires Microsoft IIS Server.

Servlet Containers (stand - alone) :

  Liferay: Jetty, Resin, Tomcat.
 Sharepoint: None.


Operating System:

  Liferay: Liferay Portal runs on any major operating system.
  Sharepoint: Windows only.

Database:

  Liferay: Any RDBMS supported by Hibernate.
  Sharepoint: Microsoft SQL Server.

Framework Support:

  Liferay: Struts, Spring MVC, JSF 1.2, Seam, Tapestry.
  Sharepoint:Required custom implementation


Scripting Language Support:

 Liferay: PHP, Ruby, Groovy, Python, JavaScript
 Sharepoint: Required custom implementation

Standards

 Liferay: JSR-186, JSR-286, JSR-170,CMIS,WSRP 1.x,WSRP 2.0,JSR-252, WAP
 Sharepoint: WSRP 1.x


  8 - Liferay is based on java while Sharepoint is based on Microsoft .NET.
        - Java is very known for enterprise applications because it has better scalability , security and  performance in the heavy transactional environments.
        - because lot of vendors created different frameworks on the top of java, whenever you use liferay, you have the freedom to chose any framework you want to develop your portlets while
           with sharepoint, you don't have any choice other than what microsoft offer you.
        - experts and communities of developers who know java and much bigger and more mature than Microsoft side.


  9 - Liferay is a very light product (the software is around 200 MB) where you can download and install it in 2 simple steps while Sharepoint is very complex, involve different products to be installed and certain complex steps to follow to start and shutdown the server. sharepoint needs 8 GB minimum of memory to run while liferay can run with only 1 GB.

 

Conclusion:

Liferay’s unique approach to building an open platform, based on open standards, gives you all of the power and flexibility you need.Whether you use the pre-packaged applications, or want to build a customized solution through our enterprise application integrations,Liferay delivers immediate results and long-term value.

Unlike SharePoint, Liferay runs in non-Microsoft environments, is easy to customize, and integrates with your existing applications.Not only is it built with full Java support for sophisticated integration work, Liferay Portal also supports multiple languages and frameworks.On average, our clients see savings of up to 90% over that of commercial competitor pricing.