In today’s competitive business scenario, the document management system plays a vital role in taking your company to the next level. Today, we have several frameworks available to make enterprise content management system with desired features or build a robust document management system. However, out of these frameworks, only Alfresco and Liferay have attracted maximum developers and entrepreneurs worldwide.
Alfresco is an open, secure, and modern system that activates process and content intelligently to accelerate the business flow. Whereas, Liferay is an open-source framework that provides free documentation and paid professional services while enabling users to build portals, websites, and connected experience.
Let’s compare them from various aspects. But before that, it is better to go through some common requirements that lead us to consider Liferay and Alfresco.
Common Requirements for Alfresco and Liferay
Here is a list of some common requirements that customers need to have before selecting any of these platforms. If your project has all these requirements then you should look for a reputed enterprise content management system developer.
- Document management system
- Wiki Pages, blogs, and chats
- Collaboration and coordination
- Portal development
- Document sharing
- Business workflow based on content
- Enterprise-level search
- Intranets and Common Knowledge Area
- Forums and Discussion Boards
- Knowledge management
- Event management and corporate calendar
- Web content management
- Mobile-friendliness
However, it is fair to mention that comparing Alfresco and Liferay is like comparing an apple and an orange. When it comes to their strengths and selection of the right platform, it is possible that poor tool selection can increase the cost development and implementation. Let’s go through the circumstances that make Liferay the right choice.
When you should opt for Liferay development services
Liferay is a great framework especially when you want to come up with mobile-friendly presentation interfaces. This is basically a portal framework and highly useful for-
- Developing responsive websites, Intranets, and web portals
- Web content management
- Publishing static and dynamic content in abundance with workflows to manage the entire content cycle
- Document management limited to managing documents available on an Intranet or a website as compared to an enterprise-wide document library
- Collaboration app-centric views with social media integration or social media apps
- Websites or applications that use wikis, blogs, and chat heavily
- Integrating underlying corporate systems to present data to a huge audience
Here are some of the major circumstances when you should seek help from an Alfresco content management company.
Also Read- How to Make the Most of Enterprise Content Management System in 2020
When you should go for Alfresco development services
Alfresco is a popular content repository and workflow engine. It is designed as a robust Enterprise Document Management System and it has less part of a collaborative portal or Intranet, unlike Liferay.
Much confusion in its role as a collaborative framework is prevailing because of its module named “Share”. It is a collaborative application over document repository, but it has no match with big CMS frameworks like Liferay and Drupal.
Alfresco has gained popularity in providing web content management, but in reality, its WCM experience is not worthy of comparing the same with Liferay. In other words, Alfresco is not a dedicated WCM framework. But, when it comes to document repository and enterprise-grade search capabilities, Alfresco knows no competition. Even the Liferay framework is not this much capable in a document repository.
Alfresco workflow engine is an excellent BPM (Business Process Management) tool that can help companies automate a lot of workflows based on documents along with non-document-based workflows. Alfresco is best used when your enterprise has to manage thousands or millions of documents and all of these documents are either presented to a website or Intranet or within the firewall.
Though Alfresco provides the same features related to Wikis, blogs, and forums like Liferay, the framework cannot give the user experience like Liferay and other similar frameworks. Unnecessary customization and enhancements are outcomes of an Alfresco-based development system used for these objectives.
Do you know that a reputed Liferay development company can integrate Alfresco for enhanced document management and document repository? Here, the Liferay framework takes care of the presentation and web content along with the workflow while providing a rich digital experience. The content-centric workflows are useful for creating the final copies of documents. Here, the Alfresco repository can be used for presenting some of the documents on the Liferay-based portal.
Concluding Lines
Alfresco ECM and Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP) are excellent platforms for establishing an enterprise content management system. Though we have covered the major aspects of comparison between these two frameworks here. It is better to contact a reputed ECM services provider to know the most suitable platform for your document management system-related requirements.
ContCentric is a leading Alfresco and Liferay development company. We have provided customized solutions for modern enterprises in a cost-effective way since our inception. ContCentric provides a one-stop solution for all ERP and document management-related queries.
