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Liferay Vs. Websphere: Total Cost of

Ownership Examined
in Liferay / by Nick Quach

Why is Liferay accelerating in the Gartner magic quadrant

[http://www.gartner.com/technology
/reprints.do?id=1-22PHCII&ct=141002&st=sg] and why are so
many medium to large enterprises continuing to adopt open
source products? Has open source software now become the
preferred choice for enterprises? According to a Black Duck
Software report [http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F
%2Fwww.slideshare.net%2Fblackducksoftware%2F2014-futureof-open-source-survey-results&sa=D&sntz=1&
usg=AFQjCNGmANwGNwSunxd41UtC088aLGnLAg] , over half
of all enterprises will utilize or contribute to open source in some
manner in 2015.
This series of Infographics will provide a side by side comparison
of Liferay Vs. Websphere, examining different aspects of the
Liferay and IBM portal products. The Infographic below, the rst
of the series,examines the total cost of ownership.

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[http://www.veriday.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06
/liferay_vs_websphere_body1.png]

Liferay
Liferay Portal is a single product that provides the complete
functionality without the need for any additional cost.
Over 70 out of the box portlets plus additional portlets are

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available through its marketplace. 3rd party portals and

extensions are also available.
Liferay provides:
Liferay Social enhanced integrated collaboration
Liferay Sync
at no additional cost to Liferay Portal customers.
Core products provide the following capabilities:
Content Management
Document Management
Full Collaboration Suite
Workow Engine
Leveraging out of the box functionality can dramatically
reduce development investments and accelerate time to
market, while providing the core portal capabilities.
Liferay enables organizations to leverage existing
infrastructure and open source, or lower cost options. There
is an extensive list of supported operating systems,
application services, database, caching and indexing
appliances. Liferay does not lock you into a vendor
Commercial and Enterprise offerings of open source products
continue to grow in the market place. The difference between
traditional enterprise offerings and open source offerings are
becoming narrower. Signicant cost savings can be achieved
by leveraging lower cost application servers. Database
alternatives will only be further multiplied in deployments
and architectures that support high availability and disaster
recovering.
Liferays core products are based on its open source variant
and rely heavily on open source libraries.

WebSphere
WebSphere Portal Family consists of 3 main products:
1. WebSphere Portal Server is the base portal. This does not
include collaboration or content management capability.
WebSphere Portal Express is targeted at small to midsize
businesses and has limits on the numbers of users.
2. WebSphere Portal Enabled, which contains integrated Web

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Content Management capabilities.

3. WebSphere Portal Extend, which contains additional
collaboration features in additional to Web Content
Management.
Licensing cost is signicantly higher in the majority of
WebSphere deployments due to its Processor Value Unit
(PVU) pricing vs. Liferays Server and JVM base pricing, which
allows organizations to take advantage of todays multi-core
processors without incurring additional costs.
WebSphere Portal Extend, which is IBMs most feature rich
portal product, is double the price of its base Portal server
PVU cost, and is feature for feature most comparable against
Liferays single platform.
WebSphere has a much more limited list of deployment
options and is primarily limited to IBM infrastructure
products such as IBM zOS, IBM application server, IBM DB2
and Oracle products, such as oracle dataset.
WebSphere Portal is tightly coupled with WebSphere
Application Server and RAD, and has a more limited support
for databases outside of IBM DB2, which limits enterprise
exibility and increases TCO.
Although IBM portal product is a closed product, at its core it
relies heavily on open source libraries, so the open source
factor is not as big of a factor.

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