Three years into Liferay CE, one company hit a wall
Take a 200-person insurance company that picked Liferay Community Edition three years ago to rebuild its customer portal. There were no license fees, the team was capable, and the platform did what they needed. It went well enough that leadership started planning more: a partner portal, tighter security reviews, and maybe a support contract now that the business depended on the system.
Then someone asked a question nobody had planned for: how do we move to DXP from here?
Until recently, the answer was a migration. CE and DXP were separate installations, so moving from one to the other meant new infrastructure and a project timeline. That landed right when the business wanted speed, not a rebuild.
In practice, the team would have to provision a new environment and plan how existing content and configurations would move over. They'd test every custom module against the new install, then ask leadership to approve a timeline that could run months, not weeks. None of that was because DXP was hard to use. CE and DXP had simply never been the same installation.
Liferay has now changed that. CE and DXP are no longer two products. They're one platform, and what you can do on it depends on the key you hold, not the version you installed.
What is the Liferay unified platform?
Since the 2026.Q1 release, Liferay ships as one product instead of two. A solo developer testing it and an enterprise running a customer portal install exactly the same platform. The key applied to it is what separates one user from another, not the software.
- One installation for everyone. There's no longer a separate CE download and DXP download. Every user, community or enterprise, runs the same core Liferay installation.
- Activation Keys turn on capabilities. You get features by applying a key, not by installing a different product. A free key gives you community-level access. A subscriber key opens up enterprise capabilities in the same environment.
- Four quarterly releases a year. Liferay ships a new version every quarter, such as 2026.Q1 and 2026.Q2. Free and paid users both follow a predictable schedule.
- Free Tier is the successor to CE. Liferay's free option is now called the DXP Free Tier, and it runs on the same codebase as Enterprise. It has real limits: MFA, SAML and advanced search tuning require an Enterprise Subscription key, clustering tops out at three nodes, and the key is tied to a domain and renews every 12 months.
- Open source hasn't changed. The source code is still published under the LGPL license, so this move doesn't change Liferay's open source commitment.
How did the old CE/DXP split work, and why did Liferay move on?
For years, CE and DXP were more than different price tags. They were two different ways of running Liferay. Looking at what each one offered shows why keeping them apart stopped making sense.
Community Edition (CE) gave you:
- A free, open source platform under the LGPL license
- Community-driven support, with no formal SLA
- Its own installation, separate from DXP, with its own setup and downloads
DXP added:
- SLAs, security patches and structured enterprise support
- Enterprise-only modules, such as Analytics Cloud
- Its own installation too, so moving from CE was a migration rather than an upgrade
Why Liferay changed it
According to Liferay's own release notes, the separation caused friction at exactly the wrong moment. Growing organizations had to migrate just when they least wanted disruption. The unified platform removes that step. Moving from community-level access to a paid subscription now means changing an Activation Key, not the installation underneath it.
The insurance company from earlier would have felt this directly. Every enterprise capability it eventually needed, including SLAs, security patches and Analytics Cloud, sat behind a separate installation from the one it had already built on. On the unified platform, the same growth doesn't require leaving the environment it started with.
The problem was never CE or DXP on its own. It was the wall Liferay had built between them.
| Community Edition (legacy) | DXP Free Tier (today) | DXP Enterprise Subscription (today) | |
| Cost | Free | Free | Paid subscription |
| Installation | Separate from DXP | Same installation as Enterprise | Same installation as Free Tier |
| Support | Community-driven, no formal SLA | Community-driven, no formal SLA | SLA-backed enterprise support |
| Patch cadence | Annual release cycle | Quarterly .0 release plus one stable patch | Continuous patches through the full quarter |
| Clustering | No license-enforced cap | Up to 3 nodes | No cap |
| SAML & MFA | Not included | Requires Enterprise key | Included |
| Enterprise modules (e.g., Analytics Cloud) | Not included | Requires Enterprise key | Included |
| Source code license | LGPL | LGPL | LGPL |
What changes for your team?
Business leaders and technical teams will notice different things.
For business and technology leaders:
- Simpler budgeting. You don't need to plan a separate migration project for when the business outgrows the free tier.
- Easier vendor evaluation. You can start on the Free Tier and prove the platform out before you commit to a subscription, in the same environment you'd keep long term.
- Lower risk. The insurance company from our example wouldn't need a new infrastructure project just to get enterprise support.
For developers and architects:
- No re-platforming. Code, configurations and customizations built on the Free Tier carry over when you apply a subscriber key.
- One set of documentation and APIs. There's one set to learn, instead of tracking differences between two distributions.
- Patch cadence depends on the tier. The Free Tier gets each quarter's initial release plus one designated stable patch. Enterprise subscribers keep getting patches for the rest of the quarter. Check this before you commit to the Free Tier for anything in production.
What stays the same
The platform is still open source. Liferay's source code remains available under the LGPL license, so teams that prefer to build directly from source still can.
Fewer decisions up front means fewer decisions to undo later.
Is the Free Tier enough for production?
The Free Tier doesn't replace an Enterprise Subscription. Before you build anything beyond a pilot on it, check three things.
Security. SAML and multi-factor authentication both require an Enterprise Subscription key. If your project needs either one, plan for it early rather than finding out later.
Scale. The Free Tier supports clustering, but only up to three nodes. That covers most mid-sized deployments, but not large, high-availability systems.
Patching. The Free Tier gets each quarter's stable release, then waits for the next one. An Enterprise Subscription keeps getting patches the whole time in between.
If you're deciding between the Free Tier and an Enterprise Subscription, or planning a move from an older CE install, our Liferay development team can help you scope it. For more on how the platform fits together, read our guide to the Liferay ecosystem for enterprise platforms. You can also hire Liferay developers directly, or book a scoping call.
