Migrating from Liferay to CrafterCMS

Organizations that adopted Liferay years ago are now facing new realities: omnichannel delivery, API-first experiences, and developer velocity expectations that monolithic platforms weren’t designed to meet. In our recent webinar, “How to Migrate Liferay to CrafterCMS,” we walked through the core technical drivers behind these migrations, demonstrated a Liferay site import capability, and shared resources to help teams plan a smooth move.

If you’re evaluating a shift from Liferay, here’s a concise, practical summary of the session.

Why Teams Are Moving On from Liferay

Every enterprise has its own reasons (cost, support, roadmap), but the consistent technical themes we hear include:

1) A need for a modern, lightweight architecture: Liferay is capable but monolithic, with heavy technologies (e.g., OSGi) baked in. That can make the platform harder to scale, secure, and evolve for API-rich, multi-channel experiences.

2) Stronger headless capabilities: While Liferay exposes APIs, it wasn’t born headless. Teams increasingly need flexible, opinionated options (REST, GraphQL, scripted services) that make modeling, retrieving, and shaping content effortless without brittle custom work.

3) Composability in a best-of-breed stack: Most enterprises are breaking up platform monoliths into focused pillars like CMS, search, personalization, and analytics. A truly composable DXP approach lets you select the right vendor for each capability and plug them together without friction.

4) Versioning and multi-environment pain: Database-centric content management makes environment promotion, rollbacks, and CI/CD awkward. Teams want content versioning that behaves like code: precise, traceable, and automatable.

How CrafterCMS Solves These Pain Points

A Fully Decoupled, Secure-by-Design Architecture

CrafterCMS cleanly separates content authoring from content delivery. They run in independent infrastructure connected by secure publishing, so each tier can be scaled and secured for its job:

• No database on delivery. CrafterCMS delivery uses disk/ES storage with an OpenSearch index. To scale, simply scale the application tier with no database clustering required.

• Smaller attack surface. Editorial tooling never lives in the public delivery cluster, minimizing exposure.

• AuthN/AuthZ fit for purpose. Different requirements for authors vs. site visitors are handled natively because the tiers are separate.

Technically, CrafterCMS is built on a modern Java/Spring stack, supports server-side and client-side rendering, and lets you use any front-end framework (Next.js, React, Vue, Angular, Freemarker, you name it). You pick the stack that fits your team and use case.

Headless That Meets You Where You Are

CrafterCMS offers multiple paths to headless content management:

• Out-of-the-box REST APIs for quick content retrieval.

• Powerful GraphQL with the ability to define custom endpoints and shape responses, often without code.

• Scriptable APIs on top of platform services for advanced integrations and full control over request/response contracts (using the built-in Groovy engine).

In the webinar, we used the built-in GraphQL Explorer to select content types and fields, execute a query, and even rename a field in the response (e.g., authorName → author) to illustrate how easy it is to tailor response shapes for consuming apps.

Composable by Nature

In a composable DXP, the CMS plays a central, focused role (including content modeling, authoring, workflow, and multi-channel delivery) while adjacent capabilities (search, personalization, commerce, experimentation) integrate through clean interfaces. CrafterCMS supports many of these needs out of the box, but its architecture is explicitly designed to plug into your preferred services with minimal coupling. That means more vendor choice, less lock-in, and an architecture you can evolve over time.

Git-Native Versioning and DevContentOps®

CrafterCMS's content repository is Git-based at its core. Every content change is captured as a commit, providing you a time-machine for your entire repository, not just single objects. This delivers:

• Granular rollbacks. Revert a single item or an entire set of changes.

• True CI/CD for content and code. Use standard tooling and pipelines across environments.

• Happier developers. Work locally with familiar tools against Git repos linked to the system—no CMS-specific IDEs required.

• Frictionless collaboration. Authors, developers, and operations share a common repository, coordinated by workflows and publishing.

We call this DevContentOps®: the seamless collaboration of content, code, and operations. Compared with database-driven systems and their limiations (export/import, overwrite conflicts, brittle scripts), Git makes promotion, branching, merging, and auditing predictable and automatable.

See It in Action: A Liferay → CrafterCMS Migration Example

To accelerate migrations, you can see in the recorded webinar here that we have an tool that imports Liferay structured content and content models directly into CrafterCMS. In the webinar demo, we:

1. Showed a Liferay content structure (e.g., title, image, body) and added a new authorName field.

2. Created/updated a few content instances in Liferay and published them.

3. Switched to CrafterCMS, ran the “Import Site from Liferay” plugin, and watched as the tool brought over both the content model and all instances.

4. Opened the migrated content in CrafterCMS to confirm fields (including the newly added authorName) and used GraphQL to retrieve items headlessly.

The import is designed to be push-button simple for structured content. This jump-starts evaluation and reduces lift in your early migration phases. From there, teams typically:

• Map additional content types and relationships.

• Recreate templates or move to front-end frameworks with REST/GraphQL.

• Wire up integrations (search, DAM, personalization, etc.).

• Establish CI/CD pipelines and environment promotion with Git.

Migration Approach: From Proof-of-Concept to Cutover

A pragmatic path we see work well:

1. Discovery & sizing. Inventory Liferay structures, templates, integrations, and customizations. Identify dependencies and prioritize what to migrate vs. re-imagine.

2. Pilot the import. Use the open-source import tool to bring over one or two representative content types and their instances. Validate editorial workflows and headless delivery in CrafterCMS.

3. Modeling & UX. Finalize content models, authoring forms, workflows, and preview. Decide whether to keep template-driven delivery or build a headless front-end.

4. Integrations & search. Connect adjacent systems; index content in OpenSearch for blazing-fast delivery.

5. CI/CD & environments. Stand up Git-based workflows, pipelines, and release gates.

6. Parallel run & cutover. Run side-by-side, validate traffic and analytics, then cut traffic over by domain/route.

7. Optimize. Measure performance, personalization, authoring velocity, and iterate.

The Bottom Line

If you’re feeling the constraints of a monolith, CrafterCMS offers a clean, decoupled, Git-native path forward, without sacrificing enterprise-grade authoring, security, and scale. Our migration tools and services lower the barrier to entry, so you can validate quickly with real content and focus your energy where it matters: a future-proof, composable architecture that empowers authors and developers alike.

Ready to see your Liferay content running in CrafterCMS?

Start a free trial now, and contact us today to scope a migration plan tailored to your stack and timelines.