Java content platforms are chosen by institutions, universities, public bodies and large companies, whose requirements go beyond publishing pages: portals with single sign-on, structured content across hundreds of contributors, document governance. The marketplace has five of them, and they are not five competitors but five tools for related jobs. This post follows a university IT lead sorting the institution's needs across them on MassiveGRID PaaS, which is built on Virtuozzo Application Platform, formerly Jelastic.
The institution is a university we will call Thornfield University, replacing an ageing intranet, a public website and a departmental document store in one programme. The packages are Liferay, Magnolia CMS, OpenCms, Ametys and Alfresco, each deploying its Java application server (Tomcat in every case) and a database in one click.
Five tools, three jobs
| Package | What it is | Job | Weight | Edition installed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Liferay | Portal platform: sites, SSO, personalisation, integration with enterprise systems | Intranets, customer and partner portals | Heavy (4 GB+ heap) | Portal Community Edition (DXP is commercial) |
| Magnolia CMS | Enterprise web CMS: clean authoring, headless delivery, author and public instances | Public websites and digital experience | Medium (2 GB+ heap per instance) | Community Edition (DX Core is commercial) |
| OpenCms | Mature web CMS: structured XML content, drag-and-drop editor, JSON API | Corporate and institutional websites | Light for a Java CMS | Fully open source |
| Ametys | Institutional web CMS: many contributors, large structured sites, strongest in France | University and local-government sites | Medium (2 to 4 GB heap) | Open source (Apache 2.0) |
| Alfresco | Enterprise content management: document repository, versioning, search, governance | Documents, not web pages | Heavy (4 GB+ RAM) | Community Edition (Enterprise via Hyland) |
The intranet: Liferay
Thornfield's intranet must show each staff member their own faculty's content, log them in through the university's identity provider, and embed views of the student-records and timetable systems. That is a portal, and Liferay is the portal platform: sites and pages composed of portlets and widgets, roles and permissions, single sign-on, personalisation and integration hooks. The Community Edition installed by the package lacks DXP's commercial modules and support but carries the portal core. The IT lead's sizing follows Liferay's guidance: several gigabytes of heap even to develop, so the Tomcat bundle's node gets a 64-cloudlet limit (a cloudlet is 128 MiB of RAM plus 400 MHz of CPU) with vertical scaling doing the daily work, and the document library on persistent storage with snapshots.
The public website: Magnolia, OpenCms or Ametys
Three of the five are web CMSs for the public site, and the lead separates them by two questions: how much content modelling does the site need, and how large is the team.
- Magnolia is the enterprise choice: a polished authoring interface, headless delivery through its REST endpoints, and the author-public split, where editors work on an author instance that publishes to a public instance exposed to the internet. The package can be installed twice for that layout. It suits a marketing-led site with integration and personalisation ambitions, and its commercial edition is the upgrade path.
- OpenCms is the light, fully open-source option: structured XML content, a drag-and-drop page editor, a JSON API for headless use, a stable release cadence and lower memory needs than the others. It suits a corporate or institutional site that wants structure without a large platform.
- Ametys is built for exactly Thornfield's kind of organisation: institutions with many contributors and large, structured sites, with workflows for departmental editors. Its community is strongest in France; interface and documentation are available in English, and the lead's evaluation confirmed that with the faculty's communications team.
Thornfield chose Ametys for the public site because its contributor model matched forty departmental editors, with OpenCms as the runner-up for its lightness. Magnolia would have won for a marketing-driven site with a smaller editorial team.
The document store: Alfresco
The third job is not web content at all. Departments hold policies, committee minutes and research documents that need versioning, metadata, full-text search and retention rules, and a public website is the wrong place for them. Alfresco Community Edition is an enterprise content management repository with the Share web client and a REST API, and the package deploys it with Tomcat, a database and a content store on persistent storage. The lead pairs it with the university's existing Nextcloud: Alfresco as the system of record with governance, Nextcloud as the everyday sync-and-share client, which the package's own guidance suggests. Alfresco is a Java repository that wants at least 4 GB, so its node is sized like Liferay's.
Running three Java platforms without three teams
Three heavy Java applications sound like three operations teams. On the platform they are three environments in one environment group, each a Tomcat node whose JVM heap follows its cloudlet allocation, a database node, and persistent storage, with the same add-ons: Database Backup/Restore nightly, Let's Encrypt on the public site's balancer, load alerts to the IT channel. Upgrades of all three follow one procedure: clone, redeploy the clone's Tomcat container with the new release, run the platform's upgrade wizard or migration, test, repeat on production. The lead's team of two runs all three, plus Nextcloud, and the JVM tuning they used to do by hand is a cloudlet limit and a graph.
Cost
Liferay and Alfresco average about 30 cloudlets each across the day, Ametys about 20, plus three database nodes at 6 to 8 and storage. Roughly 100 cloudlets an hour in total, about $245 a month before discounts at MassiveGRID's published $0.003372 per cloudlet-hour, plus disk for the document store. The three systems replaced an intranet on an unsupported portal product with an annual licence, a website on an agency's servers and a document store that was a network drive. The lead's summary to the university's finance committee had one line of infrastructure and no licence lines, because every package here is open source.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can Liferay or Magnolia be clustered on the platform?
Yes. Both support clustering with a shared database, shared document or repository storage and cluster configuration; add nodes to the Tomcat layer behind the platform's NGINX balancer and mount the shared storage into each. Most institutions run a single well-sized node first and cluster when availability requirements demand it.
Does the Magnolia package give me author and public instances?
The Community Edition bundle can run as a combined instance or be split: install the package twice, configure the author instance to publish to the public one, and expose only the public environment to the internet. The author environment can then sit behind the university VPN.
Alfresco or Nextcloud for documents?
Different jobs. Alfresco is a system of record with versioning, metadata, workflows and retention; Nextcloud is a sync-and-share client with collaboration features. Many institutions run both, with Nextcloud for daily work and Alfresco for governed records, and integrate them through Alfresco's API.
Portal, website and documents, each on the right platform
Liferay, Magnolia, OpenCms, Ametys and Alfresco each deploy with Tomcat and a database in one click on MassiveGRID PaaS, with JVM heap sized by cloudlets and per-cloudlet-hour billing. Free 14-day trial, no credit card.
Liferay on MassiveGRID PaaS