With the release of Liferay DXP 2026.Q1, we have evolved from separate Community Edition (CE) and DXP installations to a single, unified, modular platform. Instead of maintaining different distributions, everyone will run the same core Liferay installation.
The Free Tier of Liferay DXP is available to anyone, to test, develop, build proofs of concept and so on - and provides a simple way (if you need to) to become an Enterprise Subscriber.
This category is here so that you can ask any questions you might have about the Free Tier!
Hi, just read the info about the free tier in the liferay blog, sounds interesting.
One query I have is that in that blog post you mention:
Your key is also tied to a specific domain, which you entered during the registration process. You’ll be able to use your Liferay DXP instance for that domain, or locally via localhost.
How does this work if you have multiple sites within the one instance configured with virtual hosts? Or have more than one Virtual Instance on the same server?
They may all have different domain names that ultimately end up reaching the same server. Can you have more than one domain name tied to an activation? Or is the activation just for the main site, and virtual hosts/instances (with their own domain name) will still work as before?
This is the most important point. I don’t know anyone using a Liferay Portal CE instance for just one URL. There are Liferay Portal instances that host dozens and even hundreds of domains. A single Liferay Portal instance can host hundreds of domains tied to companyIds and hundreds of domains tied to groupIds, all sharing only one Liferay Portal CE deploy.
Please could you explain how one only license key can be valid for hundreds of Internet domains inside a single instance of Liferay DXP Free Tier?
Hi @icarrara - thanks for your comment here - and in response to my Blog post. Sorry for the delay on replying, the weekend got in the way!
OK, so trying to put it as simply as possible - the domain value provided in the Activation Key is simply used on initial startup to validate that the server you are running Liferay DXP on matches the value provided in the Activation Key.
Beyond that you can continue to create as many Sites and/or Virtual Instances as you want, each using their own unique domain names.
So, there are no changes in using Liferay to host multiple sites with their own URLs, just a simple mechanism that associates your server with the Activation Key generated for you.
HI @krucek - when you visit the Marketplace to get your Activation Key you will get prompted to accept the terms of the End User License Agreement (EULA). This provides/is the terms of use for the software. Hope that helps.
Where do we find the Liferay (Portal) source code and related resources for Liferay DXP 2026.Q1 which were available to Liferay Portal 7.4 community users?
For Liferay Portal 7.4 releases, the resources were available at
Are there alternate download links for the Liferay DXP source code and related resources for “Free Tier” users?
Also, is there a comparison chart showing the similarities and differences between Liferay Community and Liferay DXP “Free Tier” features and related resources?
I think this has been answered in Slack, but for the benefit of completeness, and for others that might have the same questions:
The source code for Liferay is the “liferay-portal” repo in Github that you’ve referred to - just go one level up. The change here is that instead of compiling the code into a CE release (which would have been made available in the folder you shared) and a DXP release, we’re now just doing one the DXP release, but providing access for anyone to use DXP.
There’s no download for the source, as such, if you need a local copy you can of course clone the repo to your own Github account.
The intention is that the features provided by the Free Tier will be identical to what was previously offered in CE. There are “Subscriber-only” features in DXP (for example like the Process Builder for Workflows, SAML plug-in, MFA, etc.) that remain subscription only, and theses are not in the free tier. As such there’s no need for a comparison between CE and DXP Free Tier. There is a “Benefits of an Enterprise Subscription” whitepaper which you can get from liferay.com that explains the benefits of being a subscriber, and that details the additional features that are available to subscribers.
My earlier queries stemmed from gaining access to previously available Liferay Portal Community resources, such as source code, and the runtime release.
I think there was a disconnect between the Liferay 7.4 (DXP) 2026.Q1 “free tier” release bundle and Git source code tag “2026.q1.0” publication (or sync) to GitHub. The Git source code tag was not available until many days after the binary release bundle, hence it was not clear where to access source code for the “free tier” release bundle.
I also discovered the initial release bundle for Liferay 7.4 (DXP) 2026.Q1 named “liferay-dxp-tomcat-2026.q1.0-lts-1773755497.7z” (circa. 19-Mar-2026) did not support my “free tier” license key. The portal log file contained a runtime error similar to the following snippet:
2026-03-25 05:46:39.072 ERROR [fileinstall-directory-watcher][c:-1] DXP Production license validation failed java.lang.Exception: License is not suppported in 2026.Q1.0 LTS atcom.liferay.portal.ee.license.b.b.a(Unknown Source) ~[portal-impl.jar:?]
A later release named “liferay-dxp-tomcat-2026.q1.0-lts-1773936305.tar.gz” (circa. 25-Mar-2026) did support my “free tier” license key. The license module issue has been resolved and usage of the Liferay 7.4 (DXP) 2026.Q1 release bundle has been granted.
Also for other readers, I have linked this message to the related Slack message.
Thanks for this. Yes, there were a lot of required changes needed to make the Free Tier work, as it’s a different model to having separate CE and DXP builds, and the Activation Key needs to do a bit more work. Unfortunately the first released bundle (…497.7z) had the issue you observed where activation didn’t work. You were so quick to try you ran into it before we were able to address it…
I have same error with the free-tier key in latest docker dxp version.
2026-03-31 13:57:08.745 ERROR [fileinstall-directory-watcher][c:-1] DXP Production license validation failed
java.lang.Exception: License is not suppported in 2026.Q1.1 LTS
Our initial intention with the Free Tier - which was communicated by Marco Leo here - was that it would be limited to the first release in each quarter - so, 2026.q1.0. That’s the issue you are running in to - i.e. the code does not allow later versions to activate using a Free Tier activation key.
However, we’ve had a couple of build issues this quarter that have created instability in the earliest release, and we are about to update that policy so that Free Tier users can make use of a stable version each quarter.
At this point in time we expect that to be the 2026.q1.2 release, which will be made available in the next day or two.
Please therefore watch this space - we will be updating the Community Downloads page as soon as 2026.q1.2 is available for download (and through Docker), at which point the Activation Key you have obtained will activate the software.
May I ask how it is with free tier licensing ? I’ve been using Liferay CE (LGPL) for a customer with only basic functionality (user and role management) so there was never need to use DXP platform for my use case.
Now as I understand it correctly I need to download Liferay DXP with free tier license but this is licensed under EULA.
So can I still use Liferay DXP with free tier license to host a Liferay instance for an external customer (purely as a platform for visualize data from different systems) or this is not possible and I would need to order enterprise subscription even though I’m not using any of the enterprise functionality ?
I dropped you a chat as well with some points that are specific to you.
In general though, you are correct, we no longer provided a compiled product called “Liferay CE” under the LGPL. Instead we offer the ability for anyone to use the Free Tier of Liferay DXP, simply by downloading a personal Activation Key.
This unlocks all of the same software features that were previously provided by Liferay CE, but gives more updates (at least once per quarter vs. once per year), as well as this being the same build that is used by Subscribers. It does mean a move from the LGPL to Liferay’s EULA, which is done simply by accepting the terms.
Since you’re using a compiled version the right to modify can’t be offered, and the right to distribute is also not offered. But, since the same compiled software can in turn be used by others, they can simply request their own Activation Key and become users of the Free Tier as well.
One simple option could therefore be to have your Customer generate their own Activation Key. They would then be using the software for their own use, even if it was hosted by you (we don’t limit how a customer deploys their instance of Liferay DXP).
And, of course, if you have no immediate need to upgrade to 2026.Q1 (or later) you can simply continue to use the version of Liferay CE that you are currently using, without needing to move from the LGPL to the Liferay EULA.
Hope that helps - if there are still questions, just let me know!
my client used Liferay CE, last updated to 7.4.3.112, and we are now upgrading to 2026.Q1 in order to move to JBoss 8.0 and Jakarta.
The issue is that, due to internal company policies, my client needs to allow a dedicated team to run a security scan on the full source code, including both the custom code and the vanilla Liferay code.
In the past, I simply provided them with the GitHub tag corresponding to the CE release, so that they could run their scan against the exact source code used to build the product.
However, I now see that Liferay has reached release 2026.Q1-6, while on GitHub only 2026.Q1.0 appears to be tagged.
Is there a way to identify the exact Git revision, commit hash, branch, or source snapshot from which Liferay 2026.Q1-6 was built?
This would allow us to provide the security team with the correct source baseline for their review.