We performed a comparison between Alfresco and SharePoint based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Enterprise Content Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Document repository."
"The product allows engineering teams and developers to introduce new things in a seamless and easy way."
"The most valuable feature is the flexibility of the searching elements of the metadata."
"I like the ease of use, sections, and calendar."
"There is not just one valuable feature; it is all of them working together."
"Staff training is reduced because learning basic SharePoint is not as complicated as an EDRMS."
"It is very stable."
"The product makes it easy to manage lists, forms, searching, and security. One of the most valuable features is its integration with Active Directory."
"It has helped us with storing all the documents, which means that people are not going to intervene. There is a way of extracting knowledge within documentation and tracking it. There are knowledge assets for where documentation is stored, indexed and searchable through SharePoint."
"It has an easy to distribute administration capability, and can also scale to meet a large number of future needs."
"It's stable. It's very widely used by companies. Also, the knowledge of the product has improved over the years, and by other companies that support it or are Microsoft SharePoint partners. So if there are problems, there's always a user or company that knows the information or can help you; even with very uncommon problems."
"It offers ease of use, which is crucial."
"Alfresco has a very steep learning curve, and unfortunately, during the learning process, it's very easy to make errors, which often are unforgiving."
"Metadata, auto class, disposition log, and legal hold."
"I think the presentation layer could be improved - currently, it's too complex, and there are too many features cluttered all over the screen."
"I would like them to consider document capture functionality."
"The initial setup is complex and has room for improvement."
"The product does not perform 100% when used outside of a Microsoft based browser, Chrome, Firefox, etc."
"Integration needs to be more straightforward, particularly with Azure. SharePoint also needs a more comprehensive introductory course for users."
"During uptime under our network, it is hard to find info when content is hefty."
"The company also needs to make sure that their policies are dictating how information is stored and used, instead of letting SharePoint take control."
"The initial setup process is not intuitive."
"There are some limitations on storage."
"We do sell Hyland OnBase, which is probably a competitor to SharePoint and does a lot more. In our own organization, we haven't had a need for it, but certainly, for our customers, we are finding that to be a better fit. In terms of the technical reasons for that, I'm not involved much on that side, so I can't give specifics, but there is certainly room for them to improve or add on certain features that clearly are not available in SharePoint, but they are available in Hyland OnBase."
Alfresco is ranked 9th in Enterprise Content Management while SharePoint is ranked 1st in Enterprise Content Management with 146 reviews. Alfresco is rated 8.0, while SharePoint is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Alfresco writes "Flexible and customizable but lacking integration with Microsoft". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SharePoint writes "Good integrations, helps with collaboration, and increases visibility". Alfresco is most compared with Hyland OnBase, IBM FileNet, OpenText Documentum, OpenText Extended ECM and Nuxeo, whereas SharePoint is most compared with Citrix ShareFile, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, WordPress and OpenText Extended ECM. See our Alfresco vs. SharePoint report.
See our list of best Enterprise Content Management vendors.
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Alfresco scores are high on all features of an ECM solution and tools.
Back office processing, rated as 3.36 good.
Business Process Application 3.55 Good to excellent.
Document Management 4.12 Excellent.
Records Management 3.81 Good to Excellent.
Team Productivity 3.66 Good.
Compared with Sharepoint the ratings are as below.
Back office Operations 3.29.
Business Process Application 3.42.
Document Management 4.07.
Records Management 3.77.
Sharepoint scored high for Team productivity features 4.31.
I fully agree with dylan's view.
In France it will be easier to find SharePoint competencies than Alfresco's.
Note that real high level SP competencies are very busy.
Fundamentally, I would say : if you have internal tech team with strong Java skills, alfresco could be a good choice; if not, prepare a strong budget with an integrator.
Out of the box without technical development, SP remains more powerfull and let users and power users realize sites they could not realize with Alfresco.
By the way, you should choose ten enterprise version of Alfreco, Community version is only for testing or for very small projects.
I fully agree with the Dylan's view. It all depends on what your specific requirements are. The best way to go about comparing the two is to do a request for proposal based on a scenario and to see what the vendors propose.
What features are you needing and what skills does the organisation have? Alfresco and SharePoint customisation are quite difference skill sets. In terms of cost, both have a free edition (Alfresco Community Edition & SharePoint 2013 Foundation Edition), but only enterprise editions contain the records management features.
Critically SharePoint is a platform with no compliance whereas Alfresco is a product with DoD 5015.2 compliance, The SharePoint philosophy is to unite all legacy systems in a web interface that can be accessed from anywhere. To that end almost any data can be connected to SharePoint - as opposed to replicated which would increase storage costs and system complexity - and used in business process automation.
The enterprise edition of Alfresco features records management, but in SharePoint you also get features such as e-Discovery of both SharePoint and Exchange data.
In most geographic areas it's easier to get SharePoint resources than Alfresco, and that also affects costs. On the other hand, Alfresco's interface is often preferred to SharePoint and that can affect adoption. Adoption is usually the biggest problem regardless of the technology choice.
Alfresco aggregates various search providers, but SharePoint has custom search verticals and people directory search built-in, using existing Active Directory data. The search configuration in Alfresco is via XML files but via the web interface in SharePoint: Both are easy but you would need access to the server console to change it in Alfresco which might bridge security boundaries in large organisations.