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Alfresco vs IBM FileNet vs OpenText Documentum Content Management comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Enterprise Content Management category, the mindshare of Alfresco is 8.6%, up from 7.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM FileNet is 8.4%, down from 10.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenText Documentum Content Management is 10.6%, down from 11.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Content Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
OpenText Documentum Content Management10.6%
IBM FileNet8.4%
Alfresco8.6%
Other72.4%
Enterprise Content Management
 

Featured Reviews

Karthi Keyan - PeerSpot reviewer
Streamlining document management with enhanced digitalization features needed
We used Alfresco as a document management system for automating and digitizing manual forms. Those were the main use cases The digitalization of workflow, forms, operations, and business processes has improved our organization. The most valuable features of Alfresco include its integration with…
Emad Rizki - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates seamless integration for large enterprises with strong deployment capabilities
FileNet was scalable and could be implemented into big multinational organizations. However, it has become very expensive recently. Compared to low-code solutions such as Appian and outsystems, FileNet has gaps, mainly because it requires coding, which is not preferred by clients due to pricing concerns in Pakistan. We transitioned clients to cloud solutions, although FileNet has been strongly integrated with on-prem deployments.
Salih çakır - PeerSpot reviewer
User-friendly content management but needs more customizations
We use OpenText Documentum for managing the command life cycle and for content management Documentum helps by saving time during daily operations. The product is user-friendly. The BPM side should be improved. It would be beneficial to have more ability to customize features for specific use…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the flexibility of the searching elements of the metadata."
"The most valuable features of Alfresco include its integration with the scanning solution, the ability to search, and the capability to store and index to capture metadata."
"I like the ease of use, sections, and calendar."
"The product allows engineering teams and developers to introduce new things in a seamless and easy way."
"Alfresco's technical support is very fast and professional."
"Document repository."
"Alfresco allows broad searches with many index fields that you can search on, although the created fields and their values may not be intuitive."
"The digitalization of workflow, forms, operations, and business processes is also significant."
"FileNet is highly scalable and suited for implementation in large multinational organizations."
"[The most valuable features are] scalability and ease of use. These features are important because the customer where we have deployed it has millions of documents... And over the last five years, the volume of the documents has been increasing. It's handling all of them and without any errors."
"The main features we find impactful are the workflow and document management along with FileNet file stores."
"It allows for multiple people to access content simultaneously."
"The key feature for us is that it keeps our content store small. That helps our DBAs when they have to do the backups of our audit system, or of the content store."
"The ability to manage the content well."
"There are a lot of valuable features, but the biggest advantage is that this system is stable; it's always online, it always works... once it's configured and running, we don't need to touch it and constantly make changes to it. It's a low-maintenance platform."
"The integration feature of IBM FileNet is most effective for document management."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the security, storage, and document search capability."
"It is a very secure system. It is reliable, and that is one of the reasons people manage their content within Documentum. It gives them the confidence that the content is accessible to the right people and not to the wrong people."
"OpenText Documentum is a robust choice for enterprise-level document management."
"I am satisfied with OpenText Documentum so far; it has great integration capabilities."
"I recommend Documentum as it supports big systems and offers good integration."
"The most valuable feature of OpenText Documentum is the versioning."
"The storage of metadata content, workflows, and life cycles are the most valuable features of OpenText Documentum."
"OpenText Documentum's composition is good. It is convenient and straight out of the box."
 

Cons

"The setup process for Alfresco was complex."
"Alfresco has a very steep learning curve, and unfortunately, during the learning process, it's very easy to make errors, which often are unforgiving."
"I would like them to consider document capture functionality."
"The configuration of Alfresco is a big challenge."
"If you don't have proper governance, things can go wrong. You have to make rules, such as one folder should not have more than 5,000 subfolders or children."
"Alfresco could improve workflow digitalization and enhance artificial intelligence capabilities."
"I think the presentation layer could be improved - currently, it's too complex, and there are too many features cluttered all over the screen."
"Currently, documents in Alfresco are stored on a file server, which, while good for performance, is a security risk."
"​I would like to see the dashboard be a little bit more robust and a little more user-friendly"
"I think it's to the point where there are probably too many features. Every software, as it matures and graduates, grows the list of features. What many of our customers express is that it's just too complicated. They're using maybe five or ten percent of the features but they're having to pay for 100 percent. There is room for improvement in terms of simplifying it."
"Needs a better administration tool."
"The application's processing engineer needs to be more advanced."
"We brought DocuSign into our company's solution three years before. At that time there was no direct integration. We would like to pull documents out from FileNet, push them to DocuSign and, when done, retrieve them and store them back in FileNet. We wrote our own custom solution for that. It would be nice if there was some tool we could have used to do that."
"I would like to see expanded search features, like content search."
"It is ability to display legacy content needs improvement."
"In Content Navigator we want to see the ability to view different types of video... We are using HTML 5 but it's very limited... We definitely want to see support for most types of video formats in the market."
"It's difficult to manage and customize Documentum."
"An area that needs to improve is how to reduce storage space on the AWS site."
"OpenText Documentum is moving to the cloud, and I am concerned about the security aspect of it."
"The user interface can be improved."
"The BPM side should be improved."
"OpenText Documentum has a lot of scope for improvement in terms of adding some AI integrations."
"While generally secure, some noted security issues need consideration. The installation process for on-premise setup needs improvement as well."
"The price is quite high as the licensing prices are significant."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you buy Alfresco through a partner, there is usually a OEM licensing option."
"The license for Alfresco is expensive - not the maximum, but close. There are also extra costs once you start building integrations, as implementation seems to be very costly."
"There are costs for any upgrade or additional functions."
"It is cheaper compared to head-to-head competitors."
"The tool is expensive, and I rate its pricing a ten out of ten."
"The licensing cost of FileNet is comparable."
"My customers have seen ROI. There have been productivity gains, time savings gains, and things that they have been doing much more efficiently in a more modern way than they were before."
"The physical space that we have gained back pays for the service. Therefore, it has reduced our operating costs overall. We have definitely seen ROI. I would estimate $30,000 a year."
"The platform is inexpensive."
"IBM FileNet is an expensive solution."
"We use extraction. Therefore, we can see 80 to 85 percent accuracy on data extraction. This reduces the manual indexing part, which is definitely a gain on performance efficiency."
"​There are lots of components to the product. Make sure before you invest that you know which components you need.​​"
"OpenText Documentum's pricing is good."
"It falls in line with a lot of things that are out there on the market. There is nothing extraordinary in terms of great or bad."
"It is quite an expensive product."
"OpenText Documentum has announced a new licensing model, which could be more expensive."
"The product is expensive."
"The price is considered affordable now."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Government
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
9%
Insurance Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Government
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise73
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise28
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alfresco?
The pricing of Alfresco starts at $100,000, which can be expensive for small projects. There is often a transition fr...
What needs improvement with Alfresco?
Currently, the challenge is the general availability to users. Initially, they had poor documentation, but over the y...
What is your primary use case for Alfresco?
This is mainly for unstructured document management systems with workflow and data classification.
What do you like most about IBM FileNet?
The product is robust and can process a lot of documents for enterprise content management.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM FileNet?
From the company's perspective, the licensing cost for IBM FileNet is still affordable. Though the license cost is so...
What needs improvement with IBM FileNet?
The API provided by IBM FileNet is a very out-of-date implementation. From the beginning, we cannot use a REST API; w...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Documentum?
It falls in line with a lot of things that are out there on the market. There is nothing extraordinary in terms of gr...
What do you like most about OpenText Documentum?
The most valuable feature of Documentum for our content management needs is its ability to segregate access based on ...
What needs improvement with OpenText Documentum?
The interface of OpenText Documentum could be more intuitive; sometimes it is hard to find where the information is l...
 

Also Known As

No data available
No data available
Dell EMC Documentum, Documentum , Documentum xCelerated Composition Platform
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Over 1,300 companies from 180 different countries. Including EuroStar, Saks Fifth Avenue, NASA Langley Research Center, and KLM.
Suncorp Group Limited, St. Vincent Health, Citigroup, SRCSD, and UK Dept for Work and Pensions.
Agility; Bibliotheca Alexandrina; Capitec Bank; Department of Social Development, Republic of South Africa; County of Los Angeles, Department of Human Resources; Fresenius Kabi; Heathrow Airport; Lahey Health; Linde PLC; Milestone Pharma Co. Ltd; National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development; Open Grid Europe GmbH; REPCO NEX Industrial Solutions; Springer Nature; Syngene International; Tata Power DDL; University of Texas Austin
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, OpenText, IBM and others in Enterprise Content Management. Updated: August 2025.
867,349 professionals have used our research since 2012.