No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Alfresco vs SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Alfresco
Ranking in Enterprise Content Management
4th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Document Management Software (1st)
SAP Extended Enterprise Con...
Ranking in Enterprise Content Management
15th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Enterprise Content Management category, the mindshare of Alfresco is 6.4%, down from 8.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management is 1.7%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Alfresco6.4%
SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management1.7%
Other91.9%
Enterprise Content Management
 

Featured Reviews

Jaspreet k - PeerSpot reviewer
Head Of The Operations at Flash AI
Streamlined compliance workflows have reduced manual document handling and improved governance
Alfresco offers many features that I value highly. The first is the open architecture that provides extensive REST API and support of open standards such as CMIS, allowing our development team to easily extend their capabilities. The second valuable feature is the activity workflow engine, a powerful BPMN compliant workflow engine that automates complex and multi-step processes natively alongside the content. Another favorite feature is smart document processing. Due to its built-in AI capabilities, Alfresco can automatically classify documents based on our business requirements and tagging. This directly helps us find those documents by tagging them and locating them more easily. The smart document processing in Alfresco has helped us extract information via OCR and identify entities without requiring manual data entry, as it works on a metadata approach that is directly searched via OCR. The text is assigned as a token in the backend, and using the AI capabilities, Alfresco can automatically classify and read via OCR. Alfresco also provides automated lifecycle management that helps us enforce legal holds, retention schedules, and secure disposition of records, keeping the files secure and ensuring that our organization remains compliant with legal requirements.
MukeshGiri - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Solution Architect at Freeport LNG Development, L.P.
Offers advanced search capabilities, integrates seamlessly with SAP and efficiently stores non-essential business content
Consider you have some use cases. For example, something for your accounting or procurement department. And you purchase equipment, machines, and plants for plant-related operations. Essentially, there will be manuals and basically anything and everything related to your particular equipment. So, where do the equipment entries go? They go into SAP. Depending on your SAP deployment, it can go into some database. Most companies these days are talking about SAP HANA and stuff like that. So it will be stored in SAP HANA. But, these documentation, drawings, manuals, and help files for these big pieces of equipment, where do they go? That’s where Extended ECM for SAP comes into the picture. All these integrations are through a one-way push, essentially, but with two-way access. So as a user in the procurement department or the accounting department, or an engineering department where you are using SAP for asset management entries inside your system. All those related documents, drawings, manuals, and files have to be stored somewhere. If you store them in SAP, it will be a costly implementation going forward. After maybe a couple of years, you will realize that it’s too much to deal with because HANA database will be too costly. There will not be much business value because you cannot utilize a lot of search and cool features inside your application from an SAP perspective. That’s where you will integrate SAP. For example, SAP Extended ECM for SAP Plant Maintenance. One of the modules SAP provides is SAP Plant Maintenance. So what you will do is deploy Extended ECM for SAP, then try something called SAP Plant Maintenance, Extended ECM for SAP Plant Maintenance. The content maintenance, manuals, files, drawings, and related stuff, its details or tags, or any kind of stuff is stored in your SAP. But anything and everything else is pushed through this integration into Extended ECM platform. So now it is available to be utilized by your business user who knows nothing about SAP. They only live and breathe in a different management system. They can look into these details depending on what kind of integration has been done for that company. So that’s one use case. Second use case will be in SAP itself. Now, if you are an SAP user, you have this information readily available at your fingertips. Anything goes wrong in your maintenance or any kind of management, you can look into these details, which are readily available because this documentation lifecycle is being managed by Extended ECM for SAP. It will give you extended storage capabilities within your SAP application. So it will be a two-way integration, essentially. Similar, wider features will be available within Extended ECM platform. Within SAP, you have these extra features called business attachments or business content retrieval. Those business contents are stored inside Extended ECM, and those features will be available within your SAP GUI from an SAP perspective. So it’s a win-win situation for both worlds.

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 features of Alfresco include its integration with the scanning solution, the ability to search, and the capability to store and index to capture metadata."
"One of Alfresco's strengths is the data modeling, as document domain experts can model type and hierarchical associations and metadata constraints in a declarative way, and a graphical user interface model manager now allows users that don't know XML formalisms to build models."
"Alfresco has positively impacted my organization by providing consistent use and the ability to utilize the system when needed to research zoning compliance records."
"The most valuable feature is the flexibility of the searching elements of the metadata."
"Alfresco is a very good product that has very good inbuilt features, and at the same time, it is customizable and we can customize this product the way we want."
"Document repository."
"Alfresco has impacted my organization and my customers' organizations positively by enabling them to have a very flexible solution that could meet their requirements."
"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 integration capabilities of the product are pretty good."
"All these integrations are through a one-way push, essentially, but with two-way access."
 

Cons

"Some of the user interface could be more intuitive, such as the new record category, where the expression is a term and not really a dynamically evaluated expression as it might imply."
"Metadata, auto class, disposition log, and legal hold."
"Currently, documents in Alfresco are stored on a file server, which, while good for performance, is a security risk."
"We would like to see improvement in the numbers of documents that can be managed by the repository."
"The setup process for Alfresco was complex."
"Alfresco can be improved as the roadmap went a little stagnant for the past few years, so there had not been any new development, and coming out with a new roadmap with new features and executing and delivering on those new features would be an improvement."
"I have not seen a return on investment, as at the time it was not saving them money at Evernorth and Cigna, which is why they moved out of it."
"The configuration of Alfresco is a big challenge."
"The deployment could be costly because of resource availability."
"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"If you buy Alfresco through a partner, there is usually a OEM licensing option."
"There are costs for any upgrade or additional functions."
"It is cheaper compared to head-to-head competitors."
"I rate the product price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Enterprise Content Management solutions are best for your needs.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
8%
Energy/Utilities Company
14%
Government
13%
University
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise14
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alfresco?
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing is that Alfresco is very cheap and cost-effective.
What needs improvement with Alfresco?
Alfresco could be improved in terms of maintenance and could have a simpler architecture regarding search functionality. If I change the metadata, I have to perform re-indexing of all the content f...
What is your primary use case for Alfresco?
My main use case for Alfresco is as a content management system at an enterprise level. A specific example of how I use Alfresco as an enterprise level content management system is for sharing docu...
What needs improvement with SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management?
Improvement could be more about training because it is one of the giants in this market. Nobody can be exposed to SAP and other stuff. So the deployment could be costly because of resource availabi...
What is your primary use case for SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management?
For engineering in the oil and gas industry, most of these companies, specifically in the Texas region, are kind of OpenText customers. Since we all do bigger enterprises and stuff like that, I go ...
What advice do you have for others considering SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management?
I would rate it maybe eight out of ten because I’ve seen the stability. It’s amazingly stable. We have not completely rolled it out the way I would like to, but we are looking into that. Most likel...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management by OpenText, SAP Extended ECM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Over 1,300 companies from 180 different countries. Including EuroStar, Saks Fifth Avenue, NASA Langley Research Center, and KLM.
Metropolitan Utilities District, MAN Diesel & Turbo
Find out what your peers are saying about Alfresco vs. SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.