We performed a comparison between Alfresco and SharePoint based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, OpenText, Box and others in Enterprise Content Management."I like the ease of use, sections, and calendar."
"Document repository."
"The most valuable feature is the flexibility of the searching elements of the metadata."
"The product allows engineering teams and developers to introduce new things in a seamless and easy way."
"The ability to take Excel files and make them dynamic SharePoint lists with instant reporting capabilities has been a major benefit."
"OneDrive and SharePoint provide a secure, fully auditable way of storing information."
"It improved transparency around work products."
"For SharePoint, I believe the most valuable feature is the customization and allowing you to share and edit files and documents. Being able to share externally and the precise administration of the files in terms of giving permissions and controlling who has access to what is a very good feature."
"SharePoint has made things easier with the increased functionality for building the portals, microsites, and total integration with Microsoft categories."
"It is well supported by Microsoft."
"Our staff found it simpler, as they did not have to work within a classification system."
"SharePoint enabled the staff to share documents and work on a document simultaneously."
"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."
"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."
"Search can be improved a lot because we are always trying to compare it with Google Search. Beyond that, it would be helpful to tag the documents."
"The initial setup was very complex."
"Make it more intuitive."
"The areas of this solution that need improvement are the relationships between lists, cross-site web parts, and page-building tools."
"It is too heavy. MS should not have paid foreign coders dollars per each row of code. They wasted the stability and reliability in the end."
"Workflow is something that can become more intelligent."
"No good process to import emails from several users into a single comprehensive SP repository."
"The company also needs to make sure that their policies are dictating how information is stored and used, instead of letting SharePoint take control."
Alfresco is ranked 9th in Enterprise Content Management with 10 reviews 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, OpenText Documentum, OpenText Extended ECM, IBM FileNet and Nuxeo, whereas SharePoint is most compared with Citrix ShareFile, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, Box and OpenText Extended ECM.
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.