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Alfresco vs SharePoint 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
5.6
Alfresco delivers significant ROI with cost savings, efficiency, reduced IT support, automation, and centralized document management benefits.
Sentiment score
5.5
SharePoint enhances efficiency by centralizing document management, improving collaboration, and reducing operational costs, despite inconsistent ROI evaluations.
Centrally managing records has helped us automate legal retention policies and reduce physical storage costs by eighty percent, saving us in costs and protecting us from massive financial penalties associated with compliance failures.
Head Of The Operations at Flash AI
Alfresco provides a significant return on investment by efficiently managing documents.
Country Head Spain at Apiux
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.6
Alfresco customer support is generally positive but mixed, with prompt responses and some challenges due to complex workflows.
Sentiment score
6.2
SharePoint customer service is generally good, but experiences vary based on support packages, with premium options offering quicker resolutions.
I would prefer a direct relationship with them, focusing on updating their products more like in an agile practice
Head Of Information Technology at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Alfresco's technical support is very fast and professional.
Country Head Spain at Apiux
The support team was very responsive and resolved my query within forty-five minutes, which was a good experience.
Head Of The Operations at Flash AI
There is a lack of detailed and timely responses, and support is not always transparent with the solutions.
Practice Manager at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
The quality of Microsoft's technical support is very high.
Consultant/Administrator O365 solutions at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
It's also difficult sometimes to get the right information because we speak at first to a generalist and they have to go to a specialist.
Supervisor at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
5.5
Alfresco efficiently scales with growth, excelling in clustering and customization, though complex setups are required for high document counts.
Sentiment score
6.8
SharePoint is scalable and adaptable, but requires careful planning to avoid issues, especially in large deployments.
Implementations needing to handle millions of documents may involve complex cluster setups requiring expert assistance.
Country Head Spain at Apiux
However, if you are looking to expand into areas with more images and videos, the scalability is somewhat limited without a developer and customization.
Agile Product Owner - CMS at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees
Making it easy to scale from a load-balancing and infrastructure perspective.
Cloud Security & Governance at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
SharePoint is massively scalable and I would rate it as 8.5 out of ten.
Cloud Architect at Freelance
SharePoint allows multiple teams to work at the same time, making it adaptable for large data volumes.
PM at EUIPO - European Union Intellectual Property Office
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Alfresco is stable and reliable with few issues, though proper scaling and expertise are essential for optimal performance.
Sentiment score
7.7
SharePoint is stable with few issues, mainly from setups, data size, and updates; following best practices enhances reliability.
Alfresco is definitely a stable and scalable solution.
Head Of The Operations at Flash AI
The stability of Alfresco is rated highly as it hardly goes down.
Head Of Information Technology at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Alfresco is generally a very stable and high-performance platform.
Country Head Spain at Apiux
The stability of SharePoint is high; it is quite stable and resilient.
Cloud Security & Governance at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Everything runs smoothly, and I have no problems with its stability.
Financial Director at Est
SharePoint is a stable product.
 

Room For Improvement

Alfresco requires UI refinement, enhanced security, better tools, documentation, modern database support, and smoother integration with other systems.
SharePoint's user interface, performance, integration, and support challenges hinder usability and require expertise, customization, and third-party tools.
It would be beneficial if Alfresco offers different options for document storage, such as databases or cloud solutions.
Country Head Spain at Apiux
Being able to leverage something such as MongoDB, a NoSQL database as part of the architecture would be a big improvement to enable high volume in the hundreds of millions of documents.
Manager, Major Accounts at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
Governance of this system is required. If you don't have proper governance, things can go wrong.
Technical Project Manager at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Microsoft forces users to upgrade their license to access proper auditing information, which is essential and should be included in any license.
Practice Manager at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
The rights management aspect can be particularly challenging, which may affect the overall user-friendliness of the product.
Lead Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Expansion of scalability is needed, specifically the threshold limits for site items should be increased beyond the current 5,000 items.
 

Setup Cost

Alfresco has competitive pricing for large enterprises, focusing on pay-per-use with potential costs for upgrades and integrations.
SharePoint pricing varies widely based on deployment type and offers cost-saving opportunities through strategic planning and licensing agreements.
Since we obtained Alfresco through AWS Marketplace, we are billed for what we use.
Head Of The Operations at Flash AI
The pricing of Alfresco starts at $100,000, which can be expensive for small projects.
Country Head Spain at Apiux
Pricing is considered mid-range.
Head Of Information Technology at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Unlike Drupal, all necessary applications are included in the Microsoft license, making it cost-effective.
PM at EUIPO - European Union Intellectual Property Office
Microsoft offers bundled pricing for Office, SharePoint, and Exchange, making it cost-effective.
Cloud Security & Governance at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Enterprise licensing is generally cost-effective compared to individual purchases.
Lead Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

Alfresco offers robust document management, integration, customization, collaboration, and user-friendly features, meeting diverse organizational needs efficiently.
SharePoint enhances collaboration and productivity with customization, secure file sharing, Microsoft integration, workflow automation, and comprehensive search.
This makes the record independent of the document, which is beneficial as documents often change, and it helps avoid continual updates to the registry.
Country Head Spain at Apiux
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.
Head Of The Operations at Flash AI
It enabled users to find exactly what documents they were looking for in a timely fashion, as well as to export to patients and healthcare members what they needed to do for Medicaid, Medicare, or any other secondary insurance, including the documents they needed to fill out as well as prescriptions.
Agile Product Owner - CMS at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees
Additionally, SharePoint acts as a version control system, allowing easy recovery of past document versions.
Cloud Architect at Freelance
Its rights management capabilities and ability to restrict access to certain people are also very useful.
Lead Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The most valuable feature of SharePoint is the ability to collaborate on documents without having multiple versions.
Financial Director at Est
 

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)
SharePoint
Ranking in Enterprise Content Management
1st
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
165
Ranking in other categories
Web Content Management (2nd), Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) (1st), Enterprise Intranet (1st)
 

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 SharePoint is 12.0%, down from 15.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SharePoint12.0%
Alfresco6.4%
Other81.6%
Enterprise Content Management
 

Q&A Highlights

AS
Community Manager at PeerSpot (formerly IT Central Station)
Apr 04, 2023
 

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.
AnjneyBhardwaj - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Market Research Analyst at IDC Corporate
Collaboration has improved through simplified document access and controlled sharing
SharePoint is definitely used to keep a record of our files and data. The capability is quite good because it is time-saving. I have used it only four or five times, but it has been very helpful to keep all my information in a consolidated manner. The search feature is one of the most beneficial factors that we use to filter out the latest data or the latest file as per our convenience and use case. When you have a large repository, this feature is particularly valuable. Role-based access control has been helpful while developing the knowledge platform. The roles were defined clearly, which made it easy for the four or five of us to work simultaneously and collaborate on our project in a similar manner.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Enterprise Content Management solutions are best for your needs.
910,005 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user8925 - PeerSpot reviewer
Developer with 51-200 employees
Aug 23, 2013
Jive vs Sharepoint vs Drupal Commons
At Mediacurrent we often get requests to compare Drupal to other platforms used for intranet sites and social business platforms (like https://dev.twitter.com/ for example). This is often referred to as “Social Business Software”, which has grown in popularity in recent years. I decided to do a…
 

Answers from the Community

AS
Community Manager at PeerSpot (formerly IT Central Station)
Apr 4, 2023
Apr 4, 2023
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...
2 out of 8 answers
Aug 4, 2014
Hi, Sorry but I am not familiar with Alfresco. We have experience with the followings: WebSphere CMS, Sharepoint and Drupal. Thank you, Jacob (Kobi) Welber CTO
it_user71736 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works with 51-200 employees
Aug 4, 2014
www.springcm.com routinely solves this problem and there now is an "easy button" on ECM and we have lots of clients to prove it, plus it includes some pre-configured apps that are very quick to deploy and derive value from. ok, commercial over... two quick questions: 1- do you need to integrate with salesforce.com? 2- what is the primary challenge with sharepoint?
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
9%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise40
Large Enterprise83
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SharePoint?
I do not know the difference between the prices of the two solutions; I did not work on this project.
What needs improvement with SharePoint?
For me SharePoint is amazing. I have not thought about any feature that could be better because downloads and renaming are all easy. However, there is a feature that could be better. When you are u...
What is your primary use case for SharePoint?
We use SharePoint as our cloud storage for files, folders, and everything else. We have different teams, including the evidence and impact team which I work with, the alumni team, and other teams t...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Over 1,300 companies from 180 different countries. Including EuroStar, Saks Fifth Avenue, NASA Langley Research Center, and KLM.
Toyota, Aeroports de Paris, ASBBank Ltd., Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals, CambridgeshireConstabulary, D&M Group, NPL Construction Company, and The Regional Municipality of Niagara.
Find out what your peers are saying about Alfresco vs. SharePoint and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
910,005 professionals have used our research since 2012.