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

Hyland OnBase vs IBM ECM 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

Hyland OnBase
Ranking in Enterprise Content Management
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (14th), Low-Code Development Platforms (14th)
IBM ECM
Ranking in Enterprise Content Management
15th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
2.8
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Enterprise Content Management category, the mindshare of Hyland OnBase is 5.1%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM ECM is 2.4%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Hyland OnBase5.1%
IBM ECM2.4%
Other92.5%
Enterprise Content Management
 

Featured Reviews

Abdul_Jabbar - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Infosys
Automated workflows have transformed document handling and support daily approvals and billing
The best features Hyland OnBase offers in my experience include being a robust storage solution that integrates well with the Epic solution, allows Unity Forms to be easy to create and use, and has Distribution Services for sending email notifications as reminders.Out of those features, the workflow engine has made the biggest difference for me because it is excellent for automating approval processes, and we use Hyland OnBase for legal requests, hardware requests, travel requests, corporate credit card requests, and file transfer requests. WorkView is an incredible module for gathering and displaying summary information, and we utilize it highly in our subsidiary to manage our legal contracts, their financial billing process, and their travel. We also use the Document Import Process coupled with Unity API for writing custom code to automate processes to send and receive data from other systems that are not yet API enabled. The impact of Hyland OnBase on our organization is that automating manual processes has had an incredible effect on our return on investment, and the man-hours saved by automating processes pays for the system, ranging from one to five hours. I measured the man-hours saved through the tracking of workflows and automation processes. Additionally, Hyland OnBase has allowed us to move away from moving paper around various departments, providing workflow management to keep approval inside the system and out of the email boxes, eliminating the need for paper storage, and saving storage costs with other vendors.
Thinh Tran - PeerSpot reviewer
BPM Consultant at TECHCOMBANK
Has supported enterprise document storage but lacks cloud readiness and AI capabilities
The new version of IBM ECM is at the end of support, and we need to migrate to a new version to get open support. We need AI capabilities from IBM ECM for additional functionalities in the next release. Specifically, AI is needed for finding documents. The trend is moving toward AI, and for managing many documents effectively, we need AI capabilities. Currently, IBM ECM only handles physical files, not unstructured files. IBM needs to work alongside customers and share best practices for IBM ECM. Reading the IBM Redbook alone is not sufficient for the knowledge we need to build the best architecture for my company. IBM ECM needs to improve the cloud version, such as compatibility with Amazon Cloud, not only IBM Cloud, to make their product more competitive.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It provided data security features, allowing restrictions on sensitive documents, such as who could view or modify them."
"The product's initial setup phase is not difficult."
"I like the flexibility and its modular nature that allows us to create solutions that meet our business needs."
"The solution is very developed and we are not taking full advantage of its functionalities."
"Hyland OnBase is valued for its security, especially for those in the finance domain who require data confidentiality."
"Hyland OnBase has had a positive impact on my organization by reducing manual processes and approval times since the documents are centralized and digitized."
"With Hyland OnBase, every document is unique, and access can be restricted and audited depending on user permission, allowing a company to take control of their information and be more productive."
"This solution is easy to implement and easy to use as long as you know what your business requirement are or the specifications are straightforward."
"The content management is all about you as you can make the same content for minimal purpose solutions applications."
"We have been using it for awhile for the content management purposes of some of the bank's co-functionality, and we have not seen many issues lately, thus, so far, so good in terms of performance."
"This is a good and stable solution; it is a solution that you can trust and is, indeed, the best solution that we found out there."
"It has definitely improved the way our organization functions."
"It has allowed us to take all of our faxes and put them directly into our systems versus having to print them off first and then scan them in, greatly speeding up our front-end processing and making us a lot more efficient."
"Case Manager’s most valuable feature is its ability to store all of our documents in a single place that we can give the business lines access to."
"It's given us compliance, the ability to go to cloud or to stay on-prem, it's at the forefront of technology with new products that give us new functionality and business capabilities, and IBM has fantastic, reliable support that has backed us over the years."
"We've used CMOD or its predecessor for 25 years, so that's pretty stable."
 

Cons

"The migration is a bit difficult in the tool."
"I find OnBase's monolithic architecture to be expensive, and adopting microservices could be beneficial."
"Hyland OnBase could be improved in terms of service support response time."
"We are struggling with duplicates and would like to have OCR functionality when using this solution."
"An area for improvement would be the training - getting our people up to speed on how to use it required more training than we expected due to the complexity of the solution."
"The application could potentially be more open-source, allowing integration with more solutions."
"The solution’s initial setup is a little difficult."
"As the system grows in terms of number of modules, features, and functionality, options can be confusing and they can conflict with other options that you enable."
"I would recommend not going with ECM 8 and going with FileNet instead. It seems like that is the future of the lower-volume repository. It seems like they are moving away from ECM 8.5 so I think we're going to have some challenges coming up, getting off of that technology."
"Technical support is pretty good. It's a crap shoot."
"More importantly, it is sometimes overly complex, and requires a lot of work from the infrastructure and administration standpoint; a lot of hands-on patches."
"I think we need to see less dependence on Java, and get away from those applets."
"It didn't implement as easy as we had hoped. We had some partner issues."
"There are definitely challenges. It's not an easy solution."
"I think it's already getting away from Java applets. A lot of our users struggle with keeping up to date with Java versioning, so a lot of the functions they're doing, like printing, emailing, and even some of the viewing, they're struggling with."
"I would like to see seamless application integration."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution costs around $6,000 per month."
"They can do better in terms of the pricing model. It is a really expensive tool in Latin America. They should have different prices for different regions."
"There are a number of different types of licenses. There are concurrent licenses, individual licenses and imaging licenses."
"The tool's price is high."
"OnBase is reasonably priced."
"Reach out to local IBM partners.​"
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Enterprise Content Management solutions are best for your needs.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Construction Company
16%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise13
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Hyland OnBase?
The main factors that influenced my decision to choose Hyland OnBase over other options available on the market were the cost compared to others and the high document-handling capacity that Hyland ...
What needs improvement with Hyland OnBase?
I believe Hyland OnBase could improve by making its user interface more user-friendly.I am referring to the learning curve, and I can tell you that the experience with the platform's learning curve...
What is your primary use case for Hyland OnBase?
Hyland OnBase serves as the primary document management solution for all of my company's documents.A concrete example of how I use Hyland OnBase for document management within my organization is th...
What needs improvement with IBM ECM?
The new version of IBM ECM is at the end of support, and we need to migrate to a new version to get open support. We need AI capabilities from IBM ECM for additional functionalities in the next rel...
What is your primary use case for IBM ECM?
I can answer a few short questions about my experience with IBM ECM. On our system, we put documents into IBM ECM, which has helped us with the document management process. We use the store documen...
What advice do you have for others considering IBM ECM?
We use both IBM BPM and Camunda together. We still maintain IBM BPM, and for new development, we develop on Camunda. We continue to use other IBM products. We use IBM BPM and ECM, but we don't use ...
 

Also Known As

OnBase
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Honda France Industries, Hill County Texas, Hylant Group, ING Lease France, State of South Carolina, Syracuse University, Swindon College, Rhode Island Department of Human Services, Rochester Institute of Technology, Moen, Odense University Hospital
KeyBank, Standard Chartered Bank, Union Bank, Sistema Tecnol‹gico de Monterrey, Illinois Department of Human Services, UnitedHealth Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Hyland OnBase vs. IBM ECM and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.