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Hyland OnBase vs IBM FileNet vs SAP Extended Enterprise 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 February 2026, in the Enterprise Content Management category, the mindshare of Hyland OnBase is 5.8%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM FileNet is 6.2%, down from 10.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management is 1.7%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Content Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM FileNet6.2%
Hyland OnBase5.8%
SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management1.7%
Other86.3%
Enterprise Content Management
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1981395 - PeerSpot reviewer
Product owner at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Seamless data management enhances security while monolithic architecture and reporting need improvements
I believe the reporting features need improvement, as other competitors in the market provide better analytics. Hyland is working on a new platform (HXP) to integrate features from all products, addressing some concerns. Additionally, there could be more integration points with products Hyland has acquired, such as Alfresco and Nuxeo. Offering a trial version with basic features would allow users to experience the product before purchasing. I find OnBase's monolithic architecture to be expensive, and adopting microservices could be beneficial.
Shankar-Kambhampaty - PeerSpot reviewer
Consulting CTO at a tech consulting company with 1-10 employees
Business workflows have been automated and document processes are streamlined at large scale
I believe IBM FileNet could be improved or enhanced in the future, specifically the user interface development support, which, despite all the improvements, still feels from the 2010s or 2000s. The current state of the user interface development support and the ability to customize it leaves much to be desired. The backend engine, process engine, and object engine are fantastic. However, the user interface, which is required to provide an impressive experience to the user, is difficult to build. IBM will need to do something about this area. Over time, IBM has made improvements with enhancements through CP4BA and other tools, with which user interfaces can be built. But there is much more is needed. The initial setup process for IBM FileNet requires specialists. IBM FileNet is not a click-click-click deploy kind of product. It has several components that need to be installed in different versions and in a particular order. Additionally, IBM Cloud does not provide a proper experience. The problem is I cannot use IBM Cloud easily. I cannot even get a membership easily. With AWS, I just use my credit card, sign up, and I am done. With IBM Cloud, that is not how it is. They go through all validation processes, and it is a nightmare at times. There are problems around IBM FileNet, not exactly with IBM FileNet itself, but the point is that it is not a click-click-click deploy either on the cloud or on-premise. It requires specialists, and there is a big learning curve toward deploying and managing the whole infrastructure as well as the software. I communicate with the technical support of IBM frequently. I have communicated several times, and frankly, there is much to be desired on that side. When you raise a ticket, it takes 24 to 48 hours for them to respond. We live in a time where business moves at the speed of light. Twenty-four hours is a very long time. You need to be able to get technical support instantaneously. It is not like the more contemporary support models where you get turnaround in minutes, not days.
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

"Its most valuable aspect is its flexibility"
"The product's initial setup phase is not difficult."
"The solution's most valuable features are integration and flexibility."
"The solution is very developed and we are not taking full advantage of its functionalities."
"I like the cloud and its integrability."
"The most valuable features are that it's very secure and provides audit trails for our documents."
"Integrating Hyland OnBase with our systems enabled us to automate document designs and templates, which was extremely helpful in the finance and banking industry."
"It provided data security features, allowing restrictions on sensitive documents, such as who could view or modify them."
"The most valuable features of FileNet are its comprehensive ability to store content, to get insights from the content, and to use that content for making decisions routed through workflow."
"The most useful feature is its persistent storage. Also, the full-text search and attribute searching are valuable."
"​Streamlined our business processes."
"The natural interpolatability with IBM Datacap, that is a key component of our solution, as well as with BPM, and WebSphere Portal. That's why we prefer FileNet instead of some other, less world-class solution.​"
"The beauty is the response time. It is very good nowadays within the platform."
"One of the most valuable features is FileNet's ability to capture things from the stack, from e-mail, to scanning of Excel and Word. FileNet can also convert many types of files to PDFs very easily."
"FileNet is very user-friendly... We have business users using and it is quite friendly for them."
"The usability is very good. We like the Content Navigator. It's very easy to use the search and retrieve for documents and has a lot of options for the user to download documents or send an email."
"All these integrations are through a one-way push, essentially, but with two-way access."
"The integration capabilities of the product are pretty good."
 

Cons

"The look and feel could be better. The integration with the user could be better. It could also be more user-friendly."
"I find OnBase's monolithic architecture to be expensive, and adopting microservices could be beneficial."
"The solution’s initial setup is a little difficult."
"The migration is a bit difficult in the tool."
"The application could potentially be more open-source, allowing integration with more solutions."
"We found the size of images to be a restriction, though this may have been due to the API used rather than the Hyland application."
"We need to troubleshoot why our reports didn't get downloaded in a day. There is a workflow feature which powerful but also complicated."
"For user experience, they would have to do more with the interface. It is not easy to work with and is a little messy. It is getting better, but it is not yet good enough. Other products are comparatively doing better in terms of the user interface. I have been hearing about Box, which is very easy to use and learn for the users. OnBase has to work on this aspect. It should have BPM capabilities. We compete with tools that provide the BPM feature and support those standards. 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."
"One of the things I know is a bit of a challenge for them - because I know that it lives on top of FileNet, so it's not necessarily living on top of a relational database, per se - is that we also are using it as our system of record for our language management and our language definitions. I know that that was a little bit of a challenge, just because of the underlying architecture."
"I would like to see in FileNet integrated with Watson, which can read something and send it without any human contact or interaction."
"I would like to have an offline DR deployment. If that is doable, then it would be a big win."
"We would like to see, in FileNet, the ability to manage video and audio.​"
"We know that they're looking at documents, but we don't know what documents they're actually going and finding the most, or where the bottlenecks might be. It would be nice if there was some interconnectivity back into Bluemix to say, "Ok, you've got a workflow problem here." That would be a neat feature moving forward because we've got a lot of users that would just say, "The system is not working." We had a few threads would get hung up because they were just constantly banging on these few documents. If that were the case, if we knew that ahead of time, then we could fix that, change the search sequences to make it more efficient. But we were blind to that until the users said it's not working."
"​I would rate the technical support as medium. I do not like the login process. It is not great."
"As the era is changing to AI, I believe IBM FileNet needs to focus more on AI capabilities."
"Sometimes, there can be issues with the database connections. FileNet has too many outages because things are broken in the database."
"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The deployment could be costly because of resource availability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"OnBase is reasonably priced."
"There are a number of different types of licenses. There are concurrent licenses, individual licenses and imaging licenses."
"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."
"The solution costs around $6,000 per month."
"The tool's price is high."
"The solution saves time and money. It helps us to be able to accomplish the goals of our business, as opposed to being tangled in the weeds of what we could do."
"The platform is inexpensive."
"Yearly, we pay for the maintenance, which is $20,000."
"FileNet is quite expensive, although Documentum is expensive too."
"FileNet is not cheap, but you absolutely get what you pay for. ​"
"For the medium scale or large scale, I would recommend FileNet. FileNet is free of licensing expenses, thus good for the money. It is not expensive, but worth for the money, especially for medium scale and large scale industries."
"IBM FileNet is an expensive solution."
"Licensing costs depend on the size of the storage."
"I rate the product price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Government
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
8%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Energy/Utilities Company
18%
Government
13%
University
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise74
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Hyland OnBase?
I find pricing to be on the higher side due to its monolithic architecture. I would rate it six out of ten. Transitio...
What needs improvement with Hyland OnBase?
I believe the reporting features need improvement, as other competitors in the market provide better analytics. Hylan...
What is your primary use case for Hyland OnBase?
I was a vendor managing Hyland OnBase ( /products/hyland-onbase-reviews ) for Hyland, not as a direct user but as a b...
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?
The pricing and licensing of IBM FileNet is high. We are living in a world where the minimal license from IBM costs a...
What needs improvement with IBM FileNet?
I believe IBM FileNet could be improved or enhanced in the future, specifically the user interface development suppor...
What do you like most about SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management?
The integration capabilities of the product are pretty good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management?
The prices can vary depending on the customer, region, and domain. I rate the product price an eight on a scale of on...
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...
 

Also Known As

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

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
Suncorp Group Limited, St. Vincent Health, Citigroup, SRCSD, and UK Dept for Work and Pensions.
Metropolitan Utilities District, MAN Diesel & Turbo
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, IBM, OpenText and others in Enterprise Content Management. Updated: February 2026.
881,821 professionals have used our research since 2012.