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IBM FileNet vs OpenText Documentum Content Management comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 19, 2025

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

IBM FileNet
Ranking in Enterprise Content Management
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
102
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
OpenText Documentum Content...
Ranking in Enterprise Content Management
2nd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Enterprise Content Management category, the mindshare of IBM FileNet is 10.0%, up from 10.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenText Documentum Content Management is 12.4%, up from 10.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Content Management
 

Featured Reviews

Emad Rizki - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates seamless integration for large enterprises with strong deployment capabilities
FileNet was scalable and could be implemented into big multinational organizations. However, it has become very expensive recently. Compared to low-code solutions such as Appian and outsystems, FileNet has gaps, mainly because it requires coding, which is not preferred by clients due to pricing concerns in Pakistan. We transitioned clients to cloud solutions, although FileNet has been strongly integrated with on-prem deployments.
Ashish Shelar - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers version control capabilities, easy to set up but highly-priced
The main thing is the cost. Most of the time, organizations move away from Documentum due to cost. It's highly-priced, and the support costs are high. Now, SharePoint and other options. Microsoft gives free licenses, so organizations mainly look for cost-effective products. The second thing is updates and patching. We patch very often, every six months or a year. We have SP1, SP2, and SP3, and then suddenly, it's moved out of support. That's the organization's main pain area. They don't want to keep investing from a storage perspective. The licensing model should be changed. The product itself is out of support. They have not considered it for AI initiatives. The new version should be on the cloud. I'm not sure if the new version of Documentum, xECM, is cloud compatible or on which cloud it is compatible, but the OpenText server itself is on a cloud, which would be beneficial to the business. And it would also be easier for migration.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"For a large company, for the robustness, stability, performance, and the growth — that you can grow it within seconds — I would advise using FileNet, without any doubt."
"I would say the workflow is pretty good. Also, the flexibility of being able to create custom objects with a lot of domain-specific attributes that we follow."
"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."
"The ability to manage the content well."
"The ability to tag data, as it seems to be indexed well. It is a good space to manage data, keep track of it, and organize it."
"It improves the time when providing customer service to our constituents."
"It has the ability to mix document management and process automation."
"FileNet is highly scalable and suited for implementation in large multinational organizations."
"I recommend Documentum as it supports big systems and offers good integration."
"The most valuable feature of Documentum for our content management needs is its ability to segregate access based on department and role."
"I am satisfied with OpenText Documentum so far; it has great integration capabilities."
"The most valuable feature is the good automation engine, which helps in reducing the development cost and allows easy development of applications."
"The most valuable feature is that it's a central repository for everything, whether it's videos, documents, Excel sheets, etc."
"It is a very secure system. It is reliable, and that is one of the reasons people manage their content within Documentum. It gives them the confidence that the content is accessible to the right people and not to the wrong people."
"OpenText Documentum is a robust choice for enterprise-level document management."
"It provides possibilities for us to save documents and supporting the business process while doing so."
 

Cons

"However, the configuration does take a long time. Every company needs its own configuration design. It depends on how many applications are connecting to FileNet. It can take a long time, depending on the application count."
"Programmers have to translate user needs into IBM FileNet, which causes misinterpretations."
"FileNet and similar enterprise-level tools require substantial costs, starting in the millions, which limits their use to large enterprises."
"The new software and trends with the cloud solution is a little slow. I would like them to move toward more cloud-based and microservices rather than a SaaS model. This is where the industry is going and what customers are asking for."
"It is stable as long as you create the right environment. We have had issues at times, but just because of configuration issues."
"It would be nice if they could make it like containers are working in Kubernetes to auto-scale based on demand."
"It is ability to display legacy content needs improvement."
"I would like to see it able to capture NLP in an advanced search. It would also be good if it could capture images and segregate them in categories within a span of seconds."
"The documentation often leaves customers feeling somewhat frustrated, as OpenText seems to expect customers to remind them constantly about the need for better documentation, as they don't provide clear guidance on their documentation practices."
"An area that needs to improve is how to reduce storage space on the AWS site."
"In BPM could be better. Its GUI needs the ability to build more rules. This is a crucial feature. For example, OpenText has some products that allow you to control your checks, invoices, and so on. They have exciting approaches to converting pictures to text, but the tool for business process management isn't easy to use. The GIU is not so good."
"The price is quite high as the licensing prices are significant."
"It can be somewhat cumbersome for the operations team since it’s not a cloud instance"
"The user interface can be a bit more intuitive."
"The main issue is the software's performance when storing around 10 million or more documents. It becomes slow and needs improvement. Perhaps it's a cloud-related issue, but it needs to be addressed. It could be due to our S3 bucket or something else. Nevertheless, this is a significant challenge we're facing."
"The BPM side should be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"​There are lots of components to the product. Make sure before you invest that you know which components you need.​​"
"We use extraction. Therefore, we can see 80 to 85 percent accuracy on data extraction. This reduces the manual indexing part, which is definitely a gain on performance efficiency."
"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 cost is about $40,000, plus yearly maintenance."
"The platform is inexpensive."
"Talking about the cost is difficult because IBM has offers that combine different products, and each of these offers has different types of licensing. IBM also has a policy that the actual price for a given customer may be very different from the stated book price. It's hard to say whether it's expensive or not."
"My customers have seen ROI. There have been productivity gains, time savings gains, and things that they have been doing much more efficiently in a more modern way than they were before."
"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."
"It is quite an expensive product."
"The product is expensive."
"OpenText Documentum has announced a new licensing model, which could be more expensive."
"It falls in line with a lot of things that are out there on the market. There is nothing extraordinary in terms of great or bad."
"The price is considered affordable now."
"OpenText Documentum's pricing is good."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
10%
Insurance Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Government
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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?
From the company's perspective, the licensing cost for IBM FileNet is still affordable. Though the license cost is somewhat expensive, it remains manageable. The company rates it between 3 and 5 be...
What needs improvement with IBM FileNet?
The API provided by IBM FileNet is a very out-of-date implementation. From the beginning, we cannot use a REST API; we have to use the IBM FileNet native API, which is quite outdated.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Documentum?
It falls in line with a lot of things that are out there on the market. There is nothing extraordinary in terms of great or bad.
What do you like most about OpenText Documentum?
The most valuable feature of Documentum for our content management needs is its ability to segregate access based on department and role.
What needs improvement with OpenText Documentum?
The interface of OpenText Documentum could be more intuitive; sometimes it is hard to find where the information is located.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Dell EMC Documentum, Documentum , Documentum xCelerated Composition Platform
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Suncorp Group Limited, St. Vincent Health, Citigroup, SRCSD, and UK Dept for Work and Pensions.
Agility; Bibliotheca Alexandrina; Capitec Bank; Department of Social Development, Republic of South Africa; County of Los Angeles, Department of Human Resources; Fresenius Kabi; Heathrow Airport; Lahey Health; Linde PLC; Milestone Pharma Co. Ltd; National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development; Open Grid Europe GmbH; REPCO NEX Industrial Solutions; Springer Nature; Syngene International; Tata Power DDL; University of Texas Austin
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM FileNet vs. OpenText Documentum Content Management and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
857,688 professionals have used our research since 2012.