IBM FileNet vs SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management comparison

IBM FileNet vs. SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management

Download the complete report

Helped 857,585 peers since 2012

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

SAP Extended Enterprise Con...

Ranking in Enterprise Content Management

12th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.9

Number of Reviews

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 SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management is 1.0%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Enterprise Content Management

Featured Reviews

Emad Rizki

System integrator at Indépendant

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.

Read full review

MukeshGiri

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Stability is really good. We fairly recently upgraded a version of it and have not been having any problems. The resources seem to be really good with this version; it is a little easier to troubleshoot issues."

"It provides good stability and scalability for huge enterprises as well."

"The most valuable feature is access control."

"It is used by large enterprises. It has to be scalable and robust for them to use. We have seen that on multiple projects over the years."

"We use IBM Datacap's capabilities to capture data and then we use FileNet's capabilities for filing, to create an archive of documents... We [also] use FileNet's ability to expose information via APIs and interoperate with other systems."

"It improves the time when providing customer service to our constituents."

"The usability is really good. Our business users are pleased with it. They seem to get what they are looking for, and it's very efficient."

"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."

More IBM FileNet pros

"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

"This solution could be improved with the ability to present the file system from FileNet."

"The setup process is very complex."

"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."

"For end-users there is a lack of administrative features. The interface of basic FileNet is not very good."

"It needs better collaboration between the IBM teams on the FileNet and CCM sides."

"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."

"It would be nice to have additional integration features, which could be integration with IoOT-based products and solutions that also have automation requirements on the IOT side. Anything can be integrated from a Gateway or API perspective would be a plus."

"The basic and fundamental point about FileNet is that the interface is very bad. It's just not appealing so people are reluctant to use it."

More IBM FileNet cons

"The deployment could be costly because of resource availability."

"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"For small scale industries, they allow different options. They can do open source. It is the complexity of the data security that they should think about before they choose."

"The licensing cost of FileNet is comparable."

"Yearly, we pay for the maintenance, which is $20,000."

"It has reduced operating costs by reducing the amount of manual work needed."

"1. It will be more expensive than estimated to setup. 2. You will need to double the staff while you are running the old system and installing the new system. 3. Depending on the number of documents to be migrated, make sure you understand the potentially massive amount of time and effort required to migrate the existing content to the new platform."

"The biggest issue is the cost of the FileNet, because the license cost is very high. If a customer doesn't have good technical guides that are aware of the license calculation, they will pay too much. FileNet's license calculation depends on the processor and number of users. So my advice to a new customer is to be very careful with your calculations before purchasing FileNet."

"The cost is about $40,000, plus yearly maintenance."

More IBM FileNet pricing and cost advice

"I rate the product price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Enterprise Content Management solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

857,585 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

10%

Insurance Company

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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 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 one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price.

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 and other stuff. So the deployment could be costly because of resource availabi...

SharePoint vs IBM FileNet

Comparisons

Compared 16% of the time

OpenText Extended ECM vs IBM FileNet

Compared 16% of the time

OpenText Documentum vs IBM FileNet

Compared 15% of the time

Hyland OnBase vs IBM FileNet

Compared 8% of the time

Alfresco vs IBM FileNet

Compared 6% of the time

More IBM FileNet Competitors

IBM ECM vs SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management

Compared 42% of the time

Adobe Experience Manager vs SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management

Compared 35% of the time

Newgen OmniDocs vs SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management

Compared 23% of the time

More SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management Competitors

Product Reports

IBM FileNet

Download IBM FileNet product report

Enterprise Content Management

Download SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management product report

SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management report

Also Known As

No data available

SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management by OpenText, SAP Extended ECM

Overview

IBM FileNet is a leading IBM enterprise content management product family. IBM FileNet is one of the ECM solutions that can change the way a company does business by enabling users to capture, activate, socialize, analyze, and govern content throughout its lifecycle.

There are many IBM FileNet products available, all of which are integrated and based on the FileNet P8 Platform.

IBM

A digital core built on the SAP HANA business data platform and integrated applications for content management comprise the next-generation business model to complete your digital transformation and help you manage unstructured content as part of the business transactions more effectively while facilitating collaboration and storing content to avoid redundancies, minimize information growth, and support regulatory compliance. The SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management application by OpenText helps you engage customers with a 360-degree view of their profile and optimize procurement processes, employee productivity, process efficiency, and equipment ROI.

SAP

Sample Customers

Suncorp Group Limited, St. Vincent Health, Citigroup, SRCSD, and UK Dept for Work and Pensions.

Metropolitan Utilities District, MAN Diesel & Turbo

IBM FileNet vs. SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management