We performed a comparison between Alfresco and SharePoint based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Enterprise Content Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable feature is the flexibility of the searching elements of the metadata."
"The product allows engineering teams and developers to introduce new things in a seamless and easy way."
"I like the ease of use, sections, and calendar."
"Document repository."
"SharePoint is easy to collaborate with."
"The ability to have version control and co-editing is vital to our workflows."
"It allows for simultaneous users to be on it."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is file sharing or information sharing."
"We can now share to team members by MS Teams and assign planners to follow and update statuses in a single platform."
"It offers ease of use, which is crucial."
"This solution has helped us with the categorization, organization, management, discovery, and delivery of program and project related information."
"Information is much more readily available."
"I would like them to consider document capture functionality."
"I think the presentation layer could be improved - currently, it's too complex, and there are too many features cluttered all over the screen."
"Metadata, auto class, disposition log, and legal hold."
"Alfresco has a very steep learning curve, and unfortunately, during the learning process, it's very easy to make errors, which often are unforgiving."
"The limitations and boundaries must be extended."
"There's a challenge with desktop applications synchronizing with online documents in real-time. If someone is working on a document in the desktop version of Excel, for example, and someone else is editing the same document online, the changes won't sync immediately. That's the only real challenge we've encountered."
"The workflow engine cannot support the business needs."
"One issue is that when users mistakenly hide files or set permissions incorrectly, it can lead to files becoming inaccessible, requiring intervention from Microsoft support to resolve."
"The management of the product/back-end is complex."
"Flexibility and extensibility, above everything, could be improved."
"It will fully use your system resources."
"Search can be improved a lot because we are always trying to compare it with Google Search. Beyond that, it would be helpful to tag the documents."
Alfresco is ranked 9th in Enterprise Content Management while SharePoint is ranked 1st in Enterprise Content Management with 150 reviews. Alfresco is rated 8.0, while SharePoint is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Alfresco writes "Flexible and customizable but lacking integration with Microsoft". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SharePoint writes "Good integrations, helps with collaboration, and increases visibility". Alfresco is most compared with Hyland OnBase, IBM FileNet, OpenText Documentum, OpenText Extended ECM and Nuxeo, whereas SharePoint is most compared with Citrix ShareFile, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, WordPress and Amazon WorkDocs. See our Alfresco vs. SharePoint report.
See our list of best Enterprise Content Management vendors.
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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 3.42.
Document Management 4.07.
Records Management 3.77.
Sharepoint scored high for Team productivity features 4.31.
I fully agree with dylan's view.
In France it will be easier to find SharePoint competencies than Alfresco's.
Note that real high level SP competencies are very busy.
Fundamentally, I would say : if you have internal tech team with strong Java skills, alfresco could be a good choice; if not, prepare a strong budget with an integrator.
Out of the box without technical development, SP remains more powerfull and let users and power users realize sites they could not realize with Alfresco.
By the way, you should choose ten enterprise version of Alfreco, Community version is only for testing or for very small projects.
I fully agree with the Dylan's view. It all depends on what your specific requirements are. The best way to go about comparing the two is to do a request for proposal based on a scenario and to see what the vendors propose.
What features are you needing and what skills does the organisation have? Alfresco and SharePoint customisation are quite difference skill sets. In terms of cost, both have a free edition (Alfresco Community Edition & SharePoint 2013 Foundation Edition), but only enterprise editions contain the records management features.
Critically SharePoint is a platform with no compliance whereas Alfresco is a product with DoD 5015.2 compliance, The SharePoint philosophy is to unite all legacy systems in a web interface that can be accessed from anywhere. To that end almost any data can be connected to SharePoint - as opposed to replicated which would increase storage costs and system complexity - and used in business process automation.
The enterprise edition of Alfresco features records management, but in SharePoint you also get features such as e-Discovery of both SharePoint and Exchange data.
In most geographic areas it's easier to get SharePoint resources than Alfresco, and that also affects costs. On the other hand, Alfresco's interface is often preferred to SharePoint and that can affect adoption. Adoption is usually the biggest problem regardless of the technology choice.
Alfresco aggregates various search providers, but SharePoint has custom search verticals and people directory search built-in, using existing Active Directory data. The search configuration in Alfresco is via XML files but via the web interface in SharePoint: Both are easy but you would need access to the server console to change it in Alfresco which might bridge security boundaries in large organisations.