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."I like the ease of use, sections, and calendar."
"The most valuable feature is the flexibility of the searching elements of the metadata."
"Document repository."
"The product allows engineering teams and developers to introduce new things in a seamless and easy way."
"The most valuable features are the collaboration and sharing."
"It is well supported by Microsoft."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is file sharing or information sharing."
"It's stable. It's very widely used by companies. Also, the knowledge of the product has improved over the years, and by other companies that support it or are Microsoft SharePoint partners. So if there are problems, there's always a user or company that knows the information or can help you; even with very uncommon problems."
"The ability to quickly and easily create team sites has been great."
"It has an easy to distribute administration capability, and can also scale to meet a large number of future needs."
"The most valuable feature of SharePoint is its ease of use."
"SharePoint is easy to collaborate with."
"Metadata, auto class, disposition log, and legal hold."
"I think the presentation layer could be improved - currently, it's too complex, and there are too many features cluttered all over the screen."
"Alfresco has a very steep learning curve, and unfortunately, during the learning process, it's very easy to make errors, which often are unforgiving."
"I would like them to consider document capture functionality."
"Workflow is something that can become more intelligent."
"The areas of this solution that need improvement are the relationships between lists, cross-site web parts, and page-building tools."
"The initial setup process is not intuitive."
"Too many versions being released in a short time period. Too much time being devoted to migration planning."
"Integration needs to be more straightforward, particularly with Azure. SharePoint also needs a more comprehensive introductory course for users."
"I would like it to be more compliant with global regulations. There are certain features which could be included that currently are not there, such as compliance and record management capabilities."
"It is too heavy. MS should not have paid foreign coders dollars per each row of code. They wasted the stability and reliability in the end."
"The support is the worst. It is bad when Microsoft support does not even know what to do and you have to tell them. Also, they take too long to solve a problem."
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 Microsoft Teams. 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.