The license for Alfresco is expensive - not the maximum, but close. There are also extra costs once you start building integrations, as implementation seems to be very costly.

Alfresco did change some things about the pricing and licensing recently, and I've always been on the other side of the fence. In other words, I worked as an engineer and not as a "business partner".

My top priority has always been developing against Alfresco and not selling the product. That said, if you buy Alfresco through a partner, there is usually a OEM licensing option (this depends on each Alfresco<->partner contract). Otherwise, the smallest individual business license will allow you to have a single instance Alfresco (that is 1 license = 1 server), with up to 300 users.

It's also worth mentioning that Activiti has recently become a standalone product and now has a separate license and pricing. The Activiti engine within Alfresco is still included in the Alfresco license though.

Most clients I worked with are migrating from a shared drive setup or a home grown content management system, and they want to migrate existing content into Alfresco and start using CMS features such as free text search, metadata search, rules, fine grained permissions, automation, workflow, collaboration and sharing.

In regards to the various Alfresco products that are available, the pricing and license options vary as below:

• Alfresco Two Edition
• Alfresco Community Edition - Freely Available
• Alfresco Enterprise Edition - Yearly License

The Enterprise Edition has more features than the Community Edition such as clustering, graphical workflow editor etc.

If you want to go with basic Alfresco features then you can use the Community Edition. However, if you want to use Alfresco on a larger scale, then the Enterprise Edition is preferable.

There are costs for any upgrade or additional functions.

It is cheaper compared to head-to-head competitors.