We performed a comparison between Alfresco and SharePoint based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, OpenText, Box and others in Enterprise Content Management."The most valuable feature is the flexibility of the searching elements of the metadata."
"I like the ease of use, sections, and calendar."
"The product allows engineering teams and developers to introduce new things in a seamless and easy way."
"Document repository."
"It offers an easy way to store unstructured content (.pdf, .doc, .xls, images) and to tag them with metadata."
"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."
"I do like the collaboration around documents. The versioning history has proven useful in some instances as well."
"The workflow feature is valuable because it enables us to cascade responsibilities."
"Our staff found it simpler, as they did not have to work within a classification system."
"Combined reports and data with timeline tracking."
"No code and low code, scalable, and stable collaboration platform. Straightforward to set up. Its support system is good and offers fast issue resolution."
"Quantity and variety of partners with solution development ability on the platform."
"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."
"I would like them to consider document capture functionality."
"Flexibility and extensibility, above everything, could be improved."
"We would like more security features, like automating."
"SharePoint designer workflows can be buggy sometimes without any apparent reason."
"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."
"We'd like to be able to upload from MS Excel to deploy tasks and use drop-down lists to collect further information."
"Too many versions being released in a short time period. Too much time being devoted to migration planning."
"The company also needs to make sure that their policies are dictating how information is stored and used, instead of letting SharePoint take control."
"It does not integrate despite being part of the Microsoft family."
Alfresco is ranked 9th in Enterprise Content Management with 1 review while SharePoint is ranked 1st in Enterprise Content Management with 17 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 "Stable and scalable collaboration system; good for document and file sharing, and offers fast issue resolution from its support team". Alfresco is most compared with Hyland OnBase, OpenText Extended ECM, OpenText Documentum, IBM FileNet and Nuxeo, whereas SharePoint is most compared with Citrix ShareFile, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, Box and OpenText Extended ECM.
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.