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 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."
"The most valuable feature is the flexibility of the searching elements of the metadata."
"The workflow feature is valuable because it enables us to cascade responsibilities."
"The security feature is valuable."
"The ability to take Excel files and make them dynamic SharePoint lists with instant reporting capabilities has been a major benefit."
"It is well supported by Microsoft."
"Tech support tops off as excellent."
"It facilitates collaboration and the ability to create custom workflows."
"The most valuable features are the Integrations, web site, and search."
"Our staff found it simpler, as they did not have to work within a classification system."
"Alfresco has a very steep learning curve, and unfortunately, during the learning process, it's very easy to make errors, which often are unforgiving."
"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."
"I would like them to consider document capture functionality."
"Emails stored now do not display metadata in native format."
"I would like a simpler, more cost-effective solution for connecting data sources with workflows and BI tools, or data mining tools."
"SharePoint designer workflows can be buggy sometimes without any apparent reason."
"This solution would benefit from the implementation of enhanced online forms and template development capabilities."
"The product does not perform 100% when used outside of a Microsoft based browser, Chrome, Firefox, etc."
"We do sell Hyland OnBase, which is probably a competitor to SharePoint and does a lot more. In our own organization, we haven't had a need for it, but certainly, for our customers, we are finding that to be a better fit. In terms of the technical reasons for that, I'm not involved much on that side, so I can't give specifics, but there is certainly room for them to improve or add on certain features that clearly are not available in SharePoint, but they are available in Hyland OnBase."
"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."
"No good process to import emails from several users into a single comprehensive SP repository."
Alfresco is ranked 9th in Enterprise Content Management with 10 reviews while SharePoint is ranked 1st in Enterprise Content Management with 146 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, OpenText Documentum, IBM FileNet, OpenText Extended ECM and Nuxeo, whereas SharePoint is most compared with Citrix ShareFile, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, Box and OpenText Extended ECM.
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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.