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Adobe Experience Manager vs Alfresco comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
5.6
Adobe Experience Manager boosts ROI with reduced content time, improved engagement, increased traffic, and enhanced efficiency via automation and security.
Sentiment score
5.6
Alfresco delivers significant ROI with cost savings, efficiency, reduced IT support, automation, and centralized document management benefits.
They indicated that from Adobe Experience Manager's capabilities, they have reduced the content publishing time by nearly sixty to seventy percent and they saw an uplift of approximately fifteen percent in their engagement on personalized landing pages.
Manager, Customer Success at a real estate/law firm with 501-1,000 employees
I have seen a return on investment through reduction in time to market, automation through AI, and the availability of very scalable solutions.
project manager at FedEx
Security has been very robust and has improved by 70%.
Digital Marketing Manager at Ford Motor Company
Centrally managing records has helped us automate legal retention policies and reduce physical storage costs by eighty percent, saving us in costs and protecting us from massive financial penalties associated with compliance failures.
Head of development at Flash
Alfresco provides a significant return on investment by efficiently managing documents.
Country Head Spain at Apiux
By having all documentation centralized, errors such as using a contract where the incorrect version was taken have been reduced.
Gerente De Proyectos at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.8
Adobe Experience Manager customer service varies, with faster support for enterprises but slower responses and limited coverage for others.
Sentiment score
5.6
Alfresco customer support is generally positive but mixed, with prompt responses and some challenges due to complex workflows.
They are attentive to big companies but tend to be negligent towards mid-sized companies.
Managing Partner(Austria) at a integrator with 11-50 employees
There are Adobe engineers, sales representatives, and engineers assigned to Sephora North America.
Digital Asset Specialist at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
For P1 tickets, the resolution time is approximately four hours.
Senior Technical Program Manager /Senior Lead Solution Architech- Product Technology & Gen AI at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
I would prefer a direct relationship with them, focusing on updating their products more like in an agile practice
Head Of Information Technology at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Alfresco's technical support is very fast and professional.
Country Head Spain at Apiux
I rate Alfresco's customer support as quick and effective.
Gerente De Proyectos at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.5
Adobe Experience Manager offers robust scalability, supporting high traffic and personalization, though challenges arise with cloud transition and licensing.
Sentiment score
5.5
Alfresco efficiently scales with growth, excelling in clustering and customization, though complex setups are required for high document counts.
Clients use it to manage high traffic volumes, large content libraries, and personalized experiences at scale without any major issues.
Manager, Customer Success at a real estate/law firm with 501-1,000 employees
You cannot simply add more servers without purchasing the license.
Infra At Idealake IT Pvt Ltd Head at Idealake Information Technology Pvt. Ltd.
Adobe Experience Manager's scalability is excellent, as it reduces infrastructure and maintenance costs.
project manager at FedEx
Implementations needing to handle millions of documents may involve complex cluster setups requiring expert assistance.
Country Head Spain at Apiux
It adapts well to the growth of my organization, and as more departments are added, you only need to buy additional licenses, and they join the process efficiently.
Gerente De Proyectos at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
However, if you are looking to expand into areas with more images and videos, the scalability is somewhat limited without a developer and customization.
Agile Product Owner - CMS at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.2
Adobe Experience Manager is stable and reliable for enterprises, with strong security, scalability, and cloud-based automatic upgrades enhancing performance.
Sentiment score
8.1
Alfresco is stable and reliable with few issues, though proper scaling and expertise are essential for optimal performance.
Adobe Experience Manager is a stable tool.
Senior Project Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Adobe Experience Manager delivers very high performance, is reliable, and operates fast.
Digital Marketing Manager at Ford Motor Company
Adobe Experience Manager is actually one of the strongest points in that it is considered a stable and enterprise-grade platform.
Manager, Customer Success at a real estate/law firm with 501-1,000 employees
Alfresco is definitely a stable and scalable solution.
Head of development at Flash
The stability of Alfresco is rated highly as it hardly goes down.
Head Of Information Technology at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Alfresco is generally a very stable and high-performance platform.
Country Head Spain at Apiux
 

Room For Improvement

Adobe Experience Manager needs better usability, reduced complexity, improved support, and cost-efficiency to enhance user experience and adoption.
Alfresco requires UI refinement, enhanced security, better tools, documentation, modern database support, and smoother integration with other systems.
I believe the user interface should be more user-friendly and intuitive for all levels, allowing beginners to use this tool easily.
Digital Marketing Manager at Ford Motor Company
The feature I really appreciate is how reusable components save time across pages.
Frontend Developer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
The main reasons it is not a perfect ten are the implementation complexity, higher costs, and the learning curve for teams that are newer to Adobe Experience Manager ecosystem.
Manager, Customer Success at a real estate/law firm with 501-1,000 employees
It would be beneficial if Alfresco offers different options for document storage, such as databases or cloud solutions.
Country Head Spain at Apiux
Being able to leverage something such as MongoDB, a NoSQL database as part of the architecture would be a big improvement to enable high volume in the hundreds of millions of documents.
Manager, Major Accounts at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
Governance of this system is required. If you don't have proper governance, things can go wrong.
Technical Project Manager at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
 

Setup Cost

Adobe Experience Manager is costly and complex, suited for large organizations, with pricing based on users and scale.
Alfresco has competitive pricing for large enterprises, focusing on pay-per-use with potential costs for upgrades and integrations.
For large enterprises, the cost is often comparable with other major CMSs.
Managing Partner(Austria) at a integrator with 11-50 employees
Adobe Experience Manager is expensive compared to competitors.
Infra At Idealake IT Pvt Ltd Head at Idealake Information Technology Pvt. Ltd.
The price is significantly high.
Senior Technical Program Manager /Senior Lead Solution Architech- Product Technology & Gen AI at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
Since we obtained Alfresco through AWS Marketplace, we are billed for what we use.
Head of development at Flash
The pricing of Alfresco starts at $100,000, which can be expensive for small projects.
Country Head Spain at Apiux
My experience with the price, implementation cost, and platform licenses has been that it has been a fair price.
Gerente De Proyectos at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
 

Valuable Features

Adobe Experience Manager enhances content creation and management with seamless integrations, customization, scalability, and robust digital experience tools.
Alfresco offers robust document management, integration, customization, collaboration, and user-friendly features, meeting diverse organizational needs efficiently.
Feature-wise, I believe the dispatcher module is the best aspect of Adobe Experience Manager.
Infra At Idealake IT Pvt Ltd Head at Idealake Information Technology Pvt. Ltd.
Adobe Experience Manager has made document management smoother because many people use Adobe, making it simpler for me to modify and resend PDF documents.
Founder . Interior Architect & Interior Designer at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees
Adobe Experience Manager increases operational efficiency through centralized assets and reduces time spent searching, editing, and managing files.
project manager at FedEx
This makes the record independent of the document, which is beneficial as documents often change, and it helps avoid continual updates to the registry.
Country Head Spain at Apiux
Alfresco also provides automated lifecycle management that helps us enforce legal holds, retention schedules, and secure disposition of records, keeping the files secure and ensuring that our organization remains compliant with legal requirements.
Head of development at Flash
It enabled users to find exactly what documents they were looking for in a timely fashion, as well as to export to patients and healthcare members what they needed to do for Medicaid, Medicare, or any other secondary insurance, including the documents they needed to fill out as well as prescriptions.
Agile Product Owner - CMS at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Adobe Experience Manager
Ranking in Enterprise Content Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
Web Content Management (1st), Enterprise Social Software (4th), Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (1st)
Alfresco
Ranking in Enterprise Content Management
4th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Document Management Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Enterprise Content Management category, the mindshare of Adobe Experience Manager is 4.0%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Alfresco is 6.4%, down from 8.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Adobe Experience Manager4.0%
Alfresco6.4%
Other89.6%
Enterprise Content Management
 

Featured Reviews

Hilax Chamberlain - PeerSpot reviewer
Digital Marketing Manager at Ford Motor Company
Centralized content management has unified our digital channels and delivers consistent experiences
Adobe Experience Manager offers enterprise-level digital assets management and very robust customization, brand value consistency, and omnichannel delivery. It saves development and maintenance time. The digital asset management and omnichannel delivery features have benefited my team by managing our digital assets, ensuring brand consistency, and enabling us to deliver customized content easily to our clients. Organizing and obtaining information from results is beneficial. Strengthening our online experience as a brand is valuable. Easy integration with other Adobe services improves productivity and provides a smooth experience. Adobe Experience Manager has positively impacted my organization by enabling component and page reuse, which reduces application size. It saves manual effort for maintaining all applications, improves traffic, and ensures consistency across all our applications. It provides better security, scalability, and makes our applications more robust.
reviewer2845779 - PeerSpot reviewer
Gerente De Proyectos at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
Centralized document control has improved audits and daily workflows with accurate versions
I consider the best features that Alfresco offers to be its handling of document versioning, legal retention, traceability, and granular permissions, which helps considerably for audits. Traceability and granular permissions have greatly impacted my daily management. These aspects have improved efficiency and security in my organization. Security has been improved since with granular permissions we can give the proper access to collaborators. Those who need to read a document only have that permission, and we can also see who has permission to view a document and control who can edit and who can upload a document. Alfresco has positively impacted my organization since everything is centralized, so you do not have to waste time wondering whether the information you need is on this server or that server. Everything is in one place and everyone has their own access. I have noticed a change in team efficiency, response times, and error reduction thanks to the centralization of information. Time has improved, meaning time is not lost searching for documents. In addition, errors have been reduced, as you always have the correct version of the file. There is not one version here and another over there. You always have the updated version.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise24
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise14
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Adobe Experience Manager?
One common challenge that I have heard of is that Adobe Experience Manager can feel complex and resource-intensive during implementation, especially for organizations without strong technical or Ad...
What is your primary use case for Adobe Experience Manager?
I personally have not used Adobe Experience Manager, but I have observed a retail client that uses Adobe Experience Manager to manage their personalized website content, and while they use MoEngage...
What advice do you have for others considering Adobe Experience Manager?
Adobe Experience Manager should be evaluated as a long-term digital experience platform rather than just a CMS. It delivers the most value for organizations that need personalization, multi-channel...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alfresco?
My experience with the price, implementation cost, and licenses for the platform is that the price has been fair, the implementation cost stayed within budget, and we consider the platform licenses...
What needs improvement with Alfresco?
Alfresco could be improved in terms of maintenance and could have a simpler architecture regarding search functionality. If I change the metadata, I have to perform re-indexing of all the content f...
What is your primary use case for Alfresco?
My main use case for Alfresco is as a content management system at an enterprise level. A specific example of how I use Alfresco as an enterprise level content management system is for sharing docu...
 

Also Known As

Adobe Day CQ5, Ektron Social Marketing, Episerver Content Cloud, Adobe CQ5
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Metra
Over 1,300 companies from 180 different countries. Including EuroStar, Saks Fifth Avenue, NASA Langley Research Center, and KLM.
Find out what your peers are saying about Adobe Experience Manager vs. Alfresco and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.