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Alfresco vs Atlassian Confluence comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Alfresco
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Content Management (7th), Document Management Software (1st)
Atlassian Confluence
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
106
Ranking in other categories
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) (2nd), Enterprise Social Software (3rd), Knowledge Management Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Alfresco and Atlassian Confluence aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Alfresco is designed for Enterprise Content Management and holds a mindshare of 8.8%, up 7.6% compared to last year.
Atlassian Confluence, on the other hand, focuses on Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals), holds 13.2% mindshare, down 17.0% since last year.
Enterprise Content Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Alfresco8.8%
SharePoint15.0%
OpenText Documentum Content Management10.2%
Other66.0%
Enterprise Content Management
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Atlassian Confluence13.2%
SharePoint28.8%
Liferay Digital Experience Platform19.1%
Other38.9%
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals)
 

Featured Reviews

Karthi Keyan - PeerSpot reviewer
Streamlining document management with enhanced digitalization features needed
We used Alfresco as a document management system for automating and digitizing manual forms. Those were the main use cases The digitalization of workflow, forms, operations, and business processes has improved our organization. The most valuable features of Alfresco include its integration with…
Rabindra K Maharana - PeerSpot reviewer
Editing features improve document accessibility
There is a holiday calendar, however, I need to install an app or add something to it. The add-on feature is not readily available or well-documented. Guidance on this should be available in a forum. Recently, I used a feature in another tool—perhaps GitHub—where it helped prepare a chart. It involved listing resources, like having fifteen people in the X team, ten in the Y team, and seven in the Z team. It created a bar chart showing these numbers. This chart used AI to offer users the option to create it based on the data. It was then created on a separate page and made available.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Document repository."
"The product allows engineering teams and developers to introduce new things in a seamless and easy way."
"Alfresco's technical support is very fast and professional."
"Alfresco allows broad searches with many index fields that you can search on, although the created fields and their values may not be intuitive."
"You can meet your users' expected features without having Alfresco's involvement."
"The most valuable features of Alfresco include its integration with the scanning solution, the ability to search, and the capability to store and index to capture metadata."
"I like the ease of use, sections, and calendar."
"The digitalization of workflow, forms, operations, and business processes is also significant."
"Many people enjoy its zero learning-curve.​"
"The most valuable features are hyper-linking, the Drawing Tool, and enhanced tables."
"I think that it is one of the best products on the market from my experience."
"The best feature is the automatic tagging of information in documents. The automatic algorithm highlights irrelevant information that conflict with the actual documents."
"The integration's very good. You still have integration with lots of third party products, and it's very good."
"I rate this solution a nine out of ten."
"It's easy to search for information."
"The sharing of information and simple formatting are valuable features. That is, there are no templates, and everything uses one format. This means that people don't need to worry about formatting."
 

Cons

"Alfresco could improve workflow digitalization and enhance artificial intelligence capabilities."
"Alfresco has a very steep learning curve, and unfortunately, during the learning process, it's very easy to make errors, which often are unforgiving."
"The setup process for Alfresco was complex."
"Metadata, auto class, disposition log, and legal hold."
"Currently, documents in Alfresco are stored on a file server, which, while good for performance, is a security risk."
"The configuration of Alfresco is a big challenge."
"I would like them to consider document capture functionality."
"If you don't have proper governance, things can go wrong. You have to make rules, such as one folder should not have more than 5,000 subfolders or children."
"When editing a page with many iterations, it takes time to scroll down to the last iteration."
"Atlassian Confluence could improve how information is shared outside our company. We had some negative experiences with the rights we have with our information when sharing it within Atlassian Confluence and with other teams outside the company. It's due to the limitations on the rights we have on the export capabilities. We don't have sufficient rights to do so."
"Atlassian Confluence should improve the interface, it needs to be more user-friendly. It is easy to use, but it could be more intuitive."
"They can improve the table feature of Confluence. It is currently not adequate."
"Confluence could incorporate stronger records management and automation features. The current management structure is too open, which becomes an issue."
"The product is considered expensive."
"I think the couple of improvement areas would be around Markdown support and support for adding code."
"Confluence cannot replace Microsoft Word at the moment, so even though it can be used as a document management system, it is not meant for document creation, which adds a lot of limitations to it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are costs for any upgrade or additional functions."
"If you buy Alfresco through a partner, there is usually a OEM licensing option."
"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."
"It is cheaper compared to head-to-head competitors."
"I am using the paid version. My company has purchased it for company employees. We are using Confluence as a company. I don't know how much it costs, but its price is good enough. Its price is not so high."
"There is an annual license."
"Pricing wise, it ends up being an expensive solution. In the beginning it's cheap, but by the time you have all the functions you need, it turns out to be expensive."
"The Confluence pricing is good. The only challenge we have experienced is with Jira and the add ons we use that need to be paid for separately."
"The issues I have with the pricing are in respect to the add-ons."
"Licenses are quite expensive"
"Confluence charges an extra fee for analytics."
"To my knowledge, Atlassian Confluence had a pricing approach which is a commercial open-source solution, so that if you are a company, you had to pay an amount. This fee was not huge compared to other traditional solutions, and it was free for personal use or if you were an individual."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business38
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise52
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alfresco?
The pricing of Alfresco starts at $100,000, which can be expensive for small projects. There is often a transition from the community version to the licensed version, which incurs migration costs. ...
What needs improvement with Alfresco?
Currently, the challenge is the general availability to users. Initially, they had poor documentation, but over the years, their documentation has highly improved. Initially, we had challenges find...
What is your primary use case for Alfresco?
This is mainly for unstructured document management systems with workflow and data classification.
What do you like most about Atlassian Confluence?
The most valuable feature of the solution stems from its document-controlling feature. In Atlassian Confluence, controlled documents cannot be edited by anyone else.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Atlassian Confluence?
With Atlassian, the costs are reasonable. Although higher than before when we used multiple platforms and licenses, having a collaborative platform like this is advantageous. It streamlines license...
What needs improvement with Atlassian Confluence?
There's room for improvement in the way folders are structured in Atlassian Confluence. Sometimes it's frustrating when we have two documents that we want to have the same name. For instance, we mi...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Confluence
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Over 1,300 companies from 180 different countries. Including EuroStar, Saks Fifth Avenue, NASA Langley Research Center, and KLM.
Facebook, Skype, Microsoft, NASA, Netflix, Adobe, Bonobos, LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, OpenText, IBM and others in Enterprise Content Management. Updated: September 2025.
868,787 professionals have used our research since 2012.