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Alfresco vs Conga Composer 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
Ranking in Document Management Software
1st
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Content Management (7th)
Conga Composer
Ranking in Document Management Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Document Automation Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Document Management Software category, the mindshare of Alfresco is 9.9%, down from 10.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Conga Composer is 2.4%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Document Management Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Alfresco9.9%
Conga Composer2.4%
Other87.7%
Document Management Software
 

Featured Reviews

Jaspreet k - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of development at Flash
Streamlined compliance workflows have reduced manual document handling and improved governance
Alfresco offers many features that I value highly. The first is the open architecture that provides extensive REST API and support of open standards such as CMIS, allowing our development team to easily extend their capabilities. The second valuable feature is the activity workflow engine, a powerful BPMN compliant workflow engine that automates complex and multi-step processes natively alongside the content. Another favorite feature is smart document processing. Due to its built-in AI capabilities, Alfresco can automatically classify documents based on our business requirements and tagging. This directly helps us find those documents by tagging them and locating them more easily. The smart document processing in Alfresco has helped us extract information via OCR and identify entities without requiring manual data entry, as it works on a metadata approach that is directly searched via OCR. The text is assigned as a token in the backend, and using the AI capabilities, Alfresco can automatically classify and read via OCR. 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.
Zaid bin junaid  - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at Flash
Automation has transformed document workflows and has eliminated manual data entry errors
Conga Composer is a very good product and it heavily excels in any kind of complex and high-volume scenarios. It is very well-versed with handling dynamic content such as charts, nested tables, global currencies, and it can execute asynchronously, putting it well ahead of a basic PDF generator. It also offers many additional features. The user interface is my personal favorite, as the interface is largely very developer-friendly, and it is a custom front end we built. Additionally, it utilizes familiar tools like Microsoft Word and Excel. Setting it up involves a complex API deployment and JSON payloads. Initially, it requires some technical heavy lifting compared to drag-and-drop and no-code tools. If you are from a technical background, then it is not a challenge. My personal favorite features are headless execution, which helps us to trigger the document generation in the background from the buttons, workflows, or external systems without requiring the user to navigate through an interface. This gives us all the options within a single click from the UI. The second feature I love is that it supports multi-format. Generating a Word, PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, and HTML can be done from a single source and a single, central data source. The third feature which I love is that the REST API is not locked exclusively into Salesforce. It can ingest JSON data from virtually any ERP or system of record. Additionally, the seamless add-on to the sign API has helped us to create an uninterrupted, automated contract cycle.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product allows engineering teams and developers to introduce new things in a seamless and easy way."
"Alfresco is the only enterprise CMS that has features like contribution, sharing, workflows, automation and robust content and record management, that are also Open Source."
"I have seen a return on investment with Alfresco because errors due to outdated documents have been reduced, processes have been improved, and process flow has also been improved."
"Alfresco is the most widely used open source ECM in the world and it has characteristics that I really like such as a Java based platform, lots of integration points, many protocols for accessing it, advanced workflow support, scripting, easily customizable user interface, a concept of a group/team based working area called site."
"If you are looking for a product which has all the common functionalities such as document and media management, record management, workflows, document indexing and searching, then in that case, Alfresco is the platform that you need."
"One of Alfresco's strengths is the data modeling, as document domain experts can model type and hierarchical associations and metadata constraints in a declarative way, and a graphical user interface model manager now allows users that don't know XML formalisms to build models."
"The ROI from Alfresco is highly profitable for the company, helping us accelerate operational excellence and decrease compliance risk while increasing compliance mitigation, saving at least seventy to eighty percent in time and forty to forty-five percent in manual labor, cutting processing time by ninety percent, reducing physical storage costs by eighty percent, and protecting us from massive financial penalties associated with compliance failures totaling approximately two million dollars."
"Alfresco allows broad searches with many index fields that you can search on, although the created fields and their values may not be intuitive."
"I find the Conga email template creation and the document template creation features very useful."
"Conga Composer offers extensive customization and flexibility, that allows us to create documents that perfectly align with our branding and specific business requirements."
"The most valuable feature of Conga Composer is its user-friendly interface, which allows professionals to handle the product easily."
"We have seen a major return on investment after we implemented Conga Composer into our workflows and the organization."
"The initial setup of Conga Composer is easy."
"I like that Conga Composer allows for the generation of PDFs according to specific requirements by creating templates and pulling all the information added into those fields."
"It's quite simple."
"As an implementer, what stands out for me is that I've been on it for more than ten years now, so I kind of saw some change in the UI, and it's very nice."
 

Cons

"Some of the user interface could be more intuitive, such as the new record category, where the expression is a term and not really a dynamically evaluated expression as it might imply."
"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."
"There is need to improve features such as the record management and case management in the product."
"I would like them to consider document capture functionality. Currently, for document capture functionality (ocr, read document metadata automatically, automatic document classification), Alfresco needs to be integrated with document capture such as: Kofax, Ephesoft, etc., while other Alfresco competitors already make document capture functionality as their default functionality."
"I would like them to consider document capture functionality."
"Alfresco could improve workflow digitalization and enhance artificial intelligence capabilities."
"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."
"Conga Composer can be improved because it has a steep learning curve, especially for new users."
"However, it is not user-friendly. The UI is a little confusing."
"The initial setup is at an intermediate level of difficulty since understanding Conga Composer for the first time can be confusing."
"The debugging skills could be improved as we need to stay alert for issues."
"It would be better to have a custom button that automatically sends a document to the client's email and sends it for a signature with a single click."
"The only improvement I'd like to see is the ability to hide a single column within a grouped table, which I couldn't figure out how to do."
"For newcomers to the platform, the removal of certain suggestions in recent releases can be a pain area."
"One downside of Conga Composer is that it requires integration with other tools for the signing process. Apart from that, I find nothing major to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is cheaper compared to head-to-head competitors."
"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."
"There are costs for any upgrade or additional functions."
"If you buy Alfresco through a partner, there is usually a OEM licensing option."
"It's not cheap, but it's not overly expensive either."
"Regarding pricing, I believe it’s around fifty dollars, but I’m not entirely sure. Overall, I find the pricing reasonable and am quite satisfied with the product. The value we get from it justifies the cost, as it requires minimal maintenance and is straightforward to use. The functionality it provides aligns well with the investment."
"I think the tool costs around six dollars per user."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Retailer
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alfresco?
My experience with the price, implementation cost, and platform licenses has been that it has been a fair price, the implementation cost stayed within budget, and I consider the platform licenses t...
What needs improvement with Alfresco?
For the moment, I have not had any complaints about how Alfresco could be improved that I could escalate.I could say that it is not a plug-and-play platform. It has a considerable implementation cu...
What is your primary use case for Alfresco?
My main use case for Alfresco is to centralize client records, loan documentation, digital contracts, onboarding processes, internal approval workflows, and evidence for audits.Alfresco works excel...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Conga Composer?
Since we bought Certinia, we got Conga Composer for free.
What needs improvement with Conga Composer?
In terms of improvements for Conga Composer, we did start seeing a lot of requests related to customization, which were initially difficult. As people got to know that it's very easy to customize i...
What is your primary use case for Conga Composer?
One of the main use cases for Conga Composer would be to generate quote documents. We had different types of quote documents in our business process, so we used different kinds of Conga Composer te...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Conga
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Over 1,300 companies from 180 different countries. Including EuroStar, Saks Fifth Avenue, NASA Langley Research Center, and KLM.
Arkus, CollegeTracks, Colorado Creative Industries, Davies Office, Delta Air, Depersico, Diagnostic Innovations, Digital Dolphin, Finnzymes
Find out what your peers are saying about Alfresco vs. Conga Composer and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.