Alfresco vs Hyland OnBase comparison

Alfresco and Hyland OnBase are both solutions in the Enterprise Content Management category. Alfresco is ranked #4 with an average rating of 7.4, while Hyland OnBase is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.1. Alfresco holds a 6.4% mindshare in ECM, compared to Hyland OnBase’s 4.9% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Alfresco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Hyland OnBase users who would recommend it.

Alfresco

Read 21 Alfresco reviews

6,324 Views
5,059 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Hyland OnBase

Read 17 Hyland OnBase reviews

7,827 Views
3,914 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Alfresco

Hyland OnBase

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Alfresco and Hyland OnBase are competing in the enterprise content management category. Alfresco seems to have the upper hand in flexibility and cost-effectiveness, while Hyland OnBase stands out for its robust features and integrations.

Features: Alfresco offers open-source capabilities, extensive customization, and integration options, alongside a wide range of content management functionalities. Hyland OnBase provides comprehensive document management and workflow automation, offering users an integrated platform and strong support for various business processes.

Room for Improvement: Alfresco could enhance its technical support and streamline deployment for less technical users, while improving its user interface. OnBase can improve its performance when handling a large number of keywords, provide more feature customization without complex configurations, and offer enhanced training resources for better adoption.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Alfresco's deployment adapts to diverse environments but may need more technical expertise. Its customer service is responsive but has room for improvement. Hyland OnBase provides straightforward deployment with extensive support services, ideal for organizations seeking a turnkey solution.

Pricing and ROI: Alfresco has a lower initial setup cost, appealing to budget-conscious organizations willing to invest in customization. Hyland OnBase, with a higher setup cost, offers a compelling ROI through its extensive features and efficiencies post-implementation.

To learn more, read our detailed Alfresco vs. Hyland OnBase Report (Updated: August 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Alfresco vs. Hyland OnBase

August 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 908,834 peers since 2012

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

Alfresco delivers significant ROI with cost savings, efficiency, reduced IT support, automation, and centralized document management benefits.

Sentiment score

4.6

Hyland OnBase enhances efficiency and cost savings by streamlining processes, reducing paper use, and supporting remote work.

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.

Jaspreet k

Head of development at Flash

Alfresco provides a significant return on investment by efficiently managing documents.

Jacinto Manuel Obispo Marquez

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.

reviewer2845779

Gerente De Proyectos at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Alfresco report

I have seen a return on investment with Hyland OnBase because it provides a very reliable ECM platform for my organization, helps to remove the dependency on paper files and file folders, saves real estate costs, and facilitates the ability to work from anywhere.

Abdul_Jabbar

Senior Software Engineer at Infosys

I have been able to see a return on investment as the time for approvals has been reduced, and since they are centralized, everything is in one place.

reviewer2845779

Gerente De Proyectos at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Hyland OnBase report

Customer Service

Sentiment score

5.6

Alfresco customer support is generally positive but mixed, with prompt responses and some challenges due to complex workflows.

Sentiment score

5.8

Hyland OnBase offers responsive service, but support quality varies and may require premium packages for enhanced assistance.

I would prefer a direct relationship with them, focusing on updating their products more like in an agile practice

Karthi Keyan

Head Of Information Technology at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

Alfresco's technical support is very fast and professional.

Jacinto Manuel Obispo Marquez

Country Head Spain at Apiux

I rate Alfresco's customer support as quick and effective.

reviewer2845779

Gerente De Proyectos at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Alfresco report

Our vendor relationship facilitated integration with our system and offered additional service beyond the Hyland OnBase product.

reviewer2560407

Program Manager at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

I would describe the customer service and technical support of Hyland OnBase as being based on the partner that is used.

reviewer2845779

Gerente De Proyectos at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees

I find technical support from Hyland to be good.

reviewer1981395

Product owner at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Hyland OnBase report

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

5.5

Alfresco efficiently scales with growth, excelling in clustering and customization, though complex setups are required for high document counts.

Sentiment score

6.5

Hyland OnBase is praised for scalability and adaptability, efficiently expanding to support growing business demands despite setup costs.

Implementations needing to handle millions of documents may involve complex cluster setups requiring expert assistance.

Jacinto Manuel Obispo Marquez

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.

reviewer2845779

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.

reviewer2860644

Agile Product Owner - CMS at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Alfresco report

Transitioning to cloud-based services may reduce these costs in the future.

reviewer1981395

Product owner at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Hyland OnBase report

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

8.1

Alfresco is stable and reliable with few issues, though proper scaling and expertise are essential for optimal performance.

Sentiment score

8.2

Hyland OnBase is a stable, reliable platform with strong traceability, high performance, and minimal maintenance, akin to Windows.

Alfresco is definitely a stable and scalable solution.

Jaspreet k

Head of development at Flash

The stability of Alfresco is rated highly as it hardly goes down.

Karthi Keyan

Head Of Information Technology at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

Alfresco is generally a very stable and high-performance platform.

Jacinto Manuel Obispo Marquez

Country Head Spain at Apiux

For more quotes and insights, download the Alfresco report

Hyland OnBase was a stable solution that worked effectively for us.

reviewer2560407

Program Manager at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Hyland OnBase report

Room For Improvement

Alfresco requires UI refinement, enhanced security, better tools, documentation, modern database support, and smoother integration with other systems.

Hyland OnBase needs improved usability, integration, and support, with simplified management, enhanced features, and better documentation and pricing adjustments.

It would be beneficial if Alfresco offers different options for document storage, such as databases or cloud solutions.

Jacinto Manuel Obispo Marquez

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.

reviewer2860662

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.

Utpal Chatterjee

Technical Project Manager at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Alfresco report

The application could potentially be more open-source, allowing integration with more solutions.

reviewer2560407

Program Manager at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

Hyland is working on a new platform (HXP) to integrate features from all products, addressing some concerns.

reviewer1981395

Product owner at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

The experience with the platform's learning curve is quite steep, especially for less technical staff.

reviewer2845779

Gerente De Proyectos at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Hyland OnBase report

Setup Cost

Alfresco has competitive pricing for large enterprises, focusing on pay-per-use with potential costs for upgrades and integrations.

Hyland OnBase offers modular enterprise solutions, with varied pricing and complex licensing, often seen as justified yet expensive.

Since we obtained Alfresco through AWS Marketplace, we are billed for what we use.

Jaspreet k

Head of development at Flash

The pricing of Alfresco starts at $100,000, which can be expensive for small projects.

Jacinto Manuel Obispo Marquez

Country Head Spain at Apiux

My experience with the price, implementation cost, and platform licenses has been that it has been a fair price.

reviewer2845779

Gerente De Proyectos at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Alfresco report

We also paid for workflow licenses, which allowed up to 250 concurrent users.

reviewer2560407

Program Manager at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

I find pricing to be on the higher side due to its monolithic architecture.

reviewer1981395

Product owner at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is very cost-effective and affordable.

Abdul_Jabbar

Senior Software Engineer at Infosys

For more quotes and insights, download the Hyland OnBase report

Valuable Features

Alfresco offers robust document management, integration, customization, collaboration, and user-friendly features, meeting diverse organizational needs efficiently.

Hyland OnBase excels in document management with scalable workflows, easy integration, customization, automation, and robust security features.

This makes the record independent of the document, which is beneficial as documents often change, and it helps avoid continual updates to the registry.

Jacinto Manuel Obispo Marquez

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.

Jaspreet k

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.

reviewer2860644

Agile Product Owner - CMS at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Alfresco report

It provided data security features, allowing restrictions on sensitive documents, such as who could view or modify them.

reviewer2560407

Program Manager at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

The workflow engine has made the biggest difference for me because it is excellent for automating approval processes.

Abdul_Jabbar

Senior Software Engineer at Infosys

Hyland OnBase has impacted my organization positively by faster document retrieval, intuitive setup, reduced manual processing, and comes with security.

reviewer2867946

Business Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

For more quotes and insights, download the Hyland OnBase report

Categories and Ranking

Alfresco

Ranking in Enterprise Content Management

4th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Document Management Software (1st)

Hyland OnBase

Ranking in Enterprise Content Management

5th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business Process Management (BPM) (15th), Low-Code Development Platforms (16th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Enterprise Content Management category, the mindshare of Alfresco is 6.4%, down from 8.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Hyland OnBase is 4.9%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Enterprise Content Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Alfresco	6.4%
Hyland OnBase	4.9%
Other	88.7%

Enterprise Content Management

Featured Reviews

reviewer2845779

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.

Read full review

Abdul_Jabbar

Senior Software Engineer at Infosys

Automated workflows have transformed document handling and support daily approvals and billing

The best features Hyland OnBase offers in my experience include being a robust storage solution that integrates well with the Epic solution, allows Unity Forms to be easy to create and use, and has Distribution Services for sending email notifications as reminders.Out of those features, the workflow engine has made the biggest difference for me because it is excellent for automating approval processes, and we use Hyland OnBase for legal requests, hardware requests, travel requests, corporate credit card requests, and file transfer requests. WorkView is an incredible module for gathering and displaying summary information, and we utilize it highly in our subsidiary to manage our legal contracts, their financial billing process, and their travel. We also use the Document Import Process coupled with Unity API for writing custom code to automate processes to send and receive data from other systems that are not yet API enabled. The impact of Hyland OnBase on our organization is that automating manual processes has had an incredible effect on our return on investment, and the man-hours saved by automating processes pays for the system, ranging from one to five hours. I measured the man-hours saved through the tracking of workflows and automation processes. Additionally, Hyland OnBase has allowed us to move away from moving paper around various departments, providing workflow management to keep approval inside the system and out of the email boxes, eliminating the need for paper storage, and saving storage costs with other vendors.

Read full review

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Answers from the Community

zuka19

employee at developer

Aug 9, 2022

Does Hyland include Alfresco products in Hyland OnBase?

last I knew they were two separate products/platforms. Before I left in February of this year there was talk of potentially combining platforms for a more cloud native somewhat combined platform. I no longer have access or knowledge of the current product/solution roadmap.

See 2 answers

Evgeny Belenky

Director of Community at PeerSpot (formerly IT Central Station)

Jul 25, 2022

Hi @Andrea González, @reviewer1210746 and @reviewer1279998, Can you possibly assist @zuka19 with their question? Thanks for your help.

Read full answer

Michael Bernard

Senior Vice President Business Development at Viewpointe

Aug 9, 2022

Read full answer

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

10%

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	18
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	14

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	14

Questions from the Community

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Hyland OnBase?

The main factors that influenced my decision to choose Hyland OnBase over other options available on the market were the cost compared to others and the high document-handling capacity that Hyland ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Hyland OnBase?

More training videos, if they are more findable, would improve documentation and training documentations from Hyland's side, because there is a lack of documentation and training materials from Hyl...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Hyland OnBase?

As a business analyst, while working on a recent project, I used Hyland OnBase as an enterprise-like document management tool. It was used for storing, organizing, and retrieving invoices regarding...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 7% of the time

OpenText Documentum Content Management vs Alfresco

Compared 6% of the time

IBM FileNet vs Alfresco

Compared 5% of the time

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OpenText Content Management vs Hyland OnBase

Compared 7% of the time

SharePoint vs Hyland OnBase

Compared 6% of the time

IBM FileNet vs Hyland OnBase

Compared 6% of the time

OpenText Documentum Content Management vs Hyland OnBase

Compared 3% of the time

Laserfiche vs Hyland OnBase

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Alfresco

August 2026

Download Alfresco product report

Buyer's Guide

Hyland OnBase

August 2026

Download Hyland OnBase product report

Also Known As

No data available

OnBase

Overview

Alfresco offers integration with both cloud and on-premises systems, emphasizing document management, collaboration, and high customization potential. Key attributes include its open-source nature and strong API support, driving efficient content sharing and workflow management.

Alfresco stands out as a robust platform for managing content services, records, and business processes. It enables organizations to implement central repositories for document approval, integrating effectively with applications like SAP and DocuSign. Its extensible architecture, supported by active community involvement, allows customization to meet diverse requirements. Alfresco's scalability, combined with capabilities in metadata management, version control, and workflow automation, supports efficient operations in a paperless environment. Despite benefits, it faces challenges related to interface intuitiveness, document storage security, and integration complexities. Enhancements in AI capabilities and workflow digitalization would further optimize its use.

What are the key features of Alfresco?

Integration: Connects seamlessly with cloud and on-premises systems for streamlined processes.
Document Management: Facilitates effective document handling with metadata and versioning.
Customization: Offers high extensibility through robust API support.
Collaboration: Enhances teamwork through document sharing and collaborative features.
Open-Source: Benefits from active community support for cost-effective solutions.
Workflow Automation: Automates tasks to improve decision-making processes.

What benefits and ROI indicators should users consider?

Cost-Effectiveness: Open-source structure reduces expenses.
Efficiency: Boosts organizational efficiency with scalable and flexible solutions.
Scalability: Supports growing business needs with adaptable architecture.
Flexibility: Customization to tailor to specific requirements and workflows.
Community Support: Strengthened by a vibrant open-source community for ongoing improvements.

In specific industries, Alfresco is utilized for managing intricate content services, facilitating record-keeping processes, and establishing central document repositories. Enterprises integrate it with tools like SAP and DocuSign to automate document approvals and support collaboration, fostering efficiency in document management and reducing reliance on paper-based operations.

Hyland

Hyland OnBase is acclaimed for its robust document management, automating workflows, and improving organizational efficiency across various industries. Praised for its ability to manage records compliantly, especially in regulated sectors like healthcare and finance, the tool also integrates smoothly with other enterprise systems. Users benefit significantly from streamlined processes, reduced manual tasks, and enhanced data accuracy, boosting productivity and customer satisfaction.

Hyland

Sample Customers

Over 1,300 companies from 180 different countries. Including EuroStar, Saks Fifth Avenue, NASA Langley Research Center, and KLM.

Honda France Industries, Hill County Texas, Hylant Group, ING Lease France, State of South Carolina, Syracuse University, Swindon College, Rhode Island Department of Human Services, Rochester Institute of Technology, Moen, Odense University Hospital

Buyer's Guide

Alfresco vs. Hyland OnBase

August 2026

Free Report: Alfresco vs. Hyland OnBase

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