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Alfresco vs Hyland OnBase 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
6.8
Users experience significant ROI with Alfresco via efficient document management, automation, and cost-effective, customizable open-source solutions.
Sentiment score
5.3
Hyland OnBase boosts ROI by streamlining processes, reducing paper use, and enabling faster, secure digital document access.
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.
Project Manager at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
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.
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.
Project Manager at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.6
Alfresco's customer support is expert yet sometimes slow, with community resources effectively aiding users, especially in the Community Edition.
Sentiment score
6.2
Hyland OnBase offers reliable 24/7 support, though quality varies by partner; some users find premium support and integration beneficial.
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
The support team was very responsive and resolved my query within forty-five minutes, which was a good experience.
Head of development at Flash
Our vendor relationship facilitated integration with our system and offered additional service beyond the Hyland OnBase product.
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.
Project Manager at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
I find technical support from Hyland to be good.
Product owner at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.6
Alfresco excels in scalability, managing large volumes with efficient resource management and seamless integrations for organizational growth.
Sentiment score
6.9
Hyland OnBase excels in scalability and integration, supporting large enterprises despite high initial setup costs, potentially reduced by cloud services.
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.
Project Manager 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 with 10,001+ employees
Transitioning to cloud-based services may reduce these costs in the future.
Product owner at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Alfresco is highly stable, with past clustering issues resolved, requiring careful scaling, migration, and certified administrator installation.
Sentiment score
8.3
Hyland OnBase is highly rated for its scalability, stability, reliability, and low maintenance, resembling a Windows application.
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
Hyland OnBase was a stable solution that worked effectively for us.
Program Manager at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Alfresco needs UI, integration, storage, workflow, and configuration improvements, along with enhanced metadata, documentation, and API support.
Hyland OnBase requires user interface and pricing improvements, better training, migration processes, support response, and enhanced AI features.
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
The application could potentially be more open-source, allowing integration with more solutions.
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.
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.
Project Manager at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
 

Setup Cost

Alfresco's pricing, starting at $100,000, may challenge small businesses but offers cost-effective features and a usage-based billing model.
Hyland OnBase offers modular pricing with varying licenses, potentially expensive in Latin America, but enterprise licenses enhance scalability.
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.
Project Manager at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
We also paid for workflow licenses, which allowed up to 250 concurrent users.
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.
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.
Senior Software Engineer at Infosys
 

Valuable Features

Alfresco provides customizable document management with integration, automation, and security features, ideal for scalable and efficient organizational use.
Hyland OnBase optimizes business processes with workflow automation, storage, security, integration, and user-friendly interface for improved efficiency.
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 with 10,001+ employees
It provided data security features, allowing restrictions on sensitive documents, such as who could view or modify them.
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.
Senior Software Engineer at Infosys
Hyland OnBase is valued for its security, especially for those in the finance domain who require data confidentiality.
Product owner at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Alfresco
Ranking in Enterprise Content Management
7th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Document Management Software (1st)
Hyland OnBase
Ranking in Enterprise Content Management
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (14th), Low-Code Development Platforms (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Enterprise Content Management category, the mindshare of Alfresco is 6.7%, down from 7.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Hyland OnBase is 5.1%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Hyland OnBase5.1%
Alfresco6.7%
Other88.2%
Enterprise Content Management
 

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.
Abdul_Jabbar - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
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Answers from the Community

zuka19 - PeerSpot reviewer
employee at developer
Aug 9, 2022
Aug 9, 2022
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
EB
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.​ ​ ​
MB
Senior Vice President Business Development at Viewpointe
Aug 9, 2022
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.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise13
 

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 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 ...
What needs improvement with Hyland OnBase?
I believe Hyland OnBase could improve by making its user interface more user-friendly.I am referring to the learning curve, and I can tell you that the experience with the platform's learning curve...
What is your primary use case for Hyland OnBase?
Hyland OnBase serves as the primary document management solution for all of my company's documents.A concrete example of how I use Hyland OnBase for document management within my organization is th...
 

Also Known As

No data available
OnBase
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Alfresco vs. Hyland OnBase and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.