No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Alfresco vs M-Files 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
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Content Management (7th)
M-Files
Ranking in Document Management Software
12th
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 M-Files is 3.9%, down from 9.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Document Management Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Alfresco9.9%
M-Files3.9%
Other86.2%
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.
LN
Director of IT at JH Kelly
Good workflows, and it is easy to use with a dashboard that improves contract visibility
My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing this product is to do a pilot first. After you do your research, do an actual pilot before you commit because everyone has nuances and you might find out that it is not what you want, or that it doesn't really do what you think it's going to do. It is not the simplest product to use but because of the robustness of its feature set in the ability with the workflows, and the APIs, to do just about anything you can imagine with it, that's very valuable. I wish it was a little easier to use because we have to spend more time than I'd like with new users, teaching them how it works. We try to hide all that from them but the setup time to get everything the way we wanted was probably two months. That is two months in one resource working on it half time a week, but it just took a lot of work to get the metadata set up, to get the workflows set up, and to get all the documents added to the repository. Now we've got versioning and we know where everything's at, the dashboard is great, but don't assume when they tell you that you'll be up and running in two weeks, that that is the truth. It takes much longer than you think. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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."
"The digitalization of workflow, forms, operations, and business processes is also significant."
"Alfresco is a very good product that has very good inbuilt features, and at the same time, it is customizable and we can customize this product the way we want."
"I like the ease of use, sections, and calendar."
"Document repository."
"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."
"The features which are most valuable to us are rapid deployment, ease of installation, ease of use, and Linux platform support."
"Alfresco positively impacted my organization by enabling the ability to store hundreds of thousands of documents, helping my team save time and reduce errors, enabling 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."
"Using M-Files means anybody on the executive team to go in and immediately look at a dashboard and know the status of a contract."
"M-Files licence model is very flexible. You have the choice of Named User, Concurrent, or SaaS. This gives the business so much room and flexibility to implement new projects whilst maintaining costs and maximizing production."
 

Cons

"I think the presentation layer could be improved - currently, it's too complex, and there are too many features cluttered all over the screen."
"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."
"There is need to improve features such as the record management and case management in the product."
"The setup process for Alfresco was complex."
"We did encounter some stability issues when there were many simultaneous requests on the server."
"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."
"We would like to see improvement in the numbers of documents that can be managed by the repository."
"Currently, documents in Alfresco are stored on a file server, which, while good for performance, is a security risk."
"Technical support is probably the weakest part. We had a number of authentication issues and support has been very slow to respond and get us solutions."
"The integration with other products needs to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 is cheaper compared to head-to-head competitors."
"They have an Optical Character Scanning module but we didn't buy it because it's ridiculously expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Document Management Software solutions are best for your needs.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise11
No data available
 

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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Over 1,300 companies from 180 different countries. Including EuroStar, Saks Fifth Avenue, NASA Langley Research Center, and KLM.
Crowe UK, Stearns Bank, Head Energy, OMV, TK Elevator
Find out what your peers are saying about Alfresco vs. M-Files and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.