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Alfresco vs SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Alfresco
Ranking in Enterprise Content Management
7th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Document Management Software (1st)
SAP Extended Enterprise Con...
Ranking in Enterprise Content Management
15th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Enterprise Content Management category, the mindshare of Alfresco is 7.1%, down from 7.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management is 1.8%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Alfresco7.1%
SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management1.8%
Other91.1%
Enterprise Content Management
 

Featured Reviews

UC
Technical Project Manager at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Extensive customization and governance enhance document management experience
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 finding the extension points and understanding how to extend the system. The workflow was one of the hurdles we had. At that time, it was not that beautiful or feature-rich. Even today, workflow consists of basic workflows. If you want to extend, you have to implement your own customizations. They are using it extensively with features such as records management, CMIS, Share UI, and Web Scripts. All these features are being used extensively. Governance of this system is required. If you don't have proper governance, things can go wrong. If you don't have a proper policy of how documents should be maintained, issues can arise. You have to make rules, such as one folder should not have more than 5,000 subfolders or children. This was advised by Alfresco, but we did not have that advice, so we had challenges when everything was dumped into single folders. It slows down the systems and sometimes becomes unusable. Whoever is going to use it should have that governance system in place.
MukeshGiri - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Solution Architect at Freeport LNG Development, L.P.
Offers advanced search capabilities, integrates seamlessly with SAP and efficiently stores non-essential business content
Consider you have some use cases. For example, something for your accounting or procurement department. And you purchase equipment, machines, and plants for plant-related operations. Essentially, there will be manuals and basically anything and everything related to your particular equipment. So, where do the equipment entries go? They go into SAP. Depending on your SAP deployment, it can go into some database. Most companies these days are talking about SAP HANA and stuff like that. So it will be stored in SAP HANA. But, these documentation, drawings, manuals, and help files for these big pieces of equipment, where do they go? That’s where Extended ECM for SAP comes into the picture. All these integrations are through a one-way push, essentially, but with two-way access. So as a user in the procurement department or the accounting department, or an engineering department where you are using SAP for asset management entries inside your system. All those related documents, drawings, manuals, and files have to be stored somewhere. If you store them in SAP, it will be a costly implementation going forward. After maybe a couple of years, you will realize that it’s too much to deal with because HANA database will be too costly. There will not be much business value because you cannot utilize a lot of search and cool features inside your application from an SAP perspective. That’s where you will integrate SAP. For example, SAP Extended ECM for SAP Plant Maintenance. One of the modules SAP provides is SAP Plant Maintenance. So what you will do is deploy Extended ECM for SAP, then try something called SAP Plant Maintenance, Extended ECM for SAP Plant Maintenance. The content maintenance, manuals, files, drawings, and related stuff, its details or tags, or any kind of stuff is stored in your SAP. But anything and everything else is pushed through this integration into Extended ECM platform. So now it is available to be utilized by your business user who knows nothing about SAP. They only live and breathe in a different management system. They can look into these details depending on what kind of integration has been done for that company. So that’s one use case. Second use case will be in SAP itself. Now, if you are an SAP user, you have this information readily available at your fingertips. Anything goes wrong in your maintenance or any kind of management, you can look into these details, which are readily available because this documentation lifecycle is being managed by Extended ECM for SAP. It will give you extended storage capabilities within your SAP application. So it will be a two-way integration, essentially. Similar, wider features will be available within Extended ECM platform. Within SAP, you have these extra features called business attachments or business content retrieval. Those business contents are stored inside Extended ECM, and those features will be available within your SAP GUI from an SAP perspective. So it’s a win-win situation for both worlds.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the flexibility of the searching elements of the metadata."
"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."
"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."
"The digitalization of workflow, forms, operations, and business processes is also significant."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the flexibility of the searching elements of the metadata."
"Alfresco allows broad searches with many index fields that you can search on, although the created fields and their values may not be intuitive."
"Alfresco's technical support is very fast and professional."
"All these integrations are through a one-way push, essentially, but with two-way access."
"The integration capabilities of the product are pretty good."
 

Cons

"We would like to see improvement in the numbers of documents that can be managed by the repository."
"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."
"Technical Support: Average, this might be because I am quite experienced and the questions I have might be difficult to find an answer to quickly as I have probably already exhausted most solution possibilities before I contact support."
"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."
"Metadata, auto class, disposition log, and legal hold."
"I think the presentation layer could be improved - currently, it's too complex, and there are too many features cluttered all over the screen."
"There is need to improve features such as the record management and case management in the product."
"Alfresco could improve workflow digitalization and enhance artificial intelligence capabilities."
"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The deployment could be costly because of resource availability."
 

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."
"I rate the product price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Government
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
16%
University
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise10
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alfresco?
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing is that Alfresco is very cheap and cost-effective.
What needs improvement with Alfresco?
One area where Alfresco can be improved is the ability to scan directly using Alfresco. Additionally, I would appreciate improvements especially when it comes to the ability to integrate with socia...
What is your primary use case for Alfresco?
My main use case for Alfresco is that I implemented Alfresco Content Services to solve complex enterprise problems for content service, record management, and process management. Using this tool, I...
What needs improvement with SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management?
Improvement could be more about training because it is one of the giants in this market. Nobody can be exposed to SAP and other stuff. So the deployment could be costly because of resource availabi...
What is your primary use case for SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management?
For engineering in the oil and gas industry, most of these companies, specifically in the Texas region, are kind of OpenText customers. Since we all do bigger enterprises and stuff like that, I go ...
What advice do you have for others considering SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management?
I would rate it maybe eight out of ten because I’ve seen the stability. It’s amazingly stable. We have not completely rolled it out the way I would like to, but we are looking into that. Most likel...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management by OpenText, SAP Extended ECM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Over 1,300 companies from 180 different countries. Including EuroStar, Saks Fifth Avenue, NASA Langley Research Center, and KLM.
Metropolitan Utilities District, MAN Diesel & Turbo
Find out what your peers are saying about Alfresco vs. SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.