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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
4th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
21
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 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 SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management is 1.7%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Alfresco6.4%
SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management1.7%
Other91.9%
Enterprise Content Management
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2845779 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
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 features which are most valuable to us are rapid deployment, ease of installation, ease of use, and Linux platform support."
"Document repository."
"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."
"Alfresco has positively impacted my organization by improving the accessibility of documents across the enterprise, serving as a centralized location for all documents from every business unit."
"Alfresco has positively impacted my organization by providing consistent use and the ability to utilize the system when needed to research zoning compliance records."
"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."
"The product allows engineering teams and developers to introduce new things in a seamless and easy way."
"The integration capabilities of the product are pretty good."
"All these integrations are through a one-way push, essentially, but with two-way access."
 

Cons

"We would like to see improvement in the numbers of documents that can be managed by the repository."
"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."
"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."
"Currently, documents in Alfresco are stored on a file server, which, while good for performance, is a security risk."
"Alfresco can be improved as the roadmap went a little stagnant for the past few years, so there had not been any new development, and coming out with a new roadmap with new features and executing and delivering on those new features would be an improvement."
"I have not seen a return on investment, as at the time it was not saving them money at Evernorth and Cigna, which is why they moved out of it."
"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 could say that it is not a plug-and-play platform. It has a considerable implementation curve, and the technical administration is demanding."
"The deployment could be costly because of resource availability."
"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you buy Alfresco through a partner, there is usually a OEM licensing option."
"There are costs for any upgrade or additional functions."
"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."
"It is cheaper compared to head-to-head competitors."
"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
14%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
8%
Energy/Utilities Company
14%
Government
13%
University
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise14
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 licenses for the platform is that the price has been fair, the implementation cost stayed within budget, and we consider the platform licenses...
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...
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...
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: August 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.