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IBM Datacap pros and cons

Vendor: IBM

3.8 out of 5

28 reviews
89% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

IBM Datacap offers nearly 100% accurate OCR capabilities and excels in handling unstructured data with customizable rule sets and machine learning integration. It provides advanced data capture, barcode scanning, and integration with FileNet. Despite these strengths, it faces issues with technical support, stability, scalability, and needs improvements in Arabic support and integration capabilities, including cloud-based OCR. Users suggest focusing on stabilizing new releases and enhancing support for distorted documents.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

IBM Datacap offers resiliency through multiple ways of identifying data and various export formats.

Datacap's Insight Edition allows the extraction of unstructured content using annotators, which distinguishes it from other offerings.

It is highly scalable, stable, and extensible, making it easy to tailor with custom code and configurable rule sets.

Datacap excels in capturing, recognizing, and processing unstructured data, with capabilities in OCR and integration with systems like FileNet.

The use of machine learning enhances efficiency in document handling and can significantly eliminate backlog by learning scenarios for better data processing.

CONS

IBM Datacap stability issues need to be addressed as the latest release is not stable.

The technical support for IBM Datacap is poor, with downsized teams and outsourcing affecting service quality.

OCR speed is a challenge in IBM Datacap, particularly for clients with millions of pages requiring large infrastructure and impacting licensing costs.

Scalability and performance issues exist in IBM Datacap, making it difficult to process large document volumes efficiently.

Resource availability and expertise in IBM Datacap are limited, affecting the ability to support and implement the platform seamlessly.

IBM Datacap Pros review quotes

TB

Senior Account Executive with 11-50 employees

Oct 9, 2018

It's resiliency. There are multiple ways of identifying what you are looking for. There are multiple export formats.

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TN

Senior Engineer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Oct 9, 2018

The big thing these days is really the Insight Edition component and being able to build annotators to extract from literally unstructured content: paragraphs and information where there's no start anchor point to define where that data is located. There could be a number of entities in that which you have to draw information from. Being able to extract from them is really the differentiator today between that product and many of the other products...

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RM

Datacap Practice Director at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 9, 2018

One of the valuable features of Datacap is the user experience. One thing that IBM did a few years ago was they standardized all of their ECM products on Content Navigator, including Datacap. If you're an IBM ECM customer you have FileNet, you have Datacap, you have StoredIQ and you have a consistent user experience, user interface.

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Free Report: IBM Datacap Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about IBM Datacap. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.

881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

TD

Architect at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees

Oct 9, 2018

It helps companies figure out how to use advanced imaging techniques, processes, best practices, and other tools.

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MR

Operations Specialist at Fairfax Data Systems, Inc.

Oct 9, 2018

It reduces human error and saves time.

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Product Lead at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Jun 18, 2019

The most valuable feature is its ability to capture data, which changes all the time into different formats.

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JP

John Pakledinaz

IT Manager at Andres Medical Billing, Ltd.

Jul 3, 2021

The solution automates manual data entry.

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OI

Omar IBN LKHAYAT

Business Automation Delivery Lead at OCP

Apr 26, 2020

The second thing that I like about Datacap is the fingerprint capture which is easy to configure on Datacap. From the form of the document, if a document is redundant in the same department, we can configure the capture based on the form of the documents

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reviewer1353330

Manager - Software Development at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dec 28, 2021

While we are doing indexing, we tag the document type. It's programmed inside of Datacap to automatically detect the document based on a given template. It auto-indexes that document, which means that it automatically tags the correct document type to the scanned document.

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reviewer1434726

ECP Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Jan 20, 2022

The most valuable features of IBM Datacap is the capturing and recognizing of pages, documents as well as the scanner and barcodes.

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IBM Datacap Cons review quotes

TB

Senior Account Executive with 11-50 employees

Oct 9, 2018

They have to stop focusing on new development and stabilize the latest release. It is not stable.

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TN

Senior Engineer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Oct 9, 2018

Speed of OCR is one issue. It's a challenge because we have customers that have millions and millions of pages that they want this solution to crank through. In order to do that you have to have a large infrastructure in place, and that directly impacts licensing based on the core count.

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RM

Datacap Practice Director at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 9, 2018

Reporting and analytics seem to often be something of an afterthought. With Datacap, they've started building out some dashboards, but one thing we hear from our clients a lot is, "Well, gee, we really love reports. What Datacap has is not really helpful. We'd like something better. We'd like more dashboards." That's one area where we've seen some feedback that the product could do better.

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Free Report: IBM Datacap Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about IBM Datacap. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.

881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

TD

Architect at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees

Oct 9, 2018

Going forward, IBM needs to ensure that the output is perfect (as it can make the product) while staying true to platform's core.

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MR

Operations Specialist at Fairfax Data Systems, Inc.

Oct 9, 2018

It can take some time to implement.

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Product Lead at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Jun 18, 2019

I would like to see the product have the ability to process more documents in parallel. Right now, it is a single queue. Therefore, if you want to really test the load and stress test it, having multiple instances and the ability to scale it up would be great.

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JP

John Pakledinaz

IT Manager at Andres Medical Billing, Ltd.

Jul 3, 2021

I would like better ease of use and more support options.

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OI

Omar IBN LKHAYAT

Business Automation Delivery Lead at OCP

Apr 26, 2020

The interface can be more intuitive.

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reviewer1353330

Manager - Software Development at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dec 28, 2021

When I scan a document in Datacap that has a watermark or the document is a little distorted, the image output is poor. It either becomes completely black, or there is so much distortion that we cannot read the numbers or the addresses mentioned in the POD. When we scan a document, we expect the output to be at least 95 percent accurate.

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reviewer1434726

ECP Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Jan 20, 2022

Currently, when you are entering invoices, you have to enter multiple rows. In Captiva the multiple rows will be dynamically added. This would be a beneficial feature for IBM to add.

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Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)

Popular Comparisons

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Automation Anywhere vs IBM Datacap

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