Alfresco vs. M‑Files

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Alfresco
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
The Alfresco platform, from Hyland, delivers comprehensive cloud-native content services. It is used to intelligently activate processes and content to accelerate the flow of business.N/A
M‑Files
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
M-Files is a platform for knowledge work automation. M-Files helps knowledge workers to find information faster, work smarter, and achieve more. M-Files features a metadata-driven architecture, embedded workflow engine, and advanced artificial intelligence that enable customers to eliminate information chaos, improve process efficiency, and automate security and compliance. By embedding automation and GenAI into its core, M-Files' platform not only increases efficiencies…N/A
Pricing
AlfrescoM‑Files
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AlfrescoM‑Files
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AlfrescoM‑Files
Features
AlfrescoM‑Files
Enterprise Content Management
Comparison of Enterprise Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Alfresco
8.0
Ratings
0% above category average
M‑Files
-
Ratings
Content capture & imaging3.10 Ratings00 Ratings
File sync, storage & archiving9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Document management10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Records management8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Content search & retrieval10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Enterprise content collaboration8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Content publishing & creation8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Security, risk management & information governance9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Contract lifecycle management8.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated workflows9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Artificial intelligence8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile support3.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
User Ratings
AlfrescoM‑Files
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(0 ratings)
9.9
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.9
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.9
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
9.6
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AlfrescoM‑Files
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have regulatory or business needs that require saving email into Alfresco and you are using Outlook for Mac, you may need to perform significant customization to make it work. Additionally, if you will have users that will be members to a large numbers of sites over time, you need to thoroughly explore what functionality will be degraded or lost and how to mitigate the impact. Other than these two scenarios, I cannot think of any scenarios where Alfresco would not be well suited to an organization's needs.
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M‑Files is great for companies with multiple locations. Drive letters can become cumbersome to use and collaborate with colleagues and M‑Files fills that gap. The check out/check in system is great and allows only one editor at a time. This can be good and bad depending on the situation.
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Pros
  • Integration with other applications, namely Drupal and Moodle, was simple and works beautifully.
  • The UI is intuitive, clean, and friendly. Users have required little training for basic functionality.
  • We have been pleased with the overall system performance of Alfresco Enterprise Content Management.
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  • Version control and history tracking on documents.
  • Search ability to filter content for a team, creator, or another property.
  • Permission control, limit access to documents to read or edit, or only specific workflow states.
  • Administrative control to access all content.
  • Administrative control to restore deleted content.
  • Administrative control to audit and retag content when needed.
  • Robust workflow capabilities.
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Cons
  • Alfresco Process Services and Alfresco Application Development Framework integration makes for best functionality/application of ECM.
  • Use case alignment - Marketing content and documentation of specific business requirements and user stories being available as reference material/documentation.
  • Integration with multiple silos for content.
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  • More user friendly customization options that do not require knowledge of coding/scripting. For example, prompting the creation of a new document from a template in a workflow.
  • When using the 'insert property' feature in a Word doc, I would love to convert dates from a mm/dd/yy format to be written out (such as September 21, 2018). Or possibly even just to pull the year or the month from a selected date to insert into a document.
  • I've often wished that I could find more detailed tutorials online for some features.
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Likelihood to Renew
As per the current market and the line of products that are available for content and document management system, Alfresco is a very good option compared to other systems in terms of features and cost. Plus the community support is great. Also since the product is open source, it can be extended or understood in a better way.
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M-files meets our almost all needs, we dont have other option to replace m-files. it saves lots, like Hardware because of Vault Feature means we can create many vaults (mini-servers) in m-files in other solutions we need more hardware for more installations.
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Usability
The UI is very intuitive, most of our users figure out how to use the platform by themselves, so there's not much training needed.
You can upload files by using the web drag and drop, WebDAV, FTP, and more.
Most of the platform already works as-is so you can just deploy it using Docker and it's mostly ready to go.
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It is a powerful system that can locate content fast and effectively. The system takes quite some time to setup initially. It can be hard for M-Files support to know how businesses operate and how they want to use the system in a way that works for them. The customization makes it great for companies to cater to their own needs. Once the system is set up in a way that makes sense for the business, the user experience is positive. There is room for improvement in the notifications, workflow, and support areas.
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
always there.
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Performance
No answers on this topic
I noticed some lagging with the integration with Microsoft Office but not so much that I would not use it. It has gotten better with updates. to be fair the issues were when Office 2013 first came out.
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Support Rating
I am not big fan of Alfresco Content Services' support; it works on its own speed and sometimes it becomes challenging to achieve business needs. However, I appreciate regular delivery of security patches and updates
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Usually when I need help from them I got support and it was very good and focused to solve my problem. I didn't have so many problems, but when used it worked. I just would like to have a support in my native language, but I can understand that sometimes is hard for the companies.
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In-Person Training
No answers on this topic
We had online conference call training with a recording to use later as needed
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Online Training
No answers on this topic
They answer all questions and record your training for later use.
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Implementation Rating
Process was relatively smooth and overall, downtime minimal. MSI was very responsive to our needs and made the transition easier than it otherwise might have been.
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The key insight is that the most important thing is to have a open mind. The application is easy to use, but if you have a company with different views and it is not aligned could be a huge problem. So the company transformation is required together with the application. Ensure to use as much as possible the capabilities of the application helps to have best ROI.
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Alternatives Considered
The integration is very easy and can be done with minimal time. The features like sending email, inbuilt integration with CAMEl, MULE, BOX, etc. In addition to this, the adoption of activiti-7 (the microservice version) wins the race against other tools. As the infrastructure and application modules can be deployed independently.
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I've compared recently with Box, but they still predicate their storage on WHERE instead of WHAT, which means if it isn't in a specific folder, you won't find it. Some documents may relate to multiple projects. In M-Files instead of putting a copy of a file in many folders (thus having many copies) you can build out the relationships, so there is only 1 copy of a document which prevents multiple "originals" from being developed separately.
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
do so much more than we need but has all the stuff we do need.
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Return on Investment
  • It definitely has a positive ROI in the overall business, as content management has become easier and more centralized.
  • Video and image content management has become a major plus, as they play an important role in dynamic digital marketing. Once the code is written to accommodate image and videos, we can change this content any time depending on the season of the year, what products we are looking to market, and to what type of clients.
  • It helps with easy control of the system with the business teams rather than having control with the technology teams. Hence it makes it easy to customize and make changes at any time. This also reduces the overlap that technology has with business and helps treat both of them as separate entities.
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  • The price we pay for M-Files is about one third less than the price that we were paying our previous vendor plus we have a custom-built amazing dependable system with great support.
  • From a compliance and legal standpoint, our policies are always available to end users including easy access to previous versions.
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ScreenShots

Alfresco Screenshots

Screenshot of Alfresco Control CenterScreenshot of Alfresco

M‑Files Screenshots

Screenshot of M-Files - SearchScreenshot of M-Files - Profile openScreenshot of M-Files - PermissionsScreenshot of M-Files - Process mapsScreenshot of M-Files - Pinned items