Alfresco ECM vs Plone

Alfresco ECM

Alfresco is more suited for almost all working environment that deals with paper, companies which are trendy, vibrant media, techie, courier logistics companies and insurance companies as well. Irrespective of the environment, it less appropriate to introduce the usage to people above 40 who are less interested in any form of new technology development.

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Oluwatoyin Adesemowo

IT Support Executive

MultiChoiceInformation Technology and Services, 501-1000 employees

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Plone

The larger your organization, the more appropriate Plone will be. This is not to say that Plone is a worse choice for small websites, only that the minimum investment for a Plone site is certainly higher than for other platforms. If you already use Plone for your site and are looking for a redesign or an overhaul, I would only advise switching to a different platform such as WordPress or Drupal if your organization is downsizing. For any other situation, Plone is the natural choice for your growth.

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Fulvio Casali

Principal - Soliton Consulting

University of WashingtonComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Alfresco ECM

7.6

Plone

—

Content capture & imaging

8.0

—

File sync, storage & archiving

8.0

—

Document management

8.4

—

Records management

7.8

—

Content search & retrieval

7.2

—

Enterprise content collaboration

7.3

—

Content publishing & creation

7.0

—

Security, risk management & information governance

7.6

—

Contract lifecycle management

7.6

—

Alfresco ECM

—

Plone

10.0

Role-based user permissions

—

10.0

Alfresco ECM

—

Plone

9.7

API

—

9.7

Internationalization / multi-language

—

9.7

Alfresco ECM

—

Plone

7.7

WYSIWYG editor

—

7.8

Code quality / cleanliness

—

9.0

Admin section

—

8.0

Page templates

—

7.6

Library of website themes

—

3.8

Mobile optimization / responsive design

—

7.4

Publishing workflow

—

10.0

Form generator

—

8.0

Alfresco ECM

—

Plone

7.9

Content taxonomy

—

9.4

SEO support

—

9.0

Bulk management

—

6.3

Availability / breadth of extensions

—

7.4

Community / comment management

—

7.7

Pros

First of all, Alfresco is newly developed compared to old content management systems, so it has adopted some of the best practices and it has avoided the problems faced by earlier systems.
Alfresco is open source so it is very easy to find problems if any and to extend it. The cost of licensing Alfresco is very less compared to other systems.
Alfresco does very well in performance, design, API design and has lot of great features such as auto PDF conversion, auto compression, etc.
The customer support and community support is very good.

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Verified User

Former Employee in Information Technology

Media Production Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Plone is a folder-based system, organising content in a similar way desktop-users are doing for the last two decades. No need to teach non-tech customers some relational-database like paradigm for content management.
Plone is secure. It is the most secure CMS you can get your hands on.
Plone is flexible, and makes fast development easy.

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Ronnie Stevens

Owner

Studio ZOOInformation Technology and Services, 1-10 employees

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Cons

Some more APIs can be added although the existing APIs very well provide the required features.
Their other tools such as collaboration, etc need to be marketed well so that companies adopt Alfresco as a whole package.
Alfresco needs to be on the lookout for immediately introducing any new functions provided by other competitive products.

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Verified User

Former Employee in Information Technology

Media Production Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Bullets and formatting sometimes make it difficult to add text to an existing paragraph. The 'code' button is useful in those cases, but only to those who know html.
Sometimes the pages don't save correctly and you use information.
Uploading and displaying images is a bit too much work.

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Gilmer Govaert

SAP business analyst

KULeuvenInformation Technology and Services, 501-1000 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

Alfresco ECM9.0

Based on 9 answers

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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Verified User

Former Employee in Information Technology

Media Production Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Plone8.3

Based on 10 answers

Don't fix it when it's not broke :-)

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Gilmer Govaert

SAP business analyst

KULeuvenInformation Technology and Services, 501-1000 employees

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Performance

No score

No answers yet

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Plone9.0

Based on 1 answer

Plone is very intensive in its operations, and if not configured well it can be slow. However it is designed and built with speed in mind and with proper use of coding, templates and caching can perform extremely well under high loads. It is capable of scaling to very high load availability environments with no specific coding requirements.

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Tom Cameron

Technical Manager

KitovuInformation Technology and Services, 1-10 employees

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Implementation

Alfresco ECM9.0

Based on 1 answer

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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Verified User

Executive in Legal

Financial Services Company, 51-200 employees

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No score

No answers yet

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Alternatives Considered

Java based open source wide community and popular ECM which is used by fortune 500 companies.

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Varun Shah

Software Engineer

MedImpact Healthcare Systems, Inc.Information Technology and Services, 201-500 employees

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Plone is much harder to learn then Wordpress. Development in Wordpress is learnt in day's, where development in Plone really takes years to get to the full depth. That said, once you're able to develop in Plone, is it a rock solid system, with readable code. In my experience Wordpress websites need to be updated so often, and the code feels bad organised. I have been building Wordpress websites, choosing Wordpress only when the client has almost no money. But I can never deliver the quality I want to deliver when using Wordpress. Plone does offer the possibility to deliver professional websites. As for Joomla, in the past I have done some Joomla development, but the whole CMS-paradigm could not settle in my brain. Being a web developer for over 15 years now, Joomla always felt contra-intuitive. Let alone the task of teaching this to my clients. Plone is now my only choice. It gives me a fast development-cycle, a user-friendly CMS and a rock stable and very secure system.

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Ronnie Stevens

Owner

Studio ZOOInformation Technology and Services, 1-10 employees

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Return on Investment

One company has replaced the Documentum with Alfresco and it has created a positive impact on ROI, as the cost of Alfresco is less compared to Documentum.
Another company has used this platform to store Statement of work documents with integration of SFDC., The business is happy to see the integration is seamless.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 51-200 employees

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Plone makes it possible to maintain and update the running websites with very small effort.
My customers need little to no support on using the CMS.
Creating custom content types is really fast.

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Ronnie Stevens

Owner

Studio ZOOInformation Technology and Services, 1-10 employees

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