After an opening caveat that all product comparisons are flawed, Sirius Corp blogger tcallway proceeds to compare open source ECM products Alfresco and Nuxeo with the deeply entrenched Microsoft SharePoint.

SharePoint claims a broad range of functionality including BI, records and document management, web content management and eForms. But it comes with a hefty price tag, and you never stop paying – it’s a lease program with license fees on a host of products – in fact, everything in the Microsoft Stack that is also required to make the package complete.

By comparison, Alfresco is free and runs on Linux, Unix and Mac, in addition to Windows, and supports any LDAP server. Use MySQL or PostgreSQL with Alfresco, and don’t fret purchasing an environment to extend Alfresco – it’s all included. And you don’t need licenses to provide your services to your clients.

However, it’s only the Labs Edition that’s free. The code for the Enterprise version is not available, and this version does have an annual subscription, but is worth it.

The reviewer went on to compare Nuxeo, another open source solution, with Alfresco. He claims both are beautiful, fast and feature-rich, but liked the Nuxeo UI with it’s drag and drop file management better than Alfresco. Nuxeo runs on all mainstream OS’s and is very extensible, and the code is available for its enterprise version. Close, but not close enough. But when the reviewer tried to reach a live person, in the main UK office, or the French office they were forwarded to, the Nuxeo offering came up lacking.

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