Is Alfresco a good alternative to Hyland OnBase?

As we transition to the new Hyland Community, some post links may be temporarily disrupted as we finalize redirects. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to resolve this as quickly as possible. Details.

Drummondd

I hope everyone is doing well and safe. I am writing this post to get your advice on whether Alfresco Community Edition will be a good alternative to the Hyland OnBase Document management system. The company I work for uses OnBase. It is really wonderful software but the cost to keep it operational is getting out of our hands. Currently, we pay almost $40,000 a year for the maintenance of OnBase. I was looking for an open-source alternative of OnBase which can save us that $40,000 and can also provide similar services and features that OnBase does. I would like to know what other System Admins think about Alfresco and is it worth it to spend time on it. Also, does anyone know any better Document Management System which is open source and free to use? Thank you! Stay Safe! Edit: Here, I am talking about Alfresco Community Edition

afaust

Though I myself do not have any hands-on experience with Hyland OnBase, and honestly only looked at Hyland as more than just as a name in some Gartner quadrant once the Alfresco acquisition announcement was made, I want to at least reply with some general questions that I always pose when someone asks me to compare product X to Alfresco and give an opinion whether either one would be an alternative for the other. I expect the answers would help someone with more insight into both Hyland and Alfresco give their view on this.

What specific features are you currently using within OnBase document management? Which of these features are a must-have, and which are optional? And if possible, which of these would you require to be out-of-the-box / vendor-provided and supported (as in "there is no direct support for Community Edition, but at least Alfresco supports it for their paying customers, and so we may get indirect support in new versions"), and which would you be willing to look for 3rd-party solutions / service integrators to maybe add if missing? What number of users are you dealing with (in general and concurrent / at peak)? Does your organisation have experience with / feel confident in dealing with / managing open source databases, Docker / Kubernetes?