As we alluded to in our last post, one of the major differences between Alfresco and Documentum is pricing.  While it is easy to say that Alfresco is “cheaper” – that can somewhat imply that the quality of Alfresco limited.  In talking to our clients, we realize emphasis that the business and software development model is different, and hence the sales model is “different” rather than one product being cheaper/better/worse than the other product. For this post we will explore the differences in how the products are priced and maintained.

Documentum Pricing

Documentum’s pricing has evolved over the last 15 years.  TSG worked with a client on concurrent pricing in 1996 – something that hasn’t been supported for a long time.  Documentum pricing has included CPU based, user based, foundation seats, named users, consumer and named user per application, among others.  This post will not go into any specific pricing as pricing differentiates between clients.  Documentum pricing involves a purchase of the software and then maintenance on that purchase price.   Software purchased on the most recent examples will include:

• User Content Server (1 per user per server)
• User Per Application (1 per user per application: Ex Webtop, Custom Client, My Documentum for Sharepoint…)
• Additional applications
  • Per User Application (DCM as an example)
  • Per Server Application (Documentum Transformation Services)
  • Maintenance on all of the above at a % of the total cost

The above being said, pricing model and costs greatly vary from customer to customer.  Contact your direct sales or EMC Sales rep to understand your organizations current pricing agreement.

Alfresco Pricing

Alfresco follows a commercial open source model, and offers both a community and enterprise edition of the platform.   Alfresco does not charge for the software itself, but offers a yearly subscription model for the enterprise edition.  Purchasing an enterprise subscription offers a stabilized and supported edition of Alfresco, along with access to technical support, upgrades, and access to the Alfresco Network knowledgebase.

Another key differentiator between Alfresco and closed source software is that the subscription model is CPU based vs. user based.  This provides flexibility for implementations with a large number of consumers vs. contributors, or external facing applications.  Because Alfresco’s business model  is centered around yearly subscription renewals.  Alfresco must continually add new features and functionality to their platform and provide value in support to incent customers to renew.

In one instance, a client has purchased Open Text Document Management licenses, had not implemented the product yet, and was interested in Web Content Management long term.  In making a decision to move to Alfresco, choosing to purchase Document Management allowed them to save approx. $10,000 in maintenance and provided an opportunity to deploy Web Content Management capabilities with no upfront software costs.

As Documentum clients know, there are other significant add-ons to the Documentum platform besides the core repository like:

• Document Renditions
• Full Text Search
• BPM  / Workflow
• FTP Access
• Scanning

Alfresco provides this functionality as part of the core platform, and does not require the purchase of additional components outside of the core repository.  Given the accessibility to the repository of source code and the development community, the platform incorporates or provides mechanisms to integrate repository features based on successful open source software like Lucene, jBPM, OpenOffice, etc.