Alfresco Enterprise Edition and Alfresco Community Edition Comparison
Alfresco is the Open Source alternative for Enterprise Content Management. Alfresco develops, markets and makes available two versions, or editions, of the Alfresco ECM product:
- Alfresco Community Edition – 100% Open Source, free to download and free to use
- Alfresco Enterprise Edition – Open Source with commercial support and enterprise extensions
The table below compares the two editions, highlighting the differences and indicates which edition is right for each organization. If you have any questions about the two editions please use the Contact Alfresco link.
Alfresco Edition Comparison |
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| Try Alfresco in the Cloud Download Enterprise Edition Technology Preview: Download IBM Lotus Integration |
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| Recommended For | The Alfresco Enterprise Edition is recommended for Corporations, Governments and other organizations looking for an enterprise scale, production-ready open source ECM solution without any upfront license fees, that is typically under a 1/10th of the cost of traditional Enterprise Content Management products (TCO White paper) | The Alfresco Community Edition is recommended for developers and highly technical enthusiasts in non-mission critical environments. As this edition is unsupported it is intended to be used by those happy to spend time and resource solving issues independently |
| Platform Support | Certified against leading open source stacks plus commercial platforms including:
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Developed to run on an open source stack |
| Scalability and High Availability | Includes easy clustering and high-availability extensions needed to support large scale multi-server deployments |
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| System Monitoring | Provided via advanced JMX-based tools allow access to database connection, memory usage information and dynamic server re-configuration |
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| Multi-tenant Support | Cloud ready multi-tenant architecture |
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| Application Extensions | In addition to the open source Forge extensions Alfresco makes available fully certified enterprise extensions that enhance the core ECM capability e.g. production Kofax integration for production imaging |
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| Support | Alfresco provide commercial support with Service Level Agreements (SLA) for issue tracking, problem resolution, patches and fixes | None provided |
| Certification | Rigorous testing by dedicated Alfresco QA Engineers combining both automated QA and over 3000 manual checks and tests, on both open source and proprietary stacks (see Supported Stacks for more details), for bugs, stability, scalability, and security issues. An extensive QA process that provides:
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Basic testing against open source stack running Windows, MAC OS and Linux |
| Try Alfresco in the Cloud Download Enterprise Edition Technology Preview: Download IBM Lotus Integration |
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| Commercial Support | Alfresco provides commercial support with Service Level Agreements (SLA). Two levels are available Platinum and Gold. Support services provided include:
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None provided |
| Bug Fixing and Tracking | Provided as part of the commercial support contract:
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Rolled into future versions and made available as part of daily builds |
| Community | Access to both the Alfresco Community and Alfresco Network (more details below) | Alfresco Community |
| Product Information | In addition to the Community resources available the Alfresco Network provides:
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Community resources include:
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| Upgrades and Maintenance | Provided as part of commercial support agreement:
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None provided |
| Certified Partners | A world-wide network of certified Alfresco partners |
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| Training | Training provided by both Alfresco and over 30 global Alfresco partners offer the following classroom based training courses:
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| License Price / Subscription | No software license fee – Provided as part of an annual subscription for commercial level support | No software license fee – free to download, free to use |
| Trial | Available as a 24 hour Cloud based trial and a 30 day download (see Alfresco Enterprise Edition Download for more details) | None – free to download, free to use |
| Trial Support | Alfresco support services provided during Alfresco Enterprise Edition trials | None provided |
