Alfresco vs Plone, is Alfresco the perfect open source ECMS

So, is Alfresco the perfect open source ECM? Not quite. At least not yet. First of all, Alfresco is not all open source. Features like group based access control and clustering are actually "Shared Source" and require monthly subsription fees to use.

There is a large degree of functional overlap between Plone and Alfresco. They both have the functionality necessary for groups of users to manage and share documents: access control, search, metadata, etc. Plone also supports WebDAV and has a mechanism where files automatically updated on the server when edited with a client application such as Microsoft Word. But it does not support CIFS. Alfresco has the advantage of a content rules framework which Plone is missing because of its lack of an event model. Alfresco has a better content versioning system. The many companies who have standardized on Java will feel more comfortable working with a Java solution

There are several areas where Plone has a significant edge. The most notable of which is handling web content. Plone is an effective and elegant hybrid of a document management system and a web content management system. Plone's workflow model is more robust than Alfresco's. The other significant advantage that Plone has is its maturity