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IBM FileNet vs OpenText Documentum Content Management comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM FileNet
Ranking in Enterprise Content Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
105
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
OpenText Documentum Content...
Ranking in Enterprise Content Management
3rd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Enterprise Content Management category, the mindshare of IBM FileNet is 6.2%, down from 10.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenText Documentum Content Management is 7.2%, down from 12.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Content Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM FileNet6.2%
OpenText Documentum Content Management7.2%
Other86.6%
Enterprise Content Management
 

Featured Reviews

Shankar-Kambhampaty - PeerSpot reviewer
Consulting CTO at a tech consulting company with 1-10 employees
Business workflows have been automated and document processes are streamlined at large scale
I believe IBM FileNet could be improved or enhanced in the future, specifically the user interface development support, which, despite all the improvements, still feels from the 2010s or 2000s. The current state of the user interface development support and the ability to customize it leaves much to be desired. The backend engine, process engine, and object engine are fantastic. However, the user interface, which is required to provide an impressive experience to the user, is difficult to build. IBM will need to do something about this area. Over time, IBM has made improvements with enhancements through CP4BA and other tools, with which user interfaces can be built. But there is much more is needed. The initial setup process for IBM FileNet requires specialists. IBM FileNet is not a click-click-click deploy kind of product. It has several components that need to be installed in different versions and in a particular order. Additionally, IBM Cloud does not provide a proper experience. The problem is I cannot use IBM Cloud easily. I cannot even get a membership easily. With AWS, I just use my credit card, sign up, and I am done. With IBM Cloud, that is not how it is. They go through all validation processes, and it is a nightmare at times. There are problems around IBM FileNet, not exactly with IBM FileNet itself, but the point is that it is not a click-click-click deploy either on the cloud or on-premise. It requires specialists, and there is a big learning curve toward deploying and managing the whole infrastructure as well as the software. I communicate with the technical support of IBM frequently. I have communicated several times, and frankly, there is much to be desired on that side. When you raise a ticket, it takes 24 to 48 hours for them to respond. We live in a time where business moves at the speed of light. Twenty-four hours is a very long time. You need to be able to get technical support instantaneously. It is not like the more contemporary support models where you get turnaround in minutes, not days.
FC
Consultant In Risk Management and Performance Improvemenf at Deloitte Risk Advisory
User finds integration useful but seeks improvement in interface intuitiveness
I am satisfied with OpenText Documentum so far; it has great integration capabilities. The connection with our API and SAP is useful, as you can use their SAP interface. The key point that my company decided to go with OpenText Documentum is mostly because you can integrate it with many other tools such as Salesforce.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"IBM FileNet enhanced the productivity of our work and increased overall productivity."
"IBM FileNet can scale phenomenally, performance is good, security is good, and everything about it is strong."
"There is a significant ROI from IBM FileNet because before its introduction, the company needed to do all the work manually."
"Users are able to create their own content, and they can manage their own sets of tasks, to work at their own pace and get their jobs done."
"FileNet is very user-friendly... We have business users using and it is quite friendly for them."
"We probably would not have seen adoption so strongly without it."
"IBM FileNet is a very robust system with many functionalities for content management."
"[The most valuable features are] scalability and ease of use. These features are important because the customer where we have deployed it has millions of documents... And over the last five years, the volume of the documents has been increasing. It's handling all of them and without any errors."
"We like Documentum for its capacity and reliability."
"It provides possibilities for us to save documents and supporting the business process while doing so."
"The storage of metadata content, workflows, and life cycles are the most valuable features of OpenText Documentum."
"Documentum is a highly scalable document management solution because it's built on a solid platform."
"The most valuable feature is that the documents are kept secure."
"OpenText Documentum has improved availability and performance in our organization."
"I appreciate Documentum's scalability, allowing for vast volumes of content storage."
"The most impactful thing is the size, which is almost 25 TB."
 

Cons

"The FileNet API seems like it is very difficult and not transparent."
"I know it took them seven months to convert, so the initial setup was, probably to some degree, complex."
"Programmers have to translate user needs into IBM FileNet, which causes misinterpretations."
"The basic and fundamental point about FileNet is that the interface is very bad. It's just not appealing so people are reluctant to use it."
"I think the support could be better, and it could improve."
"In terms of functionality, what customers might be looking for is a little more in terms of native-records retention. Records Management is an add-on product. If there were just a little more of that built into the core functionality, that would be helpful."
"We brought DocuSign into our company's solution three years before. At that time there was no direct integration. We would like to pull documents out from FileNet, push them to DocuSign and, when done, retrieve them and store them back in FileNet. We wrote our own custom solution for that. It would be nice if there was some tool we could have used to do that."
"In Content Navigator we want to see the ability to view different types of video... We are using HTML 5 but it's very limited... We definitely want to see support for most types of video formats in the market."
"The price is quite high as the licensing prices are significant."
"It should provide more tools to help clients upgrade solutions based on Webtop."
"OpenText Documentum is moving to the cloud, and I am concerned about the security aspect of it."
"They should develop something so that bugs don't happen in our project. We make changes manually and some bugs happen."
"The user interface can be a bit more intuitive."
"The user interface can be improved."
"I would like to see performance improvements, especially regarding slow response times."
"Documentum is a very robust system. Everything can be improved, but at this time, I do not have anything in particular. If anything, they can put our software in their standard."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Yearly, we pay for the maintenance, which is $20,000."
"My customers have seen ROI. There have been productivity gains, time savings gains, and things that they have been doing much more efficiently in a more modern way than they were before."
"For small scale industries, they allow different options. They can do open source. It is the complexity of the data security that they should think about before they choose."
"We use extraction. Therefore, we can see 80 to 85 percent accuracy on data extraction. This reduces the manual indexing part, which is definitely a gain on performance efficiency."
"The cost is about $40,000, plus yearly maintenance."
"The physical space that we have gained back pays for the service. Therefore, it has reduced our operating costs overall. We have definitely seen ROI. I would estimate $30,000 a year."
"For the medium scale or large scale, I would recommend FileNet. FileNet is free of licensing expenses, thus good for the money. It is not expensive, but worth for the money, especially for medium scale and large scale industries."
"1. It will be more expensive than estimated to setup. 2. You will need to double the staff while you are running the old system and installing the new system. 3. Depending on the number of documents to be migrated, make sure you understand the potentially massive amount of time and effort required to migrate the existing content to the new platform."
"The price is considered affordable now."
"OpenText Documentum has announced a new licensing model, which could be more expensive."
"It falls in line with a lot of things that are out there on the market. There is nothing extraordinary in terms of great or bad."
"OpenText Documentum's pricing is good."
"It is quite an expensive product."
"The product is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
8%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise74
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise28
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM FileNet?
The product is robust and can process a lot of documents for enterprise content management.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM FileNet?
The pricing and licensing of IBM FileNet is high. We are living in a world where the minimal license from IBM costs anywhere from seventy-five thousand to one hundred thousand US dollars, depending...
What needs improvement with IBM FileNet?
I believe IBM FileNet could be improved or enhanced in the future, specifically the user interface development support, which, despite all the improvements, still feels from the 2010s or 2000s. The...
What do you like most about OpenText Documentum?
The most valuable feature of Documentum for our content management needs is its ability to segregate access based on department and role.
What needs improvement with OpenText Documentum?
The interface of OpenText Documentum could be more intuitive; sometimes it is hard to find where the information is located.
What is your primary use case for OpenText Documentum?
We are using it to archive the information about our sales.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Dell EMC Documentum, Documentum , Documentum xCelerated Composition Platform
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Suncorp Group Limited, St. Vincent Health, Citigroup, SRCSD, and UK Dept for Work and Pensions.
Agility; Bibliotheca Alexandrina; Capitec Bank; Department of Social Development, Republic of South Africa; County of Los Angeles, Department of Human Resources; Fresenius Kabi; Heathrow Airport; Lahey Health; Linde PLC; Milestone Pharma Co. Ltd; National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development; Open Grid Europe GmbH; REPCO NEX Industrial Solutions; Springer Nature; Syngene International; Tata Power DDL; University of Texas Austin
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM FileNet vs. OpenText Documentum Content Management and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.