Alfresco Community Enterprise Feature Comparison

Question

I've seen this question but the answers are simply not good enough. I've searched the web and could find a clear listing of the main differences.

I am particularly surprised to see contradictions in the above link, that holds only 4 short answers.

So the question is, beyond support, what are (all) the differences between Alfresco Community and Enterprise editions (for the current versions of course)?

Are there functional or technical features that available in the Enterprise edition, that are not in the community edition?

I find it strange that it's so difficult to get a clear list. Looking at the forums to find this answer is not a serious option from a business perspective.

Until now, I found this link to be useful, but it's from 2009.

In particular, I find the platform support interesting, with the community edition supporting only lamp stuff:

• Linux
• MySQL
• Tomcat
• OpenLDAP
• Firefox

And the enterprise edition supporting:

• Windows
• SQL Server
• WebLogic, WebSphere
• AD/Kerberos
• IE and Safari

Apparently, these features are only available in the enterprise edition:

JMX monitoring

• Runtime admininstration: What's that exactly? And what's in the community edition then?
• Runtime indexing consistency check and update: What's in the community edition then?
• High performance and availability: How is that implemented and what's in the community edition then?
• Storage policies
• Open source and proprietary technology stack support: which ones exaclty? Which ones are supported in the community edition?

If anyone could guide me towards serious documentation about these differences, that would be great.

I also went through the wiki but could not find an answer to my questions in there.

Answer 1

Well, regarding JMX monitoring:

• Runtime administration: Alfresco enterprise allows to perform certain actions on Alfresco subsystems without restarting the server. This allows you to be very fast during debugging/developing and also making changes in production environment. Also you can access the JMX interface that supports JMX Remoting.
• There is no consistency check or update, until you restart the server (during the startup you have to validate/check/rebuild your indexes). There is an option in alfresco.global.properties (or the original repository.properties config file) for that. If you have some inconsistencies in the Alfresco Community index, you're gonna have a bad time xD.
• Alfresco Enterprise has specific license for clustering your architecture, the Community edition doesn't support those systems. Replicate and cluster Alfresco is one of the main improvements in performance/scalability/availability you could achieve.
• The storage policies allow you to use Content Store selectors in Alfresco Enterprise. You can manage a primary and a secondary file store, and map/connect these stores in your architecture. The Community Edition allows you only to use one content store at a time.
• These include everything inside Alfresco (Spring Framework, Apache-Lucene/Solr, Tomcat, and so on), because with the Enterprise license you have also the full support with everything inside the Alfresco package. The difference is that the Community is based on daily builds, supported by community, and therefor not guaranteed. The Enterprise support helps you resolve many problems that you might encounter during developing and in production environment, not only Alfresco related, but also on some configurations on supported platforms (Windows/Linux), your web application servers, and so on.

Hope it helps.

Answer 2

differences between Enterprise and Community vary in detail from version to version and are mainly visible for administrators. We see or maintain both flavors of Alfresco in midsize to very large environments and I would say it's more or less a question of taste and budget what the best decision / edition is for you. Excellent skills in infrastructure and java are highly advisable for both editions to run Alfresco in production. The technical differences are not as dramatic as not being able to provide very similar functionality for the users - so if you're actually in a decision you should focus on a good technical partner, the support services and maybe the fact that you only get official patches in the Enterprise subscription, not on the Community. BTW Alfresco Enterprise is not Open Source but this is not a real point of interest for most end users. You can access the code as a subscription customer but it is not public available/accessible.

The main differences in features are already named more or less:

1. Administration

   • Enterprise has more views and setting in the admin web GUI. In Community you can access most configuration only from the command line. This may be a restriction but in real live Administrators prefer the command line and scripting automation.
   • Enterprise lets you change some Alfresco settings during runtime (most settings still require restart). Some can be change in the GUI and more in the jmx interface. Also you're able to stop and start subsystems like the CIFS protocol server. We use this feature to switch a system in read only mode. This point is meant with "runtime admininstration". Community requires restart of the service for most configuration changes. It is possible to work around this by advanced scripting like groovy or by implementing modules.

2. Indexing

   • Runtime indexing consistency check and update is not a self healing functionality as expected. You will have to learn (at least for now) that you have to recreate the Alfresco index from time to time even in Enterprise environments and that it is better to focus on good strategies how to speed recreation or how to setup standby indexes instead of hunting failed indexing transactions using the check and update methods. For major document model changes you need to recreate the index anyway.

3. High performance and availability

   • This is mainly the cluster and replication functionality which is no longer available in Community. It's similar to MS Clusters: It's a lot, lot work for very view more availability since some concepts are missing. The price is high in terms of complexity and can end up in loss of robustness. Even with enterprise support it's a hard job to keep a alfresco cluster running - so you need very good arguments why to go this way. But of course: its possible and available! High performance: There shouldn't be any difference and if - I'm very curious about the explanation.

4. Technology stack

   • The main difference is the database support. In the Community you only can choose between MySQL and Postgres (No Oracle or MS SQL for Community). All other technologies are independent from Enterprise or Community (AD, Kerberos, OS, Browser, ...)
   • Java Container: I believe over 95% of all Alfresco installations run in tomcat. That's the configuration which is documented, tested and scales. Using WebLogic or WebSphere gives you no added value except new challenges - quite the contrary: You have to solve most issues for yourself and can't benefit from others experience.

Storage policies: I'm not pretty sure and should check in 4.2.x if the Content Store Selector / Storage policies is no longer available in the Community, but it was there in the 3.x versions.

[Edit]: storage policies have been removed in Community 4.2.x:

NoSuchBeanDefinitionException: No bean named 'storeSelectorContentStoreBase' is defined

If there is a really need for this functionality someone may re-enable that feature by coding a module for Community.

Regards

Answer 3

This page explains the difference between the editions: https://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Enterprise_Edition

This page is the canonical, comprehensive list of the differences.

If you are considering an Enterprise Subscription and you have a question that isn't answered by what you can find on that page, you should talk to your account rep.