Key eFileCabinet and Laserfiche Similarities
One Size Fits All & Small Industry Overlap
Laserfiche has a strong foothold in the legal, wealth management, education, and justice system industries, whereas a greater percentage of eFileCabinet’s customers, if not in accounting, are spread among verticals from property management to construction.
Human resources and healthcare are the main overlaps between the two vendors. But despite the respective footholds and tiny overlaps, each vendor offers a solution that could benefit businesses in any industry.
A more important factor in selecting the best solution for your business is understanding the difference between ECM and DMS.
Key eFileCabinet and Laserfiche Differences
eFileCabinet = DMS, Laserfiche = ECM
eFileCabinet is a document management system, whereas Laserfiche is an enterprise content management (ECM) solution. Although the differences between these two terms are far-reaching and complex, ECM is generally built for larger organizations and costs more.
Although Laserfiche does offer solutions for smaller businesses, the bulk of their credibility comes from their large scale product line.
Although “management” is a term shared by both abbreviations, ECM is engineered to help organizations measure information, whereas most document management systems are engineered to manage information.
This distinction is the main reason Laserfiche lists document management as a feature of Enterprise Content Management on their homepage: Measuring information requires it first be managed.
Where eFileCabinet Wins
Capture, Document Automation, and Simplicity
eFileCabinet makes going and staying paperless remarkably easy through Zonal OCR, predefined document naming and templates. eFileCabinet’s automation is not more sophisticated than Laserfiche’s, but it is more intuitive and easier to manage.
Price
Laserfiche remains silent on price on its website, and for good reason: Their solutions are very expensive.
Although Laserfiche is highly scalable, most small businesses cannot justify its scalability and breadth of features given the solution’s price. What’s more, the way Laserfiche leverages the extra money from higher prices on an internal level may be of concern to smaller businesses.
Rather than emphasizing retention and user success, Laserfiche spends a large proportion of its profits to fuel R&D for larger organizations, meaning that the money small businesses give to Laserfiche won’t necessarily ensure their success long term.
Support, Training and Customer Success
What happens when you buy a complex product like Laserfiche? The training costs money, because the number of people well-versed enough in the product to train others is scarce—hence the Laserfiche certification, but we’ll get to that a bit later. While Laserfiche offers multiple support plans, eFileCabinet has only one plan–and that plan is to provide free, quality support.
No Annual Maintenance Fee
Laserfiche does have an annual maintenance fee, as noted in this review.
Where Laserfiche Wins
Recognition, But It’s All for Naught
Laserfiche has been mentioned by Gartner in the Magic Quadrant for ECM many times, but effort and customer base is more important than recognition.
eFileCabinet hasn’t yet appeared in the Magic Quadrant, but that may only be because Gartner has no such thing as a Document Management Magic Quadrant.
If you want personalized and highly tailored help with your solutions, eFileCabinet is likely to be the best bet. Our support team’s record is proof we will ensure your success post-purchase, because eFileCabinet’s customer base is smaller and therefore easier to assist.
The fewer the number of customers, the greater the value each one brings to a business, and that level of value is reflected in the post-sale support and nourishment eFileCabinet’s continually brought to its customer base.
One financial adviser even lamented to an editor about his omission of eFileCabinet in an article about great information management solutions that the writer eventually dedicated an entire article to eFileCabinet.
Product Certification, But It’s Not What It Seems
eFileCabinet doesn’t offer a certification for users of its software, but that’s only because it’s usable enough to make a certification pointless.
If eFileCabinet offered a certification for its products, every eFileCabinet user would have it. Yes, eFileCabinet is not as feature-rich as Laserfiche, but its features, though fewer in number, carry organizations far.
Whereas, although Laserfiche offers a certification for users of its product line which, essentially, validates that someone knows how to use Laserfiche, and this skill can be monetized into some sort of an asset. But we’ll put this question to Laserfiche: How usable is a product if one needs a certification to validate their ability to use it?
Software Developer Kit
If you purchase Laserfiche and somehow have another $80,000 to spend on a salaried software engineer, this toolkit is an advantage. But it’s yet another microcosm of the many differences between Laserfiche and eFileCabinet. Laserfiche offers a software developer kit with java libraries and pre-built merge modules, whereas eFileCabinet just offers an Open API—customizing its adaptability to an equal yet less complex degree than Laserfiche.
Business Process Management Workflow
Laserfiche offers a business process management (BPM) workflow superior to eFileCabinet’s. If automating a lengthier series of collaboration processes is a deal-breaker for you, then Laserfiche may be your best bet despite the higher price.
It’s worth noting that the workflow is extremely difficult to configure, and this is documented in many of Laserfiche’s customer reviews. If your preexisting processes are already deeply embedded into your workflow and mostly contingent upon manual document handling, eFileCabinet is the better option.