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After years spent in the Niche and Visionary quadrants, document management solutions provider Laserfiche earned its place as a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Document Management for the first time. Not only that, but it outscored the 14 other vendors — including big names like Microsoft, Box and OpenText — in the "completeness of vision" category.
The 49-year old company, founded in 1976 in the basement of Nien-Ling Wacker, its female founder, stands out for several reasons. Other startups of the time, like Apple, Microsoft and Oracle, were started by men. Still others like Compuserve, Wordstar International and Tandy TRS-80 have since disappeared from the marketplace.
Customers Know Best
So what did Laserfiche do to earn both its longevity and ascension?
"I believe we listened to our customers," said Thomas Phelps IV, CIO and SVP of Corporate Strategy of the enterprise content management firm (Gartner now uses “document management” in place of ECM and content services platforms). While Phelps’ quote sounds like self-congratulatory marketing-speak, analysts at Forrester noted the company received the most customer feedback in its Forrester Wave for Content Services Platforms,Q1 2025. Forrester principal analyst and lead author of the report Cheryl McKinnon noted that Laserfiche is a customer favorite. Other vendors in the Forrester Wave included Box, Google, Hyland (Alfresco), iManage, IBM, M-Files, Microsoft, Net Documents, Newgen Software and SER Group.
Talk to Laserfiche users and you’ll see why its customers are so enthusiastic. “It’s (Laserfiche) so flexible and hits every point we need it to hit,” said Angela Goerner, director of enterprise content management at Coppell Independent School District in Texas. She’s so excited about the product that she started a user group that includes 30 independent school districts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. "We have now received inquiries from the Houston area," she added. The group meets in-person four times per year and four times per year virtually.
“We talk about ideas and new things we can do with Laserfiche,” she said, adding that they often discuss their experiences, ideas and new use cases. Would the level of excitement have been as high if they had chosen a different vendor? Probably not, given that before purchasing Laserfiche they considered a number of its competitors, including at least two that are also in the leader’s quadrant (Goerner asked us not to name the other vendors.)
Southern Illinois University School of Medicine rolled out Laserfiche forms and workflows at the beginning of the pandemic. The university had already been using Laserfiche in-house since 2010. "COVID gave us the opportunity to win management buy-in," said Jennifer Washburn, IT manager at the school. While Laserfiche’s ECM repository was already in place, Washburn’s team implemented Laserfiche forms and associated workflows for timesheets and other documents to accommodate employees working remotely. The end result is almost unfathomable. "The manual processes that once took a week or longer, now take less than a minute," said Washburn. When it comes to adoption, users of Laserfiche forms find it so valuable that they are lining up with new use cases.
Lovely Experiences Aren’t Enough
Of course, Laserfiche didn’t earn its place in the leader's quadrant just because of the experience it provides users. Describing the document management product, Gartner analysts Tim Nelms, Marko Sillanpaa, Max Goss and Chris Jackson wrote that the “eponymous Laserfiche product is broadly focused on two things that companies and organizations care about — content-centric business processes and information governance.”
Laserfiche serves five key industries: education, financial services, government, healthcare and manufacturing. It provides an extensive portfolio of solution accelerators tailored to these market segments. These out-of-the-box templates help customers address common business challenges without the need to customize the platform.
The software is sold as a self-hosted solution or in the Laserfiche cloud (see here for cloud pricing). Other pricing information should come from the company or a Laserfiche reseller. In general, Laserfiche depends on its partner ecosystem to help implement software, which allows Laserfiche employees to focus on R&D.
All of that said, the Gartner analysts did point out several shortcomings including that Laserfiche’s ability to invest in its platform at the same rate as its largest competitors may be limited. They also noted that its smaller workforce has resulted in slower integration of AI capabilities into its product offerings. It is worth noting here that after Gartner's report was written, Laserfiche introduced Laserfiche AI. In addition, Phelps offered that AI will be embedded ethically and legally in its tech stack.
How will AI impact document management? Phelps said it should make knowledge workers more productive. Considering that new AI-driven capabilities like document summarization, smart invoice capture, auto-populating fields and such, while adhering to governance and privacy policies, he’s probably right.
