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Why customers choose Nectain over Hyland
Nectain vs Hyland: find your perfect DMS
| Function | Hyland (Onbase) | Nectain | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI-First Architecture | AI capabilities are being added to an established ECM platform. | AI is a core part of the platform from day one. | You get document understanding and automation without stitching together multiple tools. |
| Document Understanding | Relies heavily on document types, metadata, indexing, and workflow rules. | AI understands document content, context, intent, and relationships. | Less configuration, more automation. |
| Workflow Creation | Workflows are typically designed and maintained by administrators. | Business users can build and modify workflows with low-code tools and AI. | Process improvements don't have to wait for IT resources. |
| Process Automation | Automates document routing, approvals, and content-centric workflows. | Automates document processing, decision-making, actions, and communications. | Move beyond document management into business automation. |
| AI Search & Retrieval | Search is primarily driven by metadata, indexing, and repositories. | AI-powered search understands natural language and document meaning. | Find information faster without knowing exactly where it is stored. |
| Adaptability | Best suited for structured, well-defined business processes. | Easily adapts to changing documents, workflows, and AI use cases. | Your automation can evolve with your business. |
| AI Agents & Actions | Focuses on managing and governing content. | AI agents can analyze documents, make decisions, and trigger actions automatically. | Reduce manual work across entire document-driven processes. |
| Business User Autonomy | Process changes often require administrator support. | Business teams can manage workflows, AI prompts, and automation themselves. | Faster innovation and less dependency on technical teams. |
| Business Outcome | Helps organizations manage enterprise content. | Helps organizations automate document-driven work. | The goal is not just storing content—it's eliminating manual processes. |
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Why switch from Hyland to Nectain?
What Nectain can do
Automatically identify document types—contracts, invoices, forms, receipts, reports—and sort them into the right categories instantly. Nectain AI Center handles mixed files at scale, even with different layouts, formats, or quality levels.
Extract key fields from any document—amounts, dates, names, IDs, line items—directly into structured data. Works across PDFs, scans, images, and handwritten forms without templates or retraining, even when layouts or fields change.
Automatically split multi-page or mixed-document files into separate, correctly ordered documents. Nectain identifies boundaries, types, and content so large batches are separated accurately without manual review.
Process hundreds or thousands of documents at once—classify, extract data, and structure results automatically. Ideal for high-volume operations, with consistent accuracy across mixed formats and varying document quality.
Nectain reads and analyzes every document in depth, surfacing key deadlines, risks, responsibilities, amounts, and anomalies. After understanding the content, it can answer questions, compare documents, highlight inconsistencies, and generate actionable recommendations or ideas—all instantly.
Find exactly what you need inside any document—not just titles or metadata. AI-powered search looks through full content, terms, numbers, clauses, names, and concepts to deliver precise results instantly across all files you have access to, even in large archives.
Trigger multi-step AI-powered operations on any document—evaluate claims, check compliance, draft responses, match data, validate fields, or recommend next steps. Smart Actions run instantly, follow your business rules, and adapt to each document’s content and context.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Hyland is a well-established enterprise content management (ECM) platform focused on managing, storing, and governing enterprise content. Nectain is an AI-powered document automation platform that helps organizations understand documents, automate decisions, and trigger business actions with AI.
Nectain was built as an AI-first platform. AI is embedded throughout document processing, search, workflows, and automation. Rather than relying primarily on predefined rules and metadata structures, Nectain uses AI to understand document content, extract information, make decisions, and trigger actions.
Yes. Unlike many cloud-only solutions, Nectain supports cloud, on-premises, and hybrid deployment models, allowing organizations to meet their security, compliance, and data residency requirements.
Nectain follows industry-standard security practices, including access controls, audit trails, monitoring, and compliance-driven security processes. The platform is designed to help organizations protect sensitive documents while meeting regulatory requirements.
Yes. Nectain combines OCR, AI-powered document recognition, data extraction, validation, workflow automation, and document understanding in a single platform.
Yes. Nectain includes enterprise-grade security controls, role-based permissions, audit trails, encryption, and governance features designed to support organizations with security and compliance requirements.
Yes. Nectain’s AI Center allows organizations to choose from multiple AI providers and models, enabling flexibility, governance, and optimization for specific document automation use cases.
Yes. Many organizations evaluating Hyland OnBase consider Nectain when they want to reduce implementation complexity, accelerate automation projects, and leverage AI-powered document understanding and workflow automation.
Yes. Nectain is designed to integrate with ERP, CRM, HR, accounting, banking, document management, and other business systems. The platform includes flexible APIs and no-code integration tools that help organizations connect Nectain to their existing technology stack.
