Last Updated: March 3, 2013
As we strive harder to achieve the ideal of a paperless office, we realise that we need good document management systems to actualise this goal. For all of us using WordPress, the good news is that there are some really good document management plugins around.
Countless people have gone for Joomla just for it’s Docman plugin, but this is no longer necessary as WordPress combined with the plugins we are reviewing here is more than enough to handle your document and file management needs.
Without further ado, these are the top WordPress Document/File Management plugins:
WP Download Manager by WP Eden
WP Document Revisions by Ben Balter
WP-Filebase by Fabian Schlieper
WordPress Advanced File Manager by Red Hawk Studio
WP-DownloadManager by Lester Chan
Client Document Monitoring by Hitesh Joshi
Groups File Access by itthinx
WordPress File Centre by Spadez8
Digital Products E-Commerce
Easy Digital Downloads by Pippin Williamson
Discontinued
WordPress Download Monitor by Mike Jolley
Old and Not recommended
Drain Hole by Urban Giraffe
Most of the above plugins are actually described as WordPress download managers, but they do the job of document and file management perfectly fine.
My favourite is WP Download Manager, but you may find that one of the others is more suitable for your needs. For example if you want to sell digital downloadable files from your site, look no further than Easy Digital Downloads, it has all the e-commerce functionality you need in built.
For convenience’s sake, here are the descriptions given for each of the above plugins:
WP Download Manager
WordPress download manager includes all features you need to control you file downloads like password protections on download, download visibility based on members roles and capability, hit counter, detailed download log, packed download, price setup for downloads and many more feature.
WP Document Revisions
WP Document Revisions is a document management and version control plugin. Built for time-sensitive and mission-critical projects, teams can collaboratively edit files of any format — text documents, spreadsheets, images, sheet music… anything — all the while, seamlessly tracking the document’s progress as it moves through your organization’s existing workflow.
Additional information, including a screencast of a typical use case, is available on the WP Document Revisions page. For more information on document management including digital signature services, look into YouSendIt.
WP Document Revisions is three things:
- A document management system (DMS), to track, store, and organize files of any format
- A collaboration tool to empower teams to collaboratively draft, edit, and refine documents
- A file hosting solution to publish and securely deliver files to a team, to clients, or to the public
Download WP Document Revisions
WP-Filebase
WP-Filebase is a powerful download manager supporting file categories, thumbnails and more. Uploaded files can be associated with a post or page so the download URL, thumbnail and other file information are appended automatically to the content. Additionally the downloadmanager offers options to limit traffic and download speed.
Groups File Access
Groups File Access is a WordPress plugin that allows to provide file download links for authorized users. Access to files is restricted to users by their group membership.
With Groups File Access you can provide file downloads for Premium Members or allow only registered users to download files from your site.
Access to files is restricted by group membership. To be able to download a file, a user must be a member of a group that is assigned to the file. If an access limit has been set for the file, the user must also have accessed (downloaded) the file fewer times than the file’s access limit.
If you want to restrict access to a file to users that belong to a certain group, create the group, add the desired users to the group and assign the group to the files that the group should be able to access. More than one group can be assigned to a file.
Shortcodes are used on posts or pages to render links to files, provide information about files and conditionally show content to users depending on whether they are allowed to access a file.
Client Document Monitoring
This plugin helps in managing document and users more easily and effectively.
Features:
- You can create users more faster than wordpress default user system.
- You can upload documents and can assign to different users.
- Users can login and download/view their document.
- Everything AJAX based.
Download Client Document Monitoring
WordPress File Centre
This plugin transforms your WP site into a file manager. Use the wordpress admin panel to add users and files, as well as manage them and delete them. Give your clients/users login details for them to view the files and stop unwanted users viewing them.
Download WordPress File Centre
WP-DownloadManager
Adds a simple download manager to your WordPress blog.
WordPress Download Monitor – Discontinued
Download Monitor is a plugin for uploading and managing downloads, tracking download hits, and displaying links.
Drain Hole – Old Plugin
Drain Hole is a centralized download manager, with full monitoring and statistics, versioning, SVN support, and SEO download URLs (no more nasty query strings!). In addition to it’s monitoring abilities, Drain Hole has a run-time tag replacement feature that lets you embed special tags in your post which are replaced with information from Drain Hole. For example, you can embed download URLs, version information, last update times, and so on. Whenever you change a downloadable file it is automatically updated throughout your blog, without you needing to change anything else.
Digital Downloads E-Commerce
I know many readers find this post when looking for a good plugin that can handle the selling of digital downloads. The best plugin for this is Easy Digital Downloads, created by established developer Pippin Williamson. It is a free plugin with premium add-ons.
Easy Digital Downloads
Selling digital downloads is something that not a single one of the large WordPress ecommerce plugins has ever gotten really right. This plugin aims to fix that. Instead of focusing on providing every single feature under the sun, Easy Digital Downloads tries to provide only the ones that you really need. It aims to make selling digital downloads through WordPress easy, and complete.
Features of the plugin include:
- Cart system for purchasing multiple downloads at once
- Complete promotional code system
- Many payment gateways. PayPal and Manual are included by default with Stripe, PayPal Pro, PayPal Express, and others available as add-ons
- Complete payment history
- User purchase history and ability to redownload files
- Multiple files per downloadable product
- Variable prices for multiple price options per product
- Customizable purchase receipts
- Earnings and sales charts
- Detailed purchase and file download logs
- Data export options for CSV and PDF
- Extensible with many add-ons
- Developer friendly with dozens of actions and filters
Don’t forget to leave a comment below if you have any opinions on the above plugins, or want to suggest any other good document management plugins for WordPress.
Good website! I really do love how it is easy on my eyes as well as the details are well composed. I am wondering how I might be notified whenever a new post has been made. I have subscribed to your rss feed which really should do the trick! Have a nice day!
Thanks! You can also add us on Twitter to be notified whenever we post something new.
Do any of these plugins allow you to setup private files for certain specific users?
I haven’t tried doing that yet Pete, I assume you can, but I’m not sure whether you’d have to do some hacking in order to achieve that functionality. Best to ask on the plugins’ forums as this is something the developers would be best positioned to help you out with.
you want something like MS sharepoint for this.
Download Monitor does that. You can restrict download to certain users.
Hello,
I’m wondering exactly the same… Group users by deparments, and share files only to members of that department.
Which of these plugins has this functionality?
Thank you!!
A very informative article you’ve got there about document management and the usual problems that come around with trying to do such an organizing task. To provide solutions, you may want to try the new BusyDocs software. It’s great software to manage your files and organize them with labels. The best part about the app is that it synchronizes with Google Docs. Any changes made on the file folder or on the file itself is automatically detected and updates the changes every minute. Visit our website for a free trial http://busydocs.com/.
These are NOT document management related. Instead these are download management related. That is a huge difference!
If you look at some DMS’s, you’ll immediately realize the difference.
Each description of these plugins (from the creators) all describe them as download managers, in one fashion or another. (Not document management).
These are to my knowledge the most suitable plugins currently available for WordPress. If you have any plugins which are more suitable for document management let me know and I’ll include them, or even write a separate post about specifically document management plugins. Thanks.
Rama & Jean, very true. For a long time, WordPress lacked true “Document Management” support. Many of the plugins in the post are more file management, or download management tools.
I don’t know about any other plugins to add to the list, but you may want to take a look at WP Document Revisions, a formal document management and version control plugin for WordPress (the first, as far as I know).
For those looking for more of a traditional document management system, may meet your needs.
Nice work Ben, will definitely be checking it out.
I see you looked at http://www.jeangalea.com/posts/wordpress/wordpress-document-management-plugins/
Yes Max that happens to be my personal site
Oh, haha, sorry.
Online document management systems can be used by all forms of businesses, manufacturing industries, law firms, hospitals, research institutions, non-profit organizations etc. In fact these systems are so versatile that they can be used by almost every organization. For more information visit: http://www.ecelticdocs.com/
thanks
Hey Jean,
Very valuable information. I am looking for a plugin, where Admin will upload files for users. These files must be user specific. One user should not be able to see or download other users files. And the files should be downloaded if and only if the user is logged in. Are there any plugins which will meet my requirements ???
Regards,
Trivikram.
Hey Trivikram, this sounds like a good case for a membership plugin.
Thanks Jean, But Is this kind of plugin available ???
Yes Triv, check out this post, you might need to contact the plugin authors to make sure that you can do what you want, but I’m pretty sure it can be done.
Hey Jean,
Thanks for the link, but almost all the plugins are paid versions. First I need to test if my requirement can be done using the plugin.
Thought it might be useful to provide a few words about my experience with WP Document Revisions. I have deployed the WP Document Revisions plugin by Ben Balter along with the Members plugin and the Edit-Flow plugin to support business processes for a global geographically dispersed team.
Together, these 3 plugins create a true document management system with enterprise level security, excellent collaboration tools, versioning history, permanent links to most recent versions of any file type and too many more features to list here.
An unexpected plus has been a private blogging platform which team members use internally to announce business developments and customer success stories, discuss challenges experienced in the field, etc.
User training required only some basic instruction that is included on the home page for the site. WP Document Revisions is an almost unbelievably robust and full fledged document management tool. Just my 2 cents.
Thanks for the valuable contribution Mark.
Hi Mark,
Could you share which member plugin do you use for your DMS?
Thanks, Neven.
Thank you for shareing this topic. I got many information from your site. Again I say you thank you for discus the document management system plugin. Now a days every small and simple company have big problem which is data management problem. This topic is really very valuable for those people.
For more information to visit document management system.
I’m working for client that would like to use a premium or 3rd party document library PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS or even if it’s a separate web app that can be integrated with WordPress with the ability to be hosted on their own server and that will also allow them to upload, downloads and have the ability to search with filters.
I’ve shown them the free plugins available but they’d rather pay for a full fledged plugin with support if available. Does anyone know of any? They’re willing to pay too.
Those are the ones I know of Victor, do post back if you find anything interesting.
Regarding: WP Download Manager – WordPress Plugin
We spent $210 for the developer version of this plugin. From the start we had issues with getting it to work correctly. Namely it was not properly saving settings in the admin, it was sporadic when rendering packages on the front end, and we were repeatedly getting a “link expired” error after using a download link despite not setting it to do so. We attempted several “fixes” provided by the author’s support team, including the immediate updating of the plugin during all this due to a bug we discovered.
After 3-days of trying to get the plugin to work we decided to go with another solution, and requested a refund. After a considerable amount of back and forth emails from the company that developed this plugin, we were told the only way they would issue a refund is if we provided them access to our admin control panel to see if they could determine what the issues were. This was completely unreasonable to us as it is a well know fact you NEVER give your WordPress login details to a third party.
I would highly recommend only using the free version of this plugin, and do NOT pay for the Dev or Premium versions of this plugin. If you have compatibiality issues, and do not wish to allow them access to your admin, they will REFUSE to give you a deserved refund.
That doesn’t sound good at all David, will ask them for their input on this matter. Thanks for pointing it out.
@David McGuffin,
– If you really facing any issue, certainly you are missing something that need to do to make it work. But matter is we even don’t know what you missing without checking that as the plugin is working great for us and every other users.
“This was completely unreasonable to us as it is a well know fact you NEVER give your WordPress login details to a third party.”
— actually it’s totally depends on your mentality! as for many other high traffic and sensitive sites, they trust us doing their regular upgrade of wpdm pro.
— up to now 300,000+ installation of wpdm pro, they are using it happily
— support team replied, they will refund you but they need to be confirm. Now, even not seeing anything, who will even know that, what you are saying is true. But we’re sure, its certainly will be working fine in your site.
— we have full open demo to test/check every features and functionality.
— a few of highly reputed sites here who are using wpdm pro with their full satisfaction:
http://designzzz.com
http://iso.uni.lodz.pl/ ( University of Lodz )
http://www.clevelandfire.gov.uk/
http://makeuseof.com
http://webdesign.com
and many others…
— you could at least make a test environment and send access to support team if you were honest with your word, if we see its not working for you what will we do with your money? you just said it’s not working and give me redund!!!
Man, try to be reasonable, at least, to prove your own words.
@Shaon
Be reasonable man, and don’t assume that every client will give you access to their environment (most company security policies don’t allow this at ALL), be it production or not, and don’t assume your client is lying and ask them to prove it. Not professional Man.
Your refund policy:
-As we are offering non-tangible digital goods, we do not generally issue refunds after the purchase has been made. We will be happy to consider a refund within the first 30 days of your purchase if you are unable to get the plugin to install properly on your website or if the plugin fails to perform the basic functions as designed and you have worked with the product support team to try to resolve these issues. Refunds will be granted at the sole discretion of InteliSoft Solutions. No refunds will be given after 30 days from the initial purchase. Please note that by purchasing the plugin, you agree to the terms of the Refund Policy.
–No where does it say that it’s a must for you to enter your customers environment to check the problem. This is not a reasonable assumption of your refund policy, if it is CLEARLY state that.
I personally think your product is great, but I don’t like to support companies that treat their clients disrespectfully. There is so much more you could have done, like offer him a 50% off discount and try to keep him as a client. Your refund should include an apology to David.
Man, your clients keep you in business, without them you are NOTHING.
@NRKey,
actually in some situation where client need help in setup we need access to his site, that is the regular way, atleast he can create a test environment and give us access. As we know the plugin is fully functional for many other users and suddenly someone claims its not functioning for him, we atleast need a proof and he should give us a chance to check. He also posted it in wordpress.org forum and the forums moderator also suggested him:
“Normally topics about non-free versions of plugins are not accommodated here, but I would suggest you could resolve this issue in much more satisfactory manner by giving the developer access to a clone of your site either at a sub-domain or on a development server. Obviously use a different admin username/password to your live version. ”
as that’s the regular way. what else can I say!
@NRKey
What you said is just “basic” customer service. And they have already lost business from two people who have asked me about their plugin and wanted to learn more about my experience with the company. What do you think my recommendation was?
By the way, as an update (8/6/12), they essentially ignored me going forward and did nothing.
DO NOT GIVE THIS COMPANY ANY MONEY. You do so at your own risk.
Just to add, I’ve had problems with this plugin. My site takes 7 seconds to load my plugins (70% of this is due to wpdownloadmanager) and it’s getting worse as I upload more files. Support is inconsistent and sometimes queries just don’t get answered, or get cryptic answers that upon further investigation turn out to be recommendations for “custom development” at $50 per hour. The update that was supposed to be out in July to fix most issues is still nowhere to be seen.
The premium version of the plugin seems to entitle you to the same kind of support and help that you’d get from most of the free plugins available elsewhere.
I’m now looking for an alternative as I’ve come to the end of the road with this plugin. No doubt it’s ideal for a small document repository but for >100 docs, it’s crawling. Use with caution and test thoroughly before buying.
Thanks Angela, let us know if you find a better plugin so we will include it.
Will do. Thanks for this page though – am currently investigating the others so resources like this are hugely appreciated!
I would like a plugin which handles uploads from members
by putting the upload into a category, probably by means of a form with upload capabilities.
From there I want other members to be able to download those uploaded files. I have searched the web and as yet not found any plugins that do this job. Can you help ?
I have set up the menue on my site and under “lots” have uploaded some but only I am allowed this facility unless i make members admin – which i do not want to do. Plus it looks clunky and was quite difficult to place then in a page.
I’m not sure I’ve encountered a plugin that does just that, although a combination of plugins will achieve it. You could create a custom post type and then use Gravity Forms to create the file uploads form directly into that custom post type. A member management plugin would then be required to handle which users can download the files.
Will keep my eyes open and report back if I find a better solution.
Hi Wittylady,
I am looking for similar plugin that would let a member to upload files. If you happen to find one, could you please share ?
Thanks,
R.
Did you happen to find anything suitable?
WP-Client was designed from the ground up to serve many of the needs requested in this stream of comments. Private client portals, unique permissioning system, file upload/download, file categories, private messaging, and a lot more.
http://WP-Client.com
Nice post Jean, and it definitely generated some good discussion
Thanks!
That’s an interesting product Mike, hope you do well with it, keep us posted.
Indeed interesting. Thanks.
Hi!
Thanks for this list of plugins, i am going to try each one as i am searching for a “tax services cpa” system for a client.
Something where users can buy a tax service (maybe in a shopping cart system), upload a document, and get back their tax service prepared.
A kind of download manager maybe, still don’t know but will find a solution.
Great post!
Hey Nicola,
What I suggest is that you let the user/client upload the document via a form (Gravity forms can submit to a custom post type for nice management), then add a way for them to purchase the service via Paypal. They will then receive the tax service via email.
Alternatively take a look at Easy Digital Downloads which is geared specificially for digital services.
Bdw could your post your question as a comment on that post so it will be helpful to other users who are searching for something similar? I will then reply there.
New to wordpress, and wondering if I am looking in the right direction. I wish to do the following:
have a directory with a number of documents, will be named with identifiers
have users logon to the website
user clicks on link, is directed to page
page has list of files that correspond to user, based on identifiers.
This can be done, I’m not too sure there is a plugin that does it out of the box though, it seems more like a case for custom functionality.
Hi.
Thanks for your effort! I’v been through most of these now (very quickly) trying to find a plugin that will meet all my needs
I find that the easiest way for my users to upload documents in articles is to use the built-in media manager (not very organised, I know).
However, I would like to list the documents they attach, in a widget. I have tested the “Related Documents” widget, but this only lists the document in a post or page.
Do you know of any plugin or widget that would list the documents for a complete category?
Hello, I enjoy reading all of your article post. I wanted to write
a little comment to support you.
Hi there,
Thanks for your wonderful post.
I’m looking for a plugin that would automatically organized the contents in a post by just filling in form.
For example, there are different form fields, one just need to key in the form fields, and all these will be captured and show in a post in a structured and predefined manner.
The reason is so that different authors will be able to post with a standard template and more structural in a way.
Not sure whether you have came across something similar?
Hi Alvin,
Have you had a look at podsframework.org? I’ve found it really powerful and it can control inputs to provide a customised page with specific text, numerical and other data entry fields, downloads, custom taxonomies and data validation.
It’s perhaps not the easiest to get started on and the developer is still writing documentation for the new version but if you’ve got a decent grasp of php it’s a great plugin.
Now that Angela mentions it, yes that would be an excellent solution. I think Gravity forms can also accommodate this when combined with Custom Post Types.
The files I want to make available for download are created as the result of a non-logged in user,s form inputs i.e. on Submit the server takes the inputs, does a bunch of work and builds a file that I would like to offer for sale through a download manager. The file is more “fun” than “private” so I am not worried about who can download it. So I am looking for a download manager that has a broad enough API that it can automaticially add a new download file via the API (ideally using a product template to the the files, price and control features are copied from. Do any of these do that??
Not sure any of these plugins can handle that, sounds like a good case for custom development.
hey can you please help my content box in wordpress (where content is pasted and editing is done) it happens automatically wat 2 do man??
Appreciate the post! Just wanted to show some love for taking the time to write this article. Very helpful
Welcome!
Hi, i am looking for a solution for people to put (upload) file to out ftp server. We need PDF, DOC and some other file from client between 100 ans 250 meg and i dont what to force the customer to use a ftp client, jut login in the site and “send” the big file !… wich one do the job ?
This is possibly the only such plugin I’ve heard of: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/easy-ftp-upload/ haven’t tried it myself though and it’s not been updated in some time.
You can consider http://www.7tech.co.in/wordpress/file-manager-plugin-for-wordpress/ also
too bad they discontinued WordPress Download Monitor i loved that plugin
@Jean Any suggestions if I need an alert on file expiration, When file expires I need a notification email sent out to the admin that the file is about to expire.
I’m not sure as I haven’t needed this feature, however it shouldn’t be too hard to implement it yourself if none of the plugins do it. Try WP Download Manager and email the guys with your requirement, I’m sure they’ll help you out with implementing this feature.
I’ve found this amazing plugin to manage my pictures
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/media-file-manager-advanced/
I find it interesting that there isn’t a good plugin to present a set of mixed file types to a client via a client page with thumbnails, meta data and previews (i.e., playback or thickbox )
The best way to describe this would a plugin similar to Apple’s cover flow.
I’m wondering if there’s a way to use one of these plugins in conjunction with other plugins to have a more robust library with better presentation to add icons, thumbnails and previews of images, files and videos?
For my purposes, I am creating an online repository of branding assets for many products (PSD, AI, PDF, PPT, TIF, JPG, etc.). So each product will have graphics files and branding guides and perhaps even a few videos.
I would really like to be able to show thumbnails (automatically generated of course) of all files or the file type icon and an option to download or preview.
Separately, I’d also like to use something like this for a client area. Primarily as a repository for uploads and downloads but again with nice thumbnails and previews.
I think SP Client Document & Project Manager came close. I have to check again as I have looked at too many of these today… I didn’t like the way the files where displayed, No list options.
thx,