R2 Docuo vs Athento: full comparison (2026)

R2 Docuo or Athento? Both are Spanish document management systems with artificial intelligence, both are certified under Spain’s National Security Framework (ENS) and both publish their pricing. Beyond that they have little in common: Athento is built to process enormous volumes of documents in banking, insurance and debt management, and R2 Docuo is built to run complete business processes —Contracts, Invoices and Quotes— in companies operating under Spanish regulation.

The quickest way to work out which one fits is not to compare features, but to look at the size of the problem. If you have to classify millions of documents and you want it running on your own infrastructure, look at Athento. If you have processes that need to be modelled, approved, expired and audited, and you want to be working in weeks rather than quarters, look at R2 Docuo.

If you are weighing up more options, our document management software comparison analyses eight tools by process, regulation, price and G2 rating.

Summary: which one fits your case

Choose Athento if:

• You process hundreds of thousands or millions of documents a year: credit files, insurance claims, debt portfolios.
• You need to install it on your own infrastructure, on-premise or hybrid, or run the AI models locally, with no data leaving your servers.
• You work in banking, insurance or debt collection, and you want a vendor with specific experience in those processes, including in Latin America.
• You have more than 500 users and the per-user price matters more than the base fee.
• You want a published, off-the-shelf availability SLA, without having to negotiate it.

Choose R2 Docuo if:

• Your problem is not filing, but managing processes: contracts that expire, invoices that need approving, quotes that get signed, case files that pass through seven pairs of hands.
• You need Spanish regulatory compliance out of the box: ENS at HIGH category, Verifactu and eIDAS electronic signature.
• You want to start with one specific process —contracts, for example— with the people involved in it, instead of licensing an entire platform from day one.
• You want to be working on day one with apps that are already built, not after a configuration project.
• You want to ask Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini what state a case file is in and who approved what, without opening the application.

What R2 Docuo and Athento have in common

Before the differences, it is worth establishing what they share, because it is more than it seems and it prevents false comparisons.

Both are Spanish vendors with Spanish-language support and their own teams: Athento Europa, S.L. is based in Málaga and R2 Sistemas Informáticos, S.L. in Madrid. Both build real artificial intelligence into the product, not as a marketing label: automatic classification, data extraction and semantic search. Both are certified under the National Security Framework, which allows them to work with the Spanish public sector. Both publish pricing on their websites, which in this market is not the norm: DocuWare and M-Files, for example, do not. And both expose their platform to AI assistants through an MCP server, each with its own scope.

If your requirement is “a Spanish vendor, with support in Spanish and ENS certification”, both options meet it. The decision has to be made somewhere else.

R2 Docuo vs Athento comparison (2026)

Criterion	Athento	R2 Docuo
Vendor	Athento Europa, S.L. (Málaga)	R2 Sistemas Informáticos, S.L. (Madrid)
Focus	High-volume document processing	Business processes over documents and data
Entry price (annual billing)	€235/month + €12.99/user (PLUS plan)	€12/month with 1 user (single app)
Cost for a team of 10	€364.90/month	€134/month
Entry plan ceiling	50,000 documents	No document limit; 100 GB included
Ready-to-use apps	Modules configured per project	Contracts, Invoices and Quotes, live on day 1
Verifactu	Not declared	Yes, responsible declaration published
National Security Framework (ENS)	MEDIUM category	HIGH category
Other certifications	ISO 27001, 27017, 27018 and SOC 2	ISO 27001 and ISO 9001; ISO 14001 in progress
Sub-processors	By category, without naming companies	Public list, company by company, with country and transfer basis
Data location	Not published	Servers in Spain
Deployment	Cloud, on-premise and hybrid	Cloud
MCP server	Yes, since May 2026. 5 tools, with write access	Yes, since September 2026. 17 read-only tools; write access committed for 2026
EU AI Act	No specific published section	Clause 21 of the general terms, in full
Use of your data to train models	Not expressly ruled out	Contractually prohibited, own models and third-party
Low-code platform	Yes	Yes, with JavaScript, T-SQL and calls to external APIs
Applications	Browser	Browser, Windows desktop, iOS and Android
Availability SLA	Published and standard: up to 15% of the monthly invoice	Not in the general terms; negotiated in the Custom plan, up to 30%
G2 (as of 11 September 2026)	3.5 · 1 review · no badges	4.6 · 98 reviews · #2 of 14 in Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Europe, Fall 2026 reports
G2 badges in ECM (2026)	None	13 across the Summer and Fall reports
Implementation	Configuration project	4 weeks on average · Fastest Implementation, G2 Summer 2026

How we compared

Everything on this page comes from three places: each vendor’s public pricing, certification and documentation pages; verified G2 reviews; and our own experience implementing document management projects. Where a figure comes from Athento, we link to their website so you can check it yourself.

And let’s be clear about one thing: we are the ones publishing this comparison. We are R2 Docuo and we obviously have an interest in you choosing us. That is why we have done three things that are not usual on a page like this. We have calculated Athento’s price using their actual published rates instead of writing “contact us”, we have corrected what we used to say about their ENS certification —they do have it, at medium category— and we have devoted an entire section to the cases where Athento is a better fit than we are. If after reading it you decide that your problem is theirs and not ours, this page has done its job.

Price: the real numbers, not “contact us”

Athento publishes its pricing, so it can be calculated. Their model has a base fee per plan plus a per-user price, and that per-user price drops as you move up the plans. R2 Docuo works the other way round: a small base fee and additional users at a fixed price.

This is what the same team pays with each one, with annual billing and excluding VAT:

Team	R2 Docuo	Athento	Difference
3 users	€50/month (All Apps)	€273.97/month (PLUS)	5.5×
10 users	€134/month	€364.90/month (PLUS)	2.7×
25 users	€314/month	€559.75/month (PLUS)	1.8×
50 users	€614/month	€794.50/month (STANDARD)	1.3×

The interesting part is not that Athento is expensive, because it isn’t. It is that they charge per platform and we charge per process. Their base fee starts at €235/month before you add a single user, and their scaling rewards organisation-wide rollouts: the per-user price falls to €12.99 on PLUS, €9.99 on STANDARD, €6.99 on COMPANY, €4.99 on ENTERPRISE and €4 on ENTERPRISE+. That is consistent with their approach, which is to take the platform to the whole organisation at once.

The practical consequence is that the number of users you pay for is not your headcount, but the headcount of the process. In an industrial group of four thousand people there may be twenty-five who take part in contract management: that is the team you license, and when the next process calls for it, you expand. Where the rollout really is large and organisation-wide from the start, the gap narrows: from around fifty users it shrinks considerably, and above five hundred the arithmetic can tip the other way. Run the numbers for your own case before deciding.

There is a second detail worth checking before you sign, because it is structural rather than a matter of price. Athento’s PLUS plan allows up to 50,000 documents. The next plan raises that ceiling to 2.5 million, but requires a minimum of 35 users. That means an engineering firm of twelve people with three hundred thousand documents in its historical archive finds that it either buys additional document packs, or jumps to a plan whose floor is €644.65/month for users it does not have. R2 Docuo does not count documents: it counts gigabytes, with 100 GB included and €15/month for each additional 100 GB.

Where we do have a cost that Athento does not publish is in getting custom projects up and running: a two-week consultancy sprint costs €2,590 and training sessions €200. The ready-to-use apps do not need it, but a custom project does. You can see the full detail, including usage credits, in our pricing calculator.

Spanish regulation: ENS HIGH versus ENS MEDIUM

This is where the comparison stops being a matter of taste.

Both are certified under the National Security Framework, but not at the same category. Athento is certified at MEDIUM category, renewed and audited by OCA CERT. R2 Docuo is certified at HIGH category, the most demanding of the three levels and the one required by public bodies whose systems handle information where a breach would have very serious consequences. It is the reason the Regional Government of Andalusia can work with us.

This is not an administrative nuance. If you are going to bid for a public tender that requires high category, a medium certification does not qualify. And if you are never going to bid for one, the high category still tells you something useful: that the traceability, encryption and continuity controls have passed a tougher audit.

On invoicing, the difference is simpler still. R2 Docuo has published its Verifactu responsible declaration and the Invoices app complies with the regulation and with Spain’s Crea y Crece Act. Athento does not declare Verifactu compliance. If your problem includes issuing invoices, that takes it out of the direct comparison: you would need separate invoicing software.

And there is a third point that almost nobody compares and that your data protection officer will thank you for. We publish our list of sub-processors by name: StackScale and Altair Networks for infrastructure and backups, both in Spain and with no international transfers; and Anthropic, OpenAI and Google for the language models, with the country of processing, the legal basis for the transfer and the retention period for each. Athento’s privacy policy describes categories of recipients —”hosting providers, CRMs, emailing companies”— without naming them, and does not publish where its customers’ data is hosted. The information may well exist in their contract; it is not on their website.

Our full certifications: ENS HIGH category and ISO 27001, plus ISO 9001, with ISO 14001 in progress. Where Athento is ahead is in cloud and internal control certifications: they hold ISO 27017, ISO 27018 and SOC 2, which we do not. If your procurement committee asks for them in the tender, that is a point in their favour.

The EU AI Act: who has it in writing

Both products use language models. The question almost nobody asks in a demo is a different one: when the AI gets it wrong, who is responsible for what? That answer is better had in writing before you sign, not after.

Our general terms devote an entire clause, clause 21, to Regulation (EU) 2024/1689. It is not a passing mention; it is the full allocation of obligations:

• Who is who. R2 Sistemas is the provider of the AI functionality and your company is the deployer. Each party takes on the obligations the regulation assigns to its role, and undertakes to give the other the information it needs to meet its own.
• Generated content, marked as such. We apply the identification and marking required by Article 50 to text produced by the AI, and you undertake not to remove it when you show that text to a signatory or to someone filling in a form.
• Prohibited practices, listed one by one. All six from Article 5 are written into the contract —emotion inference in the workplace, biometric categorisation, social scoring, crime prediction, facial scraping and manipulative techniques— and using them is a material breach with immediate suspension.
• High risk, stated plainly. The service is not designed or assessed as a high-risk system under Annex III, and we do not declare it fit for that. If you want to use it for recruitment, creditworthiness assessment or access to essential services, specific terms have to be signed. Those obligations apply from 2 December 2027.
• Human oversight. The contract states, in so many words, that the models are not deterministic and that answers may be incorrect, incomplete or invented even when the repository data is correct. A person with the right judgement reviews before use. And no decisions with legal effects on a natural person are taken on the basis of an AI output alone.
• AI literacy. Article 4 requires training for whoever uses it; we provide the functional documentation in the Help Centre.
• Change the purpose and you change roles. Article 25 says that if you turn the service into a high-risk system or offer it under your own brand, you become the provider. The contract warns you of this.

On top of that there are two things a security committee appreciates more than any certificate. First: your data is not used for training. The contract prohibits using it to train, fine-tune or evaluate models, whether ours or third parties’, to build profiles or to develop new products. Second: the controls are yours and they are granular. Artificial intelligence is switched on and off per repository, with a master switch that turns it off entirely, and the R2AI Assistant can be enabled or disabled per document category. Publishing the repository over MCP is disabled by default.

We have not found an equivalent section in Athento’s public documentation. Their privacy policy mentions OpenAI as a recipient in one specific form, but it does not publish an allocation of roles under the AI Act, nor the list of prohibited practices, nor an express commitment not to train models on their customers’ data. It may be in their contract; it is not on their website.

Artificial intelligence: who got there first and who goes further

We have to start by acknowledging something, because it is true and it takes two clicks to check: Athento got there first. They put their MCP server into production on 20 May 2026 and announced it as the first document management system on the market with MCP. We launched ours in September 2026. If the criterion is who was first, they win.

That said, the useful criterion for choosing is not who got there first, but what you can ask your assistant. And there the two implementations are nothing alike.

Athento’s MCP exposes five tools: search documents, get a document, create a document, update its metadata and query a knowledge base. It is a short set but it has write access, and today that is a real advantage: from Claude or ChatGPT you can create and modify documents in Athento. Their own documentation clarifies that deletion and workflow management are not available yet.

The R2 Docuo AI connector exposes seventeen tools and today they are all read-only: it does not create, modify or delete. In exchange, it does not just read documents: it reads the process. You can ask things that a classic document management system has no answer for:

• “How much did we invoice per customer last month?” It aggregates totals, averages, maximums and minimums without downloading a single document.
• “What state is order 1043 in and what steps are left?” It reads the complete state machine, with its transitions.
• “Who approved this invoice and when?” It queries the transition history, filtering by step, state, person or date.
• “What fields does the invoices category have?” It introspects the data model, the categories, the folders and the saved queries.

That is the underlying difference, and it is not a difference in the number of tools: Athento’s connector knows about documents and ours knows about the process. One lets you write a document from the chat; the other lets you audit who did what and when without entering the application.

As for write access, ours is publicly committed. Our CEO announced at the DES keynote in Málaga that before the end of 2026 one hundred per cent of the functionality, write access included, will be exposed over MCP. Until that happens, the honest position is the one above: they write and we do not.

A note on the rest of the AI. Athento publishes its processing architecture in considerable detail: several OCR engines —Tesseract, PaddleOCR, EasyOCR—, zonal extraction, regular-expression extraction, local embeddings and FAISS vector indexes. It is serious engineering and at high volume it works. It is also, quite literally, plumbing that has to be configured: zonal extraction and regular expressions are the template-and-coordinate approach, and every variation of a document calls for a new template. We have written about why we believe that approach no longer pays off. If you have a technical team to tune it, Athento’s power is real. If you don’t, it is time you had not budgeted for.

From the file to the process: what you can model in each one

There is one question that separates document management systems better than any table: can you create a process that has no document at all?

A supplier onboarding. A non-conformity. A purchase request. A maintenance plan. If the system only knows how to exist around a file, sooner or later you will take half your processes outside it, usually into a spreadsheet that somebody maintains by hand. And the moment that parallel spreadsheet exists, the document management system has stopped being the system of record.

Athento models the document and enriches it: metadata, classification, states and flows around the content. That is consistent with its problem, which is processing a lot of paper turned into data.

R2 Docuo models the information first —what a contract is, what fields describe it, what it relates to, what states it can be in, who changes them and what happens at each change— and the file becomes one more element of that model. You can create tables with your own fields and relationships between entities, and build case files and procedures without a single PDF. In fact, many of the processes our customers build have no document attached at all. Underneath there are finite state machines, not flowcharts, which is what makes the transition history auditable step by step.

The second question is who gets to touch that model. In R2 Docuo, adding a field, a state or a rule is done by an administrator from the interface, and if you need to go further there is real low-code: JavaScript blocks, T-SQL conditions, custom buttons and calls to external APIs inside your automations. Whether that change depends on raising a ticket with the vendor and waiting for the next release marks the difference between a tool that adapts to how you work and one you have to adapt to.

Implementation and evidence: 98 reviews against 1

Both products are good. The difference is how many people have said so in writing.

As of 11 September 2026, R2 Docuo has 4.6 out of 5 with 98 verified reviews on G2, and is the second highest-rated product in Europe in the Enterprise Content Management category of the Fall 2026 reports, ahead of iManage, M-Files, Box and DocuWare. More than forty of those reviews were published in the last six months without the score dropping. Athento has 3.5 with a single review, which is too small a sample to conclude anything: it does not say the product is worse, it says there is no public evidence to consult.

And this is where the comparison stops being a matter of opinion, because G2 does not hand out badges by commercial agreement: it calculates them from the responses of verified users in each category. In Enterprise Content Management —the same category Athento is in— R2 Docuo earned ten badges across the Summer and Fall 2026 reports. Athento earned none.

G2 badge in the ECM category	Report	What it measures
Fastest Implementation, Enterprise	Summer 2026	The shortest go-live time in the category
Best Estimated ROI, Enterprise	Summer 2026	The best estimated return, combining time to ROI and time to go live
Users Most Likely To Recommend, Enterprise	Fall 2026	The product its users are most willing to recommend
Momentum Leader	Fall 2026	Top 25% of the category in the Momentum Grid
High Performer (six badges)	Summer and Fall 2026	High customer satisfaction in the global, EMEA and Enterprise Grids

The three above carry the most weight in this comparison, and each one backs something we have claimed. Fastest Implementation confirms with user data what we said about timescales: the average implementation of a custom project on R2 Docuo is four weeks and the apps are live the same day you buy them, whereas Athento is implemented as a configuration project. Best Estimated ROI is the one that holds up the pricing section: G2 calculates it by combining how long a customer takes to recoup the investment with how long they take to go live, which are exactly the two variables in the table above. And Users Most Likely To Recommend measures something no feature table captures: whether the people who already have it would choose it again.

These badges are worth reading with their full label —category, segment and season— because that is what makes them verifiable: every one above is in the Enterprise Content Management category, which is where Athento competes, and you can check them on our G2 profile. The detail of the summer recognitions is in our summary of the G2 Reports.

On customers, each has their own and they are very different. Athento works with insurers and banks, with a strong presence in Latin America: AXA Colpatria, SURA, Aegon, La Segunda, La Caja. Ours include SGS, TÜV SÜD and Applus+ —three of the largest certification bodies in the world, companies whose business is auditing whether other organisations’ documentation is in order— as well as Navantia, Elecnor, Engie, Sodexo, Fnac, Grupo IFA, Grupo Hotusa, Rhenus Logistics and the Regional Government of Andalusia. How this works in audited sectors is covered in document management software for audits and ISO certifications.

When should you choose Athento?

There are scenarios where Athento is the better decision, and there is no point hiding them.

When volume is the problem. If you process hundreds of thousands or millions of documents a year —credit files, insurance claims, debt portfolios, court mediations— Athento is designed for exactly that. Their plans reach fifty million documents and their capture architecture is built to swallow at that rate.

When the data cannot leave your premises. Athento deploys on-premise and hybrid, and can run language models locally with Ollama or against OpenAI-compatible servers inside your network. If your security policy requires that no document and no inference leaves your infrastructure, we cannot offer you that: R2 Docuo is cloud, with the servers and backups in Spain.

When you want the SLA already written, without negotiating it. Athento publishes a standard SLA with compensation in credits of up to 15% of the invoice for the month of the breach. Our general terms do not commit to a response time: support is handled as soon as possible. We do sign SLAs in Custom plan contracts, with negotiated compensation that can reach 30% of the invoice, but it has to be negotiated. If you would rather not have that conversation, theirs comes as standard.

When your committee asks for ISO 27017, ISO 27018 or SOC 2. They have them and we do not.

When the rollout is organisation-wide. Above five hundred users their per-user price drops to €4.99 and then €4, and there the arithmetic can favour them.

When you operate in Latin America. Their customer base and experience in Argentina, Colombia and the region are far greater than ours.

When should you choose R2 Docuo?

When your problem is the process, not the archive. Contracts that expire and have to be renegotiated, invoices that pass through three approvals, quotes that have to be generated and signed, technical case files with twenty documents and six people responsible. R2 Docuo models that entire process and automates it: state changes, alerts, document generation from Word 365 templates, notifications to Teams or by SMS and eIDAS advanced electronic signature.

When Spanish regulation is a requirement and not a preference. ENS at HIGH category, Verifactu, ISO 27001 and ISO 9001, data in Spain and a public list of sub-processors.

When you want to start this week. Contracts, Invoices and Quotes work from day one at €12/month each or €50/month for all three. No project and no prior analysis.

When you want to pay per process and not per headcount. You start with contracts, invoices or one specific case file, with the people involved in that process, and you expand when the next one calls for it. No base fee to absorb before you start and no document ceiling forcing you to change plan.

When you want to grow without changing tools. Underneath the apps there is a complete low-code platform to build whatever you need, with the document management system, the workflow, the database, the web forms and the API.

When you work with AI assistants and you want to ask the process, not just the documents.

How to migrate from Athento to R2 Docuo

Changing systems is the most common objection, and with a simple plan it stops being one.

Start by auditing what you have: how many documents, in what structure, with what metadata and who actually uses them. Migrate a single process —contracts is usually the best candidate, because the result shows within weeks— and check that it works before going further. Keep the previous system in read-only mode for a few weeks so the team feels comfortable. And train the team before the change, not after.

Two specific warnings for this case. One: export your documents with their metadata, not just the files, because the value of what you have built is in the fields, not in the PDFs. And two: use the migration to rework the data model instead of replicating it as-is; there are almost always fields nobody fills in and states nobody uses. You have the detail in how to implement a document management system.

Frequently asked questions