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Alma does not need the additional piece of software, and for that reason it's better. Additionally, it does have RFID support. You essentially use NGINX or implement an RFID driver which accepts requests from Alma to do that. What's inconvenient in Alma is that when you place an item on the RFID pad, the item barcode is not "fed" into the place where the cursor is sitting. You essentially have to press the blue RFID icon every time you need to read an item. A benefit of RFID is increased read rate which is achieved by not having to read each barcode one at a time. Alma has yet to offer the automatic reading of items that are placed on the RFID pad, though they do plan to bring the functionality in future releases. What we do in Sierra, is we put a set of books on the pad, and they're all read and automatically "fed" into the check-in or check-out screen (many books at once).
Here's an interesting illustration:
For now, on Alma we'll have to scan one book at a time. Exlibris plans to eventually add the ability for Alma to constantly query the RFID pad to see if there's something on it, but for now that functionality is not there.
So until the functionality is there, Fresno intends to use RFID like we do now in Sierra. Essentially, Fresno will add the integration but will not make it active for now. Instead, Fresno will use a set of Alma hotkeys to switch between Check-in and Check-out (alt+w and alt+r, more on hotkeys here). We also intend to configure the 3M Pad Staff Workstation to utilize the same hotkeys to switch the 3m software and alma at the same time (essentially doing the same as we were doing with F1/F2 in Sierra).