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Bonita vs IBM BPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Bonita
Ranking in Business Process Management (BPM)
25th
Ranking in Process Automation
19th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Design (13th)
IBM BPM
Ranking in Business Process Management (BPM)
5th
Ranking in Process Automation
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
113
Ranking in other categories
Application Infrastructure (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Business Process Management (BPM) category, the mindshare of Bonita is 2.1%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM BPM is 4.1%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Process Management (BPM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM BPM4.1%
Bonita2.1%
Other93.8%
Business Process Management (BPM)
 

Featured Reviews

Mohamed Guermazi - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Director / Project Manager at I-way
The user interface is easy to use, and the product performs well, but the dashboard and the monitoring features are limited
We use the product to design workflows. We model and install them on the server. We use the Community edition The modeling features are easy. The performance of the tool is good. The user interface is easy to use. I have used the product for complex processes and sub-processes successfully. The…
Ateeq Rehman - PeerSpot reviewer
Unit Head System Implementor at Allied Bank Limited
Automation platforms streamline processes and offer flexibility, but AI integration and version upgrades pose challenges
In the technology world, there is always room for improvement. Technologies evolve day by day, especially with the emergence of artificial intelligence and generative AI models. Although IBM BPM is a substantial product, adopting and integrating new technologies quickly is not easy due to the migration and upgrade paths involved. Every time new versions are released, we face business and production challenges that make rapid adoption challenging. The main concern bothering me today regarding IBM BPM is the integration of AI components.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Process automation with Bonita BPM is really easy."
"The user interface is easy to use."
"The most valuable features of Bonita are the connectors, detailed documentation, and web applications. The documentation was useful because it is how I learned how to use it."
"The solution is easy to use."
"I really enjoy using the workflow management."
"Flexible and drag-and-drop type of UI is very valuable. The integrations are also very good. You can build workflows very quickly, which is my favorite activity. By using the GUI, you can build the entire mechanism, notifications, and all this kind of stuff."
"One of the most valuable features is you can create without coding, it is a low code platform."
"Bonita is user-friendly."
"This solution is very stable."
"It makes the company business processes work more efficiently."
"Some of the features that I like the most are team management and process performance. They are both very useful and very powerful with regard to the workflow."
"Technical support is good. They are very responsive. It is usually me who takes more time to get back to them than they take to get back to me, which is good."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to customize your rules and put them inside the tool."
"We have used a lot of out-of-the-box reporting on the process performance metrics. We have been able to make suggested changes to staff for this role or streamlining by eliminate some activities where people were not requiring a lot of work in the first place."
"The integration and design are valuable features."
"Automation is the most valuable feature of IBM BPM."
 

Cons

"I would like to improve the product's load balancing."
"I should be able to park the tasks that are within a process in a kind of container, and dynamically, a super admin should be able to connect these processes. This kind of feature might be helpful."
"There could be an improvement in IoT connectivity."
"The dashboard has limited features."
"Bonita can improve by offering more flexibility. The developer does not receive the code of the application to modify it. Most of the other solutions I have used allow the developers to change or improve the code that is generated."
"Bonita must add a rule engine. We are a 360-degree partner of Bonita. We can integrate with any kind of rule engine. We have a dashboard related to engine performance, but getting a configurable dashboard for the Buildium or transactional data will add value."
"Installation could be made easier."
"We are struggling a bit with integrations."
"The options for customization could be improved. More customization using your own code would be beneficial."
"One of the things that we are looking at is cognitive learning. IBM has another product called IBM RPA, I think, which is doing some of that stuff. We would like to see more of that with respect to cognitive learning and AI put back into the process engine to help."
"When you have to integrate files for enterprise applications."
"The price and the overall installation process could be improved."
"Process Server is no more available than new products out there, but in general IBM has a high cost and complex setup."
"It is a really powerful tool, but its entry price is so high, which makes it a very exclusive club for who gets to use it. The thing that seemed to be the most intolerable was that you could put lots and lots of users on it, and it worked fine, but if you put lots and lots of developers on it, it sure seemed to have challenges. The biggest challenge was the development because of the Eclipse tool. It just seemed like irrespective of the development team that you put together, whether it had 10 or 50 people, you would end up having to reboot the development server throughout the day when you concurrently had lots of people hammering on the system. The development server just got sluggish. This was true for every project I was on. Once you got more than about five people working on the system at the same time, it would just get slower and slower during development work, and the only way to fix it was to reboot the server. It became just like a routine. Sometimes, we would reboot at lunch or dinner time, which is silly. After the cloud instances started rolling out, I never saw that again. That was probably the one big advantage of the cloud version. Instead of using an independent Eclipse-based process development tool, we moved to web-based process and design. The web-based tool definitely had greater performance than the Eclipse-based tool. I never got onto another project after that with 50 people, so I don't know how the performance is when you get a large team on it, but it definitely seems that the cloud design tool was a massive improvement."
"This is technology, and there's always room for improvement. It would be better to have a single solution. Trying to have an overview in terms of this solution brings together the concepts of BPM processes, customer journeys, and an automation part for KPIs. All of this working together and coming up with a single solution with privacy is more commercial than anything else."
"There are a few areas, like triggering mechanisms, externally exposed variables, and changing its values."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's pricing is acceptable. Pricing is yearly."
"The Community Edition comes free of charge."
"You pay an annual fee and can have an unlimited number of processes and users."
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
"have installed the image of Bonita BPM on Amazon AWS and there is just one option to use and pay for."
"We are using the Community Version, which can be used free of charge."
"The Enterprise edition is very expensive."
"The price is fair for what we are using the solution for."
"I wish it was less expensive. I don't know why their pricing model is so high for a piece of software that could benefit so many. It just seems to me that they could have a lower cost, maybe with fewer features or whatever, but it should be possible to do a lower cost workflow software that uses the same interface and underlying engine but does not cost so much that you have to be a Fortune 50 company to buy it. It is annoying to me. There are a lot of solutions that IBM has that are really powerful but nobody can afford them. They know their business, but I still feel that there are a lot of customers who would benefit from this sort of thing. I don't know what this elitism is all about. I am sure they have people doing the money numbers, but it seems like you can make a lot more money by selling it to way more people for a little bit less."
"The solution might be expensive, but I can't give you a precise number. In the market here, I've seen two main products for BPM: IBM BPM and Camunda. Camunda is very popular and open-source, so there's no direct comparison."
"IBM BPM cannot be considered a cheaply priced product. IBM BPM is a really expensive product compared to other companies. One needs to opt for the perpetual licensing model offered by IBM."
"Its price is on the higher side, and it can be improved. Its licensing is on a yearly basis. There are no additional costs."
"Our customers do see ROI. They'll identify some particularly painful or uncoordinated processes to start with, then build out from there, picking off low hanging fruit."
"I rate the tool's pricing a seven out of ten."
"I think it's a reasonably priced tool, but it's important to consider which customers should buy this solution. It's designed for enterprise customers, not small ones."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the pricing a ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
24%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise72
 

Questions from the Community

How does Bonita compare with Camunda Platform?
One of the things we like best about Bonita is that you can create without coding - it is a low-code platform. With Bonita, you can build the entire mechanism using the GUI, it’s that simple. You c...
What do you like most about Bonita?
The user interface is easy to use.
Which is better, IBM BPM or IBM Business Automation Workflow?
We researched both IBM solutions and in the end, we chose Business Automation Workflow. IBM BPM has a good user interface and the BPM coach is a helpful tool. The API is very useful in providing en...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM BPM?
Once it is installed, maintaining it is not a big issue.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Bonita BPM
WebSphere Lombardi Edition, IBM Business Process Manager, IBM WebSphere Process Server
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

With more than 1000 customers in 75 countries, and its ecosystem of more than 120,000 members, Bonitasoft is the largest provider of open-source Business Process Management, Low-code and Digital Transformation software worldwide.
Barclays, EmeriCon, Banca Popolare di Milano, CST Consulting, KeyBank, KPMG, Prolifics, Sandhata Technologies Ltd., State of Alaska, Humana S.A., Saperion, esciris, Banco Espirito Santo
Find out what your peers are saying about Bonita vs. IBM BPM and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,360 professionals have used our research since 2012.