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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)
30th
Ranking in Process Automation
27th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Design (18th)
IBM BPM
Ranking in Business Process Management (BPM)
5th
Ranking in Process Automation
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
113
Ranking in other categories
Application Infrastructure (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Business Process Management (BPM) category, the mindshare of Bonita is 1.8%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM BPM is 4.1%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Process Management (BPM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM BPM4.1%
Bonita1.8%
Other94.1%
Business Process Management (BPM)
 

Featured Reviews

Paparao Nadipineni - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect at Evoke
A simple and lightweight college course automation system with third-party integrations
The initial setup is straightforward and can be completed with the environment within an hour. First, take the latest from the git repository and check the git code to the monitor studio and a bar file, a deployable Bonita archive file. Then, take that process to the Bonita server, running at runtime on another server. Finally, deploy and enable it by selecting the proper organization.
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

"The solution is easy to use."
"Bonitasoft helped us automate complicated and labor intensive processes"
"When there is heavy customization in the process Bonita is the best compare to other products in the market."
"Customer Service: Very good, also the commercial team !Technical Support: Perfect ! and the community is a great help also"
"The user interface is better than all of the open-source BPMs that I have tried."
"Bonita is user-friendly, and the features are useful."
"Its user-friendliness, along with the availability of comprehensive and clear documentation on the website is the most valuable."
"Development of forms and flows."
"Its most valuable features are usability and integration with other IBM products."
"I like the APIs and the BPM coach is a good tool. But if I had to pick one, it would be the API."
"The integration capabilities of IBM BPM are excellent."
"IBM BPM is equipped with all the functionalities which are needed for building BPM enterprise-level applications."
"If you are looking for a good solution where you don't need to do multiple enhancements and there is a good troubleshooting and support team, you can definitely go ahead with this solution."
"The solution offers great notifications."
"Faster: industrialization of the renewal process with the automation of certain tasks and a clarified organization can handle a case 3 times faster."
"It is perfect if you have to develop complex apps without much coding, and it is also good if you don't have much IT resources in your company and would like to involve business analysts in the process of developing apps."
 

Cons

"We are struggling a bit with integrations."
"The community edition has limited module functionality. If they could release some of the functionality that's available in the enterprise edition that would be helpful to those learning to use the solution."
"At times Bonita BPM Studio crashes, intermittently."
"There could be an improvement in IoT connectivity."
"There is a considerable learning curve."
"There is a considerable learning curve."
"The price is good, but I do not like the process instance annual quantity pricing base used today."
"Automation in vacation of a human resources replacement would be a good improvement in the product."
"We had hoped that the product would provide us with plug-ins like Salesforce. Its development environment needs to improve. We expect to see elastic features like containerization. We don't just need an on-prem virtual machine."
"IBM BPM can improve the dashboards and reports. It only has two dashboards, and reporting is very difficult to build."
"Needs better reporting. I do not think that we are fully taking advantage of what it already has yet."
"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."
"Importing and exporting between multiple environments is more difficult with other tools."
"We would like to see this product cloud-native, as the market now is moving to both hybrid cloud and multi-cloud deployments."
"Except for the Lucene the index - we had a couple of issues in the Process Portal where the Lucene index went out of sync, and we had to work at least 15 - 20 hours to have it back in sync with the database."
"Yes, on the Process Center (development environment), especially when you have too many developers working on it. Then, it becomes unstable."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is not cheaper, not costlier; it is reasonable. Bonita’s license is very flexible, with options to meet the needs of different customers and clients. Previously, it was less flexible, but now, many different licensing options are available."
"Price to service ratio with Bonita BPM is good."
"We are using the Community Version, which can be used free of charge."
"I believe this is a very good financial choice."
"You pay an annual fee and can have an unlimited number of processes and users."
"Licensing cost for the Enterprise edition comes out to be around 40,000 a year. There is also a Community edition, which is free. Some customers can go for the Community edition, but some of them require the Enterprise edition. Big companies go for the Enterprise edition, which comes with a lot of additional features such as a mobile app."
"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."
"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."
"It is pricey."
"The price of the solution is fair for an enterprise solution that has both cloud and on-premise deployments and when comparing to competitors. Recently IBM has introduced Cloud Pak which allows for more flexible licensing options for automation and other features."
"The price is good but could be a little lower."
"Its price is on the higher side, and it can be improved. Its licensing is on a yearly basis. There are no additional costs."
"It's expensive. All software is always extremely high. The manufacturing cost that we have compared to the selling cost, it's not like you're building a house or building a car. But putting that aside, considering that it's expensive, it's a lot of money. If you compare it with some of the other alternatives in the market, it's a similar price. For instance, if you compare it with Pegasystems, it's a similar price."
"We have a yearly licensing model. It is not expensive. There are no addition costs to the standard license."
"It may be cheaper for organizations to pay for the Viewer licenses that are immediately up and running in the cloud, rather than paying for someone to administer publishing to an intranet."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
6%
Computer Software Company
5%
 

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...
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.
What needs improvement with IBM BPM?
There are negative aspects, such as IBM BPM being quite heavy and not lightweight, and the licensing cost is higher, which has caused some companies to shift away. IBM BPM is complicated to install...
 

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: April 2026.
895,990 professionals have used our research since 2012.