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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

"I think Bizagi is a powerful software or tool for organization, but Bonita is user-friendly and easy-to-use — easier to use for development."
"Process automation with Bonita BPM is really easy."
"The solution is stable. Even the older versions are stable."
"Compared to other products on the market, Bonita presents a pretty acceptable level of robustness."
"The user interface is better than all of the open-source BPMs that I have tried."
"Our lead generation system involves both automated and human tasks. By centralizing the workflow to our internal Bonita BPM system, we have improved the conversion rate (leads to customers) and lowered the number of leads dropped."
"In general, Bonita is a very good solution."
"I find process management and user interface designing the most valuable features."
"I liked its robustness the most; it was a very robust platform in my experience, and it seemed like a very stable and powerful tool for handling lots of concurrent users and hammering at the system."
"It is efficient in reducing costs."
"The solution is stable."
"Faster: industrialization of the renewal process with the automation of certain tasks and a clarified organization can handle a case 3 times faster."
"It has an elaborated way to explore the IBM BPM processes."
"Our organization has improved by using IBM BPM because our development time has reduced and connectivity improved."
"I think the best way it can be it improved, is to make it easier to install. It's a very complicated piece of software, and there are a lot of things you have to do to get it set up. It's not just running an installer. You install WebSphere. You install the BPM product, and there's a large host of other steps you have to do: run queries against the database, you have to manually configure a bunch of properties files for your environment. I think if they could streamline all that, so it wasn't a considerable effort to install, that would be very useful. Because from an engineering point of view, you want to spend as little time as possible actually installing a product."
"Compliance with the BPMN 2.0 standard."
 

Cons

"Bonita can improve by offering more flexibility."
"The community edition has limited module functionality."
"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."
"The support is mandatory to access all features (Subscription), maybe they can have a different business model."
"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."
"At times Bonita BPM Studio crashes, intermittently."
"So Bonita is easy to use but it seems to be missing some powerful features that competing products have."
"The documentation and examples definitely could be enhanced."
"We had a weird problem that whenever the database would go down, even for a few seconds, it broke the connection."
"We would like better performance and more visibility on each step of the tool."
"I would like IBM to consider including AI-enabled process mining, robotic process automation, and very good OCR capabilities from the computer vision side."
"We never got to a comfort level with the product; we ended up not using it that much."
"I'd like the tool to be more flexible."
"The pricing is a little bit high. It's gone up in cost."
"Some of the features are not enough for my business. We need to build custom user management for the many end users affected by BPM."
"The initial setup was complex."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is fair for what we are using the solution for."
"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."
"You pay an annual fee and can have an unlimited number of processes and users."
"We are using the Community Version, which can be used free of charge."
"I believe this is a very good financial choice."
"have installed the image of Bonita BPM on Amazon AWS and there is just one option to use and pay for."
"The Community Edition comes free of charge."
"I am using the free version of Bonita."
"I already compared some solutions related to business process management, and I saw that the cost of IBM BPM is more expensive compared with that of Camunda, for example."
"It should provide more flexibility to connect with external systems, and there should be in-built services that can be used to integrate with other systems quickly."
"We chose to purchase IBM BPM because it was bundled with the actual RPA program/solution that we decided to purchase. We decided to use Automation Anywhere tool (RPA), and it is was bundled with IBM BPM."
"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."
"Price wise, IBM BPM is cheaper than other similar solutions and has excellent pricing."
"Starting out with Express can also help reduce the cost for adopting the product."
"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."
"I rate the tool's pricing a seven out of ten."
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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.
895,151 professionals have used our research since 2012.