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Bonita vs Visio comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 3, 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 Design
10th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (14th), Process Automation (12th)
Visio
Ranking in Business Process Design
2nd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
106
Ranking in other categories
Mind Mapping Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Business Process Design category, the mindshare of Bonita is 4.7%, up from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Visio is 12.5%, down from 13.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Process Design
 

Featured Reviews

Paparao Nadipineni - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Tugrul TASCI - PeerSpot reviewer
We have seen return on investment in the form of time savings but should have more design tools
I am generally using Visio to create some diagrams Visio should implement more complex tools or graphics to facilitate processing and use flexible templates. It should allow users to easily drag and drop some previously created diagrams. The tools supplied or provided are very basic, and there…

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."
"I really enjoy using the workflow management."
"This product is very easy-to-use and user-friendly."
"I find process management and user interface designing the most valuable features."
"The solution is easy to use."
"It is a great product that is powerful in developing applications."
"The solution is stable. Even the older versions are stable."
"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."
"It is pretty easy to use if you are looking for this type of solution."
"What I like about it is that the templates are easily findable and usable, and they are usually created for other software packages. It seems to be pretty much widely adopted in the industry."
"Architecture modeling software with satisfactory standard features. It's also stable and effective in facilitating communication with others."
"The valuable feature about Visio is it has all the basic tools for creating processes."
"The fact that you could program in VBA is most valuable."
"The primary functionality revolves around the creation of flow diagrams and diverse Building Information Modeling (BIM) using contemporary and pre-established notations. In my perspective, these ready-made notations prove highly beneficial. Despite being a compact tool, it is effective for tasks such as drawing organizational charts, making it a straightforward and uncomplicated tool."
"Just the fact that a majority of the industry uses it, and you've got third-party templates that were created."
"I think the best part of Visio is that you can import drawings very well into Microsoft Word. For example, if you put the Visio drawing into Word, you can double click on it and it opens in Visio. It is a very useful feature and something which I miss switching to Enterprise Architect. In Enterprise Architect, if I import a drawing into Word it does not open the diagram in Enterprise Architect. This is one of the strongest features and the ability to create your own stencils."
 

Cons

"The interface is advanced and quite good, but it could improve."
"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 is a need for more components in the library and additional customization options for these components."
"I would like to improve the product's load balancing."
"We are struggling a bit with integrations."
"The main issue with Bonita is that the workspace crashes sometimes."
"I have run into a lot of problems because there is not enough documentation."
"There is a considerable learning curve."
"Something that needs to improve, is the interface interaction with other tools."
"It's not the easiest software to use. It's not user-friendly out-of-the-box."
"Sometimes, there is a little bit of a learning curve with it, especially while doing complex network diagrams and getting the lines to snap the way you want them and not overlap or be confusing. It would be great if there was a built-in tutorial. It is not that you can't YouTube, but it would be nice if they gave you some free training. I've been using it forever, but every now and then, I got to do something complicated with it and I wonder how do I do that again. Maybe they do have such information, and I don't know. I have not done research on it because a bunch of people work for me, and some of them are better at it than I am, so I just ask them to do this for me."
"An area for improvement in Visio is pricing. It's a costly tool for my company because it only uses Visio occasionally."
"Visio should implement more complex tools or graphics to facilitate processing and use flexible templates. The tools supplied or provided are very basic, and there are not enough tools for design."
"Visio is not as scalable as other tools due to the proprietary restriction. You cannot customize it or scale it up like the way you do with Trello or Jira. Microsoft places restrictions on things that you can do with Visio."
"Transferring data was one of the issues that I expected Visio to have resolved. I use the older version."
"I would like to see the project planning element improved, although it won't happen because Microsoft deliberately made it worse."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The Enterprise edition is very expensive."
"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."
"have installed the image of Bonita BPM on Amazon AWS and there is just one option to use and pay for."
"The product's pricing is acceptable. Pricing is yearly."
"I believe this is a very good financial choice."
"You pay an annual fee and can have an unlimited number of processes and users."
"I am using the free version of Bonita."
"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."
"While I don't recall the exact price I do recall that it was quite high."
"It is a free solution for us. It is integrated with our pack. We are trying to use the solutions that we already have."
"Visio is included with our Microsoft enterprise license."
"I pay for the license and it is very expensive. If you're only going to use this tool from time to time, you can save money by just using the available online tools. But if you plan on using it heavily, then it's worth it to invest."
"Now we pay about $200, which is maybe $10 per user per month."
"The pricing is reasonable and I would rate it 6 out of 10."
"It's not the cheapest product, but it's extremely valuable."
"The solution could be less expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Educational Organization
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Government
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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.
How easy is it to migrate process flow charts (modeled using tools like Visio) into Bizagi?
I have been using Bizagi with a major project for a state government agency for about four years now. It is pretty straightforward to load in files that are BPMN 2.0 compliant. The option to load V...
What do you like most about Visio?
The diagrams Visio creates are quite impressive in the sense that we can cooperate with more colleagues in one task and see the flow of the process.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Visio?
One of the main problems with Visio is its licensing options and associated issues, which lead to discussions about the price with a Microsoft representative. If asked to rate the price, I would gi...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Bonita BPM
Microsoft Visio
 

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.
Thomas College, Hamburg Port Authority, Portigon AG, Conseil G_n_ral du d_partement des Hautes-Alpes, AAA Auto a. s., Commonwealth Financial Network, ICA, Abu Dhabi National Energy Company
Find out what your peers are saying about Bonita vs. Visio and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.