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F5 BIG-IQ 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

F5 BIG-IQ
Ranking in Process Automation
23rd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM BPM
Ranking in Process Automation
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
111
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (8th), Application Infrastructure (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Process Automation category, the mindshare of F5 BIG-IQ is 0.2%, down from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM BPM is 6.9%, down from 10.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Process Automation
 

Featured Reviews

AshutoshMalik - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamless migration enhances user management for data center administrators
The product is excellent. It is easily manageable and user-friendly for administrators working on both the GUI and CLI. The best part is the seamless migration of the configuration from one box to another, even when hardware changes. This is particularly beneficial during migrations from old boxes to new ones. While other vendors might have issues, F5 BIG-IQ ( /products/f5-big-iq-reviews ) provides a smooth transition.
Muhammad Kamran - PeerSpot reviewer
Has efficient processes and intuitive workflow with many valuable features
You will have access to make any needed changes. Additionally, the review will be published on PeerSpot.com in written or audio format, available to other people. You can stay anonymous if you wish. Notifications and the use of the review are subject to PeerSpot's terms of use, which you can find at PeerSpot.com/TOS. I would give the solution an overall rating of ten out of ten points.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The customer service is great."
"The backup, monitoring and logging are the best features."
"Features like AFM, the gateway, and Global DNS are the coolest features that save work for us."
"F5 BIG-IQ reduces the propensity for error."
"The most valuable features are load balancing and WAF."
"F5 BIG-IQ has always provided us with great support."
"F5 BIG-IQ is a central management system for the BIG-IP."
"We use this solution on a daily basis, and it is very stable."
"The integration capabilities of IBM BPM are excellent."
"The integration capabilities of IBM BPM are excellent."
"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."
"It is transparent to business users because it is mostly picture based modelling."
"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."
"I like the APIs and the BPM coach is a good tool. But if I had to pick one, it would be the API."
"Its dashboard is easy to use and very good. It allows us to customize."
"The initial setup process is easy."
 

Cons

"There are a lot of scripts available on the internet for people who know how to use them, but with a graphical interface, it would be easier for new users."
"They could use YAML or JSON if they wanted to make it a little bit easier for us."
"I had trouble with high availability deployment in my environment."
"The shell, kernel, or Linux has something like a delay, especially with the Virtual Edition, when you are trying to implement it in the cloud and you want to access it remotely with web management. It would be great if they could improve their kernel. It was difficult for me, especially when I got started with BIG-IP. I was struggling to find which commands work with it. If you want to work with it, you have to be a Linux guy."
"The solution's rSeries has been made free, and iSeries should be made free as well."
"Integration with VAS is something that they need to work on."
"From a hands-on experience perspective, more resources should be available on the Internet, like labs and lab preparations."
"F5 BIG-IQ should improve by being a complete certificate management solution because currently, it is only for Venafi. Other automation platforms, should be added."
"Finding errors and bugs on the system is not easy. We can't seem to use the events or logs to find them, so it makes it difficult to debug the system. They really need to work on their debugging features to make is much, much easier. It would improve the solution considerably and should be something they add in a future release."
"They could provide case studies to investigate and understand the functionality of business processes before development."
"IBM BPM's UI is an area with shortcomings where improvements are required."
"There is a lot of room for improvement of the dashboards."
"IBM BPM's price could be improved."
"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."
"It can definitely be improved in terms of performance and stability."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"F5 BIG-IQ is a cheap solution."
"Users have to pay an annual subscription fee for the solution's iSeries."
"I would like the product to be cheaper."
"There is only one licensing fee for F5 BIG-IQ and everything is included in the price."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the pricing a ten."
"Due to its extensive features and capabilities, the product pricing is more aligned with medium—to large enterprises."
"The solution is highly-priced."
"It is pricey."
"The solution is expensive since it is an enterprise application."
"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."
"Its price is on the higher side, and it can be improved. Its licensing is on a yearly basis. There are no additional costs."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
31%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about F5 BIG-IQ?
F5 BIG-IQ is a central management system for the BIG-IP.
What needs improvement with F5 BIG-IQ?
The product is really good with no significant downsides. However, better and simpler integration with ACI could improve the product.
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

No data available
 

Also Known As

No data available
WebSphere Lombardi Edition, IBM Business Process Manager, IBM WebSphere Process Server
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
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 F5 BIG-IQ vs. IBM BPM and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,671 professionals have used our research since 2012.