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IBM BPM vs ServiceNow Orchestration comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM BPM
Ranking in Process Automation
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
109
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (8th), Application Infrastructure (8th)
ServiceNow Orchestration
Ranking in Process Automation
12th
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Process Automation category, the mindshare of IBM BPM is 11.1%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Orchestration is 5.0%, up from 4.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Process Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Mohammed Almalki - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 8, 2024
Offers good case management and its integration with process design but there's a learning curve
We mainly use it for human-centric operational processes (less than 20) The case management and its integration with process design are the only pros comparable to Komunda. There is room for improvement in terms of integrations. It is one of the biggest drawbacks. My organization has been using…
ShaheenKapery - PeerSpot reviewer
May 24, 2024
Easy to integrate, stable solution and incredibly good customer service
It is a long setup. It was customized to our company's requirements. Bearing in mind that there is not just an IT team. You've got an IT team consisting of end-users, consulting, and user support sides. Install support, ServiceNow support, application support, and so on. What ServiceNow does is it's really good at getting the tickets to the right person. That's the power of it. There's no issue with it. But you need to set that up in advance. You need to know the structure and who is responsible for each task. The initial setup does take a long time, and the organization might face some issues. But once you've got that resolved, it's amazing.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The initial setup is straightforward and easy. I would give it a nine out of ten."
"Everything is coupled together and comes as one solution."
"The process creation."
"It makes the company business processes work more efficiently."
"Setting it up is fairly easy. If somebody has knowledge of the system, he or she will be able to do it fairly quickly."
"It provides a very robust environment to build an integration framework or workflow patterns that we have. A lot of changes or modifications have been made to this solution over the past few years. The features that they have added this time have helped developers like us to work on the developmental environment and leverage all the capabilities of the tool. This is what I like about this solution."
"It has an elaborated way to explore the IBM BPM processes."
"Agility is the key. It gives our customers a faster way to be able to implement processes, get ownership of task, visibility into a process. The ability to modify that process, optimize that process over time, is probably the biggest benefit that they get from the software."
"The product has a flexible interface for development."
"The data visualization is good."
"Employee onboarding, de-boarding, and other service-provision features make the process easier and it saves us a lot of time."
"Orchestration is commonly utilized by major corporations. The process of linking methods in ServiceNow, known as the RTS chain to parent methods, is executed seamlessly and efficiently. It's quite impressive and significant in its impact."
"It has competitive AI capabilities."
"It's scalable."
"The solution effectively automates business processes."
"The interface of the solution is very user friendly and it is easily accessible via a simple URL. This makes it easier to complete the UI based tasks but using other features require expertise in languages like Java. But along with that, there are limitation in terms of network connectivity testing and administrator faces regular challenges in conducting connectivity tests due to these limitations."
 

Cons

"Performance on large scale requirements could also be improved."
"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."
"The engine itself tends to accumulate a lot of data that needs to be cleaned up, and that's the kind of thing that keeps it from, in some scenarios, scaling as much as it needs to. And then, when you're building solutions, if you're not careful to keep the screens from being associated with too much data, if you're going to just do things the way that a lot of people would just assume that they can do, without having experience of having made those mistakes before, it will accumulate a lot of data, and that will cause it to perform very badly."
"User Interface components could be further refined to enhance and extend customizations dictated by end clients."
"I suggest establishing a developer forum for better communication and issue resolution. Also, the administration panel could be improved for task management."
"Stability wavers. We have some opportunities for improvement in this space, especially as we approach our target volume of a million transactions a day. It is tough, because it is not necessarily the product. It is more around the platform and infrastructure to support it, so the connectivity to the database, web sessions, and reverse proxies in front of that."
"It can definitely be improved in terms of performance and stability."
"We would appreciate more user-friendly definitions of processes with a more user-friendly interface for documenting processes."
"We cannot perform GUI automation using the tool."
"The flow rate for releases and updates is very, very slow and does not meet customers' objectives for scalability."
"Efficiency of some features could be improved."
"There can be gaps in integration."
"There is still room for more integrations. Or, it would be nice to bundle multiple products together rather than selling everything as a model as that turns out to be a bit costly."
"It is a highly complex platform to work on."
"ServiceNow Orchestration needs to improve multiple aspects in which their event monitoring system is one. The solution lacks event monitoring systems which makes them non-competitive. They need to include improvements in a similar manner that they did in Sweden."
"From my space, the only thing that I can say is the spinning up with Google Cloud Services."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is very high."
"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."
"It has a low cost to implement. You'll get your money back in the same year that you complete the project."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the pricing a ten."
"The pricing is quite high, I would rate it two out of five."
"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."
"Price wise, IBM BPM is cheaper than other similar solutions and has excellent pricing."
"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."
"ServiceNow doesn't give a clear cost indication. They have different contracts with different organizations and it's all about negotiation, so you don't know how they are doing at the cost level."
"This is an expensive product, but it is the best in the market considering the features and lack of competitors."
"The cost of the solution is based on the number of plugins, conductors and integrations used and is charged annually. The licensing cause has been increasing gradually which makes it difficult to access. Initially offer free features but over the time the charges rise which make it an expensive solution with limited features. Along with that, the integration issues persist and require additional middle where and internet connectivity for effective usage."
"It is quite expensive because we've had some customers come back and say it's quite pricey because in order for them to go ahead with Orchestration, they must have already been paying for Discovery, service mapping, and a few other things."
"Pricing is custom to every customer."
"It is not very expensive."
"The solution is costly and orchestrations are very expensive."
"In terms of price, this solution is at the higher end of what you'll find."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
31%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 do you like most about ServiceNow Orchestration?
The interface of the solution is very user friendly and it is easily accessible via a simple URL. This makes it easier to complete the UI based tasks but using other features require expertise in l...
What needs improvement with ServiceNow Orchestration?
There is a lot of complexity in the platform, but that comes with the scalability. It is a highly complex platform to work on. There are changes in their workflow technology, and the flow technolog...
 

Also Known As

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

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
experian, BEACHBODY, HealthPartners, Banosoft
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM BPM vs. ServiceNow Orchestration and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
815,854 professionals have used our research since 2012.