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IBM BPM vs Temporal 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

IBM BPM
Ranking in Process Automation
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
111
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (5th), Application Infrastructure (8th)
Temporal
Ranking in Process Automation
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

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.
AbhishekDash - PeerSpot reviewer
Orchestrates infrastructure tasks like deployment, deletion, and management
Temporal focus on developers rather than business users. In contrast to older workflow orchestration engines like Camunda, which are more business-oriented and strongly emphasize UI and workflow authoring, Temporal is geared toward developers. It provides extensive capabilities for building complex workflows. A standout feature of Temporal is its handling of long-running workflows, a significant advantage over many other solutions. Temporal excels in managing distributed transactions and application state durability, especially in microservice environments where transactions might fail due to network issues. Temporal simplifies these challenges by managing retries, fail-safes, and circuit breakers. As a result, developers don't need to implement these features manually; Temporal handles them implicitly, though it also allows for tuning based on specific needs.

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 stable."
"There is information during the process that the analyst will look at, their procedures. We created a part of the application such that the business can change those procedures as needed, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. As the reps go through the process, they don't necessarily know it's changing, they just know they have to refer to some documentation, and the business can keep that up to date."
"The case management and its integration with process design are good features."
"I would say that I like its GUI designer the best."
"Scalability is good. In the time that I have been there, we have added more JVMs to help with the increased workload, so it does scale."
"It helps maintain, and in many instances, lower costs, as well as to maintain those costs, keeping them stable."
"The performance is fine."
"We use it for automating certain processes which previously took a lot of time for agents to set up different products for customers. They would have to enter a lot of different systems. This has now mostly been automated."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ability to retry from an interrupted state."
"Temporal allows retryability for different workflows whenever they fail. It helps ensure idempotence and that things get done."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ability to fix things quickly."
"When some jobs take a lot of time and fail midway, the solution’s retry feature automatically causes them to retry."
"The solution's most valuable features include its ability to simplify the management of complex workflows, improve system resilience and fault tolerance, and reduce the need for extensive boilerplate code."
"Temporal focus on developers rather than business users."
"The tool is easy for a beginner to learn. The documentation covers activities, workflows, workers, servers, and more. While more examples could be beneficial, the existing resources are good enough to help you get started. There are also YouTube videos available that can provide additional context. The Slack community for Temporal is very active and helpful, similar to Stack Overflow, where you can find answers to a wide range of questions from basic to advanced levels. If you have a unique question, the community is responsive and provides knowledgeable support."
"What I like best about the tool is that it's easy to install, especially since it uses JavaScript. It's also easy to set up with Docker, and the documentation is easy to understand."
 

Cons

"There is a lot of room for improvement of the dashboards."
"The analysis reports could be much better."
"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."
"One suggestion for IBM BPM is to provide better integration between their products, such as DataCap, which we use for scanning. Although the new CP4BA offers offline capabilities, not everyone is on CP4BA, so enhanced integration for those on older versions would be beneficial."
"There needs to be better documentation for IBM BPM in a central place. There is not any standard documentation for each component available and has been a barrier for developers."
"UI is an area with a shortcoming that needs improvement."
"The user experience, while it has improved, should continue to improve."
"IBM BPM lacks openness, that is, the ability to become open for new options in terms of APIs, front-end development, and ecosystem. IBM BPM has been quite closed. One of the main improvements would be to somehow embed the rules engine into IBM BPM. Merging IBM BRMS and the rules engine with IBM BPM would be helpful. If there was some simpler way to define rules without having to put IBM BRMS on top of it, it would be good. It's something that we can get out of Camunda but not out of IBM BPM."
"Configuring workflows can be improved —the solution could offer more options, but it's not a must-have."
"Temporal images aren’t FIPS compliant, and we have to be FIPS compliant."
"Developers often mention the desire for a more intuitive visualization of workflow states."
"I don't like the limitations on data flow, particularly the difficulty of passing large amounts of data between different activities."
"Temporal's debugging is a bit complex."
"Temporal lacks many resources, like YouTube videos, which users can use to learn or refer to if they get stuck with the solution."
"Temporal could be improved by making it more user-friendly for beginners and non-technical staff, ensuring easier integration and usability across different use cases."
"One area where I think Temporal could improve is its dashboard, particularly in event tracking. Currently, the dashboard doesn't show a time-based view of events, meaning it doesn't display when an event started or went through the retry process. If this feature could be added in a future release, it would significantly enhance monitoring capabilities. Other than that, Temporal's overall performance is quite impressive, and we're confident we can migrate to the Temporal workflow."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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 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."
"Price wise, IBM BPM is cheaper than other similar solutions and has excellent pricing."
"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."
"The price is good but could be a little lower."
"When considering the features of the solution the price is expensive compared to competitors."
"Temporal is open-source and free to use, which is great. We didn't have to pay for any premium features."
"It is worth the price."
"The tool is open source under the MIT license, so there are no hidden fees. You can freely use everything on their GitHub and Docker images."
"The savings weren't as big as we initially expected, but they were pretty great from a developer's perspective."
"Temporal is a free, open-source tool."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
31%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
19%
Retailer
9%
Manufacturing Company
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM BPM?
Once it is installed, maintaining it is not a big issue.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Temporal?
Temporal OSS is expensive in infrastructure, but it brings back the reliability that companies need.
What needs improvement with Temporal?
The actual user interface is still in its early stages. It’s very basic. Users don’t really have a complex permission model yet. Users don’t really have ways to automate things like, for example, p...
What is your primary use case for Temporal?
We [my company] use it to run a large workload. We have a set of security scans we want to perform, and we distribute them over a full day, that’s over 24 hours. We use it to orchestrate all the st...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

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

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
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