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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
7th
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 most valuable feature of IBM BPM is the low code design, and ease of maintenance. Additionally, the integration is good and easy to do."
"The initial setup process is easy."
"Its Analytics is the most valuable feature."
"Technical support is pleasant to work with and always available."
"It continues to keep up with the changing needs of the business. That is the strong value proposition of BPM. It's not a one-time automation."
"It helps improve your process through continual measurement."
"The most valuable features are the integration capabilities - BPM can connect with almost any legacy or advanced system."
"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 most valuable thing about Temporal is that we can create multiple and child workflows. We can segregate work as we want, which is good for work organization. It's also easy to maintain. We're trying to generate and fill PDF forms with custom data, including digital signatures. We call AWS and do all activities through Temporal, like calling and saving data in buckets. We do this because we have a lot of load, with multiple users requesting data. We have two types of users: admin and customer. The admin creates forms, and employees or customers fill them out. When admin gets a form, it's stored in Temporal."
"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."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ability to fix things quickly."
"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."
"Temporal provides visibility into workflow progress and analytics and supports scheduled tasks with customizable settings, making it very convenient."
"Temporal allows retryability for different workflows whenever they fail. It helps ensure idempotence and that things get done."
"When some jobs take a lot of time and fail midway, the solution’s retry feature automatically causes them to retry."
"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."
 

Cons

"The debugging needs improvement. There is some confusion surrounding the debugging."
"There are a few areas, like triggering mechanisms, externally exposed variables, and changing its values."
"The major issue is the pricing, which is very high. IBM BPM also lacks smaller solutions, so I must purchase multiple solutions to start with workflows and applications."
"The initial setup can be tricky because IBM BPM is not based on a popular stack, and it's difficult to hire a developer for this product."
"We need process monitoring. It is somewhat complex to monitor all the processes which work."
"I would like to see a lot more case studies."
"I would like to see the front-end support improved because it should be fully integrated and supported."
"We had a weird problem that whenever the database would go down, even for a few seconds, it broke the connection. It would not come back up as it was supposed to. However, working with IBM, we were able to figure out a fix, then it came back up, even after an interruption of the database."
"Retro compatibility needs improvement. Sometimes, when we make new changes to a workflow, it fails if it is not configured properly due to compatibility issues."
"Sometimes it scales kind of badly, but it depends on the process of our products."
"One issue is that we don't have enough resources in the community to get answers when we face problems. We once had a cross-cluster persistence issue, which we solved using different keys. I think Temporal is good right now, but I'm part of the community and will let you know if I think of any improvements."
"One area for the product improvement is the learning curve."
"There are areas where Temporal could improve. For instance, calling multiple microservices with Temporal introduces latency due to workflow registration and analytics overhead."
"Temporal lacks many resources, like YouTube videos, which users can use to learn or refer to if they get stuck with the solution."
"I don't like the limitations on data flow, particularly the difficulty of passing large amounts of data between different activities."
"Temporal doesn't have built-in data storage to store the state of the ongoing execution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the solution's pricing a four out of ten."
"The solution is expensive since it is an enterprise application."
"The pricing is quite high, I would rate it two out of five."
"The price is good but could be a little lower."
"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."
"I give the pricing an eight out of ten."
"The product is expensive considering the hardware and software costs."
"Price wise, IBM BPM is cheaper than other similar solutions and has excellent pricing."
"Temporal is open-source and free to use, which is great. We didn't have to pay for any premium features."
"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."
"It is worth the price."
"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
27%
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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