We performed a comparison between IBM BPM and IBM WebSphere Application Server based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Application Infrastructure solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"IBM BPM and Automation Anywhere working together automate manual tasks with a reduction in FTEs, creating about a 30% reduction in FTEs by automating processes."
"The performance is fine."
"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."
"I would say that I like its GUI designer the best."
"IBM BPM is stable."
"IBM BPM's best features include document sharing, management document creation, widget and barcode creation, and integration."
"IBM's deployment box is one huge black box. We can create all the services with our own code or without a codebase, however, we have a huge amount of space with practically no limitation."
"IBM WebSphere Application Server is one of the best servers due to its stability and paid license."
"The solution has good performance."
"The VPN service is quite useful."
"The performance is good."
"Network Deployment is the most useful feature for scalability. It has many features within the standard WebSphere Application Server edition."
"IBM WebSphere Application Server is the best in terms of scalability and performance, as well as the support for managing distributed transactions."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is Portal Virtualization."
"WebSphere Application Server's best features include the data subscription and connection viewer."
"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."
"I believe that if the license were cheaper, it would have a greater impact."
"We have been experiencing bad performance and instability."
"Could increase vulnerability and security patches to make it more robust."
"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."
"Performance on large scale requirements could also be improved."
"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."
"I'd like the tool to be more flexible."
"What could be improved in IBM WebSphere Application Server is its interconnection with other products, for example, Kafka. What I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is a better graphical user interface."
"Sometimes, I feel WebSphere runs a bit slow. It might be loading unnecessary libraries, impacting its performance compared to other application servers."
"IBM needs to pay attention to market changes more quickly. We now have Java 9 and very soon Java EE8. We do not want to wait for two or three years after their release until they are supported by the new version."
"While WebSphere mostly supports IBM HTTP Server (IHS) as the web server plugin, I think it would be beneficial if it also supported Apache and NGINX web servers. That would give customers more flexibility in their choices."
"The solution could improve the integration."
"The footprint could be reduced so that we can use a smaller virtual machine to run the application. We could also use more scripts. I would like this solution to be more script oriented, rather than GUI oriented."
"WebSphere Application Server doesn't have an automated deployment option, forcing us to use third-party tools like Jenkins UCD and Palo Automated Deployment."
"It should be able to serve more concurrent requests like Oracle. Oracle has more powerful stability, availability, and real-time serving."
More IBM WebSphere Application Server Pricing and Cost Advice →
IBM BPM is ranked 7th in Application Infrastructure with 105 reviews while IBM WebSphere Application Server is ranked 5th in Application Infrastructure with 26 reviews. IBM BPM is rated 7.8, while IBM WebSphere Application Server is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of IBM BPM writes "Offers good case management and its integration with process design but there's a learning curve". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM WebSphere Application Server writes "Compatible, stable, and scalable". IBM BPM is most compared with Camunda, Appian, Pega BPM, IBM Business Automation Workflow and Nintex Process Platform, whereas IBM WebSphere Application Server is most compared with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss, Tomcat, Oracle WebLogic Server and IBM DataPower Gateway. See our IBM BPM vs. IBM WebSphere Application Server report.
See our list of best Application Infrastructure vendors.
We monitor all Application Infrastructure reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.