We performed a comparison between Appian and IBM BPM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Business Process Management (BPM) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It has good integrations. We were looking for out-of-the-box integration with both on-prem and publicly accessible data sources. We needed integration with the cloud, OData, our REST API feed, and then on-prem passthrough to go to a SQL database or on-prem APIs through Azure local deployment, etc."
"Since implementing we have had a faster time to solution, with fewer resources needed."
"Write to Data Store Entity - Saving data in SQL databases is done easily using entities. Entities (CDTs in Appian terminology) define relationships and target schema tables via XSD files."
"Good workflow engines that bridge the gaps of processes."
"Technical support is quite responsive."
"The solution has a lot of strong features for the financial industry, it is very easy to use."
"The solution's most valuable features are the regular periodic and quarterly updates, they are very useful updates. They keep improving the solution more often, and that helps the platform or code always be up to date with the latest features."
"The most valuable features are the low coding and low code data."
"This solution has always been lacking in the user interface (UI), it needed to be improved a lot. However, from the acquisition of Spark UI, the UI is much better. Overall the solution is robust and has the ability to integrate with any product for complex workflows."
"Its dashboard is easy to use and very good. It allows us to customize."
"It provides value and simplifies processes."
"Setting it up is fairly easy. If somebody has knowledge of the system, he or she will be able to do it fairly quickly."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"This solution is very stable."
"One of the most notable things is how you can develop use cases with the customers, internal customers, but directly within. The software process model that BPM supports is really exciting in that aspect."
"Responsive Portal + Process Federation Server. This set of solutions offers a unified worklist to our customers."
"There are some restrictions with respect to using external components within Appian. So, for example, if we do not have a particular feature available, there's a long cycle of getting approvals and all of that. That does not offer flexibility, which definitely can be improved on."
"The tool itself is pretty good, but the main area that we struggled with was the backend. The frontend development is really good, but the backend modeling can be streamlined a little bit. There are good integrations, but tying them through the data layer and then up into the frontend could be improved a little bit. It does read/write on the data source, and you can configure it to just write or just read, but there is a little bit of work involved."
"It would be nice if you could create your own customized apps when the business needed them."
"It is difficult to set up the on-premise version."
"It would be useful if they could create an academy or forum in the future to help active users answer questions they have about the solution."
"While Appian is generally flexible, it's rigid in some ways. It takes longer to do something that isn't available out of the box."
"Even though the company has made great improvements in online documentation, featuring rich material which includes case studies of real-life use cases, the material could definitely be better in quality and coverage of use cases."
"The solution could improve robotic process automation."
"The business would like to use the product with a lot less IT and equipment involvement."
"They don't have a mechanism to achieve processes, data sources, and data."
"I have an interest around the robotic piece, and integrating that with the processes. I think that is certainly a good direction to be going."
"The initial setup process is complex for basic users."
"User Interface components could be further refined to enhance and extend customizations dictated by end clients."
"They could provide case studies to investigate and understand the functionality of business processes before development."
"IBM BPM integrated with Spark UI and the UI is now much better, but they still need to improve the UI because competitors have predefined templates and other additional features. In these competitor's solutions, you are able to use the templates, map your data, and the form is ready to use. With this solution, you need to write a lot of code to have the same quality as the competitor's templates. It would be a benefit to make this platform more towards low-code or no-code."
"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."
Appian is ranked 4th in Business Process Management (BPM) with 57 reviews while IBM BPM is ranked 5th in Business Process Management (BPM) with 105 reviews. Appian is rated 8.4, while IBM BPM is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Appian writes "Low resource consumption, easy setup, and stable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM BPM writes "Offers good case management and its integration with process design but there's a learning curve". Appian is most compared with Microsoft Power Apps, OutSystems, Camunda, ServiceNow and Bizagi, whereas IBM BPM is most compared with Camunda, Pega BPM, IBM Business Automation Workflow, Apache Airflow and AWS Step Functions. See our Appian vs. IBM BPM report.
See our list of best Business Process Management (BPM) vendors and best Process Automation vendors.
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