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."What I found most valuable in Appian is that it lets you drill down on multiple things through the structure of the reporting and UI side. It's also low-code, yet it results in quick deliverables."
"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."
"Technical support has been amazing overall."
"Technical support is helpful."
"This is the most complete solution of its kind."
"Another advantage of this tool is its reports and records. You can maintain dashboards, layouts. If you with a Java solution, it takes six months time. If you use this tool, you can finish in one or one and a half months' time."
"Appian's most valuable feature is that we can create end-to-end process workflows with minimum turnaround."
"The technical support is excellent."
"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."
"It is efficient in reducing costs."
"Compliance with the BPMN 2.0 standard."
"The case management and its integration with process design are good features."
"There are a lot of things that you get out-of-the-box: Timers and so on, which took a lot of effort and code before."
"Overall, I'm satisfied with the product. If you compare it with other products, it's probably not as easygoing or as simple to implement as the rest. But after you get used to it, it works. It has a lot of capabilities and potential, but the people, who come from different technologies, have some difficulty getting used to the way of working with IBM products."
"Provides the power to understand and automate processes."
"It is easy to take a requirement, put it in the code, and deploy it."
"Appian is easy to set up, but JBoss is complex. JBoss is the application server for running Appian."
"Something I would like to see improved is an SQL database connection."
"The documentation needs to be improved."
"The reporting is not as good as in similar products. They could also improve the dashboards."
"A point of improvement would be the SAIL forms. The built-in tool used to generate forms does not have debugging support (to view local variables as they change on live preview, and step-by-step valuation) which is a big drawback for form development. Moreover, the script language used to build SAIL forms does not support inheritance or lambda expressions (functions as arguments of other functions), which makes the code base more verbose."
"It needs better integration with our existing application ecosystem."
"The ability of the interface to load automatic data is not great."
"We would like to have more granular control for interface styling."
"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."
"They could provide case studies to investigate and understand the functionality of business processes before development."
"The product is extremely complex to use and administrate."
"The initial setup process is complex for basic users."
"This is technology, and there's always room for improvement. It would be better to have a single solution. Trying to have an overview in terms of this solution brings together the concepts of BPM processes, customer journeys, and an automation part for KPIs. All of this working together and coming up with a single solution with privacy is more commercial than anything else."
"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."
"User Interface components could be further refined to enhance and extend customizations dictated by end clients."
"Better integration with other products in the automation suite."
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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