We performed a comparison between IBM BPM and Magic xpa Application Platform 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."Enabled us to convert most of the paper-based work into an automated workflow process, and some of them were converted into straight-through processing, with no human interaction involved whatsoever."
"Its workflow and integration with SAP are the most valuable features. It is also a stable solution."
"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 initial setup is straightforward and easy. I would give it a nine out of ten."
"One thing that I love about them is that they make it easier to integrate with other systems, especially with the use of smaller files."
"It makes the company business processes work more efficiently."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"Technical support is good. They are very responsive. It is usually me who takes more time to get back to them than they take to get back to me, which is good."
"Magic’s Database Gateway allows the logic of the program to be isolated from the underlying database. This provides the flexibility not only to move existing programs to different database environments without the need to change the logic in the program but also allows the programmer access to different databases without the need to know how to "talk" to them."
"Magic is rapid, it's a tool which we use to develop, change and maintain our programs. xpa has a lot more features onboard and it gives us the opportunity to do such things so that we can easily adapt and maintain our programs. It gives certain benefits to stay with our customers and the market."
"Magic’s unique approach to development ensures that the programmer stays focused on the objective of the program (i.e. display all customers in California), instead of the repetitive tasks that surround it (i.e. connect to database, open customers table, create the query to retrieve records within the specified criteria, fetch the result of the query, connect it to a data grid, etc.)."
"Typically an experienced Magic developer can do the work of two to three experienced C#/.NET developers. Customers are amazed at how quickly most new features can be added and bug fixes implemented. I have worked for four employers - including myself - using Magic, and in most instances, bug fixes are addressed and deployed in under six hours."
"xpa gives us a fast development speed."
"The best feature of Magic is the development time. The time it takes to develop something is incredibly fast if you compare Magic with, for example, Java."
"Speed of development and database connectivity (MS SQL, Oracle, DB2, Btrieve/Pervasive PSQL, ODBC, MySql, and SQLite)."
"Being able to make changes to existing programs to comply with last minute changes in requirements, and/or being able to fix, test, review, and deploy new code in a manner of hours instead of days, definitely gives us a huge advantage over our competitors and this is only possible thanks to Magic’s speed of programming."
"Except for the Lucene the index - we had a couple of issues in the Process Portal where the Lucene index went out of sync, and we had to work at least 15 - 20 hours to have it back in sync with the database."
"We would appreciate more user-friendly definitions of processes with a more user-friendly interface for documenting processes."
"We care about technology and support because support is very important and a BPM is not easy to implement."
"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."
"IBM BPM uses JavaScript as a programming language for the server-side. I don’t know why it’s not Java, as it’s more powerful and the JavaScript part is translated into Java anyway."
"The stability varies because it involves a lot of other components like databases, so sometimes if something goes wrong there, it can't recover from the fatal errors."
"They don't have a mechanism to achieve processes, data sources, and data."
"Process Server is no more available than new products out there, but in general IBM has a high cost and complex setup."
"When you have several tasks, you open a screen in a task in developing mode, and you don't see the parent screens. Debugging lacks the effects to solve problems. You have to do it first in a kind of studio. Then you have to be sure that you can do it in Magic because there is almost nothing to debug it. It's practically impossible to debug. You have to be sure before you put your snippets."
"In the next version of the Magic xpa Application Platform, I want tables or small programs where I can directly add expressions. I can do it on SQL, but it would make life much easier if that specification were added to the platform."
"Magic has a tradition, when it adds new technologies/features to the Magic development tool, to provide either no documentation or documentation that does not provide an organized approach for bringing this new technology/feature to experienced Magic programmers."
"The configuration of the xpa RIA mobile environment is complex and a discouragement to new developers. Also, Magic's documentation can be less than complete at times which leads to frustration for new developers. (I encourage new Magic developers to join the Magic Users Group)."
"It is missing basic charting tools for bar/pie/series charts. It is left to the developer to acquire and deploy charting tools or the customer to purchase a third-party reporting tool to produce charts."
"I would like to see a spell checker included with optional language support. Currently, this has to be purchased from a third-party."
"Throughout my career, I've encountered difficulties when integrating new technologies with Magic xpa Application Platform. In particular, when attempting to incorporate features from other development languages into earlier versions of the solution called uniPaaS. I struggled to integrate .NET components due to the limited options available. This made the process more challenging and complicated. I find it challenging to create a more user-friendly experience for users who may be comparing the system to other systems they have used outside or within the company on different platforms."
"The Android environment is missing a number of functions for file/folder manipulation, sending receiving text messages (SMS) and the menuing options are limited. For now, it is left to the developer to write his/her own Java functions to include in the APK."
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IBM BPM is ranked 7th in Application Infrastructure with 105 reviews while Magic xpa Application Platform is ranked 14th in Application Infrastructure with 10 reviews. IBM BPM is rated 7.8, while Magic xpa Application Platform is rated 8.6. 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 Magic xpa Application Platform writes "Fast development and user-oriented functionalities, but it needs better .NET integration and a completely different pricing structure". IBM BPM is most compared with Camunda, Pega BPM, Appian, IBM Business Automation Workflow and Apache Airflow, whereas Magic xpa Application Platform is most compared with Microsoft .NET Framework, Mendix, OutSystems and GeneXus. See our IBM BPM vs. Magic xpa Application Platform report.
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