We compared Camunda Platform and IBM BPM based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison of Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Camunda Platform seems to be the superior solution. Because users are divided over how easy IBM BPM is to deploy and because of its high price, users feel Camunda Platform is a better investment.
"It is open-source. It supports microservice orchestration. This is what we are really interested in. We can customize our products depending on the use cases."
"The flexibility characteristic in a BPMS, through BPMN and DMN, is undoubtedly the most interesting feature for our business."
"The number of client implementations and cross-language capabilities to support multiple frameworks is very pluggable compared to Pega. It's also more portable."
"We have been able to save costs using this solution compared to the product we used before."
"The most valuable features are the workflow, the task list, and the modeler where we use VPN."
"The solution is useful for small projects."
"Ease of use and ability to streamline a process model."
", Camunda can be a powerful tool to work with when used in an optimized and well-implemented manner."
"The system integration layer is valuable because this enables an organization to create a single point where all the key organizational master data is held in different IT applications across different functions, that can be accessed and updated."
"We can scale by increasing the infrastructure which is currently running."
"It helps maintain, and in many instances, lower costs, as well as to maintain those costs, keeping them stable."
"Integration is a big plus for me."
"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."
"IBM BPM's most valuable features are its speed in implementing and providing any changes."
"IBM BPM is easy to deploy."
"They have some quick-win programs that are designed to come in, they'll bring a developer in and they'll work with your developer to get you started. That's what we did and that worked really great. We got an understanding of the product, we got an understanding of how to deploy the product. And when we were done with that engagement, we were off and running."
"The documentation could use improvement."
"Like all BPM tools, they're very bad with proprietary UIs. In general, anyone who uses BPM tools should not expect to use their proprietary UI."
"When you search for Camunda BPM resources or books on how to utilize Camunda BPM, it is lacking. When it comes to Alfresco, there are thousands of resources that can help you to utilize within AWS and its Group Services. I would like to see the usage of Camunda BPM on Amazon Web Services be improved."
"Without a proper frontend, the business cannot effectively use the platform."
"I would like to see the forms engine available in the open-source version of this solution."
"I would like to have a feature for audit logging, audit logs and audit log management. And some history of use for the audit logs."
"It is not difficult to change existing processes. The difficulty was in integration, for example, to call an external web API, and in the security capabilities, to use a vault for secrets. That was difficult."
"I would also like a very easy to use form builder."
"It might not be suitable for entry level clients because it comes with a huge number of modules for processing that at times might not be necessary for upcoming clients."
"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."
"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."
"It is not user-friendly."
"We have been experiencing bad performance and instability."
"Some of the features are not enough for my business. We need to build custom user management for the many end users affected by BPM."
"Our developers are complaining that it's too complex to maintain."
"One of the things that we are looking at is cognitive learning. IBM has another product called IBM RPA, I think, which is doing some of that stuff. We would like to see more of that with respect to cognitive learning and AI put back into the process engine to help."
Camunda is ranked 1st in Business Process Management (BPM) with 71 reviews while IBM BPM is ranked 5th in Business Process Management (BPM) with 105 reviews. Camunda is rated 8.2, while IBM BPM is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Camunda writes "Open-source, easy to define new processes, and easy to transition to new business process definitions". 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". Camunda is most compared with Apache Airflow, Bizagi, Pega BPM, Appian and Bonita, whereas IBM BPM is most compared with Appian, Pega BPM, IBM Business Automation Workflow, Apache Airflow and AWS Step Functions. See our Camunda vs. IBM BPM report.
See our list of best Business Process Management (BPM) vendors and best Process Automation vendors.
We monitor all Business Process Management (BPM) 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.
Hi Leandro,
those two BPM's shouldn't be compared on the functional level. They are different type of solutions.
Camunda offers the workflow engine and decission engine, where you can create process models according to BPMN and DMM standards. This gives you the flexibility and agility in the process management. It also gives you the tools to monitor, manage and optimize those processes.
Camunda provides very limited functionalities, if it comes to end user interfaces. Usually they are built as custom applications or existing application are used. With Camunda projects you always focus on automation, that requires system integration and custom development and usually concerns core business processes.
Camunda is an openAPI solution, which makes the integration fast and easy. It is a common situation in financial industry, that you have many systems, that need to be integrated in one process, that is why Camunda is so popular in this sector.
Before you decide on the switch, you have to consider the processes you want to use it for. If this is for standard processes like holiday requests, invoice approvals etc. Camunda is not the best option. But if you want to automate sales or after sales processes, client/partner onboarding, claims management, debt collection you should definitely consider Camunda.
I found once in Camunda documents an interesting comparison between Camunda and BPM suites:
"On a blank canvas, an artist can paint a picture in exactly the way he imagines. Alternatively, there is the principle of “painting by numbers”, where even the artistic layman can create stunning images by coloring in predetermined areas. However, they can only create what was already pre-designed."
And finally, Camunda is available as open source solution and there is no vendor lock.
I hope it helped ;-) There is always an option to have a talk...
Cheers,
Piotr
You could have a look also on jBPM / jBPM based solutions (as an alternative to Camunda).
Camunda has limited capabilities in the community version. In the case of jBPM, the same capability set is provided in both the community and enterprise versions (the only difference is that with the enterprise version you pay for support).
If you are looking for the jBPM engine combined with content services in one unified platform/user experience, you could have a look at SEAL (https://star-storage.ro/product/seal-online/).