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 created executable requirements and speeds up the SDLC process greatly."
"The process models provide self-documenting systems."
"Compared to other code tools that I've seen, Appian has a more robust rules engine"
"Appian also has very flexible local integration."
"Technical support has been amazing overall."
"Good workflow engines that bridge the gaps of processes."
"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 is quite responsive."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of IBM BPM is the low code design, and ease of maintenance. Additionally, the integration is good and easy to do."
"IBM BPM should become cloud-native. It should also add a cloud deployment feature."
"We made the transformation to agile. Altogether with BPM, it is the total package."
"This product does the job in terms of executing the workflow."
"I rate the technical support a ten out of ten...The product's installation was easy."
"We use it for automating certain processes which previously took a lot of time for agents to set up different products for customers. They would have to enter a lot of different systems. This has now mostly been automated."
"The integration and design are valuable features."
"It has it's own built-in UI components and doesn't provide much flexibility to customize or extend those components."
"It would be nice if you could create your own customized apps when the business needed them."
"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."
"I would like to see more complete university tools. For example, with UiPath, I have had a good experience related to a free course in order to provide some users some different levels of knowledge. This extra training helps users not only use the solution but to develop further within the tool."
"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."
"They should provide more flexibility so designers can create a more picture perfect device."
"The reporting is not as good as in similar products. They could also improve the dashboards."
"We have clients that want to use Office 365, Microsoft Analytics, and Power Apps. Appian just isn't the same as using something specifically designed to cater to the Microsoft Suite."
"I'd like the tool to be more flexible."
"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."
"I'm hearing things might be improving, to really deliver on BPM as opposed to simply workflow. That really should be emphasized a lot more than it has been, because a lot of customers will simply implement the process and leave it there, because the product maybe doesn't emphasize BPM as much as it should, as much as maybe they talk about it in the sales process. The whole idea of BPM, is to iteratively improve the process, and in order to do that you have to have the analytics tool with it. A lot of times that doesn't go as far as it should simply because there's a lot more work to be done for that to happen, and just some sort of technical limitations that don't make that as easy as it should be."
"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 can improve the dashboards and reports. It only has two dashboards, and reporting is very difficult to build."
"It needs more customization. We like to customize the screens to show more things related to our company."
"IBM BPM's UI is an area with shortcomings where improvements are required."
"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."
Appian is ranked 4th in Business Process Management (BPM) with 58 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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