We performed a comparison between IBM BPM and Pega BPM based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Pega BPM finishes slightly ahead of IBM BPM. Pega BPM is low-code and very user-friendly. It provides next-generation processes that will convert problem statements into different diagrams and then implement the process, saving time and keeping organizations running efficiently. IBM BPM has a big learning curve and lacks many basic features that other BPM solutions provide.
"This product does the job in terms of executing the workflow."
"We can scale by increasing the infrastructure which is currently running."
"IBM's deployment box is one huge black box. We can create all the services with our own code or without a codebase, however, we have a huge amount of space with practically no limitation."
"The initial setup is straightforward and easy. I would give it a nine out of ten."
"With the Process Center, I can go to one place and view what all the environments are doing."
"It has improved my organization quite a bit. It brought awareness to what the business processes are, even to the business side, who did not necessarily know what they are."
"We like that it does not require a lot of hours to train our people."
"It is efficient in reducing costs."
"It is quite configurable, which is the most exciting feature. We can easily configure it as per our needs."
"It is easy to use, easy to understand, easy to implement and easy to enhance and we can do it as a Cloud. Also it is very user friendly."
"The ability to define processes, build reports, and get insights or analytics on data is most valuable. It is a powerful platform."
"The solution's case management is its most valuable aspect."
"Application development is very rapid. A lot of code gets reused while building the applications, which is something we highly appreciate."
"The case management functionality of this solution has been most valuable."
"The technical support of Pega BPM is very good."
"The best part of Pega, for me, is that they let you reuse a lot of the aspects in the product."
"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 is stable, but sometimes there are issues with the server."
"The interface is limited and should improve in the future."
"I would like to see a lot more case studies."
"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."
"There is a lot of room for improvement of the dashboards."
"We need process monitoring. It is somewhat complex to monitor all the processes which work."
"We had a weird problem that whenever the database would go down, even for a few seconds, it broke the connection. It would not come back up as it was supposed to. However, working with IBM, we were able to figure out a fix, then it came back up, even after an interruption of the database."
"The initial setup takes time."
"One of the areas of this solution that could be improved would be to advance the low code features of the application itself. We would also like to use the same platform to build any application, even if it is not necessarily defined as a functionality needed by a BPM."
"I believe that Pega's strategy when it comes to the UX part is not that great currently as compared to the other emerging BPM tools in the market."
"To learn Pega, you need to be a partner. If someone just wants to learn Pega for the sake of learning, they won't be able to do so as they don't give access to that."
"It needs more integration with other platforms."
"Lack of stronger cloud support is somewhat inconvenient for users and implementation."
"Pega's technical support could be better."
"Pega Cloud early adoption and use for cross enterprise capability was new to many. The early adoption meant version 2.0 of their cloud service may require refactoring and redesign of some services."
IBM BPM is ranked 5th in Business Process Management (BPM) with 105 reviews while Pega BPM is ranked 3rd in Business Process Management (BPM) with 57 reviews. IBM BPM is rated 7.8, while Pega BPM is rated 8.2. 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 Pega BPM writes "Provides built-in frameworks that can be reused and reduces time and cost". IBM BPM is most compared with Camunda, Appian, IBM Business Automation Workflow, Apache Airflow and AWS Step Functions, whereas Pega BPM is most compared with ServiceNow, Camunda, Appian, Microsoft Power Apps and OutSystems. See our IBM BPM vs. Pega BPM report.
See our list of best Business Process Management (BPM) vendors and best Process Automation vendors.
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