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."The tech support is quite good."
"Appian's most valuable feature is that we can create end-to-end process workflows with minimum turnaround."
"With low-code, we don't need a lot of coding, and then from the plumbing perspective, there is a complete CI/CD pipeline that exists within Appian that can be leveraged for open deployment."
"The initial setup was seamless. We didn't run into any hardships at all."
"Write to Data Store Entity - Saving data in SQL databases is done easily using entities. Entities (CDTs in Appian terminology) define relationships and target schema tables via XSD files."
"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."
"Form building capabilities and well thought out process modelling are key points to this product."
"It is really simple to create a new app, and I like the data-centric aspect of the BPM tool."
"It is transparent to business users because it is mostly picture based modelling."
"The solution has helped us automate business processes."
"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."
"Its workflow and integration with SAP are the most valuable features. It is also a stable solution."
"I think the best way it can be it improved, is to make it easier to install. It's a very complicated piece of software, and there are a lot of things you have to do to get it set up. It's not just running an installer. You install WebSphere. You install the BPM product, and there's a large host of other steps you have to do: run queries against the database, you have to manually configure a bunch of properties files for your environment. I think if they could streamline all that, so it wasn't a considerable effort to install, that would be very useful. Because from an engineering point of view, you want to spend as little time as possible actually installing a product."
"The functionality to design UI to be responsive and can run on multiple devices."
"Automation is the most valuable feature of IBM BPM."
"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."
"They should provide more flexibility so designers can create a more picture perfect device."
"The product’s pricing could be improved from the developers' perspective."
"If we could calculate the amount of data that will be realized, it would help us a lot."
"The graphical user interface could be easier to use. It should be simplified."
"One of the areas that Appian is working on is to improve its UI capabilities and give more flexibility to the UI."
"The solution needs more features. For example, a way to connect to our viewing database, to record, and more interface and component design."
"The performance is pretty good, but the distortions need to be optimized in order for it to work well."
"It needs better integration with our existing application ecosystem."
"The initial setup can be tricky because IBM BPM is not based on a popular stack, and it's difficult to hire a developer for this product."
"IBM BPM needs to have a better and modified interface."
"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."
"There needs to be better documentation for IBM BPM in a central place. There is not any standard documentation for each component available and has been a barrier for developers."
"There is room for improvement in the stability."
"Our developers are complaining that it's too complex to maintain."
"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."
"We thought there might have been a little more discussion early on about, "Hey, if you're doing this, set it up this way," or some best practices or some guidance that we didn't get."
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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