Apache Airflow vs Oracle BPM comparison

Apache and Oracle are both solutions in the Business Process Management (BPM) category. Apache is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.3, while Oracle is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.0. Apache holds a 6.1% mindshare in BPM, compared to Oracle’s 2.0% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Apache users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 80% of Oracle users who would recommend it.

Apache Airflow

Read 39 Apache Airflow reviews

5,583 Views
1,386 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Oracle BPM

Read 25 Oracle BPM reviews

1,404 Views
517 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Apache Airflow

Oracle BPM

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Oracle BPM and Apache Airflow compete in process management and automation. Oracle BPM appears stronger for complex business processes, whereas Apache Airflow's flexibility makes it ideal for data workflows.

Features: Oracle BPM offers business process modeling with BPMN 2.0, integration with Oracle's SOA platform, and comprehensive analytics through advanced reporting tools. Apache Airflow, as a Python-based open-source platform, provides flexibility, a wide range of connectors, and excels in orchestrating ETL processes.

Room for Improvement: Oracle BPM has a steep learning curve, lacks native microservices support, and has costly pricing. Apache Airflow's dependency on DAGs limits workflow cyclicity, its UI needs updating, and it could improve on stateful step management.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Oracle BPM requires complex deployment, often on-premises, and has notable customer service delays. Apache Airflow offers cloud deployment versatility and community support, though it lacks formal technical support.

Pricing and ROI: Oracle BPM is expensive but can deliver high ROI for large enterprises, with a focus on cloud migration incentives. Apache Airflow is open-source and cost-effective, appealing to budget-conscious entities, although operational costs may arise from infrastructure needs.

To learn more, read our detailed Apache Airflow vs. Oracle BPM Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Apache Airflow vs. Oracle BPM

June 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Apache Airflow

Ranking in Business Process Management (BPM)

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Oracle BPM

Ranking in Business Process Management (BPM)

15th

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Business Process Management (BPM) category, the mindshare of Apache Airflow is 6.1%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle BPM is 2.0%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Business Process Management (BPM)

Featured Reviews

Madhan Potluri

Head of Data at a energy/utilities company with 51-200 employees

We efficiently manage and monitor production pipelines through job resumption and error log integration

We utilize Apache Airflow for managing machine learning production pipelines. The deployment of our machine learning models takes place through Apache Airflow. We configure pipelines, decide on the frequency of recalibration, deployment, and dataset training Apache Airflow allows us to resume…

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Erick Kathurima

CIO at Clarinox Technologies Kenya

Helpful tool for business process management integration and a straightforward setup

Oracle BPM is used as a tool integrated into another system. It helps in business process management and the generation of reports, predominantly at the end of the month For any new deployment of any system, it helps in improving some efficiencies, which is the reason for having the system. It…

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Apache Airflow is creating and scheduling jobs. Additionally, the reattempt at failed jobs is useful."

"The solution is flexible for all programming languages for all frameworks."

"Apache Airflow's best feature is its flexibility."

"Apache Airflow is easy to scale and its UI improves with each release."

"We have been quite satisfied with the stability of the solution."

"The best feature is the customization."

"The solution's UI allows me to collect all the information and see the code lines."

"Every feature in Apache Airflow is valuable. The number of operators and features I've used are mainly related to connectivity services and integrated services because I primarily work with GCP."

More Apache Airflow pros

"We selected this solution not only for the BPM but for the entire package."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"Our company is based around Oracle processes. It provides a lot of flexibility in its processes."

"What I found most valuable in Oracle BPM is that it has a lot of out-of-the-box integrations. The solution also provides a lot of adapters which is very helpful."

"The benefit from the tool is we can develop it quickly and easily use it for middleware services. We can publish the services so other applications can consume them. This is providing us some reusability and a type of security."

"The support is good."

"The Workspace is a full, rich application where most users can find what they want. It shows them a list of their work."

"It is easy to use in a business processing suite."

More Oracle BPM pros

Cons

"We have faced scenarios where Apache Airflow becomes non-responsive, leading to job failures. To resolve such situations, we had to manually reboot Apache Airflow since it doesn't provide an option to restart within the application. This necessitated modifying some configurations to initiate a restart of all Apache Airflow components. Although Apache Airflow is generally dependable, it may occasionally encounter glitches that can disrupt production flows and batches."

"There is an area for improvement in onboarding new people. They should make it simple for newcomers. Else, we have to put a senior engineer to operate it."

"The dashboard is connected into the BPM flow that could be improved."

"There is a need for more features on experimental evolution steps."

"It is not suitable for real-time ETL tasks."

"Adding more automated components in Apache Airflow for basic things like exporting the data would be helpful."

"UI can be improved with additional user-friendly features for non-programmers and for fewer coding practitioner requirements."

"The dashboards could be enhanced."

More Apache Airflow cons

"You have to maintain it manually."

"Oracle BPM should allow integration with external, common APIs."

"Oracle BPM is hard to configure."

"The time it takes to get from deployment to production could be faster."

"It could have easier administration. It takes time to configure and deploy."

"We have had some issues with version migration, from one version of processes to another. We would have to call Oracle Services but on a day to day, we didn't have any issues."

"There are delays in offering the latest technology, so there is a need to be more responsive to technological changes."

"From my knowledge of this solution, I don't see that the Oracle BPM includes features such as the growth of discovery and process mining."

More Oracle BPM cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is cheap."

"Apache Airflow is a product that is free of licenses, meaning there is no need to buy a license."

"It is an open-source tool. There are no additional fees or charges associated with the product."

"We are using the open-source version of Apache Airflow."

"The pricing is on the higher side."

"It's open source. You can install it locally on your own system. If you are deploying it in the production system, you normally deploy it on some cloud, such as EC2 service, which would have some cost. If you are setting up a Docker container or something for Apache Airflow yourself, which is quite easy, you can do pretty much everything online."

"The solution is free if you use Amazon AWS."

"For the time being, it doesn't cost anything."

More Apache Airflow pricing and cost advice

"As with all Oracle products, the licensing over VMware is an issue."

"The licensing for this product is very costly. We pay for a yearly license to use Oracle BPM."

"The licensing model is good."

"The pricing is very expensive."

"We received the product packaged into the Oracle database solution."

"Oracle is good, but they're still expensive compared to other vendors."

"I don't have information on the exact cost of Oracle BPM because a different team handles that, but it's pretty high. Oracle products are very costly. I would rate pricing for Oracle BPM three out of five. Though the pricing is high, the solution has a lot of features."

"The pricing is significantly high, particularly for Brazil where fluctuations in the exchange rate between the dollar and the real can further increase the cost of Oracle licenses."

More Oracle BPM pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Business Process Management (BPM) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

27%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Wireless Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Which would you choose - Camunda Platform or Apache Airflow?

Camunda Platform allows for visual demonstration and presentation of business process flows. The flexible Java-based option was a big win for us and allows for the integration of microservices very...

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What do you like most about Apache Airflow?

Apache Airflow is easy to use and can monitor task execution easily. For instance, when performing setup tasks, you can conveniently view the logs without delving into the job details.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Airflow?

We don't experience issues with pricing as Apache Airflow is part of a larger platform. It is a sub-feature and not an individual purchase.

See all answers

What do you like most about Oracle BPM?

The solution provides extensive functionalities.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle BPM?

The licensing is expensive. It needs to be more affordable, especially in the Kenyan market.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Oracle BPM?

Oracle BPM should ensure its product is aligned with current technology by keeping up with advancements like AI. There are delays in offering the latest technology, so there is a need to be more re...

See all answers

Comparisons

Camunda vs Apache Airflow

Compared 57% of the time

IBM BPM vs Apache Airflow

Compared 9% of the time

Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) vs Apache Airflow

Compared 6% of the time

AutomateNOW vs Apache Airflow

Compared 4% of the time

Boomi AtomSphere Flow vs Apache Airflow

Compared 2% of the time

More Apache Airflow Competitors

SAP Signavio Process Manager vs Oracle BPM

Compared 28% of the time

Camunda vs Oracle BPM

Compared 25% of the time

IBM BPM vs Oracle BPM

Compared 15% of the time

AWS Step Functions vs Oracle BPM

Compared 10% of the time

Pega Platform vs Oracle BPM

Compared 7% of the time

More Oracle BPM Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Apache Airflow

June 2025

Download Apache Airflow product report

Buyer's Guide

Oracle BPM

June 2025

Download Oracle BPM product report

Also Known As

Airflow

Oracle Business Process Management

Overview

Apache Airflow is an open-source workflow management system (WMS) that is primarily used to programmatically author, orchestrate, schedule, and monitor data pipelines as well as workflows. The solution makes it possible for you to manage your data pipelines by authoring workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks. By using Apache Airflow, you can orchestrate data pipelines over object stores and data warehouses, run workflows that are not data-related, and can also create and manage scripted data pipelines as code (Python).

Apache Airflow Features

Apache Airflow has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Smart sensor: In Apache Airflow, tasks are executed sequentially. The smart sensors are executed in bundles, and therefore consume fewer resources.

Dockerfile: By using Apache Airflow’s dockerfile feature, you can run your business’s Airflow code without having to document and automate the process of running Airflow on a server.

Scalability: Because Apache Airflow has a modular architecture and uses a message queue to orchestrate an arbitrary number of workers, you can easily scale it.

Plug-and-play operators: With Apache Airflow, you can choose from several plug-and-play operators that are ready to execute your tasks on many third-party services.

Apache Airflow Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Apache Airflow. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

User friendly: Using Apache Airflow requires minimal python knowledge to get started.

Intuitive user interface: The Apache Airflow user interface enables you to visualize pipelines running in production, monitor progress, and also troubleshoot issues when needed.

Easy integration: Apache Airflow can easily be integrated with cloud platforms (Google, AWS, Azure, etc).

Visual DAGs: Apache Airflow’s visual DAGs provide data lineage, which facilitates debugging of data flows and also aids in auditing and data governance.

Flexibility: Apache Airflow provides you with several ways to make DAG objects more flexible. At runtime, a context variable is passed to each workflow execution, which is quickly incorporated into an SQL statement that includes the run ID, execution date, and last and next run times.

Multiple deployment options: With Apache Airflow, you have several options for deployment, including self-service, open source, or a managed service.

Several data source connections: Apache Airflow can connect to a variety of data sources, including APIs, databases, data warehouses, and more.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the Apache Airflow solution.

A Senior Solutions Architect/Software Architect says, “The product integrates well with other pipelines and solutions. The ease of building different processes is very valuable to us. The difference between Kafka and Airflow, is that it's better for dealing with the specific flows that we want to do some transformation. It's very easy to create flows.”

An Assistant Manager at a comms service provider mentions, “The best part of Airflow is its direct support for Python, especially because Python is so important for data science, engineering, and design. This makes the programmatic aspect of our work easy for us, and it means we can automate a lot.”

A Senior Software Engineer at a pharma/biotech company comments that he likes Apache Airflow because it is “Feature rich, open-source, and good for building data pipelines.”

Apache

The Industry's Most Complete and Unified BPM Solution A complete solution for all types of processes that provides a unified process foundation, user-centric design, and social BPM interaction. Reduces complexity and risk and increases business efficiency, visibility, and agility.

Oracle

Sample Customers

Agari, WePay, Astronomer

State Revenue Office Victoria, New South Wales Health, REDISA, Panduit, Total E&P Indonesie

Buyer's Guide

Apache Airflow vs. Oracle BPM

June 2025

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