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ELMA 365 vs IBM BPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

ELMA 365
Ranking in Business Process Management (BPM)
41st
Average Rating
0.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
CRM (53rd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (50th)
IBM BPM
Ranking in Business Process Management (BPM)
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
111
Ranking in other categories
Application Infrastructure (8th), Process Automation (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Business Process Management (BPM) category, the mindshare of ELMA 365 is 0.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM BPM is 7.3%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Process Management (BPM)
 

Featured Reviews

PT
A great ERP for medium and even small businesses
If one has experience in the ERP market, big brands like Microsoft require a lot of money over other platforms like Odoo. We can implement an on-premise model for some enterprise customers because it gives privacy and security. For other customers, we provide the cloud version. Currently, we recommend customers implement the ERP platform on the cloud environment because of the flexibility and scaling. I recommend that customers invest in a solution with the possibility of scaling in the future while providing many functions and features out of the box. In many ERPs we provide, although we would recommend ELMA as a default option for medium and even enterprise customers, they need bigger brands. ELMA 365 should be the second or third option for customers right now. I rate ELMA 365 a ten out of ten.
Muhammad Kamran - PeerSpot reviewer
Has efficient processes and intuitive workflow with many valuable features
You will have access to make any needed changes. Additionally, the review will be published on PeerSpot.com in written or audio format, available to other people. You can stay anonymous if you wish. Notifications and the use of the review are subject to PeerSpot's terms of use, which you can find at PeerSpot.com/TOS. I would give the solution an overall rating of ten out of ten points.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"A lot of customers, when we introduce this kind of product into their organization, it provides a lot of analytics."
"It continues to keep up with the changing needs of the business. That is the strong value proposition of BPM. It's not a one-time automation."
"Automating the whole workflow process to give our data steward the ability to take actions rapidly, and making sure we have all the data synced within the different platforms that we are using."
"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."
"With the tester coach wherein you can interact with the interface while you're designing the process."
"It is a stale 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."
"For me, the most important feature is the easy-to-use business process dashboard. It's simple to orchestrate business processes, and the interface is clean and intuitive. Once your workflow is designed on paper, it's easy for the business process manager to implement and follow it. Another IBM product that was good in the past is the IBM Case Manager. I haven't used it for three or four years, so I'm unsure if it's still available, but it was quite effective."
"The process creation."
 

Cons

"Customers want improved productivity."
"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."
"The cost of the solution has room for improvement."
"Except for the Lucene the index - we had a couple of issues in the Process Portal where the Lucene index went out of sync, and we had to work at least 15 - 20 hours to have it back in sync with the database."
"UI is an area with a shortcoming that needs improvement."
"We are a government organization, and we are the largest government power sector in India. We generate around 30% of power in India. Therefore, our processes are quite complex. Although IBM BPM is a low-code or no-code software, if you want to have extremely complex workflows, just the business process diagrams are not helpful in creating those workflows. While implementing complex workflows, only the process flow diagrams did not help us. We had to write a lot of Java scripts and Java queries to achieve what we wanted. Its integration capabilities with the SAP environment have to be improved. At present, we are only talking at the web services environment level. Its price also needs to be improved. It is currently expensive. Previously, Active Directory required a heterogeneous environment, but now they want a homogeneous environment. We had onboarded employees through Microsoft Active Directory, and now I have to implement Microsoft AD only from the cloud for my vendors."
"When you have to integrate files for enterprise applications."
"Finding errors and bugs on the system is not easy. We can't seem to use the events or logs to find them, so it makes it difficult to debug the system. They really need to work on their debugging features to make is much, much easier. It would improve the solution considerably and should be something they add in a future release."
"I would say the scalability is very good but it's not perfect. It is much more scalable than it has been in the past but... it does require some work to keep it stable. So that is an area that should be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten."
"IBM could improve the price. It is far too expensive."
"When considering the features of the solution the price is expensive compared to competitors."
"The pricing is very high."
"Our customers do see ROI. They'll identify some particularly painful or uncoordinated processes to start with, then build out from there, picking off low hanging fruit."
"I give the pricing an eight out of ten."
"The solution might be expensive, but I can't give you a precise number. In the market here, I've seen two main products for BPM: IBM BPM and Camunda. Camunda is very popular and open-source, so there's no direct comparison."
"I already compared some solutions related to business process management, and I saw that the cost of IBM BPM is more expensive compared with that of Camunda, for example."
"It has a low cost to implement. You'll get your money back in the same year that you complete the project."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
38%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Comms Service Provider
5%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
31%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about ELMA 365?
A lot of customers, when we introduce this kind of product into their organization, it provides a lot of analytics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELMA 365?
I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten. It's not so cheap and not so expensive.
What needs improvement with ELMA 365?
Our customers mention three main topics when they review our product. The first point of improvement is the cost, the second one is they want improved productivity, and the last point would be cent...
Which is better, IBM BPM or IBM Business Automation Workflow?
We researched both IBM solutions and in the end, we chose Business Automation Workflow. IBM BPM has a good user interface and the BPM coach is a helpful tool. The API is very useful in providing en...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM BPM?
Once it is installed, maintaining it is not a big issue.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

ELMA BPM
WebSphere Lombardi Edition, IBM Business Process Manager, IBM WebSphere Process Server
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Air Astana, GS Nanotech, Kapital Bank, Mriya Resort & SPA, Obninskorgsintez, VestaBank, pwc, Zarubezhneft, lockobank, Rosatom
Barclays, EmeriCon, Banca Popolare di Milano, CST Consulting, KeyBank, KPMG, Prolifics, Sandhata Technologies Ltd., State of Alaska, Humana S.A., Saperion, esciris, Banco Espirito Santo
Find out what your peers are saying about Camunda, Apache, Automation Anywhere and others in Business Process Management (BPM). Updated: May 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.