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IBM BPM vs IBM WebSphere Message Broker comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

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

IBM BPM
Ranking in Application Infrastructure
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
111
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (5th), Process Automation (4th)
IBM WebSphere Message Broker
Ranking in Application Infrastructure
16th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Infrastructure category, the mindshare of IBM BPM is 3.0%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM WebSphere Message Broker is 1.5%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Infrastructure
 

Featured Reviews

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.
BrajendraKumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers large-sized business information processing with a time-saving setup and impressive stability
I primarily use two previews of the product for Dev and two for QA as part of the production process. Whatever tools our company is using, the cost of a license in IBM WebSphere Message Broker is about 80% of all these software or tools. The message routing capabilities satisfy workflow efficiency. The product supports message formats of XML, JSON, and SSID, which are around 24 KB to 50 KB in size. The solution supports communication protocols like STTP and TCP. Features like DataGraph need to be introduced in IBM WebSphere Message Broker. Some of the clients of our organization are using an outdated version of IBM WebSphere Message Broker for which the vendor doesn't provide direct support anymore. For the aforementioned version, our company professionals can solve the queries on their own without seeking support from IBM. During the installation of a prior version of IBM WebSphere Message Broker, sometimes I have to configure the failovers through the cluster, where issues arise, and I often seek help from the support team. The solution is being used by some medicine companies in our organization that receive sales orders from the EDR or JDE. I would not recommend the product to others as its becoming obsolete and they can rather choose a middleware solution from Amazon or Azure. But I would overall rate the product a nine out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 platform's most valuable features are its process automation capabilities and its ability to provide a comprehensive view of business operations."
"This solution has streamlined our operation and improved the TAT of sales, operations, and underwriters."
"The most valuable features come in the bundle, the design process, creating services, creating BPDs, creating coaches, and UI/UX."
"The solution offers great notifications."
"We have used a lot of out-of-the-box reporting on the process performance metrics. We have been able to make suggested changes to staff for this role or streamlining by eliminate some activities where people were not requiring a lot of work in the first place."
"There is information during the process that the analyst will look at, their procedures. We created a part of the application such that the business can change those procedures as needed, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. As the reps go through the process, they don't necessarily know it's changing, they just know they have to refer to some documentation, and the business can keep that up to date."
"It is a very powerful solution."
"Integration and mapping are easy, which is a major advantage."
"We only use the basic features, but the most valuable one for us is the Publish-subscribe pattern."
"Performance-wise, this solution is really good."
"The documentation, performance, stability and scalability of the tool are valuable."
"The most valuable feature of IBM WebSphere Message Broker is the ability to facilitate communication with legacy systems, offering a multitude of great capabilities. For example, if there is a mainframe system in place with a web service serving as the front end. In that case, the solution enables efficient protocol transformations to convert all request payloads into a format that the legacy systems can accept, rendering the integration and transformation processes seamless and highly effective."
"Message Broker is valuable because most of the applications are using MQ. Even in my current engagement, the few applications which I audit to onboard the bank are using MQ."
"It's reliable for our day-to-day operations, ensuring fast and secure data integration across different systems."
"IBM WebSphere Message Broker is one of the best middleware solutions"
 

Cons

"There are a few areas, like triggering mechanisms, externally exposed variables, and changing its values."
"There is room for improvement in the stability."
"The interface is limited and should improve in the future."
"Stability wavers. We have some opportunities for improvement in this space, especially as we approach our target volume of a million transactions a day. It is tough, because it is not necessarily the product. It is more around the platform and infrastructure to support it, so the connectivity to the database, web sessions, and reverse proxies in front of that."
"Some of the features are not enough for my business. We need to build custom user management for the many end users affected by BPM."
"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."
"They should incorporate an API gateway functionality within it to simplify integrations."
"Today I probably wouldn't go for Message Broker because of the cost structure, support, and the whole ecosystem around IBM."
"Stability and pricing are areas with shortcomings that need improvement."
"Technical support is very slow and needs to be improved."
"Technical support is good but they could have a better response time."
"The product's features are not being upgraded or enhanced by the vendor"
"The images and size of the containers are too big and I think that they should be more lightweight."
"There is some lag in the GUI. There have been some performance issues and maybe it's because of the application data."
"The solution can add container engines such as docker."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is fair for an enterprise solution that has both cloud and on-premise deployments and when comparing to competitors. Recently IBM has introduced Cloud Pak which allows for more flexible licensing options for automation and other features."
"Its price is on the higher side, and it can be improved. Its licensing is on a yearly basis. There are no additional costs."
"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."
"The product is expensive considering the hardware and software costs."
"Starting out with Express can also help reduce the cost for adopting the product."
"Licensing is managed by the client, but we know it is yearly. Camunda is relatively cheaper. There is not much difference in pricing of IBM and PEGA. For large licensing, there are discounts as well."
"When considering the features of the solution the price is expensive compared to competitors."
"IBM could improve the price. It is far too expensive."
"The price is very high and it's the main reason that we are searching for alternatives."
"The solution is expensive."
"IBM products are generally more stable and have more features, but also come at a greater cost."
"I feel with IBM, when you want certain functions or features, you have to continuously purchase add-ons. There are always additional fees."
"This product is more expensive than competing products."
"The solution is expensive."
"IBM software can be costly, but having a contract has helped manage and potentially lower costs over time."
"The licensing cost of IBM WebSphere Message Broker needs to be reduced"
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
31%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
33%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM WebSphere Message Broker?
IBM software can be costly, but having a contract has helped manage and potentially lower costs over time.
What needs improvement with IBM WebSphere Message Broker?
There could be greater flexibility and agility in service creation for the product. As our business requirements evolve, we require more dynamic capabilities to adapt and scale our services accordi...
 

Also Known As

WebSphere Lombardi Edition, IBM Business Process Manager, IBM WebSphere Process Server
WebSphere Message Broker
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
WestJet, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, Sharp Corporation, Michelin Tire
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM BPM vs. IBM WebSphere Message Broker and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.