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IBM BPM vs Temporal comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

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 Process Automation
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
111
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (6th), Application Infrastructure (6th)
Temporal
Ranking in Process Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Process Automation category, the mindshare of IBM BPM is 6.3%, down from 10.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Temporal is 7.3%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Process Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Prince Mathew - PeerSpot reviewer
More customizable than IBM FileNet and useful for automation
One suggestion for IBM BPM is to provide better integration between their products, such as DataCap, which we use for scanning. Although the new CP4BA offers offline capabilities, not everyone is on CP4BA, so enhanced integration for those on older versions would be beneficial. Another major suggestion is to offer a migration path when a product reaches its end of life. For example, there was no migration path when we moved, so we had to redo everything we had developed over ten years completely.
AbhishekDash - PeerSpot reviewer
Orchestrates infrastructure tasks like deployment, deletion, and management
Temporal focus on developers rather than business users. In contrast to older workflow orchestration engines like Camunda, which are more business-oriented and strongly emphasize UI and workflow authoring, Temporal is geared toward developers. It provides extensive capabilities for building complex workflows. A standout feature of Temporal is its handling of long-running workflows, a significant advantage over many other solutions. Temporal excels in managing distributed transactions and application state durability, especially in microservice environments where transactions might fail due to network issues. Temporal simplifies these challenges by managing retries, fail-safes, and circuit breakers. As a result, developers don't need to implement these features manually; Temporal handles them implicitly, though it also allows for tuning based on specific needs.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The case management and its integration with process design are good features."
"Its workflow and integration with SAP are the most valuable features. It is also a stable solution."
"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."
"I liked its robustness the most. It was a very robust platform in my experience. It seemed like a very stable and powerful tool for handling lots of concurrent users and hammering at the system."
"The designer feature, compared to other solutions is easy to use."
"Integration is a big plus for me."
"There is a component of this BPM pool - I can't recall the name. What it does is, it allows you to create various scenarios and then run them quickly, before actually putting them onto a tool. So I think that part of the tool is really fantastic, because that enables you to create scenarios, create simulations, before actually going out and putting it into the tool itself"
"It excels at analytics. It provides visibility across all activities of a company's processes and performance."
"The tool is easy for a beginner to learn. The documentation covers activities, workflows, workers, servers, and more. While more examples could be beneficial, the existing resources are good enough to help you get started. There are also YouTube videos available that can provide additional context. The Slack community for Temporal is very active and helpful, similar to Stack Overflow, where you can find answers to a wide range of questions from basic to advanced levels. If you have a unique question, the community is responsive and provides knowledgeable support."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ability to fix things quickly."
"The solution's most valuable features include its ability to simplify the management of complex workflows, improve system resilience and fault tolerance, and reduce the need for extensive boilerplate code."
"It is very useful for long-running workflows."
"It's easy to get started and user-friendly."
"We like the fact that the whole process is durable, which is very useful to us."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The most valuable feature is its ability to manage and automate workflows without manual intervention efficiently."
 

Cons

"The constant switch between Eclipse and its web versions can be annoying and confusing."
"If you want to use IBM BPM, you will have to invest a lot of money for licenses and you need to learn that there are limitations in developing applications. You cannot create anything you want."
"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."
"One area for improvement is the scripting languages used within the solution. They could integrate other languages such as GoMango or Python than JavaScript."
"The product is extremely complex to use and administrate."
"It needs more customization. We like to customize the screens to show more things related to our company."
"I would like IBM to consider including AI-enabled process mining, robotic process automation, and very good OCR capabilities from the computer vision side."
"The coaches and the user interface are the areas that can be improved a lot. It is good in terms of data processing, but the UI, scripting, and coaches are not very user-friendly and developer-friendly. Performance is always an issue. The scripting and the pattern that it uses are very tedious for new developers to understand, and it takes time to master it in depth. When comparing IBM BPM with IBM APN, a lot of things are provided out of the box in IBM APN. We don't have to write code or a Java connector to make a functionality work. It would be very helpful and time-saving for developers if IBM BPM is improved in this area to provide many functionalities or drag-and-drop options so that the developers don't have to write the code."
"Temporal lacks many resources, like YouTube videos, which users can use to learn or refer to if they get stuck with the solution."
"Temporal could be improved by making it more user-friendly for beginners and non-technical staff, ensuring easier integration and usability across different use cases."
"I don't like the limitations on data flow, particularly the difficulty of passing large amounts of data between different activities."
"There are areas where Temporal could improve. For instance, calling multiple microservices with Temporal introduces latency due to workflow registration and analytics overhead."
"One area where I think Temporal could improve is its dashboard, particularly in event tracking. Currently, the dashboard doesn't show a time-based view of events, meaning it doesn't display when an event started or went through the retry process. If this feature could be added in a future release, it would significantly enhance monitoring capabilities. Other than that, Temporal's overall performance is quite impressive, and we're confident we can migrate to the Temporal workflow."
"One area for the product improvement is the learning curve."
"Configuring workflows can be improved —the solution could offer more options, but it's not a must-have."
"Developers often mention the desire for a more intuitive visualization of workflow states."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I wish it was less expensive. I don't know why their pricing model is so high for a piece of software that could benefit so many. It just seems to me that they could have a lower cost, maybe with fewer features or whatever, but it should be possible to do a lower cost workflow software that uses the same interface and underlying engine but does not cost so much that you have to be a Fortune 50 company to buy it. It is annoying to me. There are a lot of solutions that IBM has that are really powerful but nobody can afford them. They know their business, but I still feel that there are a lot of customers who would benefit from this sort of thing. I don't know what this elitism is all about. I am sure they have people doing the money numbers, but it seems like you can make a lot more money by selling it to way more people for a little bit less."
"The solution is highly-priced."
"IBM BPM is expensive, so most large companies opt for IBM based on their licensing options."
"Due to its extensive features and capabilities, the product pricing is more aligned with medium—to large enterprises."
"When considering the features of the solution the price is expensive compared to competitors."
"I think it's a reasonably priced tool, but it's important to consider which customers should buy this solution. It's designed for enterprise customers, not small ones."
"It is pricey."
"I rate the solution's pricing a four out of ten."
"It is worth the price."
"The tool is open source under the MIT license, so there are no hidden fees. You can freely use everything on their GitHub and Docker images."
"Temporal is open-source and free to use, which is great. We didn't have to pay for any premium features."
"The savings weren't as big as we initially expected, but they were pretty great from a developer's perspective."
"Temporal is a free, open-source tool."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
30%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
16%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
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 Temporal?
Temporal OSS is expensive in infrastructure, but it brings back the reliability that companies need.
What needs improvement with Temporal?
The actual user interface is still in its early stages. It’s very basic. Users don’t really have a complex permission model yet. Users don’t really have ways to automate things like, for example, p...
What is your primary use case for Temporal?
We [my company] use it to run a large workload. We have a set of security scans we want to perform, and we distribute them over a full day, that’s over 24 hours. We use it to orchestrate all the st...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

WebSphere Lombardi Edition, IBM Business Process Manager, IBM WebSphere Process Server
No data available
 

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
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM BPM vs. Temporal and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.