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IBM BPM vs WorkflowGen 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 Business Process Management (BPM)
4th
Ranking in Process Automation
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
113
Ranking in other categories
Application Infrastructure (8th)
WorkflowGen
Ranking in Business Process Management (BPM)
39th
Ranking in Process Automation
41st
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Design (27th), Rapid Application Development Software (32nd), Low-Code Development Platforms (37th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Business Process Management (BPM) category, the mindshare of IBM BPM is 4.2%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of WorkflowGen is 1.1%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Process Management (BPM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM BPM4.2%
WorkflowGen1.1%
Other94.7%
Business Process Management (BPM)
 

Featured Reviews

Ateeq Rehman - PeerSpot reviewer
Unit Head System Implementor at Allied Bank Limited
Automation platforms streamline processes and offer flexibility, but AI integration and version upgrades pose challenges
In the technology world, there is always room for improvement. Technologies evolve day by day, especially with the emergence of artificial intelligence and generative AI models. Although IBM BPM is a substantial product, adopting and integrating new technologies quickly is not easy due to the migration and upgrade paths involved. Every time new versions are released, we face business and production challenges that make rapid adoption challenging. The main concern bothering me today regarding IBM BPM is the integration of AI components.
CO
SAP Solution Lead at Johnson & Johnson
Good for automatically triggering workflows, but needs to be more customizable
We use this product for many different reasons related to our business We use it a lot for creating workflows to transfer materials between plants, which is a signature part of what we do. The most valuable feature is the ability to automatically trigger the workflow. This solution needs to be…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The integration capabilities of IBM BPM are excellent."
"We have automated processes with IBM BPM and DocuSign. Its valuable features include low-code, timer, etc. It makes it simple to implement the products. We generate reports using the solution."
"Scalability is good. In the time that I have been there, we have added more JVMs to help with the increased workload, so it does scale."
"The Process Portal provides access to most heritage capabilities and introduces many new features, such as a mobile-ready user interface, the ability to edit and share saved searches, and support for federated environments."
"It has improved my organization quite a bit. It brought awareness to what the business processes are, even to the business side, who did not necessarily know what they are."
"It allows the business to make changes going forward and gives them a bit more power and accountability for some of their processes."
"It makes the company business processes work more efficiently."
"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."
"We use it a lot for creating workflows to transfer materials between plants, which is a signature part of what we do."
"It’s easier, more controlled and automatized checks of the budget through this system."
"Took few hours to build workflows with ready-to-use templates, so we had improved productivity."
 

Cons

"One of the things that we are looking at is cognitive learning. IBM has another product called IBM RPA, I think, which is doing some of that stuff. We would like to see more of that with respect to cognitive learning and AI put back into the process engine to help."
"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."
"There are a few areas, like triggering mechanisms, externally exposed variables, and changing its values, which need to be revisited, as they do not sometimes function properly."
"We never got to a comfort level with the product; we ended up not using it that much."
"They should incorporate an API gateway functionality within it to simplify integrations."
"I would like to see the user-friendliness improved and the training become free of cost for the solution."
"We still have a couple of issues that we are working on right now with stability. Mostly on the configuration side of the tool, and it has been about a month that we have been working to stabilize the platform.​"
"Yes, on the Process Center (development environment), especially when you have too many developers working on it. Then, it becomes unstable."
"Yes, for email notification but it could also be with company network."
"The reports for users. The reports with more details; we have to generate them by the database."
"This solution needs to be more customizable."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It may be cheaper for organizations to pay for the Viewer licenses that are immediately up and running in the cloud, rather than paying for someone to administer publishing to an intranet."
"We have a yearly licensing model. It is not expensive. There are no addition costs to the standard license."
"​We have definitely seen ROI. When we first kicked it off, we said it had to pay for itself within three years, and it did."
"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."
"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."
"It is pricey."
"It's expensive. All software is always extremely high. The manufacturing cost that we have compared to the selling cost, it's not like you're building a house or building a car. But putting that aside, considering that it's expensive, it's a lot of money. If you compare it with some of the other alternatives in the market, it's a similar price. For instance, if you compare it with Pegasystems, it's a similar price."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the pricing a ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Construction Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise72
No data available
 

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 needs improvement with IBM BPM?
There are negative aspects, such as IBM BPM being quite heavy and not lightweight, and the licensing cost is higher, which has caused some companies to shift away. IBM BPM is complicated to install...
Ask a question
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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
Comcast, Deloitte, Mitsui & Co Ltd, Sanofi Pasteur, Textron, XL Group. WorkflowGen accelerates business process adaptability in 70 countries for 500+ organizations and 1,000,000 users.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM BPM vs. WorkflowGen and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.