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IBM BPM pros and cons

Vendor: IBM

3.9 out of 5

112 reviews
90% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

IBM BPM delivers efficient system integration and access to organizational data across various IT applications, with excellent linkage to legacy or advanced systems. Powerful team management, robust analytics, and workflow features add value. Despite its scalability and reliability, SAP integration and initial setup pose challenges. High licensing costs and inconsistent performance require consideration. Limited customization options affect process adaptability, yet IBM BPM remains a compelling choice for enterprise environments seeking visibility into processes.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

IBM BPM's system integration layer enables organizations to maintain and update master data across multiple IT applications.

IBM BPM excels at automating processes, which helps in reducing manual work and improving efficiency.

IBM BPM provides a robust and stable environment, capable of handling a large number of concurrent users efficiently.

IBM BPM offers excellent scalability by allowing for infrastructure expansion to accommodate increased workload.

IBM BPM's integration capabilities allow it to connect seamlessly with legacy or advanced systems.

CONS

IBM BPM is described as complex to set up and requires considerable expertise, making it challenging for initial deployment and ongoing maintenance.

Performance and stability issues are noted, particularly during development and scaling processes, often requiring frequent server reboots.

Integration with other systems and platforms, including SAP and CRM, is seen as an area needing improvement, with calls for better API and middleware functionality.

The cost of using IBM BPM is considered high, with pricing obstacles impacting broader adoption and limiting accessibility to more extensive user bases.

The scripting language support in IBM BPM, primarily relying on JavaScript for server-side tasks, is criticized, with users seeking alternatives like Python for enhanced functionality.

IBM BPM Pros review quotes

Managing Director at Couture Consulting

Mar 22, 2018

Its Analytics is the most valuable feature.

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Unemployed at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Apr 20, 2021

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.

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DF

IT Systems Engineer Consultant at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

Mar 21, 2018

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.

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Lead Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 20, 2018

The Process Designer is good. We like how we can drag and drop and link the processes up, that works out great for us.

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Tech Lead at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 20, 2018

It is easy to take a requirement, put it in the code, and deploy it.

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ZC

Owner/CEO at IT SPHERE

Nov 25, 2020

IBM's deployment box is one huge black box. We can create all the services with our own code or without a codebase, however, we have a huge amount of space with practically no limitation.

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JB

John Bucknavage

Business Development Management at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 9, 2018

It helps maintain, and in many instances, lower costs, as well as to maintain those costs, keeping them stable.

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Devashish Mishra

Client Partner at Peristent Systems

Jul 23, 2021

Setting it up is fairly easy. If somebody has knowledge of the system, he or she will be able to do it fairly quickly.

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reviewer1028712

Professional Services Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Apr 19, 2023

Previously, our company's business automation process was slow. IBM BPM's schedule and response functionalities are excellent...There are countless use cases in which IBM BPM proves to be a valuable tool for my clients.

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Chief Innovation Officer at Habib Bank Ltd.

Mar 20, 2018

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

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IBM BPM Cons review quotes

Managing Director at Couture Consulting

Mar 22, 2018

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.

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Unemployed at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Apr 20, 2021

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.

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DF

IT Systems Engineer Consultant at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

Mar 21, 2018

I would like to see more inclusion of RPA technologies. If we have more manual processes, we can use robotic process automation and integrate that in with the solution.

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Free Report: IBM BPM Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about IBM BPM. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: August 2025.

865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Lead Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 20, 2018

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.

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Tech Lead at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 20, 2018

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.

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ZC

Owner/CEO at IT SPHERE

Nov 25, 2020

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.

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JB

John Bucknavage

Business Development Management at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 9, 2018

I would like to see a lot more case studies.

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Devashish Mishra

Client Partner at Peristent Systems

Jul 23, 2021

From the testing perspective and minor enhancements perspective, customization is something that is a little tedious as compared to new tools. In addition, various open-source tools that are available are not working with IBM BPM.

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reviewer1028712

Professional Services Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Apr 19, 2023

I hope IBM uses something from IBM Content Navigator to make the interface easier to navigate.

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Senior Manager at Celfocus

May 18, 2021

This is technology, and there's always room for improvement. It would be better to have a single solution. Trying to have an overview in terms of this solution brings together the concepts of BPM processes, customer journeys, and an automation part for KPIs. All of this working together and coming up with a single solution with privacy is more commercial than anything else.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 93)

Product Categories

Product Categories

Business Process Management (BPM)

Application Infrastructure

Process Automation

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Business Process Management (BPM)

Application Infrastructure

Process Automation

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Camunda vs IBM BPM

Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) vs IBM BPM

Control-M vs IBM BPM

Appian vs IBM BPM

SAP Signavio Process Manager vs IBM BPM

Pega Platform vs IBM BPM

Bizagi vs IBM BPM

ARIS BPA vs IBM BPM

IBM DataPower Gateway vs IBM BPM

Apache Airflow vs IBM BPM

IBM WebSphere Application Server vs IBM BPM

Hyland OnBase vs IBM BPM

Bonita vs IBM BPM

AWS Step Functions vs IBM BPM

ADONIS vs IBM BPM

See all alternatives

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