Appian vs Bonita comparison

Appian and Bonitasoft are both solutions in the Business Process Management (BPM) category. Appian is ranked #12 with an average rating of 7.9, while Bonitasoft is ranked #19 with an average rating of 8.3. Appian holds a 5.7% mindshare in BPM, compared to Bonitasoft’s 3.5% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Appian users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Bonitasoft users who would recommend it.

Appian

Read 63 Appian reviews

4,778 Views
2,020 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Bonita

Read 27 Bonita reviews

2,599 Views
395 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Appian

Bonita

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Appian and Bonita compete in the business process management category, with Appian holding the upper hand due to its low-code rapid development and robust feature set, despite higher costs.

Features: Appian offers agile low-code rapid development, seamless BPMN 2.0 integration for business and IT, and comprehensive mobile readiness. Bonita provides flexibility with its open-source model, extensive Java integration, and user-friendly process modeling interface, suitable for customized solutions.

Room for Improvement: Appian could enhance user interface customization, offline capabilities, and DevOps integration. Bonita would benefit from better mobile integration, improved form builders, and more comprehensive support and documentation.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Appian offers flexible deployment options but faces higher costs with on-premises setups; its customer service is responsive though tech support turnaround can improve. Bonita is praised for ease of deployment on public and private clouds with generally responsive customer service, although its technical support agility is less than larger enterprise solutions.

Pricing and ROI: Appian's premium pricing is balanced by its potential for high ROI in digital transformation projects and flexible licensing models, yet remains less affordable for smaller businesses. Bonita offers a cost-effective community edition, appealing to SMBs and those seeking low upfront costs, providing solid ROI though less favorable for larger-scale implementations.

To learn more, read our detailed Appian vs. Bonita Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Appian vs. Bonita

June 2025

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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

Appian

Ranking in Business Process Management (BPM)

12th

Ranking in Process Automation

7th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Rapid Application Development Software (10th), Low-Code Development Platforms (5th), Process Mining (8th)

Bonita

Ranking in Business Process Management (BPM)

19th

Ranking in Process Automation

15th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business Process Design (11th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Business Process Management (BPM) category, the mindshare of Appian is 5.7%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Bonita is 3.5%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Business Process Management (BPM)

Featured Reviews

Nitin-Agarwal

Delivery Manager (Intelligent Business Automation) - Pega at Persistent Systems

Seamless integration enhances workflows while memory optimization can improve complex processes

I am working with all of these products: Pega, Appian, and OutSystems. I use Appian as a process orchestrator for workflow and rule-based routing, and it is preferred when I am developing an enterprise-wide application. The application is mobile-friendly, allowing me to use it across any device…

Read full review

Paparao Nadipineni

Architect at Evoke

A simple and lightweight college course automation system with third-party integrations

The initial setup is straightforward and can be completed with the environment within an hour. First, take the latest from the git repository and check the git code to the monitor studio and a bar file, a deployable Bonita archive file. Then, take that process to the Bonita server, running at runtime on another server. Finally, deploy and enable it by selecting the proper organization.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of Appian are the VPN engine, it is fast, lightweight, and easy to set up business rules. Business teams can do it by themselves. That is a very good feature."

"Technical support is quite responsive."

"The solution has a lot of strong features for the financial industry, it is very easy to use."

"Technical support is helpful."

"It is really simple to create a new app, and I like the data-centric aspect of the BPM tool."

"The low code functionality and being able to get applications faster to customers or to the market are valuable."

"The most valuable feature is business automation."

"The application life cycle is very clear. I started learning it and giving some workshops to my team. Creating the users and the building is very structured. Documentation is nice and it's easy to learn."

More Appian pros

"Compared to other products on the market, Bonita presents a pretty acceptable level of robustness."

"Bonita is simple and lightweight and is flexible to integrate with third-party systems. The UI is now flexible, whereas it was previously rigid. Any technology can be used as a frontend, including ReactJS, Angular, and others."

"The user interface is easy to use."

"It is a great product that is powerful in developing applications."

"Its user-friendliness, along with the availability of comprehensive and clear documentation on the website is the most valuable."

"Development of forms and flows."

"The solution is easy to use."

"One of the most valuable features is you can create without coding, it is a low code platform."

More Bonita pros

Cons

"Appian has a few areas for improvement, which my organization raised with the Appian team. One is the Excel output which is limited to fifty columns when it should be up to two hundred or three hundred columns."

"One of the areas that Appian is working on is to improve its UI capabilities and give more flexibility to the UI."

"The tool itself is pretty good, but the main area that we struggled with was the backend. The frontend development is really good, but the backend modeling can be streamlined a little bit. There are good integrations, but tying them through the data layer and then up into the frontend could be improved a little bit. It does read/write on the data source, and you can configure it to just write or just read, but there is a little bit of work involved."

"It has it's own built-in UI components and doesn't provide much flexibility to customize or extend those components."

"The solution could improve by being more responsive when dealing with large quantities of data. Additionally, they can make the decision or rules engine better. It cannot handle too many rules or too many decisions at once."

"We would like to see more reduced latency. We would like to make sure that the scale-out factor will be much more as workloads come in."

"It needs better integration with our existing application ecosystem."

"Appian could include other applications that we could reuse for other customers, CRM for example."

More Appian cons

"The community edition has limited module functionality. If they could release some of the functionality that's available in the enterprise edition that would be helpful to those learning to use the solution."

"Bonita must add a rule engine. We are a 360-degree partner of Bonita. We can integrate with any kind of rule engine. We have a dashboard related to engine performance, but getting a configurable dashboard for the Buildium or transactional data will add value."

"There is a considerable learning curve."

"The dashboard has limited features."

"It is missing some important features that other products have."

"The main issue with Bonita is that the workspace crashes sometimes."

"Installation could be made easier."

"I have run into a lot of problems because there is not enough documentation."

More Bonita cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is high."

"The license is not very cheap. It's on the expensive side."

"The cost depends on the number of users, although I recommend taking an unlimited license."

"The pricing can be a little confusing to customers."

"Appian is very flexible in their pricing. In general, Appian's pricing is much, much lower when compared to competition like Pega or other products. Appian also has a flexible licensing model across geographies. Pega usually goes with a single licensing cost—which is a US-based cost—for all global customers, and it's costly. Whereas Appian has a different regional licensing cost model and it can be cheaper, depending on geography. So Appian's licensing is very flexible, and cheaper when compared to other competition."

"It's an enterprise tool and can be used by enterprise only. So it's a very expensive tool."

"Licensing of Appian is less expensive when compared to other BPMs in the market."

"Product pricing compared to some of the earlier vendors, like IBM, CA, and Oracle, is quite well-priced. Although, we do feel that as we increase the number of users and the workload increases, we will have to spend more."

More Appian pricing and cost advice

"The product's pricing is acceptable. Pricing is yearly."

"The Community Edition comes free of charge."

"Price to service ratio with Bonita BPM is good."

"I believe this is a very good financial choice."

"The price is fair for what we are using the solution for."

"You pay an annual fee and can have an unlimited number of processes and users."

"Licensing cost for the Enterprise edition comes out to be around 40,000 a year. There is also a Community edition, which is free. Some customers can go for the Community edition, but some of them require the Enterprise edition. Big companies go for the Enterprise edition, which comes with a lot of additional features such as a mobile app."

"have installed the image of Bonita BPM on Amazon AWS and there is just one option to use and pay for."

More Bonita pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Educational Organization

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Educational Organization

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Which do you prefer - Appian or Camunda Platform?

Appian is fast when building simple to medium solutions. This solution offers simple drag-and-drop functionality with easy plug-and-play options. The initial setup was seamless and very easy to imp...

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Is Appian a suitable solution for beginners who have no additional preparation?

Appian is actually pretty big on educating its users, including with courses that reward you with certifications. There is a whole section on their company’s website where you can check out the edu...

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Is it easy to set up Appian or did you have to resort to professional help?

We had some issues when we were setting up Appian. It was quite surprising, since this is a low-code tool which, in its essence, means it is meant for business users and inexperienced beginners. So...

See all answers

How does Bonita compare with Camunda Platform?

One of the things we like best about Bonita is that you can create without coding - it is a low-code platform. With Bonita, you can build the entire mechanism using the GUI, it’s that simple. You c...

See all answers

What do you like most about Bonita?

The user interface is easy to use.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Bonita?

The Enterprise edition is very expensive.

See all answers

Comparisons

ServiceNow vs Appian

Compared 11% of the time

OutSystems vs Appian

Compared 10% of the time

Salesforce Platform vs Appian

Compared 10% of the time

Camunda vs Appian

Compared 9% of the time

Pega Platform vs Appian

Compared 7% of the time

More Appian Competitors

Camunda vs Bonita

Compared 54% of the time

Bizagi vs Bonita

Compared 15% of the time

Flowable vs Bonita

Compared 8% of the time

IBM BPM vs Bonita

Compared 5% of the time

SAP Signavio Process Manager vs Bonita

Compared 3% of the time

More Bonita Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Appian

April 2025

Download Appian product report

Buyer's Guide

Bonita

July 2025

Download Bonita product report

Also Known As

Appian BPM, Appian AnyWhere, Appian Enterprise BPMS

Bonita BPM

Overview

Appian is a unified low-code platform and solution used by businesses to build enterprise applications and workflows. This product adapts to the needs of clients and the technologies they are already using to combine their data in a single workflow and maximize resources. The platform has four main components through which it transforms the work process for companies of various sizes. They are:

Complete automation: Through complete automation, companies are able to coordinate and manage employees, existing systems, bots, data, and artificial intelligence (AI) in a single workflow. The solution offers a way to centrally manage all third-party automation vendors as well.
Low-code applications: Appian offers the ability to build applications faster with visual development and low-code tools. All applications are ready-made to be suitable for mobile.
Low-code data: Appian lets companies source data from multiple types of sources, eliminating the need for data migration. Through no-code and low-code solutions and industry-standard connectors, the platform also eliminates the need for data silos.
Enterprise ready: The platform offers options for companies to scale their businesses to an enterprise level without complications.

Appian is utilized across a diverse set of industries, including automotive and manufacturing, energy and utilities, education, financial services, telecom and media, transportation, retail, insurance, healthcare, and life sciences. The most frequent use cases of Appian are customer journey, governance, risk and compliance, operational efficiency, supply chain, distributed order management, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) management.

Appian Features

Appian has various features that allow users to create solutions for their businesses. These features can be separated into a few groups according to function, including automation, low-code application development, and integrations and data. Some of the most frequently used features of Appian include:

Robotic process automation (RPA): Users of Appian can assign software bots to perform rules-based tasks that need to be repeated over a set course of time. This can improve efficiency and performance within an organization while saving human resources.
Intelligent document processing: The tool offers a feature for quick and accurate extraction and structuring of data. This can reduce time and costs for organizations because it eliminates the need for outsourcing such services.
AI: Appian utilizes artificial intelligence to enhance applications, workflows, and automation. AI is also used to address complex processes and unique situations.
Business rules: Organizations can automate and simplify work processes while adhering to their operating procedures.
Application development: Appian provides a low-code development feature that allows users to deploy applications over ten times faster than through conventional approaches. This feature not only allows for quick application building, but also applications that run on multiple types of platforms, seamless data integration, and business scalability.
Integrations and data: Appian allows for data integration from a wide array of sources without the need for migration. This contributes to easy access to data across systems, real-time data insights, improved user experience, and accelerated development.

Appian Benefits

The benefits of using Appian include:

The solution ensures seamless organization growth, as it supports various UX patterns, common data schemes, and upgrades, used to facilitate application development on a bigger scale.
Appian can increase process speed and deliver applications considerably faster compared to conventional development.
The platform is easy to use and suitable for complete beginners to build applications and workflows.
Appian offers a variety of design tools that facilitate development and deployment.
Appian offers detailed real-time data insight which allows organizations to access relevant information about their processes as they are developing.
The solution offers clients the ability to move data between the cloud, on-premise, and hybrid configurations.
The platform is easy to optimize, which allows businesses to utilize it according to their personal needs.
Appian offers connectivity across web, mobile, email, voice, and chat, providing a multi-channel experience for companies and their clients.

Reviews from Real Users

A practice leader - digital process automation at a computer software company values Appian highly because the product is easy to develop, low-code, and has a good user interface.

Alan G., an advisory board member at Codecon VR, Appian offers a clear application life cycle, easy to learn documentation, and comes with a fundamentals course.

Appian

Bonitasoft helps innovative companies worldwide deliver better digital user experiences for customers and employees. The extensible and open Bonita application platform unleashes the full potential of multidisciplinary development teams to create Living Apps: applications that allow continuous and incremental improvement, connecting tailored user interfaces with reliable back-office operations.

Bonitasoft

Sample Customers

Hansard Global plc, Punch Taverns, Pirelli, Crawford & Company, EDP Renewables, Queensland Government Department of State Development, Infrastructure and Planning (, Bank of Tennessee

With more than 1000 customers in 75 countries, and its ecosystem of more than 120,000 members, Bonitasoft is the largest provider of open-source Business Process Management, Low-code and Digital Transformation software worldwide.

Buyer's Guide

Appian vs. Bonita

June 2025

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