We performed a comparison between BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench and Bonita based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC, IBM, Broadcom and others in Mainframe Application Development."It's a modernized development portal and helps reduce the learning curve for younger people coming in to work on the platform,"
"The smart editor helps because it will code-complete for me. I can see code working a lot faster and I'm able to get things coded in less time."
"It helps our staff work by speeding up their documentation process."
"We can develop in parallel today on ISPF, but it's giving us the advantage of the newer interface into the mainframe programming languages that younger programmers can use and are familiar with, rather than using the ISPF green screen."
"The most valuable feature of Topaz is Xpediter. It's more flexible than Xpediter through MVS."
"Once we got the configurations and deployment rolled out, it was very stable. I haven't had any major issues with Eclipse or the Topaz Workbench plugins."
"From a user perspective, the GUIs make it easier for people to see and interact with files on the mainframe."
"Flexible and drag-and-drop type of UI is very valuable. The integrations are also very good. You can build workflows very quickly, which is my favorite activity. By using the GUI, you can build the entire mechanism, notifications, and all this kind of stuff."
"Its user-friendliness, along with the availability of comprehensive and clear documentation on the website is the most valuable."
"One of the most valuable features is you can create without coding, it is a low code platform."
"Compared to other products on the market, Bonita presents a pretty acceptable level of robustness."
"I find process management and user interface designing the most valuable features."
"Bonita is user-friendly."
"The solution is stable. Even the older versions are stable."
"The most valuable features of Bonita are the connectors, detailed documentation, and web applications. The documentation was useful because it is how I learned how to use it."
"I'm always looking for improvement in things like the documentation, to make things a little bit easier and simpler to understand, a place where people can go to troubleshoot issues."
"It would be nice to have an audit trail to see what mainframe developers are using what."
"It's not as intuitive as it should be. In terms of navigation, there is a large training curve for using it. For a millennial it might be better, if they're used to Eclipse. But coming from a non-Eclipse environment and using Eclipse, though I have experience with Eclipse, it might be cumbersome."
"It would be good if the vendors would work together or at least have some collaboration between them, so they would know what would work and what wouldn't work. Right now, the way things are working, they're relying on the customer to make everything work."
"It often doesn't play well with other plugins in the environment."
"The area for improvement is related to the testing tools that are available for unit testing or acceptance testing. I know they have some out there that we are not licensed for at this time, but it seems like some of the Eclipse tools that are used for other programming languages, they're all just built-in and they're a little more intuitive to the developers. Making those testing tools as intuitive as possible, and as integrated as possible into the workbench, would be really beneficial."
"I'm waiting to see what 19.2 for Topaz looks like, but I have a problem with the JES Explorer right now. It limits you to a certain prefix for job names and there are some groups that have multiple prefixes that they'd like to see all at once in their job names, because of how they work in a group. And they can't see that in the JES Explorer."
"The ability to edit source code that has special characters is limited. The ability to incorporate or convert REXX into macros that are usable under the Topaz software is not there. And the REXX macros that I have developed over 40 years of work are useless, so I have a toolbox I can't use or deploy using the Topaz technology, while I can use it under MVS."
"Bonita can improve by offering more flexibility. The developer does not receive the code of the application to modify it. Most of the other solutions I have used allow the developers to change or improve the code that is generated."
"I have run into a lot of problems because there is not enough documentation."
"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."
"We are struggling a bit with integrations."
"It would be nice to have a wizard to help walk through the development process and create a backbone."
"There could be an improvement in IoT connectivity."
"Automation in vacation of a human resources replacement would be a good improvement in the product."
"Installation could be made easier."
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BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench is ranked 1st in Mainframe Application Development while Bonita is ranked 11th in Business Process Management (BPM) with 27 reviews. BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench is rated 7.2, while Bonita is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench writes "File editing/browsing and the debugging features help onboard developers who are new to the mainframe environment". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Bonita writes "A simple and lightweight college course automation system with third-party integrations". BMC Compuware Topaz Workbench is most compared with IBM Rational Developer for z Systems and BMC Compuware Xpediter, whereas Bonita is most compared with Camunda, Bizagi, IBM BPM, Apache Airflow and Visio.
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