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CA Process Automation vs IBM BPM 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

CA Process Automation
Ranking in Process Automation
37th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM BPM
Ranking in Process Automation
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
113
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (4th), Application Infrastructure (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Process Automation category, the mindshare of CA Process Automation is 1.0%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM BPM is 5.5%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Process Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM BPM5.5%
CA Process Automation1.0%
Other93.5%
Process Automation
 

Featured Reviews

SJ
Automation Solutions Developer at HCL Technologies
Added value to the delivery of services and the customer experience
We design end-to-end automation solutions for repetitive tasks performed by IT support teams This tool is used in my organization for automating IT infrastructure related incidents or service requests.  Built-in operators available for most integrations. Easy to manage. Attended/unattended…
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The benefits are the efficiency we achieve with such a product, as we could automate processes which were done in the past by humans, speeding up the reaction by 10 times and saving us a lot of money."
"It is easy to debug and troubleshoot."
"If you’re planning or looking for an application able to create process automation, stop looking."
"CA Process Automation manager is a very powerful production tool."
"We took our server provisioning process from about 30 days to about 4 days on the first iteration of implementation."
"PAM has the ability to integrate and build solutions that work well in CA's suite of service management products and those that are outside of service management."
"Technical support is unequivocally excellent; in fact, the best customer service and technical support I’ve experienced during my 12 years in IT."
"It has provided ROI by auto-resolving incidents or requests in the ITSM queue, improved MTTR and SLA adherence, and added value to the delivery of services and the customer experience."
"The most valuable feature of IBM BPM is the low code design, and ease of maintenance, and additionally, the integration is good and easy to do."
"We are receiving good assistance from the technical support."
"IBM BPM is easy when it comes to creating processes; it has an elaborated way to explore the IBM BPM processes and anyone can easily learn how to use IBM BPM within a period of a month or two."
"One of the reasons for adopting this solution ten years ago was its ease of use. It had a lot of off-the-shelf functionality, and it did not need to be developed specifically for the project that we were implementing. That was the main reason for adopting it in the beginning."
"Its Analytics is the most valuable feature."
"The functionality to design UI to be responsive and can run on multiple devices."
"It is transparent to business users because it is mostly picture based modelling."
"Its dashboard is easy to use and very good. It allows us to customize."
 

Cons

"Every so often the service needs to be restarted otherwise it runs slower and slower. I think this may be due to a memory leak."
"Somehow the product group within CA left the product dry from some regular expression functionality."
"I'd like to see additional form functionality and having Python as an available common script language."
"Better reporting, because we have to true up our licenses every three months because we license on running concurrent processes, so we have to provide a report to CA every three months using their tool -- which never works."
"Although it's drag-and-drop, there's a little bit of a learning curve to use it correctly."
"Make some of the features more open source that way developers can have more flexibility."
"It’s very complex, which is one of the disadvantages."
"OCR capability should be added as a feature."
"Finding errors and bugs on the system is not easy. We can't seem to use the events or logs to find them, so it makes it difficult to debug the system. They really need to work on their debugging features to make is much, much easier. It would improve the solution considerably and should be something they add in a future release."
"Yes, unfortunately the event manager component of Lombardi didn’t scale well, so that became our bottleneck."
"I would say it's an option to consider, but I wouldn't recommend it since we've switched to another tool."
"We need to make changes quickly, and sometimes the IBM team is very slow with the product evolution or changes to the tool."
"IBM BPM lacks openness, that is, the ability to become open for new options in terms of APIs, front-end development, and ecosystem. IBM BPM has been quite closed. One of the main improvements would be to somehow embed the rules engine into IBM BPM. Merging IBM BRMS and the rules engine with IBM BPM would be helpful. If there was some simpler way to define rules without having to put IBM BRMS on top of it, it would be good. It's something that we can get out of Camunda but not out of IBM BPM."
"Performance on large scale requirements could also be improved."
"IBM BPM is stable, but sometimes there are issues with the server."
"The analysis reports could be much better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It has provided ROI by auto resolving incidents or requests in the ITSM queue, improved MTTR and SLA adherence, and added value to the delivery of services and the customer experience."
"There are a lot of automation savings from any process which is repeatable."
"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."
"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."
"When considering the features of the solution the price is expensive compared to competitors."
"It should provide more flexibility to connect with external systems, and there should be in-built services that can be used to integrate with other systems quickly."
"It gives us a good return on investment."
"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."
"Starting out with Express can also help reduce the cost for adopting the product."
"IBM BPM cannot be considered a cheaply priced product. IBM BPM is a really expensive product compared to other companies. One needs to opt for the perpetual licensing model offered by IBM."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Performing Arts
8%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise72
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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...
 

Also Known As

CA IT Process Automation Manager
WebSphere Lombardi Edition, IBM Business Process Manager, IBM WebSphere Process Server
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Unum, HCL Technologies, Logicalis
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
Find out what your peers are saying about CA Process Automation vs. IBM BPM and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.