We compared Camunda Platform and IBM BPM based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison of Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Camunda Platform seems to be the superior solution. Because users are divided over how easy IBM BPM is to deploy and because of its high price, users feel Camunda Platform is a better investment.
"We like the idea of working with Cawemo because it enables us to keep on working, remotely or not. It allows us to collaborate between areas. It's easy to model and easy to use"
"I've found the active community most valuable but it also provides you with a lot of other features."
"Camunda Platform has a very good interface for workflow and business process design."
"I like everything about the entire BPM that comes with the BPM suite."
"Being able to use a Java-based solution makes the product flexible."
"We can share, discuss, and develop the model together — from a distance. It's really helped us during these times of isolation."
"I can use any other tools to create services and the UI, and then use them together with the Camunda BPMN engine."
"The most valuable features are the management of internal processes, the ability to execute from design and the model for internal processes, the ability to make processes visible, and the ability to have information about the current state of each instance."
"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"
"With the tester coach wherein you can interact with the interface while you're designing the process."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"It is easy to take a requirement, put it in the code, and deploy it."
"This solution has always been lacking in the user interface (UI), it needed to be improved a lot. However, from the acquisition of Spark UI, the UI is much better. Overall the solution is robust and has the ability to integrate with any product for complex workflows."
"The functionality to design UI to be responsive and can run on multiple devices."
"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."
"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."
"Process interfaces between diagrams could be improved."
"The product must provide more videos and training materials."
"Without a proper frontend, the business cannot effectively use the platform."
"The cockpit features of the Camunda Platform can be improved to make it a bit more user-friendly, in terms of providing a bit more user experience for non-technical users. There could be some additional documentation added."
"Lacking in forms visualization."
"I have faced problems in bringing up the Cockpit in terms of GUI processes. I think that there is room for improvement in those areas."
"The primary issue regarding the Camuto platform is its high cost of training. This is why I haven't discussed it extensively, as compared to other products that are more affordable in terms of developer training."
"Initial setup can be quite complex."
"The engine itself tends to accumulate a lot of data that needs to be cleaned up, and that's the kind of thing that keeps it from, in some scenarios, scaling as much as it needs to. And then, when you're building solutions, if you're not careful to keep the screens from being associated with too much data, if you're going to just do things the way that a lot of people would just assume that they can do, without having experience of having made those mistakes before, it will accumulate a lot of data, and that will cause it to perform very badly."
"We have been experiencing bad performance and instability."
"I would like to see the solution be able to interact with other customer software solutions."
"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."
"IBM BPM can improve the dashboards and reports. It only has two dashboards, and reporting is very difficult to build."
"They could provide case studies to investigate and understand the functionality of business processes before development."
"The pricing is a little bit high. It's gone up in cost."
"I would like IBM to consider including AI-enabled process mining, robotic process automation, and very good OCR capabilities from the computer vision side."
Camunda is ranked 1st in Business Process Management (BPM) with 68 reviews while IBM BPM is ranked 5th in Business Process Management (BPM) with 105 reviews. Camunda is rated 8.2, while IBM BPM is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Camunda writes "Open-source, easy to define new processes, and easy to transition to new business process definitions". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM BPM writes "Offers good case management and its integration with process design but there's a learning curve". Camunda is most compared with Apache Airflow, Bizagi, Pega BPM, Appian and Bonita, whereas IBM BPM is most compared with Appian, Pega BPM, IBM Business Automation Workflow, Apache Airflow and AWS Step Functions. See our Camunda vs. IBM BPM report.
See our list of best Business Process Management (BPM) vendors and best Process Automation vendors.
We monitor all Business Process Management (BPM) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
Hi Leandro,
those two BPM's shouldn't be compared on the functional level. They are different type of solutions.
Camunda offers the workflow engine and decission engine, where you can create process models according to BPMN and DMM standards. This gives you the flexibility and agility in the process management. It also gives you the tools to monitor, manage and optimize those processes.
Camunda provides very limited functionalities, if it comes to end user interfaces. Usually they are built as custom applications or existing application are used. With Camunda projects you always focus on automation, that requires system integration and custom development and usually concerns core business processes.
Camunda is an openAPI solution, which makes the integration fast and easy. It is a common situation in financial industry, that you have many systems, that need to be integrated in one process, that is why Camunda is so popular in this sector.
Before you decide on the switch, you have to consider the processes you want to use it for. If this is for standard processes like holiday requests, invoice approvals etc. Camunda is not the best option. But if you want to automate sales or after sales processes, client/partner onboarding, claims management, debt collection you should definitely consider Camunda.
I found once in Camunda documents an interesting comparison between Camunda and BPM suites:
"On a blank canvas, an artist can paint a picture in exactly the way he imagines. Alternatively, there is the principle of “painting by numbers”, where even the artistic layman can create stunning images by coloring in predetermined areas. However, they can only create what was already pre-designed."
And finally, Camunda is available as open source solution and there is no vendor lock.
I hope it helped ;-) There is always an option to have a talk...
Cheers,
Piotr
You could have a look also on jBPM / jBPM based solutions (as an alternative to Camunda).
Camunda has limited capabilities in the community version. In the case of jBPM, the same capability set is provided in both the community and enterprise versions (the only difference is that with the enterprise version you pay for support).
If you are looking for the jBPM engine combined with content services in one unified platform/user experience, you could have a look at SEAL (https://star-storage.ro/product/seal-online/).