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F5 BIG-IQ 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

F5 BIG-IQ
Ranking in Process Automation
24th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM BPM
Ranking in Process Automation
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
111
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (7th), Application Infrastructure (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Process Automation category, the mindshare of F5 BIG-IQ is 0.2%, down from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM BPM is 6.6%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Process Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Ravindra-Mali - PeerSpot reviewer
Key features like SSL uploading strengthen file handling
From the study material point of view, there are multiple certifications available. The challenge is there is hardly any study material available that can be referred to or used as a study material. Of course, from the knowledge perspective, multiple courses and details are available. However, from a hands-on experience perspective, more resources should be available on the Internet, like labs and lab preparations.
Prince Mathew - PeerSpot reviewer
More customizable than IBM FileNet and useful for automation
One suggestion for IBM BPM is to provide better integration between their products, such as DataCap, which we use for scanning. Although the new CP4BA offers offline capabilities, not everyone is on CP4BA, so enhanced integration for those on older versions would be beneficial. Another major suggestion is to offer a migration path when a product reaches its end of life. For example, there was no migration path when we moved, so we had to redo everything we had developed over ten years completely.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Features like AFM, the gateway, and Global DNS are the coolest features that save work for us."
"Scalability: To move from larger boxes to smaller boxes, along with virtualization. So, we are not locked into a particular size."
"The best aspect of the solution is that we can have everything integrated with a rather large capacity in order to personalize and configure specific rules."
"The customer service is great."
"F5 BIG-IQ has always provided us with great support."
"We use this solution on a daily basis, and it is very stable."
"The GUI is fine, at least from an engineer's perspective."
"The backup, monitoring and logging are the best features."
"We are receiving good assistance from the technical support."
"It helps improve your process through continual measurement."
"IBM BPM's best features include document sharing, management document creation, widget and barcode creation, and integration."
"The solution is stable."
"The customer service is outstanding."
"It is easy to take a requirement, put it in the code, and deploy it."
"The solution offers great notifications."
"Initially, the process architecture studio was very helpful and it was compliant with BPMN standards."
 

Cons

"The solution should improve pricing. It's expensive in comparison to other American solutions."
"The solution's rSeries has been made free, and iSeries should be made free as well."
"They could use YAML or JSON if they wanted to make it a little bit easier for us."
"There are a lot of scripts available on the internet for people who know how to use them, but with a graphical interface, it would be easier for new users."
"F5 BIG-IQ should improve by being a complete certificate management solution because currently, it is only for Venafi. Other automation platforms, should be added."
"Sometimes the solution does not work."
"From a hands-on experience perspective, more resources should be available on the Internet, like labs and lab preparations."
"I had trouble with high availability deployment in my environment."
"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."
"They should incorporate an API gateway functionality within it to simplify integrations."
"If the processing gets better, it would be more efficient."
"IBM BPM can improve the dashboards and reports. It only has two dashboards, and reporting is very difficult to build."
"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."
"Also, we would like to see integration with artificial intelligence, machine learning-type of technical capabilities. Right now, there are a lot Watson libraries out there. Building those integrations more, out-of-the-box, from IBM would be a good direction."
"I would like to see the solution be able to interact with other customer software solutions."
"There is room for improvement in the stability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"F5 BIG-IQ is a cheap solution."
"I would like the product to be cheaper."
"There is only one licensing fee for F5 BIG-IQ and everything is included in the price."
"Users have to pay an annual subscription fee for the solution's iSeries."
"We chose to purchase IBM BPM because it was bundled with the actual RPA program/solution that we decided to purchase. We decided to use Automation Anywhere tool (RPA), and it is was bundled with IBM BPM."
"I give the pricing an eight out of ten."
"The solution is highly-priced."
"IBM could improve the price. It is far too expensive."
"​We have definitely seen ROI. When we first kicked it off, we said it had to pay for itself within three years, and it did."
"The cloud and license of the subscription model for IBM BPM can be complex. There are a lot of alternatives to choose from."
"The solution might be expensive, but I can't give you a precise number. In the market here, I've seen two main products for BPM: IBM BPM and Camunda. Camunda is very popular and open-source, so there's no direct comparison."
"I think it's a reasonably priced tool, but it's important to consider which customers should buy this solution. It's designed for enterprise customers, not small ones."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
30%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about F5 BIG-IQ?
F5 BIG-IQ is a central management system for the BIG-IP.
What needs improvement with F5 BIG-IQ?
The product is really good with no significant downsides. However, better and simpler integration with ACI could improve the product.
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.
 

Comparisons

No data available
 

Also Known As

No data available
WebSphere Lombardi Edition, IBM Business Process Manager, IBM WebSphere Process Server
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
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 F5 BIG-IQ vs. IBM BPM and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.