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IBM BPM vs IBM DataPower Gateway comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

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

IBM BPM
Ranking in Application Infrastructure
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
111
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (7th), Process Automation (5th)
IBM DataPower Gateway
Ranking in Application Infrastructure
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) (5th), SOA Application Gateways (1st), API Management (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Application Infrastructure category, the mindshare of IBM BPM is 3.4%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway is 4.4%, up from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Infrastructure
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Mehdi El Filahi - PeerSpot reviewer
Security features meets compliance needs and offers MPGW (Multi-Protocol Gateway) that simplifies integration efforts
While I like IBM products, I'm not an evangelist. I work with Java, Microsoft ASP.NET, and various technologies. I'm not tied to any specific vendor. However, I do find IBM to be a bit greedy. It's a large, profit-driven company. The support team is mostly based in India, and they follow a very structured process and protocol. Sometimes, it feels like playing ping pong with them – lots of back and forth before the problem gets escalated. You might even have to get your sales rep involved to push things along. For me, the support it could be better. Indian support teams aren't inherently bad, but with IBM, it feels impersonal. They respond, sure. But if it's a complex technical issue, they might ask you a lot of questions that just seem designed to waste your time. Sometimes it feels like they hope you'll get frustrated and solve the problem yourself.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Overall, I'm satisfied with the product. If you compare it with other products, it's probably not as easygoing or as simple to implement as the rest. But after you get used to it, it works. It has a lot of capabilities and potential, but the people, who come from different technologies, have some difficulty getting used to the way of working with IBM products."
"Its workflow and integration with SAP are the most valuable features. It is also a stable solution."
"We made the transformation to agile. Altogether with BPM, it is the total package."
"The solution is stable."
"The case management and its integration with process design are good features."
"The system integration layer is valuable because this enables an organization to create a single point where all the key organizational master data is held in different IT applications across different functions, that can be accessed and updated."
"Automating the whole workflow process to give our data steward the ability to take actions rapidly, and making sure we have all the data synced within the different platforms that we are using."
"It is a very powerful solution."
"The solution is stable."
"The solution is scalable, our customers are mostly South African banks and they handle mostly transactions with this solution."
"You don't have to have a separate DMC proxy because DataPower Gateway is an appliance and will take care of a lot of security features. These include data validations, encryption, as well as XML or any type of scripting or security threats that are present."
"The most valuable feature is the security appliance, it's very secure."
"The solution is robust."
"The solution is straightforward and for large organizations, it functions well."
"I like all of the features in this product and it does what it's supposed to do."
"The product's most valuable features are AAA policies and security features."
 

Cons

"IBM BPM uses JavaScript as a programming language for the server-side. I don’t know why it’s not Java, as it’s more powerful and the JavaScript part is translated into Java anyway."
"We are a government organization, and we are the largest government power sector in India. We generate around 30% of power in India. Therefore, our processes are quite complex. Although IBM BPM is a low-code or no-code software, if you want to have extremely complex workflows, just the business process diagrams are not helpful in creating those workflows. While implementing complex workflows, only the process flow diagrams did not help us. We had to write a lot of Java scripts and Java queries to achieve what we wanted. Its integration capabilities with the SAP environment have to be improved. At present, we are only talking at the web services environment level. Its price also needs to be improved. It is currently expensive. Previously, Active Directory required a heterogeneous environment, but now they want a homogeneous environment. We had onboarded employees through Microsoft Active Directory, and now I have to implement Microsoft AD only from the cloud for my vendors."
"When you have to integrate files for enterprise applications."
"We care about technology and support because support is very important and a BPM is not easy to implement."
"The interface is limited and should improve in the future."
"Performance on large scale requirements could also be improved."
"The stability varies because it involves a lot of other components like databases, so sometimes if something goes wrong there, it can't recover from the fatal errors."
"Process versioning was tricky, not straightforward."
"The user interface or the application development perspective and customization of the tool could be a little better."
"The IBM community does not have much engagement from the IT community in Saudi Arabia and developers for this solution are difficult to find."
"An area for improvement in IBM DataPower Gateway is its price point because it's a relatively expensive product. Sometimes, when the customer use case is just a very small subset of what's being offered in IBM DataPower Gateway, then the product can be expensive, making my company lose some of the opportunities because of the expensive pricing. A lower price point for IBM DataPower Gateway, even if that results in a less feature-rich version, would be appreciated. In terms of additional features that I'd like to see in the next release of IBM DataPower Gateway, nothing specific comes to mind because IBM constantly improves its standards and provides quarterly updates to the product, so it's quite fine."
"Traceability could be improved, especially for business operations. The traceability of the transactions could be an improvement point for DataPower to work on. It would be better if they provided JSON support. JSON protocol data has changed format. It started performing internal transformation to JSONx. This might be an additional complexity."
"Additional documentation needs to be provided for complex automations."
"Some pre-packaged connectors for integration with various applications, such as SaaS offerings, would be a useful addition."
"Scripting needs improvement. It's hard for our customers."
"The DCDR process should be less complex."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The product is expensive considering the hardware and software costs."
"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."
"The solution is highly-priced."
"The cloud and license of the subscription model for IBM BPM can be complex. There are a lot of alternatives to choose from."
"I rate the tool's pricing a seven out of ten."
"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."
"Price wise, IBM BPM is cheaper than other similar solutions and has excellent pricing."
"This product is a bit expensive as IBM products are costly assets. However, for enterprise customers it is a worthwhile investment."
"Most customers' use case budgets are not inlined with the price of IBM DataPower Gateway. It is too expensive."
"The total cost of IBM DataPower Gateway would depend on the configuration, but in my experience, it can amount to 60,000 Euros per box, even for the virtual version. Usually, customers need high availability and a non-production environment, so the total price for IBM DataPower Gateway can be quite a lot. It can be 200,000 Euros or a similar figure."
"The tool's initial costing is expensive for small banks and financial institutions."
"The appliance is a bit on the expensive side for the workloads that are not too high."
"As far as I know, they have a perpetual license for this product. They are paying perpetual fees rather than an annual subscription or annual pricing."
"It is an expensive solution."
"IBM DataPower Gateway is quite expensive to get resources to work on this product. If the price could be cheaper, I think that will make it a little bit better and easily accessible to smaller clients. Then it could compete with other solutions that are available in the market. There's a whole lot of other solutions available that work well and are cheaper than IBM's products."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
30%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
30%
Insurance Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 do you like most about IBM DataPower Gateway?
The MPGW (Multi-Protocol Gateway) is great because it allows you to easily expose services using various protocols – web services, REST (JSON), and others. This flexibility simplifies things.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM DataPower Gateway?
I would rate the pricing a two out of ten, with one being high price, and ten being low price. It's high-priced for smaller companies. But it is okay for enterprises. So, the price could be more fl...
What needs improvement with IBM DataPower Gateway?
The DCDR process should be less complex. AI should improve developer efficiency and effort. Whenever I am writing code, it should give recommendations automatically by incorporating AI so I can wri...
 

Also Known As

WebSphere Lombardi Edition, IBM Business Process Manager, IBM WebSphere Process Server
WebSphere DataPower, IBM DataPower, IBM WebSphere DataPower
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
RBL Bank, Availity
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM BPM vs. IBM DataPower Gateway and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.