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IBM BPM vs Red Hat Polymita Business Suite vs TIBCO iProcess Suite comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Business Process Management (BPM) category, the mindshare of IBM BPM is 4.1%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Polymita Business Suite is 0.4%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TIBCO iProcess Suite is 0.8%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Process Management (BPM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM BPM4.1%
TIBCO iProcess Suite0.8%
Red Hat Polymita Business Suite0.4%
Other94.7%
Business Process Management (BPM)
 

Featured Reviews

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.
LY
Partner at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Gives you the ability to design the screens outside the software and connect them as a component with the BPM engine
On the improvement part, I think the documentation for the tool, the official documentation, is not as strong as in other tools. You have lot of community. That is good. But sometimes you need - when you are working on a big client or a critical process - to be certain about certain things. So I think that the documentation for the tool, from the company, could be a little stronger. Also, the size of the team within Latin America. The size of the team that, in each country, knows about BPM - because of the size of Red Hat in comparison with the size of IBM or Oracle - is very little. You have maybe three or four people in the company, in Red Hat Mexico, that know about BPM; and in Peru, maybe one, who also needs to know about five other tools. You have help there, but sometimes you don't need that kind of help. You need to sit down with someone and take a good amount of time and discuss a process to solve a problem. It's a consequence of the size. IBM and Oracle are monsters. They have, say, 100 more employees than Red Hat. That is the problem. But on the other side, the price is good. You could pay four times less, five times less, in an average implementation with Red Hat than with IBM. So there is a trade-off.
SA
Senior Software Development Team Leader at sejel
An easy-to-use solution with great integration
It involves a lot of investment. The learning curve is not similar to other products, like K2. Regarding the user interface, I have to access workflows and define and manage the processes on the variant of a Windows application, which is not accessible if you don't have access from the client to install it on the workstation. And most of the solutions we're currently evaluating are web-based. Our customers and developers have complained that the UI is a little bit confusing. It has lots of elements. It's not user-intuitive compared to other products. Other than that, the licensing model is our main concern.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"IBM BPM's best features include document sharing, management document creation, widget and barcode creation, and integration."
"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."
"It is transparent to business users because it is mostly picture based modelling."
"It excels at analytics. It provides visibility across all activities of a company's processes and performance."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to customize your rules and put them inside the tool."
"It is a stale solution."
"Everything is coupled together and comes as one solution."
"Agility is the key. It gives our customers a faster way to be able to implement processes, get ownership of task, visibility into a process. The ability to modify that process, optimize that process over time, is probably the biggest benefit that they get from the software."
"The main factor that separates Red Hat software from Oracle, IBM, Pegasystems, is the ability that it gives you to design the screens outside the software and connect it as another component with the BPM engine."
"It's very simple to use and the integration features between Java and other services within the workflow are very easy."
 

Cons

"The major issue is the pricing, which is very high. IBM BPM also lacks smaller solutions, so I must purchase multiple solutions to start with workflows and applications."
"We thought there might have been a little more discussion early on about, "Hey, if you're doing this, set it up this way," or some best practices or some guidance that we didn't get."
"We had a weird problem that whenever the database would go down, even for a few seconds, it broke the connection. It would not come back up as it was supposed to. However, working with IBM, we were able to figure out a fix, then it came back up, even after an interruption of the database."
"We have had to use Mule as an alternative integration tool because it is more flexible than IBM BPM."
"The analysis reports could be much better."
"Process Server is no more available than new products out there, but in general IBM has a high cost and complex setup."
"I would say the scalability is very good but it's not perfect. It is much more scalable than it has been in the past but... it does require some work to keep it stable. So that is an area that should be improved."
"Process versioning was tricky, not straightforward."
"I think the documentation for the tool, the official documentation, is not as strong as in other tools. You have lot of community. That is good. But sometimes you need - when you are working on a big client or a critical process - to be certain about certain things. So I think that the documentation for the tool, from the company, could be a little stronger."
"Our customers and developers have complained that the UI is a little bit confusing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is quite high, I would rate it two out of five."
"The solution is highly-priced."
"Its price is on the higher side, and it can be improved. Its licensing is on a yearly basis. There are no additional costs."
"I rate the tool's pricing a seven out of ten."
"Licensing is managed by the client, but we know it is yearly. Camunda is relatively cheaper. There is not much difference in pricing of IBM and PEGA. For large licensing, there are discounts as well."
"I wish it was less expensive. I don't know why their pricing model is so high for a piece of software that could benefit so many. It just seems to me that they could have a lower cost, maybe with fewer features or whatever, but it should be possible to do a lower cost workflow software that uses the same interface and underlying engine but does not cost so much that you have to be a Fortune 50 company to buy it. It is annoying to me. There are a lot of solutions that IBM has that are really powerful but nobody can afford them. They know their business, but I still feel that there are a lot of customers who would benefit from this sort of thing. I don't know what this elitism is all about. I am sure they have people doing the money numbers, but it seems like you can make a lot more money by selling it to way more people for a little bit less."
"When considering the features of the solution the price is expensive compared to competitors."
"It has a low cost to implement. You'll get your money back in the same year that you complete the project."
"Without any discount, you need tools that cost roughly between $80,000 to $100,000. That is less than with IBM. And on top of that you need the consulting. That will be another $200,000. So a quarter to a third of a million dollars is needed to use get started with BPM. So I usually recommend to my clients that they begin with a little project, with the community version. That way they don't spend $200,000 or $300,000, they spend $150,000 and zero on software."
"The price could definitely be lower."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Insurance Company
6%
No data available
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise72
No data available
No data available
 

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 inter...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM BPM?
Once it is installed, maintaining it is not a big issue.
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Also Known As

WebSphere Lombardi Edition, IBM Business Process Manager, IBM WebSphere Process Server
Polymita Business Suite
iProcess Suite
 

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
Bayer, Grupo Televisa, RCBC, Peavey
Delta Air Lines, Detroit Water and Sewerage, DVLA, E-Plus, FedEx, Geisinger Health System, ING Turkey, Kempen & Co., KPN, LCL, Merck, Merial
Find out what your peers are saying about Camunda, Automation Anywhere, Pega and others in Business Process Management (BPM). Updated: January 2026.
881,821 professionals have used our research since 2012.