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IBM BPM vs Temporal 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

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)
Temporal
Ranking in Process Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Process Automation category, the mindshare of IBM BPM is 6.6%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Temporal is 7.0%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Process Automation
 

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.
AbhishekDash - PeerSpot reviewer
Orchestrates infrastructure tasks like deployment, deletion, and management
Temporal focus on developers rather than business users. In contrast to older workflow orchestration engines like Camunda, which are more business-oriented and strongly emphasize UI and workflow authoring, Temporal is geared toward developers. It provides extensive capabilities for building complex workflows. A standout feature of Temporal is its handling of long-running workflows, a significant advantage over many other solutions. Temporal excels in managing distributed transactions and application state durability, especially in microservice environments where transactions might fail due to network issues. Temporal simplifies these challenges by managing retries, fail-safes, and circuit breakers. As a result, developers don't need to implement these features manually; Temporal handles them implicitly, though it also allows for tuning based on specific needs.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its workflow and integration with SAP are the most valuable features. It is also a stable solution."
"There is information during the process that the analyst will look at, their procedures. We created a part of the application such that the business can change those procedures as needed, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. As the reps go through the process, they don't necessarily know it's changing, they just know they have to refer to some documentation, and the business can keep that up to date."
"The solution is stable."
"It excels at analytics. It provides visibility across all activities of a company's processes and performance."
"It helps improve your process through continual measurement."
"We have used a lot of out-of-the-box reporting on the process performance metrics. We have been able to make suggested changes to staff for this role or streamlining by eliminate some activities where people were not requiring a lot of work in the first place."
"They have some quick-win programs that are designed to come in, they'll bring a developer in and they'll work with your developer to get you started. That's what we did and that worked really great. We got an understanding of the product, we got an understanding of how to deploy the product. And when we were done with that engagement, we were off and running."
"I would say that I like its GUI designer the best."
"We like the fact that the whole process is durable, which is very useful to us."
"It's easy to get started and user-friendly."
"When some jobs take a lot of time and fail midway, the solution’s retry feature automatically causes them to retry."
"Temporal provides visibility into workflow progress and analytics and supports scheduled tasks with customizable settings, making it very convenient."
"What I like best about Temporal is its durable execution, which means you don't need to write many boilerplate code for critical pieces, especially for retries. It also has great observability and a nice dashboard to see issues without digging into logs. The interface for viewing activities is excellent, with good tracing that shows how long activities took and what ran, making it almost perfect for debugging."
"The most valuable feature is its ability to manage and automate workflows without manual intervention efficiently."
"What I like best about the tool is that it's easy to install, especially since it uses JavaScript. It's also easy to set up with Docker, and the documentation is easy to understand."
"The most valuable thing about Temporal is that we can create multiple and child workflows. We can segregate work as we want, which is good for work organization. It's also easy to maintain. We're trying to generate and fill PDF forms with custom data, including digital signatures. We call AWS and do all activities through Temporal, like calling and saving data in buckets. We do this because we have a lot of load, with multiple users requesting data. We have two types of users: admin and customer. The admin creates forms, and employees or customers fill them out. When admin gets a form, it's stored in Temporal."
 

Cons

"Importing and exporting between multiple environments is more difficult with other tools."
"All our clients are changing to microservice and cloud service. However, BPM does not have a solution for microservice and cloud service."
"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."
"The constant switch between Eclipse and its web versions can be annoying and confusing."
"The business would like to use the product with a lot less IT and equipment involvement."
"I suggest establishing a developer forum for better communication and issue resolution. Also, the administration panel could be improved for task management."
"It needs more customization. We like to customize the screens to show more things related to our company."
"Could increase vulnerability and security patches to make it more robust."
"Developers often mention the desire for a more intuitive visualization of workflow states."
"I don't like the limitations on data flow, particularly the difficulty of passing large amounts of data between different activities."
"There are areas where Temporal could improve. For instance, calling multiple microservices with Temporal introduces latency due to workflow registration and analytics overhead."
"Temporal lacks many resources, like YouTube videos, which users can use to learn or refer to if they get stuck with the solution."
"Configuring workflows can be improved —the solution could offer more options, but it's not a must-have."
"Temporal images aren’t FIPS compliant, and we have to be FIPS compliant."
"Temporal could be improved by making it more user-friendly for beginners and non-technical staff, ensuring easier integration and usability across different use cases."
"Temporal doesn't have built-in data storage to store the state of the ongoing execution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is good but could be a little lower."
"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."
"When considering the features of the solution the price is expensive compared to competitors."
"​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."
"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 solution is highly-priced."
"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."
"The pricing is very high."
"Temporal is open-source and free to use, which is great. We didn't have to pay for any premium features."
"The savings weren't as big as we initially expected, but they were pretty great from a developer's perspective."
"The tool is open source under the MIT license, so there are no hidden fees. You can freely use everything on their GitHub and Docker images."
"Temporal is a free, open-source tool."
"It is worth the price."
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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
28%
Computer Software Company
17%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Temporal?
Temporal OSS is expensive in infrastructure, but it brings back the reliability that companies need.
What needs improvement with Temporal?
The actual user interface is still in its early stages. It’s very basic. Users don’t really have a complex permission model yet. Users don’t really have ways to automate things like, for example, p...
What is your primary use case for Temporal?
We [my company] use it to run a large workload. We have a set of security scans we want to perform, and we distribute them over a full day, that’s over 24 hours. We use it to orchestrate all the st...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

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

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