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IBM Blueworks Live pros and cons

Vendor: IBM

4.1 out of 5

21 reviews
91% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

IBM Blueworks Live offers real-time modeling and design, centralizing critical processes for enhanced management efficiency. With compatibility with Microsoft Office and access to BPMN-compliant cloud documentation, it ensures availability and connectivity. However, it lacks built-in simulation and customizable reports, impacting management insights. Missing integration with Microsoft Visio and restrictive importing/exporting from Excel limit interoperability and efficiency. Including customer journey mapping and ERP integration could further enhance process documentation.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

IBM Blueworks Live offers real-time modeling and design capabilities, making it highly suitable for conducting workshops and getting instant outputs.

For banking operations, IBM Blueworks Live serves as a central repository, ensuring critical processes are not scattered across various platforms and enhances process governance.

The platform's cloud-based nature enables mobile and desktop accessibility, ensuring connectivity and eliminating the need for installations.

IBM Blueworks Live simplifies documenting and digitizing processes, integrates with IBM BPM and ODM, and offers a comprehensive automated workflow.

Collaboration is significantly enhanced through IBM Blueworks Live, allowing online interactions and feedback similar to a social network model.

CONS

Import and export functionality is restrictive, with limitations when working with Excel and Visio.

Blueworks Live lacks integrated simulation features and ad hoc reporting capabilities.

APIs are not user-friendly for non-technical business users, necessitating IT assistance.

Lack of Six Sigma and Lean compatibility raises concerns from users.

Blueworks Live does not support image insertion within process maps.

IBM Blueworks Live Pros review quotes

Global Innovation Director at Ernst & Young

Jul 5, 2023

The ease of documenting and digitizing the processes was valuable to us.

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AJ

Head of Process Innovation and Robotic Automation at Prolifics

Oct 9, 2018

You can use if from your mobile device or you can be on the desktop. It doesn't matter. You are always connected. It is cloud-based, so you don't have to install anything.

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Global Innovation Director at Ernst & Young

Jan 9, 2020

For me, what I find to be the most valuable is its simplicity and the association with Microsoft Office.

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IBM Blueworks Live

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Learn what your peers think about IBM Blueworks Live. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: September 2025.

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JM

VP Client Services at Salient process

Jun 19, 2019

It has the ability to document in different formats. It is not tied to a specific model. You can look at it from different angles and see the intuitive nature of it. It always generates a valid diagram. You cannot create something that is not BPMN compliant.

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Consultant 2 at Protiviti

Sep 1, 2025

IBM Blueworks Live provides clear ROI as it saves both time and money.

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Risk at Citibank N.A. - ISP Peering

Mar 22, 2018

For me the most valuable feature is that it's one depository for our bank. So it's not like everybody has their critical processes on SharePoint or on their desktops. Everything is centrally located. It's very intuitive, easy to use. The support that I get from IBM is always great.

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Principal Business Process Architect at Met Office

Dec 20, 2019

It has a built-in capability to capture process owners and managers against processes along with other process governance roles.

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Director at a retailer with 1-10 employees

Mar 20, 2018

In terms of the collaboration features, from the point of discovery, it was useful to go to load up the policies and the rule sets that the client had. And in terms of exploring options and being able to model a variety of different processes, that was incredibly useful as well.

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SM

Chief Information Officer and Director at a government with 51-200 employees

Jun 2, 2023

It is a stable solution since there has not been any downtime. Everything loads fast.

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Katriina Sievanen

Communication Specialist at UPM-Kymmene Oyj

Nov 27, 2019

The business process discovery is excellent. The diagram or blueprinting functionality of the solution are very good. It's quite easy. You can link the sub-processes and get a big overview of the whole process then.

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IBM Blueworks Live Cons review quotes

Global Innovation Director at Ernst & Young

Jul 5, 2023

IBM Blueworks is BPMN 2.0 compliant, but it does not adapt to the overarching BPMN 2.0 concepts.

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AJ

Head of Process Innovation and Robotic Automation at Prolifics

Oct 9, 2018

The ability to create a very structured rule. With the capability that we have right now, Blueworks Live is more process focused. We should be able to enhance it to include a lot more of decisions as well.

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Global Innovation Director at Ernst & Young

Jan 9, 2020

It is BPMN-compliant but the tool needs to be more involved to get into a completely 2.0 oriented tool. It has a few things but it's not the complete BPMN model.

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IBM Blueworks Live

Free Report: IBM Blueworks Live Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about IBM Blueworks Live. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: September 2025.

867,370 professionals have used our research since 2012.

JM

VP Client Services at Salient process

Jun 19, 2019

We would like the ability to add additional custom colors. We would like to color additional items to add notes to the blueprint.

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Consultant 2 at Protiviti

Sep 1, 2025

The solution is stable, but there are some glitches and latency issues.

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Risk at Citibank N.A. - ISP Peering

Mar 22, 2018

I wish Blueworks Live had simulations built in, but it doesn't. It also lacks a feature of reporting; ad hoc, drag and drop reporting. A lot of senior people are always asking for reports, and there's no reporting feature within IBM Blueworks.

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Principal Business Process Architect at Met Office

Dec 20, 2019

The user interface is quite easy at first but process analysts soon run into roadblocks of limited functionality, which is disappointing.

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Director at a retailer with 1-10 employees

Mar 20, 2018

Some of the import functionality was a bit restrictive, in terms of loading data in from other data sources. Something as simple as Excel, loading data tables from Excel, wasn't great. And vice-versa. Some of the export and import functionality with something like Visio - which, I know it's a slightly different tool - but being able to work seamlessly with those other tool sets would've been quite useful. I know it was something that was in the pipeline to be looked at. So that would be useful.

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SM

Chief Information Officer and Director at a government with 51-200 employees

Jun 2, 2023

In the Blue Works Live software boxes and lines are automatically placed by the programme and can't be easily manipulated.

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Katriina Sievanen

Communication Specialist at UPM-Kymmene Oyj

Nov 27, 2019

The font size is really, really small and it's really not useful to print out process models because you cannot read what's written in different boxes. This makes it necessary for people to have access to the tool. We view licenses to see how the printing or output is. It's not very good.

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