E2E Delivery Expert - Ignite Delivery & Technical Enablement at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 5
Sep 2, 2025
There could be improvement areas in TIBCO BusinessWorks because every area needs to improve as the industry is demanding and traffic is increasing. Performance and latency could be enhanced. Additionally, having signaling stack support would be beneficial.
The creation of XSDs should be much simpler. They should ensure that what was working in the previous version must also work in the new version of BW six.
I would like to see an AI project with BusinessWorks. I haven't worked with cloud architecture using BusinessWorks, so I would like to work with it as a cloud architect. I am still learning the documentation, so I don't have a complete experience with TIBCO. The learning curve takes time compared to webMethods.
TIBCO does not concentrate on solving the issues with the solution. If you persistently face any problem, you have to solve it yourself instead of having TIBCO solve it for you. The solution’s customer support should be improved.
I haven't encountered any drawbacks with TIBCO BusinessWorks so far. Despite being a new user for the past year, everything has been smooth, including development and deployment. Challenges with TIBCO BusinessWorks were mainly due to unclear documentation, but these were overcome by referring to comprehensive documents and raising tickets with TIBCO support.
There is room for improvement on the learning side. I do not have the time to do much training to really understand the product in-depth because it is a vast product, and I am only using about five to ten percent of the product. I feel I can still learn a lot. There can be more training and documentation. There could also be room for improvement with the stability. Somehow, we experience many issues on the SAP Adaptive side, where it loses the communication between TIBCO and SAP.
Head of Technology Department at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Feb 13, 2023
For the chip code container edition, it is recommended to reduce the image size to facilitate setup and accelerate our in-service. By making this change we can then use the optimal size for the best email of the container. The cost of the solution has room for improvement.
Integration Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
MSP
Top 5
Jun 27, 2022
In TIBCO BusinessWorks, the problem is that there are multiple plugins that increase the number of product installations. For example, there is a different plugin for files and mail and different specifications, features, and integrations to install. However, comparing TIBCO BusinessWorks to other products, others don't require multiple installations. Therefore, I recommend minimizing the number of product installations and hard features.
Areas for improvement would be the cloud fitness of the product and the ease of migrating to newer versions. Its price could also be lower, and its licensing model would benefit from changing to pay-as-you-go to better fit the use of cloud services.
Integration Lead at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 10
Nov 10, 2021
This solution's cloud could be improved. I don't know whether it was because we didn't have the internal expertise or if it was the product itself, but since they came later—I think only two or three years into the cloud—after many other iPaaS that had been in the cloud for longer, I feel that maybe they haven't matured in terms of the cloud. Even building cloud images is relatively huge compared to other iPaaS services, but I know it's something that is in progress since there are releases almost every day. For the on-premise deployment, the memory could be improved. It consumes a lot of memory, so we have to ask our infrastructure team to increase the memory every day. With BusinessWorks, the application or payload can be small, but it still uses a lot of memory. Memory utilization is my biggest worry, so maybe they can optimize on that. In the next update, I would like to see support around IoT, internet of things, because we are moving toward that now. We are going to have so many devices that need to connect and communicate. Also, maybe they can gather information and improve their monitoring. They have TIBCO Hawk, but it's not as powerful as other monitoring tools that we have, so we use third-party monitoring applications.
The Business Studio tool can be improved, which is the tool for designing the processes. Improving the Business Studio tool will make this solution more stable.
GM - Enterprise Application Integration at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Mar 4, 2021
Its price can be improved. For medium enterprises, it is a very expensive tool. In the market, you won't get many resources for this solution. You won't find many developers in the market very easily. The latest version of TIBCO (6.4 or 6.x) is not very stable. It has got many issues. We have raised this with TIBCO, and they are taking a lot of time to come up with a fix, which is making us move away from this product. Some of the performance-tuning aspects are also missing in version 6. They should provide performance-related fixes, which will be helpful for the customers. If you are migrating from the current version to the container-supported version, it is quite expensive. The product has evolved, but it is very pricey. That's one of the challenges. They have provided all the features that are there in other products, but this is a platform upgrade. The platform has completely been changed from 5.x to 6.x, and we can't use the same environment. We can't run both versions on the same server as VM. The development environment is entirely different. In version 5.x, there was a proprietary designer. Now, it has common plug-ins developed on top of Eclipse.
Founder at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Real User
Nov 26, 2020
The cost of this product is too expensive for smaller companies or those with a small number of integrations. There should be more support for cloud-based integration.
Head of Technology Department at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Aug 30, 2020
I think TIBCO needs to do a lot in terms of making it a first-class cloud solution. Because the issues that we are facing have to do with the container-based image. It is so big that it makes it very difficult to autoscale. They need to do a few things. First, they need to make it smaller, and also to make it really a true cloud citizen. Because if you compare with other solutions, TIBCO is playing catch up in terms of cloud adoption. I just received a new version the other day and they have included quite a lot of changes. It is impossible to tell what they have already taken care of. But I have experienced that there are some security vulnerabilities that they need to fix on the Docker image. I do not have the specific details because we have not totally isolated the problem, but there are some vulnerabilities and those are apparent in the TIBCO container edition.
There are not many plugins available to integrate the databases. We have to write it in Java and integrate it. The developers should have more knowledge. These are the three main aspects that they could improve.
In terms of improvement, for our requirements, it's good enough. Everything that we like to do, we can find it available on the platform. Features that could be improved are its transformation matrix; the support for other communities. They don't support out of the box - you have to buy adapters or you have to have the technology.
Technical Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Sep 15, 2019
One of the main handicaps on version 5 was its development environment. In comparison with other Eclipse-based products, it is not the easiest landing at the first stages of learning. For advanced developers, it results in a simple and direct environment. It also does not facilitate integration with other external tools (release management etc). All these issues are fixed on 6 versions, but we have not migrated at this time. Pricing is not one of its strengths. Using Tibco BusinessWorks implies adopting a non-trivial set of products (Hawk, Rendez-vous, EMS in most cases), and previous cost models enabled scalability on installation and deployment. I think that current commercial management on the company is betting on promoting a strict model of licensing per product and instance that makes pricing a disadvantage in comparison with other platforms. Another gap fixed on new releases is cloud approach. We are investing in cloud migration, and currently, all our installation of this product is on-premise. Tibco BW 6 lets you choose on-premise or cloud (Container Edition) deployment. I cannot evaluate it at this time, but this was a gap on the previous version.
Integration Architect / Specialist at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 20
Aug 5, 2019
The solution needs integration support. Currently, it's all very technical and developer-driven. There is no support for a non-technical user to define the integration process. If there was support for integration for them, it would help them define the integration themselves. More monitoring would also be useful in future releases.
TIBCO BusinessWorks allows to connect applications, whether on-premises or in the cloud, providing proven reliability and scalability, out-of-the-box. With a drag-and-drop graphical development environment, TIBCO BusinessWorks eliminates the pain and cost of point-to-point application integration, connecting and unifying business processes across applications, data sources, and APIs, with access to real-time data across all your platforms.
There could be improvement areas in TIBCO BusinessWorks because every area needs to improve as the industry is demanding and traffic is increasing. Performance and latency could be enhanced. Additionally, having signaling stack support would be beneficial.
The creation of XSDs should be much simpler. They should ensure that what was working in the previous version must also work in the new version of BW six.
I would like to see an AI project with BusinessWorks. I haven't worked with cloud architecture using BusinessWorks, so I would like to work with it as a cloud architect. I am still learning the documentation, so I don't have a complete experience with TIBCO. The learning curve takes time compared to webMethods.
TIBCO does not concentrate on solving the issues with the solution. If you persistently face any problem, you have to solve it yourself instead of having TIBCO solve it for you. The solution’s customer support should be improved.
I haven't encountered any drawbacks with TIBCO BusinessWorks so far. Despite being a new user for the past year, everything has been smooth, including development and deployment. Challenges with TIBCO BusinessWorks were mainly due to unclear documentation, but these were overcome by referring to comprehensive documents and raising tickets with TIBCO support.
The initial setup is not easy.
There is room for improvement on the learning side. I do not have the time to do much training to really understand the product in-depth because it is a vast product, and I am only using about five to ten percent of the product. I feel I can still learn a lot. There can be more training and documentation. There could also be room for improvement with the stability. Somehow, we experience many issues on the SAP Adaptive side, where it loses the communication between TIBCO and SAP.
I would like the solution to be integrated into the cloud.
In the next release, I would like to see the solution having the bucket as an addition. Pricing is an area that can be improved.
The communication protocols could be improved.
The cost has room for improvement.
For the chip code container edition, it is recommended to reduce the image size to facilitate setup and accelerate our in-service. By making this change we can then use the optimal size for the best email of the container. The cost of the solution has room for improvement.
In TIBCO BusinessWorks, the problem is that there are multiple plugins that increase the number of product installations. For example, there is a different plugin for files and mail and different specifications, features, and integrations to install. However, comparing TIBCO BusinessWorks to other products, others don't require multiple installations. Therefore, I recommend minimizing the number of product installations and hard features.
Areas for improvement would be the cloud fitness of the product and the ease of migrating to newer versions. Its price could also be lower, and its licensing model would benefit from changing to pay-as-you-go to better fit the use of cloud services.
This solution's cloud could be improved. I don't know whether it was because we didn't have the internal expertise or if it was the product itself, but since they came later—I think only two or three years into the cloud—after many other iPaaS that had been in the cloud for longer, I feel that maybe they haven't matured in terms of the cloud. Even building cloud images is relatively huge compared to other iPaaS services, but I know it's something that is in progress since there are releases almost every day. For the on-premise deployment, the memory could be improved. It consumes a lot of memory, so we have to ask our infrastructure team to increase the memory every day. With BusinessWorks, the application or payload can be small, but it still uses a lot of memory. Memory utilization is my biggest worry, so maybe they can optimize on that. In the next update, I would like to see support around IoT, internet of things, because we are moving toward that now. We are going to have so many devices that need to connect and communicate. Also, maybe they can gather information and improve their monitoring. They have TIBCO Hawk, but it's not as powerful as other monitoring tools that we have, so we use third-party monitoring applications.
I'd like to see a more user-friendly solution in terms of the development area.
The Business Studio tool can be improved, which is the tool for designing the processes. Improving the Business Studio tool will make this solution more stable.
Its price can be improved. For medium enterprises, it is a very expensive tool. In the market, you won't get many resources for this solution. You won't find many developers in the market very easily. The latest version of TIBCO (6.4 or 6.x) is not very stable. It has got many issues. We have raised this with TIBCO, and they are taking a lot of time to come up with a fix, which is making us move away from this product. Some of the performance-tuning aspects are also missing in version 6. They should provide performance-related fixes, which will be helpful for the customers. If you are migrating from the current version to the container-supported version, it is quite expensive. The product has evolved, but it is very pricey. That's one of the challenges. They have provided all the features that are there in other products, but this is a platform upgrade. The platform has completely been changed from 5.x to 6.x, and we can't use the same environment. We can't run both versions on the same server as VM. The development environment is entirely different. In version 5.x, there was a proprietary designer. Now, it has common plug-ins developed on top of Eclipse.
The cost of this product is too expensive for smaller companies or those with a small number of integrations. There should be more support for cloud-based integration.
I think TIBCO needs to do a lot in terms of making it a first-class cloud solution. Because the issues that we are facing have to do with the container-based image. It is so big that it makes it very difficult to autoscale. They need to do a few things. First, they need to make it smaller, and also to make it really a true cloud citizen. Because if you compare with other solutions, TIBCO is playing catch up in terms of cloud adoption. I just received a new version the other day and they have included quite a lot of changes. It is impossible to tell what they have already taken care of. But I have experienced that there are some security vulnerabilities that they need to fix on the Docker image. I do not have the specific details because we have not totally isolated the problem, but there are some vulnerabilities and those are apparent in the TIBCO container edition.
There are not many plugins available to integrate the databases. We have to write it in Java and integrate it. The developers should have more knowledge. These are the three main aspects that they could improve.
In terms of improvement, for our requirements, it's good enough. Everything that we like to do, we can find it available on the platform. Features that could be improved are its transformation matrix; the support for other communities. They don't support out of the box - you have to buy adapters or you have to have the technology.
One of the main handicaps on version 5 was its development environment. In comparison with other Eclipse-based products, it is not the easiest landing at the first stages of learning. For advanced developers, it results in a simple and direct environment. It also does not facilitate integration with other external tools (release management etc). All these issues are fixed on 6 versions, but we have not migrated at this time. Pricing is not one of its strengths. Using Tibco BusinessWorks implies adopting a non-trivial set of products (Hawk, Rendez-vous, EMS in most cases), and previous cost models enabled scalability on installation and deployment. I think that current commercial management on the company is betting on promoting a strict model of licensing per product and instance that makes pricing a disadvantage in comparison with other platforms. Another gap fixed on new releases is cloud approach. We are investing in cloud migration, and currently, all our installation of this product is on-premise. Tibco BW 6 lets you choose on-premise or cloud (Container Edition) deployment. I cannot evaluate it at this time, but this was a gap on the previous version.
The solution needs integration support. Currently, it's all very technical and developer-driven. There is no support for a non-technical user to define the integration process. If there was support for integration for them, it would help them define the integration themselves. More monitoring would also be useful in future releases.