As organisations increasingly recognise the pivotal role of Business Process Management (BPM) in driving sustained growth, enhancing efficiency, and ensuring future readiness, the demand for BPM software is experiencing a significant surge. According to a market research report by MarketsandMarkets, the BPM market is poised for substantial growth, projected to expand from $4.4 billion in 2021 to an estimated $8.9 billion by 2026, representing a robust compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.1% during the forecast period.
The rising demand for BPM software extends beyond large enterprises, with organisations of all sizes prioritising the selection of the right BPM solution to meet their specific needs. However, with a plethora of options available, making the right choice requires careful evaluation. In this blog, we explore 10 popular BPM software solutions, examining their functionalities and user ratings.
BPM Software Market Trends
As organisations continue to accelerate their digital transformation and automation journey, the importance of BPM has become more pronounced than ever. Since the optimisation of processes—eliminating waste, inefficiencies, and redundancies—serves as a foundational step before process automation, the demand for BPM software has further increased.
Moreover, the BPM software landscape is actively evolving to accommodate emerging technologies, user demands, and industry trends. BPM tools are becoming increasingly sophisticated, offering advanced features and functionalities to address the evolving needs of organisations. Selecting the right BPM software from this growing number of tools is a business-critical decision that requires careful assessment.
Choosing the Right-Fit BPM Software
While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, organisations need to consider their requirements and assess the software to make the right choice. Here, we share key points organisations need to consider to choose the right software.
Assessing functionalities as per organisational goals: Before you start screening BMP software, it is essential that you ask questions like why are you doing BPM and what is your objective with the initiatives. Once you have a clear answer to these questions, you can understand which software functionalities are a priority for you. While some tool features can be optional/add-ons, it’s crucial to focus on aspects like intuitiveness, drag-and-drop functionalities, and automated capabilities for analysis, simulation, etc., to power your BPM projects.
Ease of Use: Usability is another critical factor in selecting BPM software. The software should be intuitive and user-friendly, allowing both business users and process experts to utilise its features. A user-friendly interface reduces the learning curve and encourages adoption, ensuring that the software becomes an integral part of daily operations.
Customer Support: Timely and efficient customer support ensures that any queries or issues encountered during the improvement process are promptly addressed. It’s crucial to assess the understanding of the customer success team in BPM methodologies and techniques. Having BPM professionals in the support team with extensive experience across various industries can significantly aid in navigating challenges encountered during the improvement journey.
Training: Adequate training is indispensable for maximising the potential of BPM software, regardless of its user-friendliness. When choosing BPM software it’s key to look at product and concept training programs offered by the provider. Accessible on-demand training sessions, allowing users to learn anytime and anywhere, are particularly advantageous for gaining a holistic understanding of the software and ensuring widespread adoption within the organisation.
Price: Cost is a significant consideration for organisations of all sizes. It’s essential to consider not only the upfront costs but also ongoing expenses such as licensing fees, implementation costs, maintenance, and support.
Customer Success Stories: Real-world BPM success stories demonstrate how the software helped organisations address their key challenges and achieve tangible business results, validating the effectiveness of the software.
Check out some success stories with PRIME BPM software here.
User Reviews: User reviews provide valuable insights into the software’s performance, reliability, ease of use, customer support, and overall satisfaction. Paying attention to both positive and negative reviews can help organisations make more informed decisions and avoid potential pitfalls.
Top 10 BPM Software for 2024
Take a look at our ready list of 10 BPM software and their functionalities and reviews.
- PRIME BPM (Get a Free Trial)
PRIME BPM is a cloud-based BPM software that has an easy-to-use interface to enable both process users and experts to work collaboratively to map, analyse, improve and monitor their business processes. A plug-and-play software, PRIME BPM, comes with the best-of-breed inbuilt methodology, combining the power of BPM, Lean, Six Sigma, Value Stream Mapping and more to maximise process improvement results.PRIME BPM comes packed with powerful functionalities, including in-built BPMN 2.0 to enable standardised process mapping across departments; one-click process prioritisation to identify high-priority processes; automated process time, cost, value and efficiency analysis; in-built simulation engine to simulate future state processes; in-built governance, risk and compliance module; and more. Its Rapid Process Mapping Functionality allows users to create a process map in just 20 minutes instead of 4 hours. The tool also supports mobile access for on-the-go process management.
PRIME BPM is highly rated for its strong unique customer success program that focuses on ensuring the success of client projects by offering comprehensive end-to-end support. Training is another key value-add that helps in greater adoption, ensuring that the software doesn’t end up becoming mere shelfware. PRIME BPM offers on-demand chat support, where queries are resolved by BPM experts.Being a cloud-based business process improvement software, PRIME can be expensed under the operational budget with a low monthly fee, thus providing value for money. PRIME also provides a 30-day free trial.
User Rating: 4.4
User Reviews“I love that you can apply salaries to roles, and apply frequency and cycle time attributes to a process map, to then generate the cost analysis for each task in a process. This helps me to distinguish the processes that are inefficient and could be improved, removed or automated with a system solution.”
“The application has clever functions that support our business in mapping and analyzing our core processes, with a view to linking processes within divisions and between. The application is clearly developed from a user and business perspective. I have found the Prime BPM training and coaching to be high value and the team is always available for further support and advice. The company is very open to discussing new features and they have a strong focus on continuous improvement”
- Kissflow
With its low-code approach, Kissflow enables business users to design, deploy, and manage workflows without the need for extensive technical expertise.Kissflow’s integration capabilities allow for seamless connectivity with third-party applications and systems, enabling organisations to leverage existing tools and data within their workflows.It also facilitates real-time collaboration and communication among team members with features such as comments, notifications, and task assignments.
While the platform is efficient, as per user reviews, the software can prove to be expensive, particularly for smaller organisations or those with a limited budget. Also, as per reviews customer support is also a concern. Free Trial is available on request.
User Rating: 4.1/5
User reviews:“It was a great tool. We built our entire set of business process controls using it. There was a steep learning curve and a few limitations that we had to work round but overall, it worked.”
“Kissflow can be a little bit pricey for larger organisations that have a lot of users. If you’re just looking for a simple task management system that requires little management or back-and-forth communication, there are cheaper (sometimes free) options out there.”
- Nintex
Nintex is a user-friendly process intelligence and automation platform, designed to facilitate organisations to embark on their digital transformation journeys. It comes with pre-configured process maps, workflow templates, and RPA bot templates, helping organisations on their digital transformation journey. The platform offers both on-premise and cloud deployment options, ensuring flexibility in implementation.Nintex offers a 30-day trial period for users to explore its capabilities. Pricing varies based on the selected features, leaning towards the pricier end compared to alternative tools in the market. Customer service and support ratings are lower than other metrics.User rating: 4.1
User reviews ““It’s very straightforward and user-friendly. It’s also clean to create and you can link multiple objects to the page.”
“The tool is not supported effectively, I would say. It has to be given more consideration and care when customers ask for help. This is just a kind advice to Nintex. Second of all, the performance is a bit slow and overall architecture is a bit complicated which it really makes it difficult to learn, implement and configure the tool over SharePoint.”
- SAP Signavio
SAP Signavio has been designed with a vision to make process management accessible to everyone within an organisation. It is an easy-to-use platform combining modelling, effective workflow management, and analytics. The software offers data analysis to examine business processes and understand improvement opportunities.SAP Signavio also offers a 30-day Free trial. The rating for ‘Value for Money’ for the software is lower than other metrics.User rating: 4.5
User Reviews“Signavio is a good software but seems to concentrate on Data mining, and missing the necessarily needed enhancement in the core as well. When you sign up, and you have lots of people depending on it, make sure you have an SLA for Bug fixes agreed.”
“Easy of use from workshop to model and publish. Process Mining to test and challenge the actual execution against the previously documented process, to add performance on top of the model and continually enrich and provide insights on when change or action is required.”
- Pega
Leveraging artificial intelligence and low-code development, Pega enables organisations to automate workflows and streamline their operations.Pega’s adaptive, rules-driven architecture allows for agile customisation and scalability. However, the tool is more suited for large enterprises, given the cost. Ease of use has a comparatively lower rating than other metrics. A 30-day Free Trial is available.User Rating: 4.3
User Reviews“It is easy to understandable and easy to use. As a new customer to Pega, they can quickly adopt to usage of the software.”
“The main problem with Pega is learning and tool cost. It’s very difficult to contact the support team. For small companies, it’s very difficult to purchase.”
- Appian
Appian is a low-code software that helps organisations design, automate and optimise their business processes. Appian targets large enterprises across financial, insurance, life sciences, health care, government and others that are struggling to meet the IT and business demands of digital transformation.Appian platform is available in Standard, Advanced and Premium versions, to offer price flexibility as per available features. However, it is an expensive alternative as compared to other software available. A free trial is available on request.User Rating: 4.2
User Reviews“Low code platform so minimum coding is needed and turnaround time to build and design workflows, user interfaces, reports, and dashboards is low.”
“Appian lacks on-premise support for high availability requirements. Appian training is linear and does not cater for real life problems. On-premise organisations suffer from multiple releases/updates throughout the year. It seems every release has major updates.”
- Bizagi
by AI and low-code apps, Bizagi enables organisations to modernize operations with end-to-end automation. It enables companies to orchestrate systems, people, bots and data across the enterprise. The suite combines Process modelling, process simulation, process mining and process automation capabilities.The rating for Customer Service is lower than other metrics. Pricing is another downside.User Rating: 4.5
User Reviews“I like the easy configuration to start from the beginning to the deployment of the processes. The architecture of the platform is well-suited. The software has many features like great integration features like web services and RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to name a few.”
“The tool loses performance with complex workflows, it gets heavy for these kind of tasks, besides, it consumes too much resources in the machine and has no integration with other programs, which affects its usage in large organisations.”
- ProcessMaker
ProcessMaker is a no-code platform that helps organisations to streamline their operations through process automation. It combines simplicity with advanced functionality by integrating AI and Natural Language Processing.The platform is designed so that business users can easily automate, while developers have advanced tools to automate complex, cross-functional processes.ProcessMaker also offers tiered pricing plans, Platform, Pro, and Enterprise +, as per functionalities. A free Trial is available.User Rating: 4.5
User Reviews:“Fully fledged BPM platform with a complete toolset for defining processes, designing forms and integrating with external systems. Well-documented APIs (both JavaScript and PHP) and easy-to-use user portal.”
“The only thing I can say that the application is bad is the customer service, the technical support is very late as the salespeople, we reached a point where we almost suspended the license for not having an offer for the renewal of In the same way, although the license price is very accessible, it is necessary to buy a license for each user and also for the flow created.”
- Pipefy
Pipefy is the AI-enhanced workflow management platform that helps organisations to centralise, automate, and streamline their workflows. The no-code platform is targeted towards boosting procurement, HR and IT operations. Pipefy also has data analysis capabilities, helping organisations to gain strategic insights. It also comes with pre-built workflows, such as Recruitment and Hiring, Employee Onboarding, Purchase Process and Customer Onboarding.Pipefy provides monthly and annual subscriptions and has 4 plans – Starter, Business, Enterprise, Unlimited, for flexibility.User Rating: 4.6/5
User Reviews“I really appreciate all the different workflow templates it provides; they make it simple to organize any kind of project or task list, and they can be easily modified to fit our needs. It also helps us keep track of all project expenses thanks to its accounting features like purchase order management, accounting, and invoicing.”
“It would be helpful if they integrated more complex metrics like performance and activity duration; for example, the Gantt chart could show how much time has passed since an activity was scheduled.”
- Process Director
Process Director is tailored for organisations with complex process automation and compliance demands. A low-code platform, it offers customised solutions for customers in life sciences, government agencies, higher education and industries. It automates intricate workflows, including nested, parallel, and conditional approvals, ensuring the complex processes are streamlined, reducing manual intervention and potential errors.Process Director also includes governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) features to help organisations navigate regulatory and compliance complexities. A free trial is available.User Rating: 4.6
User Reviews“It allows you to build, run, monitor and do continuous improvement easily. The support staff and our Account Manager are very prompt and responsive.”
“The interface can get a bit confusing at times and slow to navigate with lots of popups.”
Get Started with the Right Software
With the comprehensive checklist and list of 10 popular BPM tools provided, you’re well-equipped to choose the best fit for your organisation. Taking a free trial is a great starting point for getting a first-hand experience with the tool. Start with PRIME BPM Free Trial Here.
Note: User Ratings and Reviews are sourced from Capterra, a popular software evaluation platform.