Bonita is an open-source business process and workflow management platform created by the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science. It is available as a free community edition or as a commercial subscription product.
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Kissflow
Score 6.9 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Kissflow is a low-code platform for custom application development tailored to business operations. Kissflow empowers process owners and IT developers to automate and build processes and applications for internal business operations.
Well suited for low code/no code applications centered around approval flows. It has built-in task management for users to see their pending actions, comments, statuses, etc. It has a very nice design for process flows. Less appropriate may be for generic type applications with complex screens and logic within those screens that need a lot of data to process.
We've used Kissflow [School Cloud] in order to track parent requests for transportation in the SpEd department. It has been user friendly for parents to input a request and staff to review, double check school sites and locations, and set up specific routes to meet the needs of students and communicate the info back to parents.
Bonita seems particularly suited for processes requiring a great deal of human interaction. Its user model allows you to control access to business processes in a fine-grained way. This allows for business processes to move smoothly between users and services as the process advances.
The definition and usage of custom forms from the latest version of Bonita seems particularly powerful. It allows for a thorough customization of the look-and-feel and does not require complex developments.
The web interface and administration section have greatly improved in the latest versions. Installation and configuration of processes has become more flexible and more structured. The administration section gives a good view on failed processes, allowing to analyse problems in an efficient way.
They know what they are. You aren't going to get a Workflow program that also wants to be a CRM. You will get the equivalent of an electronic assistant going from station to station, taking care of business and giving you the end result.
Paper. It reduces the amount of paper needed for menial tasks tremendously. You can automate an entire process. As an educational institution, you may still need paper copies, but you aren't waiting for John Doe to sign Line 3, then Jane Doe to initial, and so on and so on with a paper form.
Tracking. If you need to know where things are in the process, the fact that this program is dedicated to workflow makes it incredibly easy to identify where people are in the sales flow.
Customer appreciation. When your workflow is stronger, faster, and better, the customers feel it. They feel like you are right there with them and getting things moving.
There is a learning curve beyond the boot camps that needs to be addressed with more structured curriculum.
The full stack technologies are industry standard, but these [are] challenging to learn and could use a learning path and orientation. There's probably opportunity for third-parties here to help with learning and adoption.
Workflow Design: There isn't a copy/paste function when creating the workflow, and you can't move a workflow task between parallel branches. This becomes a pain point when an item has 98% of what you need, but you can't copy it and place it in another branch to make the last tweaks. Instead, it needs to be completely recreated
Interface: While I like the current design features, which make it easy for an end-user to find their tasks and items, it would be nice to also have some flexibility within the platform. Things like being able to groups apps under a category or tailoring the look and feel of the page a little more would be a welcome addition.
Bonita Platform has allowed us to develop GUI relatively fast using its UI Designer while being able to seamlessly integrate our business logic in Java in a BPMN2 process diagram. It gives a nice productivity boost but still requires programming know-how to be able to deliver the final solution to your business problems.
The system has room to grow as it's limited by not being able to edit POs after they've been approved. The system is great for registrations and syncing to other systems while including the attachments. The reporting from Kissflow is also easy to setup to link to other platforms such as Looker
Engine itself is efficient enough for most cases I dealt with. It can also be extended by clustering. I have done performance tests with JMeter and only managed to induce the crash of... JMeter. If there are efficiency issues they usually concern bad design/implementation of created apps or bottlenecks in integrated systems. Although I have met two cases with efficiency loss.
1. Java 7 related PermGen saturation caused by big number of installed apps (there is no jar dependency reusal between apps option).
2. Big number of waiting event handlers in processes stresses the database.
I haven't encountered a need for support with KiSSFLOW. It's not a perfect platform, but it's functional, dependable, and reasonably intuitive. I can't fault a support team just because their product works!
KiSSFLOW is much easier to set up, less coding and easier to explain to those that are being trained. The company already had SharePoint, but it is a very difficult system to set up. A class had to be taken, along with getting books in order to understand the process of the workflow. With KiSSFLOW, it is simple to understand, the helpdesk is quick with their response, help topics are laid out simply and you can even talk with someone on that side to ask your questions. Overall, KiSSFLOW is a much easier workflow and system to use.
Respect of BPMN standard over the long term. Good enhancements by Bonitasoft for new use cases, for example the introduction of a real form editor even if it has been technically difficult to manage. Once done though, we have far greater possibility of human interaction.
The only real hard number savings that we have had with KiSSFLOW is the money we have saved in forms being printed, especially multi-part forms. So for a small college like us that it probably in the $5000 to $10000 per year range. We have certainly saved money in increased efficiencies of the processes that we have moved to KiSSFLOW. But that is harder to calculate.
