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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Pipefy
Score 7.6 out of 10
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Pipefy headquartered in San Francisco offers their process management and workflow software providing processes for customer success, service desk, sales operations, and other processes.
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.
Pipefy is very well suited if you have a team doing any sort of process... for real! It simplified everything from our sales and marketing objectives/processes, to our onboarding and accounting side of things. Since you can share different pipes with others, it's easy to see where others are at in the process and move the card along while keeping others informed. It makes sure you don't miss any information or steps along the way, which is great if your process is detail-oriented. It is a little less appropriate for marketing efforts, but we still try to use it to keep track of things in a central space. Definitely best suited for sales, technical things, and accounting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pipefy support is pretty good. There were a few instances where the agent didn't really understand what I was trying to get help with, but that was only once. Every other time it has been pretty fast and efficient. They are also very kind and understanding. I don't think they need much help in that dept
We started using software we already had (such as Slack and Sheets) but this software is not actually ideal to manage processes, which led to errors, miscommunication, and execution problems. Trello is good for managing demand but offers no process customization or approval and Jira is too focused on development for our needs, and also hard to customize.
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.
Our processes are more organized and we are not missing any steps.
We are able to touch base with customers easier since we have all potential/missed clients in one pipe, with automated alerts (i.e. it has been 60 days since contact with this customer).
We are able to keep track of customer billing changes easier.
