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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ProcessMaker
Score 8.8 out of 10
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ProcessMaker is a business process management and workflow automation platform. It uses a drag-and-drop interface to build workflows to drive automation.
Bonita BPM does have some nice visual tools. The annual maintenance is not so high and we particularly liked the visual tool to create business rules. Bonitasoft’s color-coded tools make life a bit simpler and more memorable for beginners or non-coder people. We really like …
Very good : to design and execute business processes with just a few data. You can use BDM and it’s easy. It’s really easy to get data from external applications using custom connectors. less appropriate : if you use complex BDM tree objects, using them in form can significantly decrease performance. Be careful to follow guidelines that are given in Bonita Documentation.
I loved it. You will not get an easier interface. You can develop workflow processes in a simple way, one which allows anyone to understand what you are trying to accomplish; however, you will get into some issues if your employees are scared of coding (when you get to the advanced features). For some, this will never be an issue as the knowledge you need is very basic. But for the school I was working with, it would have stopped them cold
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.
We can write PHP and Javascript code to handle the way the ProcessMaker does. It makes the ProcessMaker more flexible to meet our requests on our workflow.
The Processmaker provides a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get flowchart design tool, we can draw our process very easy like Visio. And, We can use the flowchart to implement our workflow.
Also, the Dynaform, the electronic form function of Processmaker, is WYSIWYG form design tool, help us design forms participated in the process.
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.
The Bonita platform is by far the most complete and flexible solution as a BPM suite with the added advantage that the Community edition is usable for production deployment. From a cost perspective, Bonitasoft licenses the subscription edition per server with no limitations as to hardware, users, processes, etc.
Before making the decision to get ProcessMaker, we assessed different and best options in the market, which are also quite competitive. KiSSFLOW, Blueworks Live, and Bizagi, being the most relevant and ADONIS, to mention the ones we consider the most relevant and capable of meeting our needs. In the end, we went for ProcessMaker because of mainly three things as described before: 1. Real-time process status tracking. 2. Metrics and dashboards. 3. Ease of use for constructing diagrams.
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.
This would have been the easiest program to implement. It would have been the quickest, and the one that most of the employees would have been able to master. That alone would have saved countless dollars in time investment.
Unfortunately, the environment doesn't support knowledge of coding. So, they would never be able to advance further than a certain degree before having to bring someone else in again. It would have saved money at first, but then would have ended up costing in the long run.
