Bonita, an excellent BPM tool
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Overview
What is Bonita Platform?
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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Popular Features
- Process designer (52)8.787%
- Business rules engine (42)8.181%
- Form builder (48)7.979%
- Model execution (48)7.676%
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What is Bonita Platform?
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.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.bonitasoft.com/pricing
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- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Alternatives Pricing
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Camunda is a process orchestration tool designed to help organizations design, automate, and improve any process. Built for business and IT collaboration using BPMN and DMN standards, Camunda aims to enable seamless integration across endpoints to transform mission-critical processes.
What is Kure?
Kure is a web-based app that helps teams collaborate to complete process optimization projects. The Kure app is powered by the Process Optimization Path™. The Process Optimization Path (POP) is powered by artificial intelligence that guides users step-by-step – through improving any process – so…
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What is Bonita Platform?
Bonitasoft supports digital operations and modernization of information systems with Bonita, an open-source and extensible platform for automation and optimization of business processes.
Presented as easy to handle and integrate into heterogeneous information systems, Bonita accelerates development and deployment of process automation projects, service orchestration and application development. This is made possible by its low code capabilities, reusable components, and unified deployment on-premise and on the cloud.
CIOs can confront both short-term challenges (often from requests from business teams who wish to support their business development), and the long-term challenge of modernizing IT to deliver on business needs and customer expectations.
Open-source, extensible and integrated, Bonita is based on an architecture that clearly separates the process, data and user interface layers. All project team members can collaborate to develop, deploy and maintain sustainable processes in line with the expectations of business users. Project governance, specific to each company, is respected by a clear separation between visual programming and coding capabilities. Each project team member can leverage their specific know-how and skills to add value. The technologies used do not require learning new languages or methods, but instead rely on commonly used components such as Java, enterprise services such as SSO and LDAP, continuous delivery, and the ability to develop in SDKs. These capabilities avoid the need for additional resources.
The use of BPMN, reusable components, numerous extension points, deployment on premise or in the cloud all help guarantee rapid and agile developments.
Complex business processes become visible with centralized monitoring. Traceability, execution control and reduced risk of errors allow teams to focus on optimizing and improving operational efficiency on an ongoing basis.
Bonita Platform Features
Process Engine Features
- Supported: Process designer
- Supported: Business rules engine
- Supported: SOA support
- Supported: Support for modeling languages
- Supported: Form builder
- Supported: Model execution
Collaboration Features
- Supported: Social collaboration tools
Reporting & Analytics Features
- Supported: Dashboards
- Supported: Standard reports
- Supported: Custom reports
Content Management Capabilties Features
- Supported: Content management
Bonita Platform Screenshots
Bonita Platform Video
The Bonita platform for digital process automation
Bonita Platform Competitors
Bonita Platform Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux, Mac |
| Mobile Application | Mobile Web |
| Supported Countries | Worldwide |
| Supported Languages | English, French, Spanish |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Bizagi Digital Business Platform, TIBCO® BPM Enterprise, and IBM Business Automation Workflow are common alternatives for Bonita Platform.
Reviewers rate Process designer highest, with a score of 8.7.
The most common users of Bonita Platform are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Reviews
(26-50 of 53)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
November 07, 2019
Best BPM tool for maintenance, improvements and a horizontal view of your business requirements
Bonita BPM is in my opinion the best BPM solution currently in the market. I developed my master's degree final assessment evaluating this technology along side with YAWL and jBPM, resulting in Bonita being the best of the three for small to big companies and environments.
In my organization I implemented the registry of non-conformance to allow users to submit company-related complaints and this was a complete success based on the extended capabilities of Bonita BPM from UI design to reporting.
In my organization I implemented the registry of non-conformance to allow users to submit company-related complaints and this was a complete success based on the extended capabilities of Bonita BPM from UI design to reporting.
- UI design
- Workflow using BPMN
- Use of Java code
- Integration using connectors
- I can only think of database connection, it could be improved for a better and shorter experience connecting the data since this is a low-code technology.
September 12, 2019
Lightweight BPM that packs a heavy punch
We on-boarded Bonita BPM to solve a basic organization-wide workflow management. Right now there are more than 20 processes implemented. IT has tremendously brought down the number of emails exchanged and paper-based approvals. Simple activities like having an escalation mechanism were implemented in workflows which enabled high productivity and SLA based tracking.
The best part is that this tool gave the business the cool swim-lane process views before they sign it off to be implemented into the system.
The best part is that this tool gave the business the cool swim-lane process views before they sign it off to be implemented into the system.
- Configuration over customization.
- Excellent process views.
- Mobile-friendly.
- Zero downtime deployment for new workflows.
- Online configuration tool instead of offline IDE.
- Support for deployment on enterprise-grade application servers like Oracle WebLogic, IBM, etc.
January 03, 2018
Bonita BPM knocked out all other BPM suites!
- Connection to other legacy systems, ERP, CRM.
- Easy UI development
- Fast time to market
- Bonita needs to improve its low code development
- It needs a BRMS functionality
- It needs a Document Records functionality
February 14, 2017
Bonita BPM - Low cost, low code efficient platform
- It is a very low cost platform. You can start with open-source edition which is free and with the application number growth upgrade to subscription editions for more features and support. Subscription editions are still not expensive compared to bigger players platforms.
- It offers a great UI designer tool for rapid building process forms and web applications.
- It gives a lot of flexibility and extensibility. It comes with features like built-in connectors, convenient API, and a web portal. You can add your own connectors, extend the API and customize the portal for your own needs.
- There is only one business data model. Even if deploying new processes does not require stopping the platform, the BDM update requires it.
- During the platform evolution often new bugs were introduced so it was risky to deploy the platform in the low minor version. For example, there were memory leaks from 7.2.0 to 7.2.3.
- The administrator portal could be improved. It is hard to look at subprocess data, for example and it is sometimes better to investigate with SQL queries. I don't like new (7.3) task list either.
November 30, 2016
BPM with BONITA : the glue of our Information System to make interact ERP, CRM and human users
BONITA has been used for 2 kinds of automation processes:
- Dynamic interfacing between IT applications including human interaction. The interface has been dynamically adapted according to the various events managed by the BPM process. It's used at the company level to enable communication with the Customer Services team using CRM Salesforce cases, and with R&D team using Clearquest as a bug management tool. The Bonita BPM process is the basis for dialog between Customer Services and R&D teams.
- Automating the HR process for employees changing their job within the company (change of manager, location, cost center, position in the HR org in the ERP, IT tools)
- Mixing interactions between several IT applications with human interaction through automatic email receipt and response
- Offering several formats for comminicating with IT applications: web services, email, files
- Provides an effective form editor, including fields where values entered by humans drive the next actions of the business process
- Not easy to delpoy new releases
- License key management has to be renewed too frequently, even with a commercial contract in place
- Adding more standard interfaces to common IT applications such as ERP systems
- Change the culture from a technical / engineering culture to a customer-focused culture - this is already underway with the arrival of BONITA Customer success
We have used Bonita to replace a couple of manual approval processes for our procurement department.
- Modeling the business data.
- Building a responsive UI for the process users.
- Building integration with LOB systems in the form designer now requires implementing REST API's. This is a development overhead, and should be simplified.
- The studio should include more options for handling exceptions.
October 12, 2016
BonitaSoft Review
We don't have Bonita currently in our organization. We have several projects in progress for particular clients for which we offer consultancy.
- Bonita UI Editor is using latest technologies and is very easy to develop. You have complete freedom.
- Living application as part of version 7 brings huge functionality for custom development.
- Modifying case instances in production environment can be easily done from the portal.
- The big list of connectors.
- API system allows you to easily access all the data you need.
- The BPM API system has no security and all authenticated users can access data with no restrictions. This can impact data security across different departments.
- You have no option to deploy processes directly from Bonita Studio in the production environment.
- Security for Bonita's Java API system should also be reviewed. Normal users should not have the possibility to access engine information.
October 10, 2016
Ease to develop and good choice of enhancements between releases
Bonita BPM is being used by the credit analysis departments, regarding credit card authorizations, car credits, and so on. The application in which Bonita BPM is involved, aims to address automatization, control and traceability of credit factory processes, where too many different skilled people work. These kind of applications allows managing staff keep control of what and how their core processes are being executed.
- Ease of integration modularity
- Building up workflow from design
- Traceability logs, in order to allow audit processes
- Licensing model
- Would be useful having more functionalities of document management
- Increase the number of backward supported releases
Bonita helped us to address two challenges: connecting editor applications to make interfaces and data exchanges between them, and processing workflows of dedicated processes within the company. The main challenges were to be able to create interfaces without having to hire external contractors to develop them, and taking advantage of this BPM tool, just by setting up the tool and by making the way we follow data exchanges between applications easy.
- Bonita simplifies the way to produce interfaces between applications of the market.
- Bonita reduces time to implement interface and time to maintain interfaces, using standard connectors.
- The IDE helps to draw a user friendly chart to accelerate deployment of process and increase process governance.
- Bonita forms are not highly customizable in terms of design.
- Some updates may break down your interface. A "test mode" on a virtual appliance with replicated copy of your [production] environment would be a great improvement.
- There is no ctrl-Z, no undo or redo, in the UI Designer editor.
August 30, 2016
An opinion about Bonita
Bonita BPM is good software that makes it to possible implement a sequence of steps quite easily. In the HR department, for example, we implemented an important process with a concrete result. It resolved a task that created a simple way to follow a process.
- Mapping the steps of the process
- Connection with a SQL Server is very simple
- Connection with web services based on the SOAP protocol
- HR processes that include candidate requests (a new employee)
- Initiation of a new project
- Quotation mapping
- The documentation does not have enough samples or examples. This is the weak point of Bonita BPM.
July 22, 2016
Bonita a workflow tools
We are currently implementing Bonita in my company for the following process onboarding, offboarding, leaving requests.
The challenges we are facing today is the business value that is not well understood by the business regarding what an application like Bonita can provide them. They would like a big data from workflow but that's not the purpose of a software like Bonita, it's only a first step to do that!
The challenges we are facing today is the business value that is not well understood by the business regarding what an application like Bonita can provide them. They would like a big data from workflow but that's not the purpose of a software like Bonita, it's only a first step to do that!
- Designing Workflow
- Bonita connectors
- Lightweight
- Task assignment
- User interface
- Data saving
June 23, 2016
Bonitasoft is good for business!
First Digital Solutions provides implementation and support to Bonitasoft users/customers. The platform is very user friendly and enables complex business processes to be designed and associated applications implemented quickly and efficiently. Furthermore, the extensive range of connectors means that applications can be easily integrated with other systems. We look forward to working with Bonitasoft on a mutually-beneficial basis in the long term.
- Easily design workflows & business processes using the GUI studio tool.
- Develop responsive web-based applications quickly and efficiently.
- End users can easily modify BPM applications without needing any code expertise.
- Be able to be implemented on LAMP Stack.
- Make it easier to upgrade between versions.
- Reduce the need for high-level Java expertise for developing applications.
June 23, 2016
Whey we looked at Bonita.
Bonita BPM provides a single design and runtime environment for business functionality. Using the Bonita Forms and BPM process runtime we can enable accurate electronic data capture, assign responsibilities and escalation for form pressing and monitor and measure the effectiveness of our business functions. Further we have compared Bonita to a range of other BPM providers and found that it meets the expectations with a competitive advantage in agility and price. Delighted to recommend Bonita.
- Dynamic form data capture, with validation and cross references.
- Process flow control with excellent roles and responsibilities allowing the ability to get the right information to the right person at the right time.
- Fantastic extensibility, both in the GUI and workflow connectors. Allows us to make the product meet customer requirements.
- Great bang for your buck, compared to other BPM products in the marketplace.
- I would love to see the process activities pre populate GUI fields, there are excellent REST capabilities, however a gap from the uplift from v6 to v7 is the auto mapping of data form a process activity into a the form. Having to retrieve it from the inside the form is cumbersome.
- Would love to see GIT support in the designer to allow for integration into modern SDLC and CI/CD tools.
- The ability to have a subscription licence work after an AWS node rebuild or a docker container rebuild would be a definite need. Licensing tools that support modern CI/CD and cloud scalability models.
- Run the Forms GUI as a web view inside the Eclipse runtime, better continuity of design tools and stops the incessant screen hopping.
- Auto start the browser developer tools in the preview mode, leverage the existing debug capabilities for REST, AJAX and JavaScript.
March 28, 2016
Bonita BPM as a versatile tool for process management and software systems interfacing
Bonita BPM is mainly used in our organisation to synchronise data between two database systems (SFDC and Clearquest) based on decision workflows for bug resolution tracking.
- Make interfaces between two system easy to modelise and to maintain in the long run.
- Avoid customised development or specific webservice interfacing to exchange data between systems following a workflow.
- Give the needed flexibility and ease of maintenance to automate internal activity processes in a versatile and agile way.
- Stability of the solution was a real issue in a first stage, latest release software is now much more reliable
- Modelisation and maintenance still need a significant initial investment in knowledge aquisition where end users or managers remains dependant from IT department
- BPM is still highly IT oriented from my point of view where needs are on end-users or enterprise core activities, continue to improve marketing target towards non-IT users may give a better adoption by mid-size companies
March 18, 2016
BPM Made Easy with Bonita
It's used for what it's intended for, the business project management process. It is currently being tested and demo scenarios are created for customers' review and approval.
- Easy to use
- Good documentation and training
- Easy to learn and understand
- Not many discussion groups around
March 16, 2016
Welcome to BPM with Bonita!
Bonita BPM is used across the whole organization, we use it for all kinds of business processes in the holding and also the other countries. We have processes for vendor claims, trainings, and investment requests.
- The modeling tool is very easy to use, it took me less than 20 minutes to create and deploy my first application.
- The large number of connectors is a plus, we manage to connect our application to SAP & Alfresco.
- We use a lot Bonita APIs, that way you can use the BPM engine in any business application.
- The administration console can be improved, for example, it's not easy to access the logs when you have a problem.
- The new forms are responsive in design but there is no mobile application!
- I would like them to add a milestone feature. With a milestone, it's more easy to follow complex business processes.
March 15, 2016
Bonita: great tool, poor documentation or support
Bonita BPM is used to provide tools and workflows for some of our procedures. It's been implemented across a few departments.
- Build great work flow logic
- Great API
- Good customizations
- Documentation
- Implementation of variables and code
- Product installation
March 14, 2016
My bonita's review
We are using it for dispatching leads between salers
- Interfacing our CRM with Bonitasoft APIs
- Modeling simple business processes
- The studio is very heavy
- The portal is a handicap for users. Takes too many steps to complete a task
- Why did they not implement gmail authentication?
March 11, 2016
Bonita BPM for Universities
We are a university consortium and we offer Bonita BPM as a facility for our customers, for many uses - for example new student enrollment or for the management of various administrative aspects. Also currently under evaluation is the adoption of Bonita BPM for internal use.
- Very friendly user interface
- Really easy to implement workflows
- The software installation process has some redundancies
- Complicated license management if you're using the subscription version
- Frequent release of new versions of the software. Lot of work for the system admins for the upgrade, and no chance to do it without service downtime
March 11, 2016
Bonita BPM Rocks!
I am currently using Bonita BPM to enable care coordination services for patients who are receiving care at home and in skilled nursing facilities.
- Excellent process authoring studio and experience. Fully featured but incredibly extensible.
- Excellent ability to author and attach forms, using a system that de-couples form development from the process engine but still has a powerful form environment.
- Difficult to understand the difference between the pool and the first task. The UI barely differentiates them. Sometimes this is confusing to new users who click the "start" icon instead of the pool and lose track of where the starting contract is.
- Need a better way to deliver forms that does not use IFRAMES.
March 08, 2016
Bonita BPM - not yet ready for continuous integration
Bonita BPM is used by the IT integration team to manage certain business processes. Other departments (typically customer care) may use the Bonita web application if they are involved in the process at some point. Bonita is used for processes that typically involve human interaction (not necessarily via Bonita) or long-running asynchronous operations. Such processes concern mostly life cycles of certain transactions that require asynchronous input from multiple systems. In this regard, Bonita is not so much used by humans as controlled by messages sent by other systems.
- 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.
- From a technical point of view, Bonita is not well-suited for integration in a development environment.
- Upcoming support for 'unit' testing and continuous integration seems bloated and overly complex. Its starting point is clearly the Bonita point of view, not the development point of view.
- To integrate Bonita efficiently in a continuous integration process, it should be possible to: completely build a process .bar without having to start the studio and/or server (typically a single maven plugin); deploy .bar files in a maven (or other) repository; start an embedded Bonita server automatically when running unit tests.
- The usage of images and the (apparently mandatory) integration with Jenkins make this more complex than it should be.
- The constraint to deploy only one database model on the server is particularly painful.
- It necessitates that unrelated processes are combined into the same repository. In fact, it completely nullifies the possibility of having multiple repositories.
- While it is definitely a great idea to allow process parameters to be configured in the web interface, it would be useful to allow import (and export) of these parameters as a .properties file. Currently, a re-install of a process requires you to reconfigure these parameters manually (not nice if there are more than a few parameters).
- It is very unintuitive (and even illogical) that the XOR operator is named as such, while it does not act as an Exclusive Or when used with multiple incoming flows.
- A formal ticketing system for encountered issues with Bonita studio and server would be nice. (if it exists, I was never pointed to it)
- Mapping of values (message variables, process and sub-process variables, step variables) is often inconsistent. Certain cases allow the usage of scripts, others don't. Same for calling Java methods on an Object. Making this more consistent would avoid surprises and probably create lesser bugs. Data operations at the entry of a step would be useful too.
March 08, 2016
Bonita BPM - A powerful and scalable solution
Bonita is mainly used for our order entry processes. It is also used for workflow for order approval and integration with Oracle R12.
- Easy worflow design and update.
- Form creation can be done by non IT resources.
- Roles and users are really managed well.
- The web portal does not allow advanced search.
- Standard connector does exist for SAP but not for Oracle EBS.
March 07, 2016
Great Open Source BPM tool
We are using it as a VAR to support our product development.
- We like it that it is open source.
- Easy to use with good management tools.
- The technology using AngularJS framework
- We like to see more API tools to allow integration with third party tools.
- Better report writer and analytics tools.
March 04, 2016
BonitaBPM Why or Why Not
We are a software company that uses Bonita BPM as the BPM Engine to customize our clients workflow processes and deliver a superior and high scale product that can be utilized in their every day needs within their departments/organization. The clients range from defense contractors, private contractors and a few select commercial companies.
- Bonita uses JBoss and is very easily integrated with Java if using API calls or even their REST services.
- Bonita has the use of JasperReports which makes it easier for us to build reports on our own and attach them as part of the process.
- Bonita Development Studio is very slow in performance. It's built on top of Eclipse BUT one needs too much patience to work with the development studio.
- I have used up till v6.3 so I am not aware of the latest and greatest features on v7.x. But I would like full control on what we can display and how we display things on BPM Admin and User Portal to the customer. Be able to use latest and greatest technology like Angular and less frameworks (They already have less).
- Development Studio should have the capability of communicating with an enterprise database server such as SQL or Oracle. The inbuilt Bonita Database is not that reliable for developers.
March 04, 2016
BonitaBPM review
Our project was to create a self-service portal for onboarding to specific engineering applications my team deployed and supported. During the design and architecture phase of our project, we evaluated multiple methods of creating workflows for our users and settled on BPM and Bonita specifically. We attempted to then integrate that with our online presence which was an AngularJS application with a Java/Spring/Hibernate backend.
- Creating workflows for evaluation of the product was easy. Makes comparing against other tools easier and quicker.
- Integration with AngularJS applications is documented and supported. This is good for existing applications you want to expand with workflow capabilities.
- UI customization was difficult.