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Bonita BPM - Low cost, low code efficient platform
Updated February 14, 2017

Bonita BPM - Low cost, low code efficient platform

Maciej Michalak | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Bonita Platform

We are using Bonita BPM to a small extent, because we are small organisation. Bonita BPM is used mainly for supporting contracts management. Our experience is built on deploying the platform to our clients.
  • 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.
  • In our small company the community edition suited our needs. Although it is hard to talk about ROI in context of that small application.
  • We have introduced the platform to several companies. Delivering things faster, ensuring things are done, optimizing distribution and reporting what has been done are the most common benefits.
I found Bonita BPM a more friendly environment, especially when it comes to front-end development. It is also better suited for a gradual introduction to an organization - PoC with Community edition, later upgrade to one of the subscription editions as needed. Tibco's product has partial case management support and stateful tasks, though.
It is well suited for well defined workflows. It could be tricky if the process and its subprocesses work on the same data. Dynamic case management is not supported.

Bonita Platform Feature Ratings

7.8
Process designer
10
Business rules engine
5
SOA support
7
Support for modeling languages
7
Form builder
10
Model execution
8
4.0
Social collaboration tools
4
7.7
Dashboards
8
Standard reports
7
Custom reports
8
4.0
Content management
4

Bonita Platform Implementation

Bonita Platform Reliability

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.
Bonita BPM has an efficient engine which can be tuned and clustered. Although I came across a case when the engine did not manage to handle a great number of event handlers and the process required redesign.

Integrating Bonita Platform

Standard protocol connectors are available and implementation of new ones is supported. REST API can be extended. The support for cron-like jobs (without executing tasks) could be introduced.