K2 Blackpearl - Personal Experience
July 08, 2014

K2 Blackpearl - Personal Experience

David Rager | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Nintex Automation On-Prem / Nintex K2

Overall Satisfaction with Nintex Process Platform

K2 blackpearl was the standard tool used by ITT Exelis for any automation of workflow type projects. Our largest project utilizing K2 was for an IT Exception Request system. This system facilitated workflow automation for doing things like requesting a firewall modifications, obtaining a mobile device that had not been approved, and numerous other types of requests that were "exceptions" to our IT standards.
  • K2 blackpearl excels at letting you visually lay out your workflows
  • Makes it very easy to build simple workflow without having to do any coding
  • The biggest complaint I have with K2 blackpearl is that is does not do html emails well. There are bugs in the email editor that make sending nicely formatted emails out very painful.
  • There is a lot of redundancy in the K2 blackpearl API which makes it very confusing to use at times.
  • K2 blackpearl helped to elimite a substantial amount of time spent by ITT Exelis employees doing manual workflows.
  • Skelta
Skelta seemed like a solid product but the licensing model was not a good fit for how we wanted to utilize the workflow engine.
K2 blackpearl is probably the best workflow engine available for the .NET platform right now. If you do not want to custom build your workflow logic I would suggest K2 blackpearl.

Using Nintex Process Platform

Personally, I prefer to custom develop my workflow engines. I believe this allows for more flexibility. What I have found is that by the time I spend getting K2 blackpearl to do what I want it to do I could have custom written the code myself. It should be noted though that I was a pretty advanced user of K2 blackpearl. What we basically did is use blackpearl as the backend workflow engine, but built the front-end in ASP.NET.