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With Formstack, automate manual processes, deliver solutions quicker, and go from idea to workflow in minutes and save hours—all with clicks, not code. Combining a visual workflow automation builder with digital forms, document generation, and eSignature s...Read more about Formstack Suite
MaintainX is a web-based CMMS tool that can be used on mobile devices. It aims to improve workflow completion and strengthen team communication. It can be used by operational teams in small to large businesses. This solution allows users to track unlimited...Read more about MaintainX
Founded in 2011, Zapier has helped over 1.8 million individuals and businesses with their automation needs. Zapier moves info between your web apps automatically, so you can focus on your most important work. Build custom workflows fast for more than 6,0...Read more about Zapier
Qntrl is workflow orchestration software built by Zoho Corporation. Created for people who orchestrate processes for their team, department, or organization, Qntrl is the easiest way to bring visibility, control, and automation to your organization's proce...Read more about Qntrl
Pipefy is the AI-enhanced process automation platform that conserves IT resources and empowers business teams to build and deploy up to 85% of workflows — no coding knowledge or third-party specialized services firms required. Standardize, streamline, and...Read more about Pipefy
Lucidchart is a cloud-based solution that helps small to large enterprises manage projects, data visualization, and diagramming processes. The centralized platform enables users to create visual diagrams of business processes and share process maps with st...Read more about Lucidchart
Enterprise Process Center, by Interfacing Technologies, is a business process management (BPM) suite that provides businesses several digitization and management programs within a single platform. The solution can be deployed either on-premise or hosted in...Read more about Digital Business Transformation Suite
Tonkean helps enterprise shared service teams improve process adoption, operate more efficiently, and move at the speed of business. Tonkean's process orchestration platform wraps around your existing systems to create an AI-driven “experience layer” for r...Read more about Tonkean
ValueData Miner is process mining software that helps users handle optimization opportunities in business processes. The software helps businesses increase their revenue through an innovative SaaS solution that enables companies to continuously manage, opt...Read more about ValueData Miner
IBM Blueworks Live is a web-based collaborative solution designed to build and improve business processes. With this solution, teams can use process mapping features to document existing or new processes. IBM Blueworks Live can be used by organizations in ...Read more about IBM Blueworks Live
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The ACTICO Platform is an AI-powered decision automation solution that enables companies to make smarter, faster, and more transparent decisions. It combines data, AI, and decision-making into a unified solution. The platform includes everything needed to ...Read more about ACTICO Platform
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The BIC Platform covers the entire spectrum of digital transformation in just one software solution. It offers companies of all industries and sizes an intuitive and technically excellent way to manage and digitalize their processes. The BIC Platform is m...Read more about BIC Platform
Aha! is the world's #1 product development software. We help more than 1 million product builders bring their strategy to life. Our suite of tools includes Aha! Roadmaps, Aha! Ideas, Aha! Whiteboards, Aha! Knowledge, and Aha! Develop. Product teams rely o...Read more about Aha!
NotoWare is a cloud-based process management solution that helps disseminate work knowledge to employees. Employees can find the latest information related to work instructions and new job task details through the solution’s database module. The solution c...Read more about NotoWare
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Datastore is a cloud-based enterprise content management platform specifically designed for financial services companies by eliminating the challenges associated with moving lots of data around. It seamlessly integrates with existing infrastructure to prov...Read more about Mitratech DataStoreDSX
CommandCenter is a Business Process Management Platform that maps, monitors and optimizes the workflows of a business. Serving a wide range of industries, it has remarkable flexibility that helps increase brand visibility, enforce consistency in deliverabl...Read more about CommandCenter
Planful for Marketing is a marketing planning solution that helps businesses manage and track marketing goals, campaigns, budgets and overall returns on investment (ROI) from a centralized platform. It enables marketing professionals to create and assign c...Read more about Planful for Marketing
Motion.io is client onboarding software that enables your business to automate information collection, streamline project communication, and elevate your customer experience. Motion.io's perfect blend of project management and client portal software prov...Read more about Motion.io
BigTime helps professional services firms reduce operational costs, easily align talent to the right projects, and accelerate time to get paid for completed work, all while enabling quicker decision-making by getting you the information you need. By stre...Read more about BigTime
BatchMaster Software offers process manufacturing software solutions for the food, chemical, nutraceutical and pharmaceutical industries. Users can run the manufacturing application with QuickBooks, Sage 100&300, Microsoft Dynamics GP and SAP Business One ...Read more about BatchMaster ERP
ARIS is a robotic process management software designed to help organizations visualize, analyze and optimize business processes. The platform offers AI-enabled tools, allowing managers to detect anomalies in process execution, measure employee productivity...Read more about ARIS
SmartProcess is a cloud-based business process management (BPM) suite that helps companies to manage the workflow of their employees. The software provides tools for resource modelling, process optimization and publication of processes and documents. ...Read more about SmartProcess
Droplet is a forms and workflow automation solution that helps businesses design web forms and manage workflows. It enables organizations to collect and store business data in a centralized repository, handle approval processes with detailed business logic...Read more about Droplet
Ennov Process is a business process management software for the life science industry. This platform offers a graphical workflow designer, visual forms editor, manual or automated task execution, real-time monitoring with dashboards and statistics, and a R...Read more about Ennov Workflow
FuseBase is an AI-powered, all-in-one client collaboration tool designed to help professional services streamline workflow and deliver outstanding customer experiences with client portals. This platform empowers professional services with hundreds of advan...Read more about Fusebase (Formerly Nimbus)
Software Advice uses reviews from real software users to highlight the top-rated Business Process Management products in North America.
Learn how products are chosen“Usability” includes user ratings for Functionality and Ease of Use.
“Customer Satisfaction” includes user ratings for Customer Support, Likelihood to Recommend and Value for Money.
Reviews analysis period: The reviews analysis period spans two years and ends the 15th of the month prior to publication.
This detailed guide will help you find and buy the right business process management software for you and your business.
Last Updated on March 16, 2023Business process management: At first glance, this term seems to be a simple description of what bosses, managers and department heads do; they manage the processes of business. The term’s unstated implication is that processes are managed with the aim of increasing efficiency, profitability and/or competitiveness.
But business process management (BPM) is actually a technical term. It still carries some of the same implications noted above—the aim of BPM is to increase a company’s efficiency, profitability and/or competitiveness—but, as a technical term, it focuses specifically on the digitization of business processes. Software and application development play a central role.
(If you're looking for more generic software to simply manage a business, without the technical implications of BPM, that would just be business management software—not at all confusing, right? Don't worry, we'll clear things up.)
Trends in, Direction of BPM Software Market
BPM is defined by Gartner as “a discipline that uses various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve and optimize business processes. A business process coordinates the behavior of people, systems, information and things to produce business outcomes in support of a business strategy. Processes can be structured and repeatable or unstructured and variable. Though not required, technologies are often used with BPM. BPM is key to align IT/OT [information/operational technologies] investments to business strategy.”
With the definition out of the way, let’s see what BPM looks like in practice. Compare the following two scenarios to understand what distinguishes BPM from the ordinary and expected activities of running a business.
Two-Year Growth Comparison, With and Without BPM
| Over two-year period | Result |
Business A (Without BPM) | • Grew from 50 to 150 employees • Changed offices twice, but changed none of its IT organizational structure • With each new hire, added one more workstation and purchased one or more additional software licenses • Underlying work performed by employees didn’t change | • Company headcount grew by 200 percent • Did not actively seek ways to optimize business processes • Growth resulted in few economies of scale • Lost market share to competitors with more efficient business processes |
Business B (With BPM) | • Grew from 50 to 60 employees • Evaluated new IT in terms of business strategy and departmental goals • Switched from Gmail for support requests to an all-in-one customer service platform • Tied new service platform into R&D’s bug reporting system • Leveraged IT improvements to streamline employee workflows | • Company headcount grew by 20 percent • Used IT purchases to streamline business processes • Productivity (profit/employee) grew 200 percent • Captured one-third of Business A’s market share |
As you might expect, BPM takes different forms and is shaped by a business’s size, segment and strategy. As a result, software used for BPM is available in many different forms.
You can focus your approach to the BPM software market by looking at it in terms of three general categories outlined by Gartner in a report by analysts Michele Cantara and Rob Dunie: “Select the Right Type of BPM Platform to Achieve Your Application Development, Business Transformation or Digital Business Goals” (content available to Gartner clients).
Gartner’s Three Types of BPM Platform
Basic BPM Platforms: As the name implies, these are the most elementary platforms for BPM. They contain tools designed to ensure that new IT applications will lead to the desired business outcomes. These can include basic, user-friendly interfaces—for example, to help test and model workflows—as well as tools supporting the development of applications which increase efficiency.
Basic BPM platforms are often chosen by smaller organizations, and many are intended to be used by staff outside the IT department.
BPM Suites (BPMS): BPMSs have a wider scope and include tools used by both IT and non-IT staff. (At this level, BPM initiatives typically require coordination between IT and other business units and departments.) They’re useful for organizations seeking continuous (as opposed to one-off) process refinement and improvement and include options to increase process agility and flexibility.
BPM suites are best for organizations that, in order to achieve their BPM goals, need deeper integration with their existing IT architecture.
Intelligent BPM Suites (iBPMS): This category is the most advanced, adding advanced analytics, operational intelligence and rapid application development tools to the BPM and BPMS mix of tools. iBPMSs can increase the speed with which a company goes from insight to action, often with the creation of automated self-adapting, goal-directed processes.
iBPMSs are used by organizations that need to incorporate complex, real-time operational intelligence, both internal and external (from partners or customers), in order to effect significant process improvements.
If we knew specifically which processes businesses would be managing tomorrow, we’d have retired yesterday… and we wouldn’t have written this Buyer’s Guide today. We can’t predict the future, but we have been observing BPM long enough to understand that these general trends in BPM technology and strategy are likely to continue.
Some businesses will fail with one or more aspect of their digital transformation strategies, not because the strategy or IT selection was misguided, but because BPM was not included in the planning. It takes a concerted effort between IT and departmental stakeholders to ensure that the dividends of digital transformation projects are distributed in the form of improved business processes.
Creation and exploration of deliberately unstable processes will increase, as companies strive to adapt their workflows and processes to changing customer needs and to a greater variety of more granular customer interaction scenarios.
Companies with strict organizational structures will have more difficulty realizing BPM gains and improvements, while more agile companies and those more comfortable with iterative process improvement will get the best return on investment from their BPM improvement initiatives.