Business process management (BPM) system is a robotic process automation tool that helps to streamline complex procedures, eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy, and restructure company for a smooth workflow.
Let’s discover what benefits you can gain from using business process management software, and what are the best tools.
What Is Business Process Management Software and Why Use It?
Business process management (BPM) software is dedicated to defining, organizing, and monitoring business processes in a company. It can also help improve current processes, shed light on ineffective areas, and show you the big picture of your firm — its condition, position against competitors, and employee engagement.
BPM software may be similar to project management tools, however, it’s focused on analytics and improving complex workflow procedures.
If you’re wondering why to use business process management software, here are a few examples of its benefits:
- The more you understand business processes, the more you can improve them
- BPM software helps to identify key problem areas in your processes
- It helps to save time and money on activities that can be automated
- It gives you a database for information about your processes to make better decisions
- BPM tools help to evaluate your results and spot the bottlenecks by looking at the data
- It helps to understand human error, what stands on the way to employee success, what obstacles they face, how can a company improve their work, and what needs to be changed, eliminated, or added
- Effectiveness of processes leads to happier and satisfied customers as a result of higher employee engagement and better workflow
Business process management software helps to improve processes, better define business goals, and make sure your company is on the right track.
👉 Read more about BPM: How to Successfully Implement Business Process Improvement
What Is The Best Business Process Management Software?
Business process management software may differ with functionalities. Every tool will give you distinct power of managing capabilities of the business process lifecycle.
But there are several crucial features to look for to make sure the BPM software will help you optimize and enhance processes:
- Automation: features that help to minimize administrative work, paperwork, and other repetitive procedures, and optimize workflow. Later you can start your own automation strategies by using AI. Make sure to implement proper data labeling process so that your model can learn accurately.
- Reports: to get all the necessary data about your company and business processes to monitor performance and define inefficiencies
- Integrations: to connect the BPMor if you prefer, you can opt for a standalone solution
- Team collaboration features: for transparency so all team can work together on business processes and have insight into what’s happening in the company
There are plenty of options to look for in the BPM systems and it may be hard to choose the right one. That’s why we narrowed down our list to several categories for different business applications.
Here is the business process management software comparison:
- TimeCamp – Free automated time tracker with reporting and analytics features
- Kissflow – Process automation software with workflow tools
- IBM Business Process Manager – Best BPM software for large tech and IT organizations
- ProcessMaker – Workflow automation for small businesses
- Process Street – Best BPM tool for small businesses and team workflow management
- Nintex Process Platform – All-in-one business process management software
- Pipefy – Integrated e-mail and workflow orchestration platform
- Ninox – Lightweight workflow automation software with a simple to use database
- Creatio – Best business process management tool for sales people
1. TimeCamp
Free automated time tracker with reporting and analytics features
TimeCamp is an automatic time tracking software with powerful reporting and analytics features. It can help you monitor the financial health of your company, the profitability of projects, and overall performance.
It’s a suitable free business process management software for companies that want to automate leave, attendance, and payroll management.
TimeCamp also helps to reflect the organizational structure of your business to organize business workflows.
Here are the main features that will help you improve business processes:
- Automatic time tracker available as a desktop app (Windows, macOS, Linux), mobile app (Android, iOS), and in-web one-click stop/start timer
- Detailed and comprehensive reports (custom reports, by projects, tasks, people, days, time entries, project budget, and many more) show you the real-time business state
- Timesheets with easy approval
- Tracking billable and non-billable time
- Tracking time by projects, tasks, subtasks, and tags to get more granular information about projects and business processes
- Monitoring productive and unproductive activities to help improve employee performance
- Attendance management to keep track of vacations, leaves, absences, and more
- Budgeting with the ability to set different rates, invoicing
Integrations: TimeCamp easily integrates with many of the popular SaaS tools
Pricing: Free 14-day trial with all features is available. You can choose from three plans—Free with unlimited users, tasks, and projects, and one integration; Basic $7 user/month; Pro $ 10 user/month; or Enterprise with custom pricing.
2. Kissflow
Process automation software with workflow tools
Kissflow is a low-code business process management platform that allows you to create a customized BPM application fitting to your work environment. It’s a modular solution that is perfect for non-IT companies that want to manage even the most complex processes within one tool.
Kissflow streamlines workflow and connects processes in four simple steps:
- Build a form for your process. You can choose from 20 field types, advanced formulas, and drag-and-drop layouts
- Set a workflow by adding steps, assignees, setting deadlines, creating conditions, and more
- Customize the workflow with personal or team preferences (hide fields depending on process steps or data), add admins, or run test data
- Monitor process with controlled access, reports, and add changes
- Additionally, Kissflow offers team collaboration features
Kissflow lets you automate business processes and go paperless by digitizing all the documents. You can eliminate manual tasks and improve the visibility and tracking of processes with automation features.
Integrations: You can connect Kissflow with over 1,000 business apps instantly through Zapier. Or use webhooks and REST APIs to push data from Kissflow to multiple third-party tools to trigger external service actions.
Pricing: Free trial is available. Pricing starts at $450 per month (includes 20 users).
3. IBM Business Process Manager
Best BPM software for large tech and IT organizations
IBM is one of the largest multinational technology companies in the world and definitely knows a lot about business processes, automation, and software.
IBM Manager is a comprehensive business process management (BPM) platform that gives you visibility and insight to manage business processes. It’s part of IBM Cloud Pak ® for Business Automation and comprises tools for business process management at every stage. It supports both long-running and short-running business processes.
Here’s what you can do with IBM BPM:
- Track performance of the entire company, project progress, and various processes simultaneously
- Get strategic analytics after the process is completed
- Receive shared variables across different processes to solve common problems and work on inefficiencies
- You get AI-based tools to automate procedures and save time
- IBM BPM is a cloud platform so the software provides you with scalability and high data security
IBM Business Process Manager works best in large, corporate environments with complex business processes.
Pricing: Free 30-day trial is available. Pricing depends on what tools you want to use.
4. ProcessMaker
Workflow automation for small businesses
ProcessMaker is a low-code platform for workflow automation. It lets you automate form-intensive, approval-based processes across departments and systems with its flexible case management features.
In ProcessMaker, you design business processes in process modeler with the drag-and-drop designer and customize them with tasks, decision points, modeling canvas, and other elements. Visualization
You can also build different types of charts and dashboards to monitor processes. With Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) feature, you are able to set Service Level Agreement (SLA) alerts that will notify you when certain business process conditions are met.
Additionally, you can approve or reject requests directly from your business email inbox or Slack.
Integrations: you can connect ProcessMaker with third-party systems via API
Pricing: starts at $19 per user per month.
5. Process Street
Best BPM tool for small businesses and team workflow management
Process Street is a simple process and workflow management software that lets you easily manage recurring workflows for your team from simple processes to a multi-level departmental workflow.
Process Street automates business process creation with its simple user interface so you can structure documents with no effort. It’s an action-oriented platform allowing for full human interaction—people are actively involved in processes rather than just reading docs.
Here are the main features:
- Create a process from scratch or use one from the Process Street library
- Customize your tasks with any details you want—conditional logic, multi-stage approvals, integrations with third-party apps, add media to your documents (images, videos and files)
- Your BPM software dashboard will tell you how your team is progressing in real-time. The reporting API allows you to generate reports that measure performance against KPIs
- Schedule daily, weekly and monthly workflows
- Communication and collaboration features
Integrations: Process Street easily integrates with third-party apps
Pricing starts at $15 per user/month. All plans start with a 14-day trial of Standard features.
6. Nintex Process Platform
All-in-one business process management software
Nintex Process Platform is a business process management suite that lets you manage, automate, and optimize your business processes. It’s a workflow automation platform that lets you build workflows and connect apps to automate team and enterprise business processes.
It provides more visibility to the processes by giving you all the tools necessary for effective work. Additionally, you can invite your clients to work with you in Nintex.
Nintex is a complete and easy to use platform based on three components:
- Manage: map, document, and share processes
- Automate: quickly build automation application (responsive forms designer with drag-and-drop feature), generate a document based on the information pulled out from the system and create a mobile app with the electronic signature to use on different devices; you can also build bots for repetitive workflows
- Optimize: leverage analytics capabilities and get insight into what’s happening in the processes and find bottlenecks to be more effective and efficient
Integrations: Nintex easily integrates with other popular apps
Pricing: Price depends on features you want to use and starts under $875 per month for unlimited users and 10 workflows. Free trial is available.
7. Pipefy
Integrated e-mail and workflow orchestration platform
Pipefy is a no/low-code business process management software with automation features. It replaces long and messy e-mail threads and to-do lists with one automated application.
You can collect process intakes from multiple channels (service portals and online public forms, emails, other tools, etc.) to later turn them into processes. Or you can create a new process from scratch.
Here are some of the main features:
- Case management
- Smallish functionalities like filtering information, alerts, list and Kanban views, building rules and criteria for your process, generating reports
- You can connect a process to other pipes
- Send and receive emails directly in Pipefy
- Customize every process
- Stakeholders and people involved in the project can track progress
Pipefy enables you to create an entire pipeline for your business processes and workflow without the need for IT support and orchestrate all your work from different tools to centralize information in one platform.
Integrations: Pipefy easily integrates with other BPM tools, project and task management software, and other popular products
Pricing: Free version is available with limited features. Pricing starts at $22 per user/month
8. Ninox
Lightweight workflow automation software with a simple to use database
Ninox is an easy-to-use single-user database app. It’s a low-code platform that allows non-technical users without programming knowledge to develop custom business apps in minutes.
You can use Ninonx as a business process management app or project and task management. It combines features of a CRM and workflow software allowing you to manage customers, processes, and invoices.
Ninox works just like any other business process management application and has all the necessary features to automate work:
- Database with all the important data
- Drag-and-drop interface to quickly arrange forms, charts, and reports
- Customizable templates for a huge variety of scenarios
- Quick customization options
Integrations: integrations with other tools are possible via Ninox API
Pricing: Ninox is available for teams and individuals. You can get a free version for desktop and mobile devices. Pricing starts at $8.33 per user/month (billed annually). Ninox offers a free 30-day trial.
9. Creatio
Best business process management tool for sales people
Creatio is a low-code platform for business process management (BPM) and CRM. It’s a good solution for mid-size and large enterprises.
Creatio provides applications for marketing, sales, and service. They can be deployed as standalone products, or as a bundle on a single platform.
The BPM software has features that let you create an entire pipeline for sales and marketing with rich case management options:
- Portal fully-integrated with the entire application to collaborate with clients, partners, and employees
- Flexible process creation and customization
- Customer 360° Profile —rich database with all the information about your customers
- Request, problem, knowledge, change, and release management
- Omnichannel communication
Creatio helps to make your business process management smooth and improve customer satisfaction.
Integrations: Creatio has extensive integration capabilities (.Net tools, REST, SOAP, OData, open API)
Pricing starts at $35. You can choose to use the tool in the cloud or on-premise.
Wrapping Up
Business process management software solutions can tremendously help improve workflow, automate and optimize complex procedures, and as a result better serve your customers. It’s also a great resource to create an end-to-end system for your business.
What tools are you using to manage and automate processes in your company? Let us know in the comments, we’d love to hear from you!