Question

We are currently in the process of evaluating a BPM engine and I’d really appreciate the community input. I am doing my own due diligence but would also like to hear on the suggestion based on implementation stories.

My main evaluation criteria are below

1. open source and OEM friendly license
2. production installations (success stories are a great help)
3. commercial support available
4. open standards support – BPMN
5. dynamic creation/assembly of the workflow based on input
6. embeddable

Currently I am evaluating Activiti and JBPM. Bonita open BPM seems like a good candidate as well but never used it. Do you guys have any successful deployments on Bonita?

Answer 1

I’ve just been doing an evaluation of Activiti vs jBPM.

In fact there seems to be very little between the two solutions.

1. Activiti is Apache V2, jBPM 5.0 is also Apache V2.
2. We’re currently using Activiti, but the project is still in dev, so I can’t comment on its robustness in production.
3. jBPM is beginning the productization process, so support for 5.x will be available in Q1 2012, see slide 32: jBPM demo. jBPM 4 was not supported by Redhat.
4. jBPM 4.x did not support BPMN 2.0, but 5.x does, Activiti does as well. jBPM 5.0 has just been released, which includes support for BPMN 2.0. So now both solutions support BPMN 2.0.
5. I’m not quite sure what you mean by this, but you can do a lot through both APIs
6. Again, not sure what you mean by this, do you mean embedded as part of an application server, in which case, yes for both solutions.

One of our criteria for jBPM was the interaction with Guvnor, and when I downloaded and ran the demo install for jBPM (28/03/2011) and there still seemed to be some major bugs (GUVNOR-1274), so I personally would test a lot more before I chose to pursue this solution.

In fact, we will be recommending one of the above two solutions, but we’re not sure which yet, we’ll look at it more closely later this year.