Low-Code vs BPM Software: What’s the Difference?

BPM software has always been known for being clunky and hard to use. Despite this, it’s an essential tool for any organization that wants to excel at process management. Taking full advantage of BPMS, however, is far from easy: to make even the most basic changes to your apps (or processes), you’d need the help of a specialized engineer. To make the process easier, BPM provides have been focused on developing low-code platforms, which allow users to create apps with extreme simplicity.

The Need for Low-Code BPM

BPM software has been around for a while – it’s been a must-have for enterprise companies since the 1990s.

And the reason for this is crystal clear. Process management and improvement provider a lot of different benefits for your organization.

  • Process Enforcement – Formal BPM processes enforce protocol. i.e, your employees will follow whatever rules you set up for the process.
  • Agility – Without BPMS, you’d need to spend a lot of time on convincing your employees to do things in a certain way. With the software, you can simply make adjustments to the process & your employees will simply follow new protocol
  • Improve Company-Wide Productivity – As a result of the first two, your company becomes more productive, which leads to higher profits.

While this does sound amazing on paper, though, it often doesn’t hold up in practice. Getting BPM to work isn’t easy.

To begin with, the software is hard to set up – you’d need to spend months looking for the best deal, and even longer for your software provider to install it for you.

Let’s say you already went through the initial trouble of installing the software – you’d think that you’re half-way there. Well, not really. Actually getting your company to use the software is a whole different dilemma.

See, from a user experience perspective, most BPM providers tend to have a very big drawback. They’re…

  • Hard to Use. You would actually need to train your employees on how to use any given BPM software. It’s a known fact that tech adoption is already hard for your employees – they won’t be too happy if your BPM software will take weeks to learn and make sense of. To make sure that the BPMS is used, you’d have to monitor your employees, which is a hard task on its own.
  • Hard to Customize. To make any changes to your processes, you’d need the help of specialized software engineers. So, if you mess up something when setting up the processes, you’ll end up paying a bunch to have them fixed.

So now you have 2 whole new problems to deal with. Because of this, some companies tend to simply forget about their new BPM software, call it a sunk cost and move on.

Using low-code BPM software, however, can help solve both of these problems.

  Interested in starting with BPMS, but not sure which provider to pick? Check out our comparison of some of the best BPM solutions on the market.

Low-Code BPM

For the past few years, most BPM software providers have been focusing on developing low-code capabilities. i.e software that doesn’t require almost any development experience to use. Depending on the software, this is done through different means. Some use BPMN2 with drag & drop graphs. Others, such as Tallyfy, have their own proprietary process design model.

The simple user experience allows your organization to create and modify apps without any intervention from the C-suite – it’s as simple as your average task-management software and can be used by just about anyone. This, in turn, makes BPMS setup much easier & yields results that were previously impossible.

The following table describes the main differentiators between the two platform types…

Low-Code vs BPM

Low-Code 

BPM 

Setup TimeInstant registration (usually cloud-based)Up to 6 Months (more often than not, on-site)
Process SetupCustomizable process templates + drag & drop design. Apps created and deployed in minutesNeed to be programmed during the setup phase. Hard to change afterward.
PricingAvg. 10 USD / Month / User6-figure installation fee + yearly subscription
User ExperienceMinimal coding needed. Apps can be developed and used by regular employeesSpecial training + IT help for configurations
IntegrationAPI integration with 3rd party SaaS softwareLimited depending on the solution. Addons require installation by software provider

Conclusion – Low-Code is the New BPMS

Looking at the benefits offered by Low-Code BPM, it’s pretty nonsensical to even consider the hassle of adopting old-school BPM software.

Low-code allows you to build apps within minutes, rather than months. The traditional BPM adoption process – months of planning, researching and development – is replaced with a simple 5-minutes registration.

So, why don’t you give low-code BPMS a try?

Is this post written for a search engine or for you?

Many B2B cloud software companies invest in blog posts in the hope of ranking high on search engines like Google. What they’re doing is writing articles around keywords, which are terms customers are likely to search for on Google. The posts don’t offer valuable information or make any sense.

But then if you’re reading something that doesn’t make sense, how are you supposed to make informed buying decisions?

We have a lot to say about workflow and we truly believe in continuos improvement. But it’s not really about us. We publish these articles to help you find Tallyfy, and to provide you with information that will help you make informed buying decisions.

Ready to automate your workflows? Check out Tallyfy.

How exactly do we conduct research?

We research topics down to the bone. We nitpick, we argue about what to keep and what to throw out. It’s a lot of work. We consult academic sources for scholarly citations to support our points. We gather data to summarize particular points. At Tallyfy – 3 independent experts validate and edit every article from the draft stage. That includes verifying facts and their sources.

Why did we write this article?

Tallyfy believes in helpful and authoritative content that helps people. Our customers requested us to write about this topic so we attempted to put together the highest quality article available anywhere – that’s our goal. Work like this takes a lot of effort. If you liked this article please share the link with your coworkers via email, or on LinkedIn.

About the author - Amit Kothari

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