Top 12 Best Business Process Management (BPM) Tools for SMBs [2023]

Business Process Management (BPM) software solutions are built to help you manage and streamline your tasks effectively in order to improve productivity and profitability. 

BPM tools can help every business, from startup to enterprise, run its process smoothly and achieve business goals. 

If you want to stand out in this highly competitive market, you must come up with unique ideas that can solve your customers’ problems, which requires time and effort.

Therefore, you can’t afford to waste time and resources on performing repetitive tasks and managing everything manually.

This is where business process management tools come into the picture.

It is the best way to manage your tasks while saving time and effort. This technology also helps you reduce error, enhance customer satisfaction, and cut down costs. It will enable you to free time for innovative ideas and make smarter business decisions. 

In this article, I’ll discuss some of the best business process management tools and the benefits of using them for your business.

What Is Business Process Management (BPM)?

Business Process Management (BPM) is an efficient approach to maintaining various processes, tasks, and activities of a business. It is a discipline covering tasks such as discovering, measuring, analyzing, modeling, optimizing, and improving your business processes.

And a BPM tool is a technology using business process management concepts. It is designed to coordinate with people’s behavior, information, systems, and things to produce a detailed report at the end. This enables you to make intelligent decisions for the betterment of your business.

Using the tool, you can eliminate repetitive and time-consuming tasks with automated workflows to improve employee efficiency, provide a better customer experience, and gain errorless insights. 

There are three types of business process management:

• Human-centric BPM: This type of BPM focuses on human activities to automate supporting functions and execute a process. This ensures the current tasks are carried out by the right team at the right time. 
• Document-centric BPM: This BPM manages the workflow of the documents in order to approve and avoid email chains by allowing better control. 
• Integration-centric BPM: It connects various tools under a single roof that allows data to flow within an organization, reducing the process of manual data transfer. 

Features of BPM Tools

An efficient business process management tool must have some essential features to optimize your business processes and offer desired results. Although the feature list might differ from one BPM tool to another, certain features are common to all.

So, here are some of the crucial features of a BPM tool:

• Intuitive user interface
• Mobile responsiveness
• Framework modeling
• Visual workflow modeling
• Controlled user access
• Unique case management
• Interdepartmental collaboration
• Change management
• Drag and drop option
• Real-time reporting
• Software integration capability

BPM Software Vs. Project Management Software 

To understand the crucial differences between BPM software and project management software, you need to understand the factors that define their functions, problem-solving capabilities, and uses. 

• BPM aims for efficiency, whereas project management’s goal is to maintain transparency.
• Process management easily adapts the organizational processes to streamline the work, whereas project management is designed to quickly adapt to the nature of change.
• In the BPM solution, all the data is moved across the system automatically, whereas, in project management, you may have to move the data manually between the stakeholders. 
• Process management focuses on the entire organization’s workflow, whereas project management aims at a specific team’s projects and tasks. 

Stages in the BPM Lifecycle

BPM is used to map and analyze your business processes to identify the area for improvement. Achieving this goal requires you to go through some stages:

• Design: Identify the area that needs improvement and define some necessary steps to achieve the outcome. 
• Model: Map the current process and design the new version.
• Execute: Implement the previously designed process into the system.
• Monitor: Monitor the performance of the executed process and measure if the said improvements are sufficient to achieve the expected results.
• Optimize: If it still lacks, look for other ways to increase its chances of winning.

This way, you can improve business processes and allow your organization to work intelligently.   

Use Cases

Many businesses have already started working smartly using BPM software and exploring its benefits. It is used in several industries to manage their business processes. The various use cases of BPM tools are:

• Account opening
• Capital expenditures
• Employee onboarding
• Claims management
• Risk and compliance management
• Aligning data across the systems
• Time-off requests
• Travel authorization
• Invoice processing
• Evolving business processes
• Transcript request
• Procurement and acquisition
• Price quotes
• Work orders
• Budget approvals
• Healthcare and insurance

And many more.

Now, let’s get into some of the best BPM tools in the market. Each tool has its own functionalities and provides various packages for small businesses to large enterprises.

monday.com

Manage your business processes and automate workflow with monday.com and gain essential insights into your project’s status, budget spending, and more. Let the automation take over your repetitive tasks and save time for you. 

Integrate monday.com with your favorite business tools to centralize all the data in a single place. It will prevent you from struggling with managing time and tasks while helping you stay on top of task management. 

monday.com works well for mapping the business processes with its interactive and easy-to-use platform that tracks each cost in each project stage. You can organize all the projects in a single place to easily manage your business processes and customize the tool according to the business demands.

With monday.com, managing and keeping a record of the team’s tasks is super easy and reliable. You can also allow your team to access the software to update their work status. If you are an individual or a team of two members, you can use the free subscription to avail of many benefits, including a content library, unlimited marketing workflows, basic filter, task management, 30+ templates, and more. 

To use more features, you can choose any plan starting from $10/seat/month. Take a 14-day free trial to understand how it works. 

Creatio

Creatio is a no-code platform for business and process management. It can be used to manage business processes of any complexity. It can be deployed on-premises as well as in the cloud. It is the platform for sales, marketing, and service.

All Creatio products are powered with no-code tools as well as out-of-the-box capabilities to help organizations digitize workflows, enhance customer and employee experiences, and boost efficiency across all business units. Creatio enables non-technical users to create powerful business apps without coding with its no-code UI builder and drag-and-drop visual design tools.

Features:

• A 360-degree customer view, lead management, opportunity management, product management, document flow automation, case management, contact center, analytics, and other features
• AI\ML automation capabilities
• Built-in best-practice templates and extensive a/b testing options
• Composable architecture that consists of packaged capabilities created as composable elements
• Automated decision-making and elimination of unnecessary steps and outdated screens
• Unified customer-centered data with powerful insights

Pipefy

Design and automate your business workflows in minutes with Pipefy and enhance your business efficiency. Easily integrate your end-to-end operations on a low-code and secure workflow and BPA platform. 

With Pipefy, you can collaborate on revenue operations, HR operations, finance and procurement operations, and IT as well as Governance. Resolve all the requests of your customers, partners, and colleagues with heroic precision and efficiency. 

Control the workflow to fulfill all the requests correctly, reliably, and quickly so your back-office team can free more time. Pipefy offers smart automation to reduce your headache of managing all the processes and enhance your productivity by allowing them to focus on other valuable work. 

Pipefy produces automatic reports based on active work. Since your operations change daily, It helps you adjust your processes according to the changes. Forget about loading the output manually to the back-office system; just describe the whole process from beginning to the end, and Pipefy will do the rest and transform the way you work. 

Join a starter pack for FREE, which is specially designed for small teams, freelancers, students, and startups. If you need extra benefits for your large business, you can go with $22/user/month.

Zoho Creator

Building process-based apps, managing your data, and automating routine tasks are more efficient and easy with Zoho Creator. Manage end-to-end business process management without investing effort and time. 

Map your internal processes based on the KPIs and organizational guidelines with a BPM framework. This results in proper communication with stakeholders so that they can communicate procedures in a better way. 

Let Zoho Creator simplify your job of designing, monitoring, executing, and optimizing processes. It will, in return, reduce your workload and eliminate manual errors or interventions. Moreover, it helps organizations set goals and improve their stability and reliability.  

Zoho Creator is built to auto-scale, which means whenever your business demands grow, the backend infrastructure of Zoho Creator seamlessly scales. Use the power of automation in your business processes and relax on your couch. You will also get more than 600 pre-built integrations to get all the departments to stay in a single place and talk to each other easily.

With API integration, businesses can connect to third-party applications. You can also get a proper view of the details through reports and statistics in the dashboards. It is the right time to pick up any plan and start managing your processes. Take a 15-day free trial to experience Zoho Creator closely. 

Kissflow’s Workflow

Instead of struggling to manage projects and tasks and making the work a headache, just relax and see your business productivity improve with Kissflow’s Workflow. It is an agile, powerful, convenient, team-friendly, and easy-to-use platform that allows you to easily implement business process management solutions in your organization and excel at it. 

With this next-generation BPM software, you can manage all the processes smartly. Kissflow offers intuitive no-code tools so that a non-coder can easily implement the solution. Start managing in days, not in months. Kissflow empowers business owners and leaders to make intelligent choices.

Kissflow is a flexible, scalable, and adaptable platform that comes with a fast and stunning UI to perform all the functions. It also introduces you to democratic computing and presents real-time information on each process in an understandable format.

You can use dashboards and build custom reports to derive actionable insights. With dynamic reporting functionality, you can quickly get key insights into business processes. Optimize your business processes by performing deeper drill-downs, eliminating bottlenecks, and making changes to the workflow anytime you want. You will also get a printable or digital paper trail of every step in the process. 

See how robust the platform is by availing of a FREE trial. Choose from various plans starting from $9.90/user/month or $495/50 users. 

Microsoft Power Automate

Take care of essential things and automate the rest of the processes with Microsoft Power Automate. It allows you to streamline all the paperless processes and repetitive tasks so that you can focus on other things.

Empower your team to build automated processes using drag-and-drop tools, pre-built connectors, and low-code and quickly automate mundane tasks. You can also visualize the recorded end-to-end processes with the help of a process advisor that provides recommendations for creating deep insights and flows.

Boost your business efficiency by using these data to automate and track every task and make your automation smarter with a smart AI builder. You can also quickly process the forms through document automation, detect images and text, create with prebuilt models, and process approvals.

Expand Microsoft Power Automate capability across web, mobile, and desktop with its applications. You can also connect your workflows to many data sources via a library of connectors that brings all your data together in a single place. This lets you uncover insights and customize applications. You can also extend the capabilities of Dynamic 365, Azure, Microsoft 365, and more. 

An individual user can analyze the processes to create unlimited cloud flows at $15/user/month. You can also choose the other plan with an RPA that includes 5000 AI builder service credits every month. You can even opt for a FREE trial.

Appian

Experience the power of business workflow automation with Appian and accelerate your business governance, results, and efficiency. Appian simplifies your workflow design to empower users and pro developers to draw processes, such as a flowchart.

Allow your team to use AI to create and store processes for faster design, automate the management work, and organize technologies, data, and people in a single place. Appian also lets you analyze the needs, regulatory changes, inefficiencies, and trends of your organization to adapt quickly and effectively.

Expand the limit of business process management to automate the processes, enhance user engagement, and collaborate. With Appian, you can draw processes, leverage intelligent services, enforce organizational rules, and embed workflows into the applications. 

In addition, build and deploy rules, unify data, and deploy workflow for a consistent experience. Integrate other tools with your business tools to draw your team’s attention toward a single task. There is no need to develop anything extra; instead, directly deliver user experiences in mobile across the enterprise. 

Start using Appian for FREE and get online training, guides, and a dedicated cloud environment. 

Nintex

Get a complete automation and process management platform to improve your productivity with Nintex. It is a powerful and easy-to-use process platform that accelerates your digital transformation.

Nintex is built to improve the way people work and makes your whole business process fast, easy to manage, and simple. Additionally, it automates and optimizes business processes so that you can focus on essential things. 

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Visually map, plan, and manage the tasks with its easy-to-use tools that participants and owners love to use. If you want, you can add third-party consultants to help you map, manage, standardize, and enhance the processes anytime. 

Nintex will help eliminate the manual and repetitive work with automated workflows and capture information faster in the proper manner. It can monitor the processes to identify and quickly address the issues and point the process improvements by using data visualization. 

Take the standard subscription of $955/month for unlimited users and 100 processes. You will get process mapping, management, feedback, collaboration, personalized dashboards, lean tagging, and standard support here. 

Kintone

Manage your business processes easily with Kintone’s handy BPM software with powerful automation, and forget about doing everything manually. From mapping your steps and assigning tasks to automating the tedious tasks, Kintone is all set to make your work easier. 

You can set up an automated reminder so that everyone on the list will get custom notifications and alerts according to their deadlines. Kintone is mobile-friendly; hence, you can access workflows, edit, and manage them from any device. 

Ensure the right people can see the workflows and set permissions accordingly to give approvals to your teams. Kintone carefully organizes all the records of the workflow processes and lets you make audits in minutes.

Power your experience with extensions and integrations. You will get more than 1000 new applications with Kintone. You can also use the template library to get started right away, add third-party tools to your applications to enhance your productivity, and change workflows in just a few clicks. 

Start managing all the processes with ease at $24/seat/month for a minimum of 5 users. Take your 30-day FREE trial today.

Process Street

Process Street is a free, powerful, and simple platform that provides an easy-to-go way to manage various work processes and checklists. It is a simple platform to manage everything by creating a workflow, running multiple instances of the same workflow, tracking progress, and collaborating with the team.

Its simple interface lets you improve by creating structured documents in seconds and quickly assigning them to your team. You can also track each activity from the dashboard and get notifications whenever the tasks are completed. In addition, drag and drop features and intuitive keyboard shortcuts make your management work easier than before. 

Use the data to know your team’s performance and assign tasks accordingly. Create dynamic workflows with conditional logic that adapts to your changing needs and streamline the processes requiring another person’s authorization. Integrate with 1000+ applications to automate processes. 

Try this platform for FREE and get one workflow, one active workflow run, one member, unlimited storage, unlimited pages, and more. Avail of more benefits at $25/member/month.

Bizagi

Optimize business processes and achieve enterprise-grade efficiencies with Bizagi’s BPM software. It’s a free tool with an intuitive interface and drag-drop option to easily map and visualize business processes and find better ways of doing tasks across the enterprise.

You can take a series of online courses and develop your knowledge and skills in process modeling along with various essentials, development, administration, operation, and integration. 

Bizagi offers human-centric BPM that focuses on human-centric management processes, document-centric processes, and integration-centric processes. Its BPM lifecycle consists of designing, modeling, executing, monitoring, and optimizing processes.  

Download Bizagi BPM software for your Windows PC and start eliminating the manual work with true automation. 

Camunda

Camunda is the universal process orchestrator that reinvents the working process automation for your modern and digital enterprise. It can streamline all the complex process flows across systems, devices, and people.

You can use Camunda from anywhere and transform your business towards the digital future. You will also get the useful components you need from the Camunda and streamline your workflows. 

With Camunda, you can connect, collaborate, and scale rapidly. Orchestrate Camunda into the process endpoints your organization needs to automate the flow and bring IT and business together to collaborate effectively. 

Moreover, Camunda offers unparalleled speed, resilience, and scale throughout the process, with an unlimited amount of transactions at low latencies. Integrate easily with technical frameworks and architectures and allow your developers to integrate any tool with Open APIs. 

Ready to start? Take a FREE trial first and later choose a perfect plan for you. 

How to choose a business process management (BPM) tool?

BPM is an indispensable tool in making your business operations run leaner and more efficiently. It enables you to create effective workflows that can cut costs by utilizing time and resources better.

Getting the right BPM tool might not be easy, but it will pay off when you find that one proper tool that may help improve your business processes.

At the broad level, users should define their goals, evaluate the current state of the business, compare different BPM tools, test and validate the final ones, and implement and optimize your BPM tool.

Below is a detailed guide that would help you to choose a tool that is right for your organization and your needs.

BPM tools come with varying features, and you need to establish a tool with the right capabilities. Common features include process modeling, task management, automation, real-time monitoring, reporting, and analytics.

Consider technical ability when choosing product type; for instance, cloud-based tools are often simpler for novices and require less maintenance than their on-premises equivalents.

BPM tools can be quite complex; therefore, you should obtain one that is easy to use for both business users and IT personnel. Consider the interface design and other issues, such as a requirement for training and overall ease of use.

Get stakeholder buy-in before deciding upon any particular BPM tool, as this will help guarantee its use and everyone is on board with it.

Your business will grow in the future, so you should get a BPM tool that can expand together with your needs. Ensure that the chosen tool supports any probable requirements you might have in the future, including more user volume or processes that are more complex.

If you already use other business software, such as CRM or ERP systems, ensure the BPM tool integrates with them. It will help you simplify your operations and avoid data silos.

The cost of BPM tools ranges from a few hundred dollars per month to tens of thousands per year. Make sure you have allocated a budget before shopping around for one, and choose a tool based on your budget and requirements.

Indeed, plenty of business process management software offerings are available –– which can make choosing the right one seem daunting. But it needn’t be.

By first considering key factors like usability and governance upfront, assessing future needs well in advance, implementing sound content management strategies, and keeping an eye on technology costs, you can chart a course that works for today’s specific demands –– and tomorrow’s challenges, too.

With carefully considering the abovementioned elements, maximize return on investment in all your BPM projects at every stage.

Conclusion

Since the world is transforming digitally, the features and capabilities of management software are also changing. BPM software is used for process modeling and automation to help increase productivity, streamline tasks, and save more time and energy. It also comes with other capabilities to help you manage processes effectively with less complexity.

Each BPM software mentioned above has different capabilities to help you grow more with less effort and time. They come with handy packages so that everyone can leverage their benefits, whether you are a small business or enterprise.

So, choose the best BPM tool according to the number of employees, type of projects, and your budget and experience the benefits yourself while managing the business processes.