Below are Rico’s Top Picks for the best of Open Source Business Process Management Applications.
If we missed one you think should be included, please let us know.

The ActiveBPEL Engine

The ActiveBPEL Engine is an open source implementation of a BPEL 1.1 engine, written in Java.

The ActiveBPEL Engine runs in any standard servlet container such as Apache Tomcat.

The ActiveBPEL Engine does not contain a visual designer that allows you to easily and quickly create BPEL orchestrations. It only supports the execution of previously-coded BPEL 1.1 processes.

If you are interested in rapidly creating sophisticated BPEL orchestrations in a completely integrated visual orchestration system, please download a fully-supported, 30-day trial of ActiveVOS, our commercial product. This screenshot tour of ActiveVOS shows just some of the enhancements that are in ActiveVOS compared to ActiveBPEL.

A more detailed comparison of ActiveBPEL to ActiveVOS is available here.

The ActiveBPEL Engine is available for download here.

The ActiveBPEL Engine is made available under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Bonita Open Solution combines three solutions in one to enable you to build process based applications at optimum cost, and includes Bonita Studio, Bonita Execution Engine and Bonita User Experience.

Smart BPMN design

Bonita Studio meets the Business Process Management Notation standard (BPMN) challenge with a simple, intuitive and graphical solution.

Draw quickly with the context palette

Draw directly on the whiteboard, step by step, using the context palette. Click on any step to drag the next element into place. No need to click back and forth from the whiteboard to a separate palette.

Connect with everything

Bonita Studio comes with a large number of ready-to-use connectors – for databases, messaging and more. If what you need isn’t already there, it’s easy to add new connectors and share them with the Bonita Open Source BPM community.

Powerful BPM Engine

Bonita Open Solution comes with a generic and extensible engine to integrate new services or standards that may emerge in BPM. The Bonita Execution Engine is flexible enough to adapt easily to any Information Systems architecture, from simple to complex. And it’s powerful enough to support intensive workload.

Run your application with a click

Ready to run your process-based application? It’s easy. Just click the run button in Bonita Studio.

Get a production application up and running in a day. Design the process, connect to your information systems, and click to run the application.

Intalio|Works‘ Community Edition is a standards-based BPMS that can be used totally free of charge. With more than 50,000 organizations using it around the world, it is the most widely used BPMS today.

Intalio|Works Community Edition is made of two components: Intalio|Works Designer, built around the Eclipse BPMN Modeler, and Intalio|Works Server, which embeds the Apache ODE BPEL engine and the Tempo BPEL4People workflow framework. All three open-source projects have been originally contributed by Intalio, and are lead by our engineers today.

Intalio|Works Community Edition is a strict subset ofIntalio|Works Enterprise Edition, and upgrading from one to the other is as simple as purchasing a subscription and entering a license key. Compare the Community Edition and Enterprise edition to see which is right for you.

Benefits

Companies select Intalio|Works Community Edition for the following reasons:

• Getting started today, free of charge.
• Online community, strong of over 50,000 organizations around the world.
• Support for industry standards, especially BPMN and BPEL.
• Zero code development, with dynamic transformation of BPMN diagrams to BPEL code.
• One click deployment, with support for a variety of deployment platforms.
• Dynamic process optimization, with support for in-flight process updates.

ProcessMaker is the world’s leading Open Source Business Process Management (BPM) and workflow system aimed at SMBs and SBUs.  ProcessMaker includes easy-to-use tools to enable efficient and effective management of operational processes across systems including finance, human resources and operations. This allows business managers and process experts with no programming experience to model and automate everyday processes, increasing transparency and radically reducing paperwork.

ProcessMaker includes tools to design forms, create documents, assign roles and users, create routing rules, interconnect with third-party systems, and to map an individual process quickly and easily. The application is web-based, which makes working across different offices and geographic locations simple. It connects with existing databases and CRM, ERP, DMS, and BI systems.

ProcessMaker clients enjoy a top quality BPM software suite with the added benefits of open source. Technology users can implement and adapt the software as they please. With no vendor lock-in and minimal implementation costs, ProcessMaker business clients benefit from higher value software than proprietary BPM solutions.

Typical ProcessMaker customers are SMEs and SBUs within larger organizations. Flexible and customizable, ProcessMaker has been implemented in a variety of industries including finance, telecommunications, manufacturing, and government.

ProcessMaker makes it easy to optimize workflow management and business operations.

• Create workflow maps, or choose from templates.
• Design custom forms for all your organization’s processes.
• Pull data from other forms, databases, and external sources through web services.
• Track case progress to see where process delays occur.
• Analyze results to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

ProcessMaker is a user-friendly workflow manangement system:

• No programming experience necessary.
• Easy-to-use AJAX interface for simple process creation and instant preview.
• Drag-and-drop, browser-based interface makes it simple to map processes.
• Add users, dynaforms, documents, messages, and alerts with the click of a button.
• Optional HTML editor gives full control over form appearance.

uEngine is a professional open source company as well as an open source community which first registered to the sourceforge.net in the past 2003. its main product – uEngine BPM suite is divided into three components which are: first, uEngine BPM foundation which includes process engine, modeling tool, and the fundamental management portal, Second, uEngine process portal which contains personalization, dashboard, and single-sign-on, For the last, uEngine BP Analyzer which provides OLAP based multi-dimensional process performance analyzer, charting, and dashboard setting. uEngine is open source BPMS but provides most features of commercial products since it incorporates best open source products such as Liferay Enterprise Portal, Mondrian OLAP Server, JBoss Drools BRE and Apache Axis II on top of its BPM foundation framework.

A component framework, which organizes the core of uEngine, enables unique integration patterns such as plug-in activity type addition using call-back implementation, single data management of external organization chart and application data using database pointer process variables. It shows features of ‘Embedded BPM’ which differs from existing package-based BPMS which can’t avoid such overheads like database synchronization batch jobs or technician-friendly EAI tooling.

A BPM Framework

uEngine has began with a component-assembling tool and many times it has been incorporated into another products under manner of OEM. This history and technical background of uEngine ease such linkage model like not only server/client model but also the library/framework model. Its call-back implementation manner enables extracting audit data from engine or connection with external instance messenger and external work list systems and packaging existing software as ‘Activity type’ so that they can be used in the BPM modeling/execution environment.