The market is saturated with business automation tools competing for companies’ attention. Many businesses view these tools as a beacon of hope amid the dark clouds of digital transformation initiatives that often fail to deliver sustainable ROI. A lesser-known truth about many automation strategies employed by companies is that they have led to more complex tech stacks that do not deliver the ROI expected by leadership. It is also worth noting that the C-Suite often lacks patience regarding ROI from their digital transformation efforts, including business process automation.
However, there is no denying that automation remains a strategic priority, with 60% of CFOs stating their organization has implemented automation technologies to enhance productivity, efficiency, and cost savings.
Why is choosing the right business automation tools important?
The leadership team now faces a crucial decision. Automation is no longer optional—it’s vital for generating ROI in a limited environment. However, with every new tool comes the risk of increasing complexity instead of clarity. The message is clear: implement an automation strategy supported by tools that match business objectives, scale with demand, and prevent the accumulation of long-term technical debt.
Choose the right tool, and automation ROI becomes achievable. However, using unsuitable tools can result in inconsistent workflows and lead your company to accumulate process debt, as automation depletes your budget without fulfilling its KPIs or metrics.
This article aims to cut through the noise surrounding business automation tools, helping you select those that can provide genuine automation value.
What are some of the best business process automation tools?
It is important to note that they haven’t been listed in order of importance. Readers are advised to conduct their due diligence when selecting the automation tools of their choice.
1. IBM Business Automation Workflow
IBM is a name synonymous with being at the forefront of innovation, and IBM® Business Automation Workflow doesn’t disappoint. It combines three vital aspects of automation—namely data, processes, and people—to automate digital workflows on the cloud or on-premises.
This platform helps you utilize both business process management and case management to enable the orchestration of structured workflows and dynamic, exception-driven work. You can standardize tasks supported by repeatable workflows, allowing for task prioritization and management across various departments within an organizations. This promotes consistency, reduces process fragmentation, and the automation framework can be designed to operate across a range of business scenarios.
Platform stakeholders can also assign role-specific access to workflow participants and case workers, ensuring the right individuals gain immediate access to relevant information, including repositories, systems, and insights, to expedite case resolution. This directly improves customer satisfaction levels.
More importantly, this business automation tool provides 360° visibility across all aspects of your automation deployments, supported by analytics. This enables operational teams to pinpoint key problem areas, focus on exceptions, expedite outcome-focused decision-making based on reliable process data, and deliver insights in real-time.
2. Camunda
Camunda enables teams to model processes and decisions using BPMN and DMN standards, facilitating easier collaboration and maintaining transparent workflows. Unlike other low-code platforms, your developers have complete control over process orchestration, whether it involves designing the framework, coding, or scalability. With Camunda, you can manage not only simple task-based workflows but also complex AI-driven workflows supported by ML, which can then be scaled across various systems and environments.
Observability is a key expectation from business process automation solutions, and Camunda delivers on this front. Its built-in metrics, logging, and monitoring capabilities provide extensive centralized visibility into every process for better control and management. Tools like ‘Console’ and ‘Identity’ help manage API keys, users, and roles, not only to observe but also to manage access, making automation more compliant.
Camunda is a cloud-native platform designed to operate in cloud environments such as Google Cloud, AWS, or Azure. It can scale horizontally, meaning that increasing workloads are easily managed. As more nodes and servers are added in response to a growing workload and increasing process instances, distributing these loads across a distributed architecture enhances productivity, cost efficiency, and overall performance.
At the heart of Camunda’s Agentic AI orchestration is Zeebe, its next-generation, high-performance engine, capable of handling increasing workloads and processing them in real-time. It functions like the power behind the throne or a skilled puppet master pulling the strings from behind the scenes. This engine drives scalability, performance, and tangible ROI.
3. Appian
The Appian Platform facilitates end-to-end automation using low-code RPA tools, allowing you to develop bots that replace repetitive manual tasks across various systems. Appian enables the accelerated creation of bots backed by the RPA Task Recorder and other low-code features. Also, you can orchestrate tasks to move easily between bots, humans and systems, for improving operational efficiencies.
Its AI Skills Designer supports automating complex content processes by enabling you to create your own AI models, rather than relying on third-party ones. Additionally, its extensive repository of pre-built connectors makes API integration straightforward, promoting enterprise-wide connectivity.
With Appian, you can integrate powerful AI capabilities into your automation workflows for data extraction, document classification, and summarization; you can also enable users to better understand data and processes by deploying conversational AI capabilities. More importantly, your developers can shorten production lifecycles by leveraging AI-generated assets such as test data and more. The use of AI in automation exposes organizations to risk, but Appian’s Private AI ensures better support and secure deployment, providing greater visibility and governance.
Appian’s data fabric capabilities allow organizations to connect and unify data from multiple systems using low-code tools, develop secure data models, and automate performance optimization across the enterprise. Users can explore this unified data in real-time, create customized reports, and enforce row-level security for improved governance. Appian moves beyond process automation to automation and process intelligence. This helps you zero in on inefficiencies, monitor key metrics, and receive actionable guidance on closing process gaps.
4. Genpact Cora
Genpact Cora is an AI-powered platform that helps businesses automate operations, coordinate complex workflows, and make faster, more informed decisions. Its modular architecture lets you tailor automation solutions to specific business needs. By bringing together AI, machine learning, RPA, analytics, and low-code tools in a single cloud-based environment, Cora accelerates digital transformation. It also provides real-time process visibility and intelligent automation to streamline operations. Designed for enterprise scale, Cora supports automation initiatives across a wide range of industries.
This platform offers a suite of business process automation solutions designed to address inefficiencies across diverse functions spanning various sectors, from fragmented workflows to unmet customer expectations, and more. Designed for precision and scale, each solution is a module that brings targeted automation and orchestration to the heart of operations.
Its modular solutions include:
- Cora Case Manager, a digital case management platform designed to streamline operations by automating work allocation, improving auditing accuracy, and increasing governance. It provides a centralized framework for managing exception-driven processes and prioritizing work with its target data calculation tools and built-in services level agreements.
- The core focus of Cora’s OrderAssist is to gather order data from different sources and systems, making a comprehensive and rich order data set available to users as a single source of truth. Both automation and AI work seamlessly together in OrderAssist to automate processing entries, update ERPs, and resolve exceptions in real time. Users can set intelligent rules and execute pre-determined actions to resolve exceptions, thereby improving CX.
- Cora Orchestration is a Microsoft Azure-based, AI-native business transformation solution that supports your business’s need for end-to-end business process automation without human intervention. It coordinates analytics, RPA, and enables generative AI agents to interact with enterprise systems, delivering context-aware output and bringing advanced reasoning to workflow automation.
Other solutions in its Cora’s portfolio include CoraAPFlow for accounts payable automation, CoraARFlow for accounts receivable automation, and Cora ContactUs.ai to enhance customer experience.
5. Microsoft Power Automate
Power Automate is an integral part of Microsoft’s solutions pantheon and seamlessly integrates across the Microsoft ecosystem with AI powering the core of its automation capabilities. This AI functionality can be easily harnessed to design, optimize, and scale workflows. Users can rely on Microsoft’s AI companion, Copilot to build and modify flows without writing a single line of code, just by describing what they need. Identifying automation opportunities is just as intuitive, with AI Insights helping teams uncover where automation can deliver the most impact. Power Automate’s AI processing capabilities manage tasks like document recognition, prediction, and image analysis, while it’s AI generation features go a step further, transforming raw data into summaries, reports, or contextual responses using integrated GPT models.
For legacy tasks, especially those led by desktop users, RPA tools can be utilized to automate repetitive and manual actions. In this case again, Copilot can aid their efforts in building desktop flows using natural language processing. Also, the benefit of Microsoft’s hosted infrastructure comes into play to automatically manage peak workloads, without overloading existing IT resources.
This platform also helps you manage cloud flows better wherein users can bring automation to cloud, services and apps on the cloud. When it comes to building workflows, you can start from scratch for complete control over the automation logic or choose from a library of prebuilt templates that can be easily customized to fit your needs. In either case, Copilot can assist by generating workflows based on simple natural language input—making the process faster and more intuitive.
Another significant benefit that Power Automate offers is that users can choose from 1000 connectors to help connect their automation workflow to a business app. This includes Microsoft apps and third-party apps, such as Salesforce, Dropbox, and many more.
But what if you want to make further improvements to the process? Process mining and orchestration tools provide AI insights, smarter exception handling, and centralized governance for a more secure and manageable AI ecosystem.
How do you choose the right business automation tools?
We have given a list of tools in this article, but what if you want to take your search beyond these tools? Here are eight pointers to keep in mind:
- Check integration capabilities to ensure it doesn’t upend your existing tech stack.
- Ensure this tool can scale to meet growing business demands and can adapt to diverse environments, teams, and workflows.
- It should be easy to use to ensure people with even limited tech expertise can maximize its potential.
- The platform must offer built-in AI, analytics and intelligence for decision making support.
- It must support a comprehensive governance framework with robust controls, access management, and compliance capabilities.
- Compare the different costs of the tools available on the market and make sure you consider TCO.
- Assess documentation, community, and enterprise support available from the vendor.
- Always begin with a pilot/PoC to validate impact, and then deploy across the organization.
Conclusion
Business process automation is evolving at a rapid rate, and the tools are keeping pace with the advancements. You must work with a reliable and experienced business automation services provider to not only help you choose the right tool but also implement it in a manner that delivers tangible and sustainable ROI.
