Open source workflow : a viable direction for BPM?

With the growing interest in open source software in general and business process management and workflow systems in particular, it is worthwhile investigating the state of open source workflow management. The plethora of these offerings (recent surveys such as [4,6], each contain more than 30 such systems) triggers the following two obvious questions: (1) how do these systems compare to each other; and (2) how do they compare to their commercial counterparts. To answer these questions we have undertaken a detailed analysis of three of the most widely used open source workflow management systems [1]: jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark. Another obvious candidate would have been the open-source workflow management system YAWL ( www.yawlfoundation.org ). However, given the authors’ close involvement in the development of YAWL, we did not include it in our evaluation