Oracle APEX vs. Oracle BPM Suite

It is appropriate for database application development supporting data driven processes, online transaction processing, BI/reports/analytics ... for addressing about any business data processing need I can think of. Oracle Application Express is fantastic for creating beautiful rich user interfaces with support for all major browsers rendering well on a range of devices. It is less appropriate for applications requiring native low level access to device peripherals and is less appropriate for applications that must execute offline without network/internet connection to supporting application and database servers.

Incentivized

Oracle BPM is part of [the] Middleware SOA suite. Hence Oracle BPM can be directly installed with Oracle WebLogic. Oracle BPM comes with [a] standard out of the box portal. Recently Oracle has introduced another Web based portal to design processes. Standard Oracle BPM workflows can be created using the Jdeveloper. Deploying BPM apps are easy to deploy over Weblogic. All features with Weblogic can be utilized with Oracle BPM. Oracle BPM is [a] standard Middleware product and can make excellent front end applications.

Incentivized

• It is an easy tool to adopt, which allowed us to replace developments in Oracle Forms in many cases.
• It is very simple to develop different kinds of analysis, in a faster and more friendly way than running Oracle Reports.
• It helped us to extend our approval workflow, in order to cope with difficult branches that were hard to solve with the standard workflow.
• It was possible to develop web applications, to share information and transactions with our commercial partners.

Incentivized

• It can easily integrate with other Oracle products and even 3rd party software via adapters
• It scales quite well and can handle the biggest enterprise level solutions we throw at it
• The ability to use previous requirements as templates is invaluable

Incentivized

• For complex APEX applications you need to be a pro expert in PL/SQL
• Debugging in APEX can be complicated if there is a logical error. Syntax errors will end up shown as ORA errors
• Lack of designer interface. Even though you are designing a form you need to do it by means of APEX interface using a series of steps, no UI for design
• Oracle specific not applicable for other databases

Incentivized

• Extremely complicated to work with. The WYSIWYG is of no help either since it very buggy and poorly designed. If you are a business or functional user, you will have a hard time using the application.
• The Oracle's "Using" and "Implementing" guides are nearly useless with no examples and case studies and there is no documentation available to learn or understand the process.
• Very few skilled developers are available in market who really understand how to implement Oracle BPM suite.

Incentivized

I felt very comfortable using Oracle Application Express from the start. I designed my data model and quickly developed the basic CRUD pages for master tables. Then I designed the main functionality and was able to test and deploy it in a couple of days work. I will probably share the app with other members of the team and continue adding some features in the short term.

Incentivized

In many scenarios it should have provided more features. It took a lot of effort while debugging, making it difficult to maintain.

Because it's very easy to develop, fast, secure, has a lot of features. It's like a prototyping tool such as figma, but it can be used as a real product. Dynamic action, plugin, rest api, minimize a lot of coding, a lot of templates, PWA, really bring Oracle APEX functionality to be able to solve most common internal users pain points.

Incentivized

Not easy to debug errors.

Very active and knowledgeable community support includes quick and helpful responses from the Oracle employees on the product development team. I've never had to raise an official support request - everything is dealt with via forums and user groups - or via direct emails. The supposrt commuinty is one of the great things about Apex.

Incentivized

Using it on the cloud is really simple, the entire process of configuring and provisioning an Oracle Database takes only a few minutes (less than 10) and then Oracle APEX is already deployed on the database, so you just have to start using it. I would strongly recommend using APEX on Oracle Cloud Free Tier.

Incentivized

Overall satisfactory

Oracle APEX and Oracle Visual Builder are both low-code development platforms within the Oracle ecosystem, but they serve different purposes. Oracle APEX is more suited for the people who are familiar with SQL, PLSQL. It provides rapid application development features based on data residing in Oracle database. It's a low code platform and best suited for web based applications/extensions based on Oracle DB that may use REST APIs and other web services. It also provides mobile application support. Oracle Visual Builder is best suited for web applications based on Oracle Cloud services. It utilizes javascript based drag-drop UI builder. It's very deeply integrated with Oracle Fusion Cloud platform.

All are fairly similar in capabilities, but the Oracle BPM Suite has good support for BPMN 2.0, integrates well with open standards and has an excellent design/development platform when compared to the other BPM vendors. The Oracle BPM Suite integrates well with the complimentary Oracle Fusion Middleware products that typically accompany a BPM implementation, making it a part of an overall well integrated solution set. Oracle BPM also has very good monitoring, reporting and analytics support built-in.

• It has increased our development output over Forms greatly. For instance, when starting at my current company, I was able to replace our aging ASP Intranet site within 4 months when our IT manager had budgeted over a year for the task.
• We've been able to standardize under one technology, incorporating previously unsupportable disparate systems under one roof.
• It's free with an Oracle Database so the only investment was our time, something we now have more of thanks to Application Express.

Incentivized

• When we moved to Oracle BPM many years ago, it was a huge uplift for our business processes because we didn't have any tool to model flows except Outlook and Excel.
• We established and streamlined the manufacturing workflows that were needed with the growth of the business.
• We discovered after a while that the ROI was not great since along with the cost of the tools, we had to account the cost of development from the software team too. It took a lot of time to deliver our first automations due to the big learning curve needed for Oracle BPM.

Incentivized