Bonita

Modelling the process people take part in: a visual designer or BPMN, forms, approval steps with roles and substitutes, deadlines and escalation, and versioning of a process that is already running — judged on whether a business owner can change a process without breaking the instances in flight.

0 — No human steps at all: neither forms nor approval steps, only machine-to-machine automation.

3 — A visual builder with branching and a simple approval or form step.

5 — A visual designer with conditions and parallel paths, forms and approval steps assigned to roles or groups, and deadlines or reminders for open tasks.

8 — BPMN 2.0 modelling or an equivalent documented notation, versions of a process kept with running instances on their original version, substitutes and escalation chains, multi-stage approvals with four-eyes rules, forms in German with validation and file upload, a task inbox for participants, and a test or simulation mode before publishing.

10 — The process is a governed asset: version history with diff and rollback, migration of running instances to a new version documented, process analytics on cycle time and bottlenecks per step, and the design documented well enough that a business team can maintain it without the vendor.

Reaching the systems a European company actually runs: maintained connectors judged by name rather than count, a generic HTTP and webhook step, custom connectors, and a way to reach systems behind the firewall without opening it.

0 — No connectors beyond email, and no API or webhook step.

3 — A catalogue of connectors to common SaaS tools, or webhooks and an HTTP step to call other systems.

5 — Named connectors with their triggers and actions documented, including Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, a generic HTTP/REST step with inbound webhooks, and an API to start or query workflows.

8 — Connectors to an ERP or accounting system common in DACH (e.g. SAP, DATEV, Microsoft Dynamics), custom connectors buildable from an OpenAPI description or code, an on-premise agent or self-hosted runner reaching internal databases and file shares, SOAP and database steps, and connector maintenance ownership (vendor, partner or community) stated.

10 — Integration is engineered: a versioned public API with a deprecation policy, connector changelogs, rate limits per connector published, event-driven triggers rather than polling where the source allows it, and the vendor maintaining the German-market connectors (DATEV, SAP, ELO or d.velop) itself.

What happens when a step fails at 3 a.m.: retries, error paths, alerting, an execution history someone can search, limits on runtime and throughput, and a status page that admits incidents.

0 — Nothing runs unattended: the product executes no automated workflows whose runs could fail or be monitored.

3 — Failed runs marked with a notification, and a history of recent executions.

5 — Automatic retries or an error path, an execution log with input and output per step, failure alerts by email or chat, and runtime or rate limits documented.

8 — Configurable retries with back-off and replay of a failed run from the failing step, queueing and concurrency controls, execution history retention stated per plan, monitoring exportable to the customer's own tools, and a public status page with incident history and an uptime commitment.

10 — Operations are designed for production: an SLA with service credits, horizontal scaling or high-availability setup documented for self-hosted installs, dead-letter handling, end-to-end tracing across workflows, and post-incident reports published.

Keeping automation from becoming shadow IT: roles and permissions, SSO, where connection credentials are stored, separate environments with controlled publishing, an audit trail of changes and approvals, and what the execution log retains of the payload. An approval record is also a record of employees' behaviour (BetrVG § 87 (1) 6), so what the trail captures matters to a works council.

0 — No user management: one account per person or one shared login, with no team workspace.

3 — Admin and member roles with shared team folders or workspaces.

5 — Role-based permissions per workflow or folder, SSO via SAML or OIDC, credentials stored encrypted and usable without being revealed, and an audit log of workflow changes.

8 — Separate development, test and production environments with a publishing approval, SCIM provisioning, external secret stores supported, payload redaction or logging off per workflow, configurable execution data retention, and the audit trail exportable — with the fields it records about users described.

10 — Governance a works council and an auditor can both sign off: field-level masking of personal data in logs, delegated administration per department, a central inventory of every workflow and connection with its owner, certifications published (ISO 27001 or SOC 2), and documentation of what the platform records about individual users.

Where the engine runs and whether the workflows can leave: cloud regions, self-hosted or on-premise editions, the licence of the engine, and export of workflow definitions in a format another tool or a later version can read.

0 — Workflows cannot be exported in any form and live only in the vendor's cloud.

3 — Cloud hosting with the region named, and workflows exportable as a file the same product can import.

5 — An EU cloud region available, workflow definitions exportable as documented JSON or BPMN 2.0, and an API to read definitions and execution history.

8 — A self-hosted or on-premise edition with its system requirements documented, workflow definitions versionable in Git, the engine's licence published, and a documented migration path between cloud and self-hosted in both directions.

10 — The customer owns its automation: an open-source or source-available engine, definitions in an open standard executable elsewhere, air-gapped installation supported, and a stated exit process that hands back definitions, credentials metadata and execution history in documented formats.

Who the contracting entity is, where workflows execute and where execution logs with their payload copies are stored, and who the subprocessors are — including the AI model providers behind any AI steps. Independently sourced by the sovereignty pipeline. A self-hosted edition counts only for the data that actually stays on the customer's servers.

0 — Proven non-EU throughout: non-EU vendor and contracting entity, execution outside the EU, and no data processing agreement offered.

3 — A privacy policy and a data processing agreement exist, while an EU contracting entity and EU execution are not shown, or an EU region is an option under a non-EU contracting entity.

5 — EU execution and log storage stated (as standard or selectable) and an EU contracting entity or EU representative, with a data processing agreement; parts of the chain such as AI steps, support access or telemetry may run outside the EU.

8 — EU execution on named infrastructure, EU contracting entity, subprocessor list published with locations including AI providers, a DPA covering execution payloads, and a self-hosted option that sends no workflow data to the vendor.

10 — Sovereign end to end and evidenced: European ownership, entity, hosting and every subprocessor, AI steps runnable on European or self-hosted models, certification published, and a self-hosted edition that works without any call home.

Whether a buyer can compute the monthly cost of their own processes from public pages alone: what the billing unit is (task, operation, execution, run, user or flow) and what counts as one, the allowance per tier, overage prices, and the cost of premium connectors, self-hosting, environments and AI steps.

0 — No public prices at all; every tier is a sales conversation.

3 — A public "from" price or one tier priced, with the rest on request.

5 — Prices public for each tier with the billing period, the billing unit named and the allowance per tier given.

8 — Every tier priced publicly with its unit defined (what counts as one task or execution), allowance and limits, overage priced per unit, premium connector and add-on prices listed, self-hosted licensing stated, minimum term and VAT treatment given.

10 — Complete price computability: the monthly cost derivable for a given number of workflows, runs and steps per run, with a published calculator or worked examples, every add-on and overage on a public page, and the effect of loops and retries on the count explained.