Understanding Bizagi’s Freemium Business Model

Bizagi was the first in the BPM market and also in the enterprise application space to support the ‘freemium’ model—well before the term was actually coined by Chris Anderson in his book “Free” in 2008. Both Bizagi Process Modeller and Studio are freeware not trial versions.

Jolanta Pilecka, CMO of Bizagi explained, “No investment is required by businesses or individuals to download these two environments. Our business model is very simple and is based on selling production licenses of Bizagi Server, to execute process applications. This way we give our users an opportunity to fully explore our technology prior making any financial commitments. Our research shows that many of our customers come from our user community who approached us only when ready to deploy the system”. Server is the runtime engine that deploys the developed process from Studio. The Server licensing model is based on named users, so you need a separate CAL (Client Access License) for each unique user.

I have written about Bizagi’s products previously.  Bizagi Process Modeller is used to diagram and document processes; it is Freeware, which means you can download the software and use it for free on an unlimited basis. Bizagi has had over 2.5 million downloads of the Process Modeller and over 150,000 active users, of which I am one. I found Modeler very intuitive as I used it to capture the business process of a charity for which I did some pro-bono work and the reports and models were easily understood by the charity business users.

The other freeware product that Bizagi offer is Studio. Studio takes process modeling one step further and automates processes ready for deployment across the department or the whole organization. One really clever thing that Bizagi have done is to include in Studio the ability to simulate the developed process; this is done using Lanner’s Simulation software.

One of the great things I have found as a Bizagi user was that I could learn, test and try the system without incurring any cost and there was no time limit. In addition Bizagi have taken their business model out to a self-service program online that includes e-learning, training courses and video—all of which is free. Pilecka feels that their business model is really working for them as they had no failed projects and feels that if more vendors followed their lead the failure rate of BPMS projects would be dramatically reduced. Worth a thought.