BPM, RPA, low-code and BOAT: what is the difference?

BPM, RPA, and low-code each have different origins and serve different purposes. RPA primarily automates tasks, BPM structures and manages processes and low-code accelerates application development. BOAT (Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies) brings these and other capabilities together to orchestrate end-to-end business processes across people, systems, and AI.

Organizations have an ever-growing range of technologies at their disposal to digitize and automate processes. While this creates more opportunities, it also leads to fragmentation. Different tools each address part of the automation challenge, while in practice, processes span people, systems and applications. BOAT has emerged in response to this development. In this blog, we take a closer look at the differences between these four technologies.

 

BPM: processes central

Business Process Management (BPM) focuses on designing, executing, managing, and improving business processes. BPM therefore looks beyond individual tasks, taking the process itself as the starting point.
Strong in: process management, workflows, and continuous process improvement.

 

RPA: automating tasks

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) automates repetitive tasks that would otherwise be performed by employees. For example, a bot can retrieve data from one system and enter it into another.
Strong in: quickly automating repetitive, rule-based tasks. The limitation is that an RPA bot typically automates only one part of a larger business process.

 

Low-code: faster application development

With low-code, organizations can develop applications and workflows using significantly less traditional programming code.
Strong in: speed, flexibility, and quickly translating business needs into working applications. However, a collection of low-code applications does not yet constitute an end-to-end orchestrated process.

 

BOAT: orchestrating the entire process

Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (BOAT) takes this a step further. It brings together capabilities for automation, process orchestration, integration, low-code, and AI. As a result, the focus shifts from:

“How do we automate this task?”

to:

“How do we ensure that all steps, systems, people, and AI work together to achieve the desired business outcome?”

For example, a BOAT platform can coordinate a customer process in which an employee reviews a request, AI analyzes documents, a decision engine assesses risk, a bot retrieves information from a legacy system, and various applications exchange data. The focus is not on the individual technologies, but on the end-to-end outcome.

 

And where does Pega fit in?

Pega is particularly interesting because many of these capabilities have historically been developed within a single platform: case management, workflow automation, low-code, AI-powered decisioning, and integration. With the rise of agentic AI, this becomes even more relevant. After all, AI agents should not become yet another standalone technology alongside existing processes, but rather a controlled and integrated part of those processes.

In 2025, Gartner named Pega a Leader in its first-ever Magic Quadrant for BOAT platforms. Pega also received the highest scores for Case Management and Enterprise Task and Process Automation in the accompanying Critical Capabilities research.

As a specialized Pega partner, BPM Company works with this technology every day. Want to explore how your organization can move from isolated automation to end-to-end orchestration? Get in touch with us.