FAQ

Bonita Process Designer is a web-based BPMN 2.0 diagram editor. You create, edit and manage business-process diagrams on a drag-and-drop canvas, generate diagrams from a plain-language description with AI, collaborate with your team in real time, and export your work for use in Bonita Studio.

It is built for enterprise use: access is controlled by role and scoped to groups, several people can edit the same diagram at once, and an administrator manages users, groups, licensing and AI usage. For a full tour, see the overview and the Getting started guide.

Every user has one of three global roles, and what they can do is further limited to the groups they belong to:

For the complete rights matrix, see Roles and permissions.

No. Bonita Process Designer is a standalone web application — you only need a running instance and an account to design diagrams. Bonita Studio comes into play when you want to take a diagram further: you can export your diagram to BPMN 2.0 XML and import it into Bonita Studio to continue building an executable process.

Yes. Groups are the data-isolation boundary. A user only sees and works with the diagrams in the groups they belong to — diagrams in other groups are invisible to them. The only exception is the Admin role, which sees and can act on every diagram regardless of group.

This boundary applies to all diagram-scoped actions (view, edit, delete, comment, AI generation), so a user can never reach a diagram — or the AI usage of a group — that they are not a member of. See Manage groups.

You can generate a diagram from a text description, and you can ask the AI to modify or analyze an existing diagram. Generation runs as an asynchronous job: you submit a description, watch a phased progress bar while the job runs, then review the generated diagram together with a migration log of any elements that were adjusted for compatibility. Where more than one AI provider is configured, an in-editor picker lets you choose one for that generation.

AI generation must be enabled by an administrator (the installation has to be registered and AI configured) before the feature is available.

Each group has an optional AI generation quota over a rolling 30-day window. Generate and modify count against the quota; analyze does not. When a group reaches its limit, further generations are rejected with a clear message until earlier usage ages out of the window. A group with no limit set is unlimited. Administrators set and monitor quotas — see Manage AI quota and the user-facing AI diagram generation guide.

Yes. Bonita Process Designer supports real-time collaboration: several users can open and edit the same diagram simultaneously. Changes are saved by an authoritative server and broadcast to everyone live, and you can see the presence and cursors of the other participants. When edits overlap, the last change wins. An advisory lock indicator signals when someone is actively editing. See Collaborate in real time.

Yes. You can export to BPMN 2.0 XML that is compatible with Bonita Studio, and also to PNG, JSON, or print. Because the editor only exposes the BPMN elements Bonita Studio supports, an exported diagram imports cleanly.

See Export and import diagrams.

The editor exposes a curated subset of BPMN 2.0 chosen for compatibility with Bonita Studio import — tasks (including user, service, script, send, receive and call activity), the exclusive, inclusive and parallel gateways, a range of start, end, intermediate and boundary events, sequence/default/conditional flows, pools, swimlanes and annotations.

When you import a BPMN file or receive an AI-generated diagram, any element outside this set is automatically migrated to the closest supported alternative or removed, and each change is recorded in a migration log so you can see exactly what was adjusted. For the full list of supported and migrated elements, see Supported BPMN elements.

If you have a question that is not answered here, start with the Getting started guide and the User guide, or reach out to the Support team.