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, organize them in folders, 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 a BPMN 2.0 file 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 and folders of the groups they belong to — those of other groups are invisible to them. The only exception is the Admin role, which sees and can act on every diagram and folder regardless of group.

This boundary applies to all diagram-scoped actions (view, edit, move, 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.

Both, for different needs. A folder gives a process its place: each process is filed in exactly one place, at Home, in a folder, or under another process, and a folder belongs to one group. A label is a cross-cutting tag from one catalog shared by all groups, and a diagram can carry several. Use folders to browse processes level by level, and labels to filter, by a theme or a status, the level you are on, the Tree view or the search results.

See Labels or folders? and Organize processes in folders.

Yes. Titles do not have to be unique: you can have a Validation process in the Finance folder and another one in the HR folder. The filing path shown on the cards and in the search results tells them apart. Folder names, on the other hand, must be unique within their level, and at Home within their group: see Folder names are unique within a level.

Duplicate titles matter in two places:

See Titles do not have to be unique and Processes with the same name.

Check, in this order:

See Troubleshooting in the folders guide.

You can generate a diagram from a text description, and you can ask the AI to modify or analyze an existing diagram. Each request runs as a background job: a progress display shows its phases, you can keep working meanwhile, and if you reload the page, the job is picked up again when you come back in the same browser. A generated diagram is placed on the canvas and saved automatically: review it before you export it. Where more than one AI provider is configured, you can pick one for a single request.

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

Each group can have an AI generation quota over a rolling 30-day window. Generate and Modify count against the quota; Analyze does not, and a request that fails is not counted. When a group reaches its limit, further requests are refused 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.

See Collaborate in real time.

Yes. A Call Activity can call another process of Bonita Process Designer: Creators and Admins choose the called process in the inspector, and everyone who can open the diagram, Readers included, can open the called process in a document tab. Calling a process does not file it anywhere, and filing a process under another one does not create a Call Activity. See Call other processes.

Yes. BPMN exports the diagram as a BPMN 2.0 file that Bonita Studio can import. BPMN+ exports the process together with every process filed under it, as one file. You can also export to PNG or JSON, or print. Because the editor only offers the BPMN elements Bonita Studio supports, an exported diagram imports cleanly.

See Export and import diagrams and Export a diagram to Bonita Studio.

The editor exposes a curated subset of BPMN 2.0 chosen for compatibility with Bonita Studio import:

BPMN sub-processes are not offered: to split a process into parts, call another process from a Call Activity.

When you import a BPMN or JSON file, an element outside this set is:

The Import Logs tab lists these elements, with a few exceptions, so that you can review each one. A diagram generated by AI does not go through this conversion. For the full list of supported and converted elements, see Supported BPMN elements.

Sometimes. If the browser tab where the changes were made is still open, first export the diagram as JSON, before you reload it. Then find out what happened:

The answers tell you which version of the Versions tab may hold the changes, and when none does: see When someone reports lost changes.

While someone’s AI Generate or Modify request runs on a diagram, the other participants see AI is editing this diagram for <name> — editing is paused until it finishes. and cannot change the diagram. Nobody can cancel a running request. The banner names the person who started it: ask them first. If the banner is still there after about ten minutes, reload the page.

For when the lock lifts, see While AI is editing the diagram.

Bonita Studio finds a called process by its name. Check these points:

See Called processes in Bonita Studio, Export a process and the processes filed under it (BPMN+) and Called processes in the Bonita Studio how-to.