Cambridge, Mass.-based consultancy Forrester has released its most recent Wave report ($) identifying and evaluating what it has identified as the top 15 providers of Digital Process Automation (DPA) technology. For Q3 2025, Forrester named Appian, IBM, Pegasystems, Salesforce and ServiceNow as “Leaders” in the DPA space.
Forrester, which uses the term DPA synonymously with the more popular term “intelligent automation,” identified two trends that currently are dominating the space.
First, it acknowledges how important AI agents have become in the conversations surrounding process automation software:
“Natural language coding, genAI-based decision management, and conversational interfaces are central to the vision and roadmap of the DPA Forrester Wave participants,” Craig Le Clair, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, wrote in the report. “While DPA vendors actively demonstrate agent-building capabilities, the most impactful solutions integrate these new agents with existing DPA strengths.”
The report also noted that the notion of citizen development seems to be moderating with professional developers leading the way on most automation projects.
“Most of the 37 reference interviews we conducted for this Forrester Wave indicated that professional developers, not citizen developers, deployed most projects,” Le Clair said. “DPA apps often include advanced decisioning, endpoint integration, orchestration, and modeling tools to build human access points. As a result, professional developers who embrace these concepts often lead DPA projects.”
In addition to the five Leaders, Forrester also evaluated AgilePoint, Axon Ivy, Bizagi, Camunda, Flowable, Hyland, Microsoft, Newgen Software, and Pipefy.