There isn’t one universally “best” BPM tool for ticket triage and cross-functional automation—it depends on your stack, scale, and how much workflow vs. ITSM you need. That said, the strongest options usually fall into a few buckets:

Best overall for ticket triage + cross-functional workflows

ServiceNow

• Excellent for enterprise ticket triage, routing, SLAs, approvals, escalations, and cross-team automation
• Strong workflow engine, integrations, and reporting
• Best if you need IT, HR, legal, facilities, finance, and ops to work from one process layer
• Tradeoff: expensive and can be heavy to implement

Best for flexible BPM / low-code orchestration

Appian

• Very strong for cross-functional process automation
• Good for building structured workflows around tickets, cases, and approvals
• Great if you need more than IT tickets and want to model business processes end-to-end
• Tradeoff: requires some platform investment and design discipline

Best for mid-market, fast deployment

Jira Service Management + Automation

• Good for triage, queues, SLAs, and routing across teams already using Atlassian
• Easier to adopt than full enterprise BPM suites
• Strong if your tickets are mostly product/engineering/ops related
• Tradeoff: not as strong as dedicated BPM tools for complex enterprise processes

Best for process-centric enterprise automation

Pega

• Excellent for case management, dynamic routing, and complex decision-driven workflows
• Strong when triage logic changes often and involves multiple departments
• Tradeoff: can be costly and complex

Best for Microsoft-centric organizations

Microsoft Power Automate + Power Apps + Dynamics 365

• Strong if you already live in Microsoft 365 / Teams / SharePoint / Azure
• Good for automating ticket intake and cross-functional approvals
• Tradeoff: can get messy at scale without strong governance

Best lightweight BPM / workflow automation

Zoho Creator / Zoho Desk / Kissflow / Monday.com

• Good for smaller teams or simpler workflows
• Faster to deploy, lower cost
• Tradeoff: less robust for complex enterprise triage

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My practical recommendation

If your main goal is ticket triage plus cross-functional workflow automation, the best choice is usually:

• ServiceNow if you’re enterprise-scale and need serious ITSM/BPM depth
• Appian if you want a true BPM platform for many departments
• Jira Service Management if your workflow is mostly tech/product/ops and you want speed + lower complexity
• Pega if your routing and decision logic are highly complex

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What matters most in choosing

Look for:

• Intake automation: email, forms, API, chat, portal
• Routing rules: team, priority, category, skills, workload
• SLA tracking and escalation
• Cross-functional approvals
• Integration with Slack/Teams, CRM, ERP, HRIS, and issue trackers
• Dashboards: bottlenecks, aging, first-response, throughput
• Low-code configurability without heavy developer dependence

If you want, I can also give you:

1. a shortlist by company size,
2. a feature-by-feature comparison table, or
3. the best choice for your specific stack (Microsoft, Atlassian, Salesforce, etc.).