Camunda Reviews

My company uses Camunda Platform as a business process optimization or business process engineering tool.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is flexible. I want to see if the tool is good enough for my company to continue with its use or if there are some limitations. If, at our company, we are sure that it would take us to complete your business processes engineering exercise up to the level of enterprise architecture, then we would really be able to appreciate the tool. I am unsure of the product's capabilities because I am unfamiliar. I want to get someone experienced enough to suggest to me which is the best choice for a BPM tool.

Collaborations and process documentation in Camunda Platform are areas with shortcomings that need improvement. It would be appreciated if we were more flexible in managing the processes.

I am unsure if we can get a beta version of the tool with many features, including data modeling, apart from process modeling. If we get something that can be achieved with data modeling and collaboration features for any tasks, including the ones from outside, it would be much more appreciated.

We want a common platform for taking care of customs and domestic taxes since that could be a good thing for our business process across our entire company.

I have been using Camunda Platform for about three months. I am a user of the product.

It has been a stable solution so far since it meets our needs, including data modeling, which we need to do before we embark on analyzing and optimizing the business processes.

My company has 6,000 employees, out of which around 100 people use the product.

I contacted the solution's technical support since I wanted them to give me some facts regarding the points raised by a person from GBTEC, a German company, who claims that Camunda Platform can't fulfill some expectations since its imitations in terms of capabilities, especially collaboration features. I dropped an email to Camunda Platform so that someone from the support can let me know about the product's data modeling and whether it can go up to the enterprise architecture level or if something is missing in it, because of which we might have to get a beta or higher version.

The initial setup was very easy and flexible.

The solution is deployed on-premises.

Camunda Platform is an open-source product.

We, the employees, had suggested the company authorities opt for Camunda Platform. I was looking into certain facts from Camunda's support team so that I can suggest a good way to help my company design business processes. Our company has to look after customs and domestic taxes, and BPMN in Camunda Platform has been done using the custom function.

We intend to do a few things with the product, and I am unsure if it would raise or drop the product's rating in the future.

So far, considering the modeling purposes for which we used the tool in the last month, I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

We use the product to automate our workflows. It is used for task management.

Camunda is a good product. The product has a good task management engine. Camunda has had a good impact on our operational efficiency. The integrations are getting better. It has a lot of REST APIs. We can integrate the tool via REST. It is a good feature. It's much better than what it used to be.

Camunda is Java-based. It would be better if the tool were made less reliant on Java.

I have been using the solution for four to five years.

The solution is very stable. I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

The solution is very scalable. I rate the scalability an eight and a half out of ten. We have more than 100 users. I use the product twice a week.

We have used Flowable. We also used an IBM product, but it was not very good. We chose Camunda because it is more scalable. It has a smaller footprint. It is the most effective product.

The initial setup is easy. I rate the ease of setup a nine out of ten. The solution has multiple deployment options. It has its own cloud services. The deployment takes just a few hours.

We deploy the tool in-house. We've embedded it within our application. We need only one person for the deployment.

We use the free version.

The number of people required to maintain the tool depends on the application in which it is embedded. We might not need many people for maintenance. Our in-house team resolves all our issues, so we do not have to contact support. There is a lot of documentation available. They are very good. The solution has BPMN and DMN. DMN is very powerful when modeling business decisions. The rules engine is very good. I will recommend it for the rules engine. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

We have a team that analyzes our existing processes. We discuss the manual processes currently in place within our company. We work on defining and representing these processes through block diagrams. This helps us to automate them. The processes in which we use the solution include customer order processing and quotation requests. 

Using the BPMN helps us to have a common shared communication language when discussing processes.

The tool's most valuable feature is BPMN diagrams and the possibility to automate processes.

The Camunda Modeler installation poses a challenge, requiring local installation, which doesn't help collaboration like other online tools, for instance. Camunda needs to improve its user interface.

I have been working with the product for 4 months.

The tool is very stable since we run it on-premises. 

Camunda is scalable. At present, my company has three users. By next week, four more users will be added. Over a couple of weeks, a few more users will be added. 

I have not contacted the technical support yet. 

Camunda's deployment is easy. You need to click some buttons. 

I did the tool's deployment myself. 

We use Camunda's community edition, which is free. 

I rate the overall product a seven out of ten. 

Camunda can be used in various workflow scenarios, such as policy administration systems, onboarding, account management in telecom, insurance products, policy issuance, claims management, and loan management. 

It is also suitable for customer service center activities where customers' accounts are created. Camunda can manage any workflow that requires customer interaction with the system. It is a competitor to other BPM solutions like Pega.

The architectural part of Camunda for workflow design is highly valuable, especially the Camunda Modeler, which allows quick process design and implementation. Camunda's DML is a competitor to the implementation of business rules. 

It integrates well with Java, making it suitable for various technology stacks. Camunda facilitates microservices integration. Its SaaS model provides scalability, automatically managing and scaling implementations.

The deployment model could be improved for easier implementation. More open documentation would be beneficial to understand the deployment process better and facilitate easier setup.

I began working with Camunda in 2013.

Camunda is quite stable, and I would rate its stability around eight to nine out of ten. There haven't been any significant outages in my experience with Camunda.

Camunda offers a high level of scalability, especially when using its SaaS model, which manages and scales implementations automatically. I would rate its scalability a ten out of ten.

Camunda's community is medium-sized, offering reasonable support. However, they provide better support for the enterprise edition. There was not a large community in the early years.

Positive

Other competing solutions include JBPM, Activiti, and Pegasystems.

The initial setup can be difficult, with a rating of seven on a scale from one to ten. While not very hard, some features present challenges.

For earlier versions, implementation involved bundling applications as WAR or EAR files using Maven, and deploying them on JBoss Server. I have yet to explore Camunda 8's implementation process.

There is a licensing cost for using the SaaS model and Enterprise edition of Camunda, although I am not aware of the specific pricing.

Other solutions evaluated include JBPM and Activiti.

For anyone considering using Camunda, it is essential to understand your workflow clearly. Camunda is the best among similar solutions like JBPM and Activiti. I love working with Camunda.

We are a fintech company located in Argentina, and most of our use cases are related to transferring money from one account to another and doing the orchestration with financial institutions. 

It is also used for the orchestration of all the documents for onboarding. We have electronic onboarding where you give some information about yourself, and then you take a selfie and provide photos of the front and back of your document. We have to orchestrate all this information in order to validate it with a third-party bureau of data. When we receive an okay from the bureau, we know that you are an active customer, and we can give you an account.

In terms of deployment, it is a public cloud. We have Amazon Web Services running inside a Kubernetes cluster. 

We are a startup with less than 200 people. We first started doing orchestration using code, but after two sprints or about a month and a half, it became very clear that we are just generating spaghetti code. No one could understand the code after one month because it had difficult logic based on what an engineer thought would be a good idea, such as creating a new branch of decision, and if it wasn't very well documented, you wouldn't understand what was going on. Another drawback of having such a code was that we couldn't make the business understand what was going on there. So, it was very difficult to do things faster. That's why we decided to look for an orchestration tool, and we decided on Camunda as a solution. The way we could orchestrate everything was transformative. We went from having to code to drawing our processes. As of today, Camunda is used for every process here.

It is very good as a universal process orchestrator for complex business processes. We are using it for microservices, not for a human process. We had thousands of processes happening per hour, and the tool was able to capture the data for this throughput. The thing that wasn't aligned was the pricing structure. Camunda On-Premises is more designed for a human process where you have to have some kind of manual processing. We had a lot of back and forth with the commercial team because of the price of the licensing due to the volume that we had to process. That's because every time we wanted to send $1, we had to start a new process or several processes. This was a drawback, but in terms of the project, the product was very good and robust. Process heatmaps show the process steps that are hanging or taking significantly longer. You can go there and see the values and debug those. So, it was very useful for not only orchestrating what we have but also in understanding where we have made a mistake with a production process.

When it comes to integration, because we are a startup, we don't have any legacy systems, but we use it to connect with the legacy systems of the general payment system in Argentina. It was very instrumental for this use case. We had our own logic for how to connect and how to do the interface inside our microservices, and we used Camunda to verify the correct logic and sequence of calling different microservices, getting the response, and handling the response.

The dashboards are helpful in making the business understand what we are talking about and what can we do in certain situations, such as, if the money doesn't arrive at its destination. We had the drawings, and we used them to ask, "For the arrow here, what should we do?" We were able to have the conversation in a clear way. If we had just the code, it would have been very difficult. To have the conversation with the business, we would have had to create a drawing on a whiteboard and hope that this drawing is exactly what is happening in the code.

It freed up the time of our technical leaders working on this part of the system. By using Camunda, we could have the application process design, and we could quickly deploy the system to production and have the product early on the market. That was our biggest gain. We didn't have engineers struggling to orchestrate microservices.

The BPMN diagram is valuable. For our use case of transferring money from one account to another, the connections have to be done in the traditional financial ways. There are a lot of unexpected errors and a lot of instability with this kind of system, and we are using Camunda in order to have clear flows. With BPMN, I can show a flow to my business partner, and the business team can easily understand what's going on. The technical team can understand what the implementation is, and we can model different errors and the process for recovering from these errors. For example, it is very common that you make a transaction, but you don't have a response from a bank. You sent the money, but the bank didn't confirm this. Such errors have to be handled because it may mean that you have to do a reverse transaction. We are able to solve a lot of orchestration problems by using Camunda. Most of them are related to payments or sending and receiving money.

The feature where you can have dynamic tables with values and actions inside the BPMN is very good when you don't have all the possible responses. We may think that the payment system is very robust, but it is not. Sometimes, we receive an error code that we weren't expecting, and this kind of solution helped a lot with that.

Camunda has licensing per process. There should be a different kind of licensing so that a company with thousands of microservices doesn't have to pay per process. It would be very useful for us. Their current licensing is very difficult for us to maintain. When you have a lot of processes running, it becomes very expensive very quickly.

It has a Postgres database at the backend, and it is very difficult to scale if you increase the number of processes running. We did hit some barriers. We were able to overcome them, but it was a problem. Camunda has another product called Camunda Cloud, which supposedly doesn't have the same scalability problems, but we are not using Camunda Cloud because the set of features is smaller than Camunda On-Premises. So, its scalability can be improved. Because it has a single database, it is more difficult to scale if you have a huge success.

We use our deployment pipeline to deploy the BPMN process. We have a continuous deployment system where when you finish your development, you are able to deploy the BPMN file as well. Sometimes, when the engineers are deploying several BPMN processes in parallel, we receive an error for Camunda, and we are unable to do the deployment. It is a very specific issue, but we have found that automatic BPMN process deployments sometimes fail in Camunda. When we try to deploy several at once, the system isn't strong or robust enough. So, there is room for improvement.

I have been using this solution since October of 2020.

In general, its stability is very good. 

Scalability is something that we have been worried about because everything that runs in Camunda is run using Postgres. It is very difficult to scale when the number of processes increases. Because Camunda uses Postgres, we had scalability challenges. We had to do a lot of fine-tuning in the Postgres database to support increased processes.

The main problem with scalability is related to the database. That's why they created Camunda Cloud, which is Zeebe. They know they have this dependency on Postgres, which is hurting its ability to scale up.

Their tech support is very good, but it also depends on which support team you get. You can get someone who doesn't understand the whole thing. 

They have been very supportive from the beginning. I believe that they didn't have our type of use case before where a fintech company is using Camunda for its microservices. We could see the same people who were committing the code in the open-source version providing the support to us. It couldn't get better than that. 

I would rate them a nine out of ten. Sometimes, we had a junior engineer, and it took a lot of back and forth communication to have the answers, but in general, we have had a very good support experience. 

Positive

We started with Camunda.

It is kind of straightforward. We have everything configured as infrastructure as a code. So, we got the best practices from Camunda, and we wrote our deployment instructions for Camunda's deployment as code by using Terraform. We did that on our side, but it would be very good if we can get it from them, but I understand that each client probably wanted to have their own method of deployment.

Camunda's deployment was easy, but fine-tuning the Postgres that we had as the backend database wasn't easy. 

After the deployment, it took us two to three months to wrap our minds around how to use it correctly. After that, it was a matter of creating templates that our team would be able to leverage and start using more and more. It isn't a very difficult product to understand. It has its quirks, and that's the part that you have to learn and has a steep learning curve, but when we did our due diligence, Camunda seemed to be more mature and straightforward than its competitors. I value it very highly.

Everything was done in-house. I built a very knowledgeable technical team. We had DevOps, and we had frontend and backend engineers. We had a complete team dedicated to making the startup grow. There were two to three people doing the work for a few weeks, and we have been able to make everything work.

It is easy to maintain, with the exception of the database. For the Camunda instance, for example, it is very easy to maintain the licenses. It is easy to attach a license to the container, and we are good to go, but we also have to take care of the database. We have grown so fast, and in order to not have a huge Postgres database, we have to delete some of the instances, such as instances from a day earlier. We are deleting the processing history because the database couldn't handle all the data that was passing through it. Maintenance-wise, that's what I remember the team complaining about.

We have definitely seen an ROI. We are using it for all critical processes in the company. The dashboard and the BPMN part have been instrumental to our success.

It is good for a startup. When we started, its price was fair, but the way we are using it to orchestrate microservices makes it expensive. When you are growing as a company, you would have more microservices, and you would have more users. There is an exponential effect when you are growing in terms of the number of conditions, processes, and users because they bill you per process. So, the price was increasing very quickly for us, and it was very difficult.

The commercial team has been trying to find a way to have different licensing, and it seems that we have found a way. We're starting a conversation with them, but so far, our experience is that when you grow as a company, the cost increases very fast. It has been difficult for us. However, our use case was related to microservices, but that might not be the case with other use cases.

We purchased a license directly from Camunda. It was the first time that we were working with a process orchestration system, and the features or aspects of the paid license that appealed to us included support and dashboards. Having a dashboard helped us to understand which processes are failing and where they are failing. They have heat maps that show the paths that are more used in our process. It has been very useful to understand how things work in general, and then you can go and do a deep dive and select a specific process and debug it. You understand why it was failing. It has been very valuable for the engineers in understanding what's going on and how to fix a bug.

If you want to debug a process and also understand what's going on in different instances that are failing, the features in the paid version are very valuable.

The paid license features are instrumental for us. Because of the price increase, we are looking at alternatives. We are looking at just an open-source solution, but we really don't want to do that because we're going to lose a lot of features. The dashboard, heat maps, and visual administrative interface are not available in the open-source solution.

We did a little bit of research. We looked at Zeebe, which is their own. We also did research on jBPM, but it didn't have all the features. 

We were trying to solve a problem in our startup, and we just started to look for solutions. We didn't have a broad benchmark. We were looking for something that could work, and Camunda was fit for our needs. We couldn’t find anything that had the stability or robustness that we were looking for. So, we went ahead with Camunda.

I would advise comparing it with Camunda Cloud or Zeebe. If your use case allows you, go with Camunda Cloud because, this way, you can leverage this new system that has fewer scalability problems. It is not a straightforward recommendation because at least until last year, the set of features in Camunda Cloud wasn't the same as Camunda On-Premises. That's why we didn't use Camunda Cloud.

We didn't use any third-party connectors. We used Camunda and then we used just the HTTP connector to orchestrate our microservices. We didn't do a direct connection from Camunda to any outside or third-party system. With Camunda, we only wanted to orchestrate our microservices, which can then connect to third-party or other systems. We wanted to keep our architecture clean, and this piece of software was used to orchestrate microservices, which was great.

Camunda provides an interface where business users can create, update, and execute complex workflows, but we didn't use this feature. No one from the business side used it for creating their own processes or modifying anything. I used it only for microservices. Being able to have a diagram and being able to have a business discussion by using the diagram as a reference was good. It was very interesting because we could have all the teams and all the specialists on the same page, but I didn't have anyone from the business side or operation side directly using or connecting with Camunda.

It hasn't reduced the cost to design and implement critical processes. That's because we weren't using any other tool previously. So, I don't have a comparison. It also didn't have any effect on our TCO. We are a cloud company. We have a very modern infrastructure where everything is on Amazon. The team is very used to getting docker systems and running complex systems inside of Kubernetes. We haven't had any trouble running it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I use Camunda Platform for trainings. I teach people how to develop process application. I am helping people understand what Business Process Management Suites are, what they can use it for, and their advantages. I am a trainer and a consultant, but not a reseller.

We use the open-source free version so we do not pay for support.

Because Camunda has various versions, there is the Platform itself, which contains the process server, and there is the Modeler, and it is distributed differently and used for different purposes.

I think that the positives of Camunda Platform are that our customers can start with the free version. I think it is the most important.

I do not recommend anybody use the free version for production without paying for a support subscription. I always recommend to use the free version only for testing and learning purposes. And I think for that purpose, it is perfect.

There are a few things that I'm missing. For instance, the user interface creator, which I know other systems have, like Aurea or Lombardi, which are IBM solutions. The interface creator, including the data model creator or some module which would allow the users who are not programmers or business consultants and who are not technically skilled in database and Java programming, to create data models and user interfaces. I used to use have this with Savvion and Aurea BPMs.

I am using the Camunda Platform for about six years.

Because we use it only for learning purposes and the solution is not used by more than four - six people at once, we haven't faced any issues.

Our purpose is very simple, it is only for trainings for our customers who come to us to learn how to create process application. I do about four trainings a year and they usually have from four to six attendees. So it's about 20 people per year who have access for only two months each.

They receive the access to their personal account for two months. They receive it when they attend the course and they have access two months after the course and then the account is closed and the tenant is deleted.

In terms of how much staff is needed for deployment and maintenance, it is just me and one programmer.

Hard to say if we will increase usage. I am in communication with another company which is developing their own process platform, so maybe I will switch from Camunda to their platform in the future.

We have been using the community very often, but we haven't tried to contact support because we do not pay for the support.

I did use two platforms intensely in the past. I worked with the IBM Business Process Suite. It was later replaced by the Lombardi solution. Then I was working with and implementing Savvion, which was later bought by Banerjee and now is represented by Aurea Business Process Management Suite, which is still my favorite.

I met in-person with Mr. Ketabchi, who is the father of Savvion Business Process Management Platform and I really believe that it is a very well designed solution and very user-friendly for the business consultants and business process analysts. It is my favorite one. After Progress Software divested this solution and created the Aurea company and distributed it from there, Aurea managers decided that our market is too small for their interest, and we had to search for new solutions.

Then we switched to Cordys and we became a partner Cordys for Central Europe, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia Republic and Hungary.

We implemented Cordys to at least one important customer which is East European broadcasting, TV broadcasting corporation. But then Cordys was diverted by Mr. Baan, the founder of Cordys to OpenText, and again OpenText changed their sales policy. So again, our market is too small for them.

We were searching again for another solution. So the next in the queue was with Bonita and Bizagi, but finally I decided for the free version of Camunda because at that time I only needed something for training purposes because six years ago I started to concentrate on trainings for business process analysts and consultants and for trainings in the area of process automation.

The initial setup is not too complicated.

We started with the analysis. The implementation depends on what you are asking for. We had a few discussions with the developers about what I expect and they developed and implemented it in about two months with about 10 days of work.

I have to say that the developers I cooperated with had previous experience with Camunda.

The price is for support, because as far as I know, Camunda doesn't sell licenses, it provides service support, not the licenses. It is a difference. Because you don't buy a license, but you do buy the support services. I think that for the support services, the price is very fair. And if I would go for the project, I would surely decide for Camunda because the yearly support price is very fair. I don't remember exactly. But at that time, when we did the calculation, it was about €20,000 per year.

My advice to anyone considering Camunda is that I recommend to use the free version for trainings and for testing and for not very crucial process automation for pilot project purposes, but not for production and not for key processes. For key processes and for production, I always recommend to buy the support.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Camunda Platform a 10 for sure.

It's very good. But it depends on what you are expecting.

For other purposes, there might be something else which is preferable. It is not easy to say there is one business process management for all purposes, for all companies. I would recommend Camunda for either small or middle-sized companies.

I would not recommend it for corporate uses because to integrate in this scenario requires much more extensive and intensive technical work for integration with the usual applications, et cetera. Therefore, Bonita or IBM Business Management Suite, for example, already have many thousands of connectors to Salesforce, SAP, ERP Systems, Microsoft systems, et cetera, whereas with Camunda, you are almost in the beginning and you have to develop everything by yourself. So for larger companies, the implementation might be too long and too expensive.

I use the solution in my company for process modeling and collaborations with other users.

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the area revolving around process modeling. It is possible to take care of the process modeling with BPMN. I think the most beneficial feature of the product is that the tool serves as a process orchestration platform and also helps in the area of process automation.

Camunda should be able to automate the processes in any department, like the ones in HR that are related to procurement or any others, which are repeated in the same manner without any significant changes in the process, as it is one area where the product faces certain shortcomings.

I have been using Camunda for about three years. I am a customer of Camunda.

It is a stable solution. I have not faced any trouble when using the product in my company.

Camunda is a scalable product.

Around 10 to 15 people in my company use the product.

I have never contacted the solution's technical support.

The product's initial setup phase is difficult for beginners.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

The product's price depends on the number of processes that need to be automated or where the orchestration part needs to be used. The product is affordable for medium and large enterprises.

My company chose Camunda since we wanted a tool for process modeling with BPMN so that we could automate some of our processes.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it, as it is a simple and practical tool with powerful capabilities.

The product helps achieve operational efficiency in our company since it helps with the process modeling area. The product also helps automate and orchestrate processes effectively.

Camunda's user interface's contribution to process modeling and deployment stems from the fact that it is pretty intuitive and simple.

It is easy for someone to learn to use Camunda.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

We process credit card applications using Camunda.

Camunda's process diagram creation and deployment is very easy. You can model the business processes very easily in Camunda.

The solution's pricing and scalability could be improved. It's very difficult to know how to really scale the solution. It would be nice if information is made available about case studies where people have scaled Camunda to a larger set of requests per second and how they did it. We really struggle to scale up the solution.

I have been using Camunda for one and a half years.

I rate Camunda ten out of ten for stability.

We have a back-end integration. So, no user logs in to Camunda on a day-to-day basis. One or two developers log in to the solution when there is some issue, or some application gets stuck.

I rate Camunda a five or six out of ten for scalability.

I posted some things on Camunda's community channel, and I found the community helpful and nice.

I previously used Apache Activiti. Apache Activiti does not have much community activity, but Camunda's community support is very nice.

It took around a week to deploy Camunda by one or two people.

Camunda is deployed on the cloud in our organization. I would recommend Camunda for low to medium-scale businesses. I would not recommend the solution to high-scale businesses because of the lack of documentation.

Camunda is the right choice for long-running business processes instead of ones that can be finished in a few seconds or minutes.

Overall, I rate Camunda an eight out of ten.