Camunda Reviews

Our primary use case for Camunda is as a process orchestration layer to help prioritize tasks for users as they were designing downstream systems. Camunda is a way to push the rules to the downstream systems. We are partly a reseller, but we also implement and we are the systems integrator. I'm the vice president and account CCO of our company. 

One valuable feature of Camunda is that it's an open BPM, so it was easier for users and developers to work together to define the rules and define the process, given their BPM and standard architecture. This also allowed us to expose the rules and the business process itself into a standard model, which wasn't possible with other tools and softwares we've used in the past. Finally, the engine itself is lightweight so it was easier for us to handle deployments and in production it didn't have a great demand of the infrastructure.

I think there is room for improvement along with the process. Camunda doesn't have a strong forms designer. While that is an advantage in one scenario in that we were able to bring a third party UI, it was lacking in forms visualization and it would be good to have some kind of a strong forms designer that allows development along with the process.

More often, we are seeing BPM used in conjunction with other automation technologies like RPA and AI. If Camunda were to be placed as a central BPM, it would need a better integration mechanism.

I've been using this solution for two years. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

This solution enables the development team to quickly create prototypes and put them into production.

If Camunda could develop something that creates user forms that would be a great feature to have. They also need to improve the UI.

It is extremely stable.

It is very scalable and it scales horizontally. You can basically automate every single process in the company.

We have not used tech support yet. 

We did not use a prior solution to this solution.

I would say it's medium complexity to setup. You do need development skills but the experience has been clear for us.

We have a lot of users, almost 1,800, and we needed something affordable, stable, and something that could be used by a large financial company. This solution truly fit the bill.

It is less cost-prohibitive than other solutions on the market. This solution was in our price range.

We also looked at IBM BPM, Peg, and Appian.

We use Camunda Platform for automating networking business processes.

The most valuable feature of Camunda Platform is its Microservices architecture, which is easily integrable with APIs.

Camunda Platform's customer support could be improved because their response is quite slow.

I have been using Camunda Platform for approximately one year.

Camunda Platform is a stable solution. However, we recently lost a lot of data because the solution's database was down.

I rate Camunda Platform a seven to eight out of ten for stability.

The solution's initial setup is quite straightforward. I rate Camunda Platform a six or seven out of ten for the ease of its initial setup.

Camunda Platform's deployment was done in a day.

Compared to other software, Camunda Platform is quite cost-effective.

Overall, I rate Camunda Platform a seven or eight out of ten.

I'm the Leader of the Center of Excellence at my company with 18 years of experience in BPM platforms, and my team works with Camunda on several different projects where we deploy Camunda either on-premises at our clients' sites or through the cloud.

Our clients that are using Camunda range from a large enterprise media company in Brazil to banks and central industry (e.g. energy industry). We have found it to be very useful in multiple segments of any enterprise. We now have about 1,000 users of Camunda in all.

I love that Camunda is a very developer-friendly platform, and my customers have evaluated the pricing as reasonable. Personally, I also like that the Camunda platform as a whole helps us to easily measure the life cycle of all the relevant processes. For example, the Camunda platform includes Cawemo for business analysts, Cockpit for process engine configuration, and modeling tools for developers. Then you have Optimize, which is helpful in managing processes and continuously improving on them.

We haven't run into many problems, because Camunda provides everything we need to delegate solutions for all the technologies (for example, Java clusters) and programming languages that we use. However, I do think that Camunda can try to do better when it comes to solving the complexities of all the products in its software stack.

I have been using Camunda for eight years.

Camunda is very reliable but you need to understand the process engineer execution in order to provide solutions that are synchronized and, thus, stable.

It's a very scalable platform in my experience. 

The Camunda installation is very simple. For example, if your project requires standalone applications, Camunda can provide the necessary external components to complete the installation. The setup can be a little more complex when compared with other applications such as JBoss, but overall it only needs a few extra configuration steps.

The evaluation of my customers on pricing is that it is reasonable.

I feel that the Camunda engine is a very scalable platform, and compares well with many other BPM platforms that I work with.

I would rate Camunda a ten out of ten.

We like the BPMN notation because it's BPMN 2.0 compliant. We like the out-of-the-box REST API features so we can build a service with Camunda, and instantly it's accessible using a REST interface, and of course, we like the REST protocol because that's much more advanced than SOAP.

The other feature that's highly advertised is the fact it's open source. We have the ability to modify the product if we need to, and that comes in handy whenever we need to add new functionality and features. One popular one is a year-end mapping feature, which is basically mapping a bunch of URLs to label in the tool, which the services can access. Instead of having to hard-code URLs, you can get the service to use the label. That is, you can configure the label in the administrator. That doesn't come with Camunda, but you can build it yourself.

The open source factor is a big one because we don't worry about feature customization issues. The problem with proprietary products is, if they're not giving you the features you want there's nothing you can do about it. All you can do is ask them to change it, and usually the product vendor is not interested. Even though you're a big client, it doesn't matter. They're worried about many clients, not just one client. So open source is huge.

Another one is that it's quite lightweight. It's much more lightweight than most other tools, so it's easy to code in, and we don't really have performance issues.

Third, using REST APIs out of the box really improves our productivity. You build it it, you deploy it, it's ready, it's good to go.

Like all BPM tools, they're very bad with proprietary UIs. In general, anyone who uses BPM tools should not expect to use their proprietary UI. It just works awfully. It's very difficult to customize. You should just build your own UI and have the UI call the REST services of the BPM service.

I've seen many mistakes made by many users of BPM tools where they just use the whole thing for everything. They use the BPM tool for the service, and then they use the proprietary UI for the UI. Next thing you know, whenever they want to customize the UI, they can't do it, or whenever there's a tool upgrade, it impacts their UI. It's just a big mess, and it gets expensive. Camunda could do an upgrade, and suddenly the UI has got a problem, so they have to spend all these man-hours to fix their UI and convert it.

Whereas, if you had a loosely coupled system where the UI is separated, where you just build it with AngularJS or something like that, then you don't care.

My team started using it in 2015, so we're going on about 30 months now in app years.

It's very stable. We've run load tests, and the only problem you'll have with Camunda is, sometimes, when you marry it with other technology like MariaDB, and you put it under high load, it seizes up. Then, when you go to the Camunda people, they say, "Well, what we're building is a tool. We didn't design Camunda to work with every little, specific product." But you'll find that issue with many BPM tools.

It's very scalable.

The only time we have a scalability problem is when the application team doesn't use it properly. For example, I've seen many BPM build teams, they didn't set up a separate database for their application data. They just used the schema that's supporting the tool engine. When they do that, the more you load up the database schema that supports the tool, sooner or later, the tool starts to bog down on server startup. Instead, they need to put all their application data in a separate database.

They're quite accommodating. I've even seen their offices in Berlin, and they're quite accommodating. They definitely go above and beyond to help you out. But at the end of the day, they're going to draw a line somewhere which is usually, "This is a proprietary UI. There's only so much we'll do for you. If you're trying to integrate this with a certain product, well, we never designed Camunda to integrate with this product."

They'll draw the line some, but it's typical for all teams, all tools.

ActiveVOS, but it is not open source. That's one of the reasons we switched.

At Camunda they had a subscription service. It was based on how many flow nodes, I think 4 billion flow nodes, and they would give you a one-time fee. You just had to pay it, and you got internal support.

Of course, you can use them without their support. You can just download it and use it, but any self-respecting entity will get support. Where they make money is not licensing. They get it in support because, sooner or later, you want help.

They have various subscription models. One of them is pay a one-time cost, and they'll support you.

We evaluated ActiveVOS and, in the past, we've looked at IBM BPM.

In terms of advice, if you're considering Camunda, you must know how to code Java. If you go on YouTube and type "Camunda", or "intro video for Camunda", the Camunda people will tell you, "You need Java developers."

When you go open source, you start to make the product a little more complex to use because they don't have as many wizards, whereas, some people will get away with only knowing scripting. They were able to use ActiveVOS because they've provided a bunch of wizards. You need Java developers to use Camunda properly.

Overall, it's very flexible and nimble.

We use the free version because our organization is a consulting organization and we work normally for customers. My primary use case is for training and modeling purposes.

I use the BPMN and the DMN model. 

The most valuable feature is that it is easy to use. I train my colleagues and customers and I don't want them to need to learn how the solution works. I want to be the one who learns about the product and teach them BPMN. 

It's user friendly, much better than most tools I have seen.

The documentation could use improvement. 

I have been using Camunda for two years. 

For modeling it's very stable. At the execution level, I don't have experience.

I think it is scalable, but I don't have experience with scaling it. 

The initial setup of this platform was very simple.

Often more functions will make a model or tool more complex. I like the simplicity of Camunda. It is very easy to use. 

Our primary use case of Camunda is for following a process in our applications. Camunda is a work process product. We are developing some applications and when we want them to follow a specific process, we use Camunda to help the programmers follow that process we want to achieve. 

We are using a version of the free service they provide, but I'm unsure which version it is. Camunda is deployed on-premise. 

The most valuable feature is that, with a visual system, you can try to have a process client before beginning the programming for the application. 

Camunda could be improved by making it easier to modify a process. You can program it to follow a process, but it is difficult to modify the process when the application is in use. It could also be improved by making it easier to use the visual platform without needing to be informed on that. Sometimes, we programmers haven't used it in the past, and it's a bit difficult to learn it. 

I have been using Camunda for two years. 

The stability is quite good. It's not used on a daily basis right now, but when we deploy the application, which is massive, it will be used daily. Camunda is stable, but there is some difficulty in changing the process. 

We will see how the scalability is in a few weeks, but we are going to do some trials and testing on the scalability. For the past two years, Camunda has been used to develop a new system, a very big system application, that is going to be used here in Spain. In a few weeks, it will be used by about 1,000 final users. As far as the programmers and technical people working with it, there are about 50 people. 

We haven't contacted technical support yet, but in the future, we will try to contact them in order to improve the platform and have new versions. We may go for the paid version, so we will have to contact them. We have been able to resolve any issues without contacting their technical support. 

I think the setup process is simple. It's not very complex because we have installed it several times for the development area and for the production and we have not had any problems. I think deployment took no more than about two or three days—it was not difficult. 

We implemented this solution through an in-house team. The installation was done internally, by the systems area in our company. 

Camunda has a free service as well as a commercial service. We are using the free service. 

In the future, we may pay for maintenance services. We haven't had to do any maintenance yet, but we plan to buy some package or product in order to handle the maintenance. 

I rate Camunda a seven out of ten. I would recommend the paid version of Camunda because of the difficulties we have had with the free version. It's easy to start using, but it's difficult to make changes. 

We had a client who wanted to use a BPM to track user subscriptions on their website. They had 20 steps from different areas and different people who wanted to join as new users of their services. 

We had to use Camunda BPM to track those services because they used to lose track of some clients in the past. They then had to spend more, add some more steps, and add new user subscriptions for months. 

The key here was always to track a new user and guarantee that they will get subscribed to their service in good time.

There's this graphic that tells you how many lines or how many tickets are in each step. In that way, you know where you stand. I find this feature very valuable.  

These are your bottlenecks, and you can see what the tasks are, the problems, see how much time must be spent on them. Then you can propose to fix it or make some improvements to make things go faster.

Documentation can be improved. Right now, the documentation isn't properly organized. We have a lot of documentation. We follow the instructions. We follow some blogs and videos on YouTube. But it doesn't feel like we have all the information we need to implement Camunda BPM.

I have been using Camunda BPM for two years.

Camunda BPM is a stable solution.

Camunda BPM is a scalable solution. It's a JAVA-based application, and we were able to install it in AWS and do all the things we wanted to do. 

The initial setup was complex. We really needed to study and understand how it worked. It was difficult because we didn't have enough information in the manuals.

We did what was said in the manual and then wanted to do more. We watched several videos, and we started to connect the dots. With our own solutions or conclusions, we were able to implement Camunda BPM.

We implemented Camunda BPM by ourselves, in-house. 

I think Camunda BPM can improve their licensing costs. It isn't easy to find clients with Camunda BPM licenses mainly because it's quite expensive. I think the license for an on-premise system is about $50,000, and that's expensive when you have only 100 users.

I used Bizagi before. It's easier to implement, but the problem is that you have to use their suite. You have to use their screen, their admin screens, or user screens. The UX and UI experience is also not good.

We decided to go with Camunda BPM because it gave us what we needed. That is, we can get inside Camunda and use only the tracker of the application. We don't need to use mandatory things like your pages or your web forms.

We can really code what we want and use it. We can create our own UI while using Camunda BPM at the same time. We really liked that because in my company specifically, we use a lot of UX, so all the UIs were very important for us.

Camunda BPM allows us to have a BPM bot with our own UI, and that's what we liked most about Camunda.

I would advise potential Camunda BPM customers to be patient. Perhaps all the information isn't available in one click, but it's possible to implement Camunda BPM, and it's quite flexible. It's worth a try.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Camunda BPM an eight.