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Appian vs Camunda comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 29, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Appian
Ranking in Business Process Management (BPM)
6th
Ranking in Process Automation
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
Rapid Application Development Software (5th), Low-Code Development Platforms (4th), Process Mining (6th)
Camunda
Ranking in Business Process Management (BPM)
1st
Ranking in Process Automation
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
75
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Design (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Business Process Management (BPM) category, the mindshare of Appian is 6.5%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Camunda is 21.8%, up from 21.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Process Management (BPM)
 

Featured Reviews

Devashish Mishra - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 21, 2023
Low resource consumption, easy setup, and stable
To determine whether a platform, such as Appian, is suitable for your domain industry, you must first assess whether it offers any out-of-the-box features relevant to your needs. If it does, utilizing that platform would be the best option since it already has the required functionalities. If the available features do not align with your requirements, consider choosing a platform that can easily build such services. Attempting to modify pre-existing features on a platform is a challenging task, and any upgrades to the platform could pose further issues for users. The solution has high performance but the main issue is the lack of customization after deploying it. I rate Appian an eight out of ten.
Peter Broucke - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 23, 2024
Support is good (even the basic one), documentation is readily available and matches the need for agile development
Probably one area I look forward to has to do with AI and how Camunda sees the AI angle on workflow. I know they're working on that or at least communicating about it. They already have versions to run on the cloud, so they've tackled that. We're looking at what they will come up with otherwise. As long as the product gets enough traction and evolves, we're happy. With open source, you can monitor what's happening. If the product is being left by many customers, that's a sign. We're also users of Camunda, and you can watch one of our guides' presentations in the States about one of our implementations. Our focus now is on developing service management and DMN APIs for the platform. AI is something we take into consideration, but we'll see what additional benefits it could bring and how to interconnect it with our data or AI engineering.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Appian is easy to install and set up, and it does not come out with your audit. It has accessible process orchestration and process management. With Appian, the time to market is much faster."
"The product has a very good mobile app."
"Rapid development with low-code makes it easier to quickly get apps implemented and the time to break-even and ROI is much faster."
"Technical support is helpful."
"The most valuable features are the low coding and low code data."
"The process models provide self-documenting systems."
"It provides us with real-time data on all connected systems in terms of how they're integrated with each other and how they are performing in a workflow manner."
"SAIL (Self-Assembling Interface Layer), a scripting language provided by Appian. It is the equivalent of JS and CSS. It allows creation of complex UIs which are also responsive. With SAIL, we have a single language for both the UI logic and its appearance. UI components can be built as reusable components and used in multiple UI interfaces."
"The Camunda BPMN Platform is very flexible and gives several options to deploy and scale it."
"The architecture is good because it's a headless workflow. I can create my own frontend, and it's fully API-based."
"The platform's approach to BPMN modeling is straightforward and versatile, making it easy to adopt and use effectively."
"The use of Java is a big plus for our intern developers, and Camunda scales well, as many of our departments are already using it in production with dedicated teams."
"The most valuable features are the workflow, the task list, and the modeler where we use VPN."
"The integration with almost any language, product, and even human tasks, is valuable. It's very seamless to integrate into existing systems. It doesn't require you to rewrite a lot of your existing system. That's where it really stands out."
"The headless nature of the Camunda Platform is something that has helped us to build our own logic and platforms on it."
"The solution is useful for small projects."
 

Cons

"The biggest areas of improvement would be in facilitating team development, DevOps, and integration with typical tools used in enterprise development (Jenkins, Subversion, etc.)"
"It would be useful if they could create an academy or forum in the future to help active users answer questions they have about the solution."
"We would like to see more reduced latency. We would like to make sure that the scale-out factor will be much more as workloads come in."
"Appian has a few areas for improvement, which my organization raised with the Appian team. One is the Excel output which is limited to fifty columns when it should be up to two hundred or three hundred columns."
"A point of improvement would be the SAIL forms. The built-in tool used to generate forms does not have debugging support (to view local variables as they change on live preview, and step-by-step valuation) which is a big drawback for form development. Moreover, the script language used to build SAIL forms does not support inheritance or lambda expressions (functions as arguments of other functions), which makes the code base more verbose."
"There is no UI customization possible."
"It needs better integration with our existing application ecosystem."
"We would like to have more granular control for interface styling."
"Initially, installation was challenging, but recent improvements have made it much easier."
"The GUI needs to be improved, with more configuration options."
"When addressing a complex and extensive process, the domain it belongs to, be it banking, healthcare, or HR, requires widespread access."
"It would be better if the tool were made less reliant on Java."
"The latency of API could be decreased."
"I would like to see the forms engine available in the open-source version of this solution."
"If Camunda could develop something that creates user forms that would be a great feature to have. They also need to improve the UI."
"As we experienced some difficulties in the beginning, deployment took almost a month."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's good value for the price."
"Product pricing compared to some of the earlier vendors, like IBM, CA, and Oracle, is quite well-priced. Although, we do feel that as we increase the number of users and the workload increases, we will have to spend more."
"I'm sure it is cost-effective, but right now, we're just toying around with it. So, I don't have any hard numbers."
"The cost is a bit higher than other low-code competitors, OutSystems and Mendix. The price needs to be more competitive."
"It is expensive, but powerful. I would recommend comparing against cheaper licensing products and open source."
"Appian is very flexible in their pricing. In general, Appian's pricing is much, much lower when compared to competition like Pega or other products. Appian also has a flexible licensing model across geographies. Pega usually goes with a single licensing cost—which is a US-based cost—for all global customers, and it's costly. Whereas Appian has a different regional licensing cost model and it can be cheaper, depending on geography. So Appian's licensing is very flexible, and cheaper when compared to other competition."
"It is fully managed, and I don't believe there are any additional expenses."
"The cost is calculated on a per-user basis. It might be expensive for small and mid-sized enterprises."
"We are using the open-source version, free of charge. We didn't bother with the enterprise features."
"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."
"We use the open-source version, which can be used at no cost."
"We're using the free version. We used the Enterprise version for some time. If I compare free versus what we paid at that time, the Enterprise version costs a lot. For the additional functionality that we got with the Enterprise version, it was too costly."
"We are using the paid edition because there is no separate support and service license yet. We are yet to find a suitable licensing model for Camunda because we only use the engine, and we have implemented our solution around Camunda Cloud. So, we are mainly interested in the support and service, and that's what we mainly use in the paid edition."
"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."
"There is a bit of scope for improvement in how the licensing and pricing are done. They are based on the number of processing instances you execute on the cluster... but on the self-hosted mode, the pricing model should be customized."
"Generally, the price could be better, as well as the licensing fees."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
28%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which do you prefer - Appian or Camunda Platform?
Appian is fast when building simple to medium solutions. This solution offers simple drag-and-drop functionality with easy plug-and-play options. The initial setup was seamless and very easy to imp...
Is Appian a suitable solution for beginners who have no additional preparation?
Appian is actually pretty big on educating its users, including with courses that reward you with certifications. There is a whole section on their company’s website where you can check out the edu...
Is it easy to set up Appian or did you have to resort to professional help?
We had some issues when we were setting up Appian. It was quite surprising, since this is a low-code tool which, in its essence, means it is meant for business users and inexperienced beginners. So...
How does Bonita compare with Camunda Platform?
One of the things we like best about Bonita is that you can create without coding - it is a low-code platform. With Bonita, you can build the entire mechanism using the GUI, it’s that simple. You c...
Which would you choose - Camunda Platform or Apache Airflow?
Camunda Platform allows for visual demonstration and presentation of business process flows. The flexible Java-based option was a big win for us and allows for the integration of microservices very...
What do you like most about Camunda Platform?
The solution is useful for small projects.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Appian BPM, Appian AnyWhere, Appian Enterprise BPMS
Camunda BPM
 

Learn More

Video not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Hansard Global plc, Punch Taverns, Pirelli, Crawford & Company, EDP Renewables, Queensland Government Department of State Development, Infrastructure and Planning (, Bank of Tennessee
24 Hour Fitness, Accruent, AT&T Inc., Atlassian, CSS Insurance, Deutsche Telekom, Generali, Provinzial NordWest Insurance Services, Swisscom AG, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, VHV Group, Zalando
Find out what your peers are saying about Appian vs. Camunda and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
815,854 professionals have used our research since 2012.