What needs improvement with Camunda Platform?

The setup process is a drawback as it has many dependencies, which affects our ability to migrate to Windows eleven due to security concerns. I would like to see better integration with the Microsoft suite and more language options, especially for our internal applications.

Camunda needs to improve its user interface for low-code development and provide more user interface options beyond the basic workflow. It also requires further development to compete with platform features, like the deployment and development life cycle.

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

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.

The product does not have a dictionary. The tool must enable users to build or design sub-processes. It must provide a more convenient and easy way to define sub-processes.

I don't see a lot that needs improvement in the core functionality. With the on-premises version, the task list has issues, and user creation is not as straightforward as in IBM BPM with its Process Admin role. Camunda also lacks some of the initial documentation that helps with onboarding. I often rely on Udemy courses for help. So, basically, on-premises user management needs improvement. I'd recommend a feature like the Process Inspector that IBM BPM offers. This is where you can troubleshoot and manage running processes. It would be very helpful for non-technical users, as sometimes they need insight into where a process is stuck. Camunda Cockpit has similar functionality, but it's a bit more complex. I'm a technical person, so I understand it, but our clients are often from non-technical backgrounds. My clients are mostly common users from commerce backgrounds. So it would be better for Camunda to be able to easily view their processes and troubleshoot process instances. The Process Portal in IBM BPM is basically a dashboard view. If Camunda could offer a similar dashboard for users, it would be a big benefit for their organizations.

They could provide more documentation regarding the integration of different programming languages. We encounter challenges finding recommendations or online documents while developing processes.

The product must provide more videos and training materials.

The support offered by the product is an area of concern where improvements are required. Though Camunda offers one of the best support services in the market, I know that Camunda Platform 8.0 is still in the development phase. The tool can have more guidelines and best practices that can be made available over the internet to help people who are researching the solution as it is a new product in the market.

The latency of API could be decreased.

When addressing a complex and extensive process, the domain it belongs to, be it banking, healthcare, or HR, requires widespread access.

Camunda lacks sufficient dashboards for operations and reporting. Although I can create dashboards and reports using the provided framework, it's not as enterprise-ready as some of the competitors in the market. They offer ready-made dashboards that are easier to create compared to Camunda. That's an area where Camunda can improve. So, in future releases, I would like to see better dashboards.

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.

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

There is something that could be improved, particularly the availability of a drag-and-drop front-end tool for the workflow designer. When building interfaces, there are limited tools to work with, especially when dealing with different types of tasks, such as user tasks and system tasks. It would be beneficial to have something like the latest version of Ondula, which offers more flexibility and ease of use.

The primary issue regarding the Camunda platform is its high cost of training. This is why I haven't discussed it extensively, as compared to other products that are more affordable in terms of developer training. For instance, if I were to compare a Process Maker who provides free training with UiPath, which is also free, and then with the Camunda Platform, the latter requires payment for its services and verification procedures. The amount charged by Camunda is quite substantial and not negligible. As you can see, I am unable to carry out any implementation without having received prior training, and this has been a major disadvantage of using the Camunda Platform. I would like to see the pricing improved.

We are not continuing with Camunda because of performance problems. We have millions of cases and when we did load testing with Camunda we found some limitations. It is not difficult to change existing processes. The difficulty was in integration, for example, to call an external web API, and in the security capabilities, to use a vault for secrets. That was difficult. They also need to integrate business role management, because Camunda doesn't have a built-in business-roles engine. The business analytics monitoring, the BAM portion, could also be improved.

They should focus more on enterprise challenges. We are using the enterprise license, and I would like to see more interactions with Camunda. The enterprise license should cover enterprise challenges. We would need more touchpoints so that Camunda understands better what's going on at the enterprise level. That's an area where Camunda could improve. They can understand the challenges of an enterprise and try to come up with solutions from their side for the enterprise. As an enterprise license owner, if we have some ideas for features, we expect them to release the features faster than now. So, a bit faster feature release is an area for improvement. There should be a multi-tenant solution for the platform where it supports multiple organizations on one platform instead of having to spin up multiple clusters for each organization. There should be an easy way to integrate different departments into one platform without having to operate multiple platforms. The operations should be easier with the enterprise solution. It should not create more overhead for the operations people. Another improvement area is the licensing model. We are yet to find out a smart licensing model for Camunda. We are mainly using the CP engine, and we require only a support and service contract, but this is not yet possible. Their licenses were probably made 10 or 20 years ago, but we need tailor-made licenses for the implemented use case. As a platform owner, I have to provide our customers with a static price tag. The price should not increase exponentially, and we should be able to tell them that we are not overcharging them. If the cost gets too high, it's likely to not be used in the future.

We're trying to put the people from the business to do it. We are using APIs, and we have open APIs to define our APIs and the request-response that each call requires and sends. So, to base the mapping on that, there was nothing to help. I know that with some tools, such as Oracle tools, you can see the input and expected output. With drag and drop, you can take one property from the left and drag it to the right, and it does all the mapping itself, but that's not the case with Camunda. So, for me, this is something that can be improved. If you stick to the basics, it can be pretty easy. If you need to extend, as we did with custom plugins, this is rather hard because the documentation is not that great. Everything is there. It is an open-source tool, and we had access to classes and documentation, but there was no great explanation on how to use them. There were also not many examples. It was pretty hard to go this way, but if you stick with the basic functionality, it is a great and easy tool. Another thing that we struggled with has already been fixed. They now offer a SaaS version of Camunda. We struggled a little bit with how to deploy Camunda in our infrastructure. The way it was designed was that the database can easily become a performance bottleneck. It is something that they could improve. They can provide more examples of how to implement a scalable solution using Camunda.

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 faced problems in bringing up the Cockpit in terms of GUI processes. I think that there is room for improvement in those areas.

I'd like to see a number of preset features and configurations included in the solution to make it more of a plug-and-play kind of product. That would help us in terms of our customers.

Community support is basically what I'm looking for. Other than that, it is okay for now.

The cockpit features of the Camunda Platform can be improved to make it a bit more user-friendly, in terms of providing a bit more user experience for non-technical users. There could be some additional documentation added.

The development team had a lot of issues at the start. Guaranteeing the execution times that it will work to is difficult. It's an embedded state machine, although it doesn't give you guarantees of when it will update the state. It can be quite difficult because you can get into timing issues, which is a real pain to sort out. We were able to resolve this by writing a wrapper around it. You have to be very certain that the transactional integrity is provided to the API user. In the future, I would like to see better transactional integrity.

The documentation could use improvement.

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 don't like the UI of the Camunda Platform, I have found the Signavio solution to be much better for me to create the process designs and execute them. Additionally, I have found the tools in the Camunda Platform are not compatible with some of my other tools. They should improve this in the future.

The user interface needs some polishing because it is too technical for end-users to use it.

We have faced problems with the performance. Camunda has two options: the Camunda main platform and Camunda Cloud. Right now we are trying to solve problems with the Camunda Cloud and there are significant problems with performance. We communicated this with the Camunda team. We're a member of the Camunda community and we try to solve those problems with them. Community support is lacking and you need to pay for enterprise support. I'd like to have the ability to buy into the data model. There are no data models in Camunda and we need information about variables and process instances. In other BPMs or other big BPM platforms, for example, IBM, there is that feature.

It would be helpful if the solution had additional out-of-the-box activities.

I would like to see better pricing.

For the short time I have with the tool, today, I can't see something that is missing as a product and its benefits. Maybe minor things that I haven't had the opportunity to notice yet, like an easy installation using Docker or scripts where you can see the functionality quickly.

The form builder that will be utilized in the system and the data monitor both need improvement at this time. I want to exchange the data between the activity and UI basis. Currently, they are using a JSON file, which needs to be improved. We need something that can be used as a user interface and the user can make the data binding and exchange data between the activities. This is what we did ourselves. We had the engine itself and we created a data monitor and formed it on top of it. This is what is missing in the system. The initial setup can be complex for business users. There occasionally be some bugs in the solution. The solution needs to offer more languages such as Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, et cetera.

In the future, I would definitely like to see the process administration (migration, audit, tracking) and process evaluation (optimize) features added to the community edition. Right now, thanks to the pluggable architecture, we have built features that partially substitute the enterprise edition features.

I don't see many issues with this product. The migration strategy needs to be improved. Most of the financial institutions in North America are looking towards open source BPM to replace their existing existing BPM platform.Camunda has already started working on a plugin to mgirate any kind of BPM workflows to Camunda BPM seamlessly. They have just released a beta plugin to migrate Legacy BPM processes to Camunda BPM. If they make it as a full-featured version, that would be a lot of help with migration projects.

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.

As I mencioned, we've just finished a proof of concept, so our experience with the tool is still very recent. In general, it mets ours expectations. Something that could be improoved is the capabilitie of integranting different modeling tools, in order to facilitate both the import and export of models.

I would like to see more examples of using .NET and Camunda. I'm from the .NET world and I would like to use it, rather than Java. For Java, Camunda is great. For .NET I have opinion that need more real life examples. For example I woudl like to see example of .NET Blazor UI with Camunda. Also, I would like to see more examples of how to work with a team of users.

Process interfaces between diagrams could be improved. I'd like to see process interfaces and structure in order to make process architecture. Not only to lift diagrams, but to make new diagrams and new data. You can make new diagram and new data but if the client wants to open a current account, then it must be a process interface. It would also be helpful if they would publish processes in a format that can be easily viewable and understandable. The main area would be in publishing because we want to have all the processes published on our intranet.

The upfront enterprise-level support could have been better. They need improvement. The initial set up could be simplified, it's complex. I would like to see better sales support, upfront implementation, and more a more wizard-like walkthrough with the next release.

The only drawback is the time that it takes to have a complete set of workflows implemented on the Camunda platform. This is from drawing the modeling and the workflow up to the production release. The support definitely has to be improved. Second, it needs to be more intuitive. As it is now, to develop an automated process in Camunda, you would need to involve a front end developer, backend developer, and sometimes, someone who has experience with modeling. Where in Appian and Pega, you would be able to simply reduce these overheads by creating the process, the flow, and converting it within certain boundaries into the automated process. The visualization part can definitely be improved. You can see the process moving live, but if you have a complex design where you would like to show the process in a different shape, that takes a lot of customization and a lot of coding effort to put this in place. The visualization needs not a little or a medium amount of work, but rather, it requires a lot of improvement. At the end of the day, we have the process, we have the workflow, we have the event, we have everything. However, what the people see at the end of the day is what they believe. So sometimes we know that we do have a lot of data and a lot of information, but we fail to represent this information in a way that meets or addresses the business requirements. Better visualization capabilities would help in this regard.

From my point of view, there is a lot that has room for improvement. But one option that they should focus on most is improving the basic parts of the BPM tools. One example is that they should offer some additional options in terms of employing connectors. We implemented most of our solutions in Java through delegation. We could have done a better job of that with connectors. So connectors are one of the cases where they might improve. Another point that I am thinking of that I can not do by myself is to improve the forms. Right now the forms are fairly simple. It would be nice to implement some kind of wizard, or advanced form, and be able to fill in data dynamically. A possible add-on is to have a mobile app. Specifically, it would be a tool used to prepare forms dynamically and to preview business projects. If you know what you need to do, you can actually do a lot with a product like that. From a security point of view, I think that some features can be added or enhanced. I see a lot of opportunities for interesting stuff that can be implemented like installation identity or places where token authorization can be used. More security measures can be added in order to offer options to protect the front line. One final feature that would be nice is the opportunity to operate an active database. I do not think that will happen soon. It is okay because we have very powerful database options right now.

The support definitely can be improved. Apart from that, the language should be extendable to other platforms. If I want to write, I'll run a different platform, like Python code on top of it, or COBOL code on top of it, and it should support those languages. It should also have some kind of a custom-engineering extension that will add on to it.

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.

Especially when you use the open-source version, there are issues with performance. The external programs that communicate with Camunda are kind of late 20th century in terms of style and need updating.

The simulation feature of this solution needs improvement. As an example, if I wanted to highlight an event then when I press on it, I would like all of the impacted processes to highlight. That way, you can see the impact of an event on different processes. If there were some industry templates it would have helped significantly, because it is similar to a process map for a domain. That is what we are currently creating, a domain-relevant process map. When it comes to insurance, just to give you an example, there is marketing, then underwriting, policies for contracts, policies for prevention, collections, there are claims, and business flows that we had to create from scratch. If we could have started through a template, it would have helped us kick start the initiative.

I would like to have a feature for audit logging and audit log management, and some history of use for the audit logs. It's not anything I need, but our clients often require these features and then we have to do it ourselves. I would also like additional models for location.

Just today I encountered a problem with the current version, and that is the functionality of the BPM standard, which is not yet implemented in Camunda. An example would be a new marker for tasks. Maybe the developers of Camunda can, as soon as possible, provide all possible functionalities of BPM standard in its process engine. Some are not yet supported and they can really cause serious problems for implementers. In the next release I would like to have more documentation on how it can interact with other organization systems, as well as other documentation about API. I would also like more support about features. It would be great for someone like me with a little programming and developing background, to see an easier platform for data modeling. A place where you can create your own data model, your own entities, your own entity relationship, and be able to find a form based on that data model. That would be much more straight forward for someone like me, as a teacher. But it's not provided here right now. I would also like an easy to use form builder.

I would like to see the forms engine available in the open-source version of this solution.

The user interface needs improvement. It should be more tailored to the end-user and offer a better user experience design over the user interface itself. The solution could also use more and better frameworks in terms of embedding them in the engine. Right now the only embedded framework that's supported is Java. It's not a problem because you can also have remote workers that do part of the process through their remote RESTful API which they have clients for, but you cannot embed .NET. You cannot embed that for execution within the engine through delegates, so I would definitely say that would be a plus if they would expand that. Certainly in terms of performance.

In terms of areas for improvement, they can come up with something called a generic workflow application. The engine is really good, but I believe that if they can come up with some sort of application while still keeping the core of Camunda, that would be really great. An application which could cater to a generic workflow, the same application can cater to any domain people can make use of it. In regards to advice, I would say the scalability features, which are available in the paid version, should also be available to the community. But otherwise, if I'm talking about the quality or the scalability issue, it's still good.

We were discussing Alfresco. They were saying that their product is much better than Camunda BPM. We signed the governance policy for "Cloud First". When you search for Camunda BPM resources or books on how to utilize Camunda BPM, it is lacking. When it comes to Alfresco, there are thousands of resources that can help you to utilize within AWS and its Group Services. I would like to see the usage of Camunda BPM on Amazon Web Services be improved. For Camunda BPM, the sense of community is lacking. The company itself is based in Germany. Alfresco is a very small company with an open source community. It is really good and it works perfectly. It was easy for us to adopt it. We are proposing that Camunda BPM can be offered as a web service. What could be improved is better support for AWS and training provided with the platform to make it easier to use.

The GUI needs to be improved, with more configuration options. The backend needs to be more configurable, as well. The security needs to be improved. Generally speaking, other tools are more mature.