What is our primary use case?
My clients' use cases involve automating processes like BPM and agentic orchestration. I wish I could find a client that wants to do agentic orchestration. When I first used Camunda, I started by modeling BPMN and DMN models. I did a very big project for a client where we effectively automated their whole accounting within the purchasing software as an add-on. The benefit of using Camunda was having a visualization of how the accounting rules and regulations were implemented. From my background as a German tax consultant, I understand accountancy rules, and therefore was able to use Camunda to build all of that myself within the framework of BPMN and DMN.
What is most valuable?
The best features in Camunda that come to mind are the incredible development of the functionalities. When we started the project, we were beginning with brand new Camunda 8. It was all very new and fresh. During the course of the project, which took two years plus, Camunda just improved and added very useful features that made my life much easier. I am impressed with the speed of the development and the quality of the development. The other thing that stands out completely is the customer support. If you run into an issue either on your own because you made a mistake in the modeling, they are very quick to help and very helpful. The customer support is outstanding.
In my project, the deployment of Camunda was all cloud-based. I assume it was AWS. For German companies, it is always very important that it is a German cloud provider.
What needs improvement?
In Camunda, areas that have room for improvement include the process OS they are working on, and they have gotten better on that. I am not an IT person, and the setup that we had during my project was very helpful for me to put me into a position to develop a solution on my own, which Camunda off the shelf does not do easily. I am not sure if that use case makes sense for them or if I am asking for something impossible or if that is even the space that they want to be in. I always need an IT person to build me a setup so I can go on and use Camunda's modeler to make processes run and decision models run on their own and also for the agentic features. The setup, the way it is right now, is the best setup that is useful because at a certain point, you always need the IT person. You need the developer to make sure that the technical aspects of whatever you are building are functioning properly because I do not know how to do that.
For how long have I used the solution?
I started using Camunda in late twenty twenty one.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
In terms of product stability on a scale from one to ten, I would rate it as nine.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
When it comes to scalability, I would rate it as ten.
How are customer service and support?
On a scale from one to ten, I rate the technical support of Camunda as ten.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
When comparing Camunda with other solutions, my experience with other vendors is mainly with Signavio, which was bought by SAP. I think we seem to have a bit of lag after being acquired by SAP. They have slowed down their development or have focused on features that are not really useful to me. While Signavio got worse and worse, Camunda got better and better. The speed of development and being cutting edge with technology has always impressed me. I would love to have more opportunities to find clients that want to build Camunda projects with me.
How was the initial setup?
Regarding deployment in Camunda, I would say it felt really simple. As I mentioned, I am not the tech person, so it was a colleague that set all that up. The outcome of that project was that the person I worked with was working for a smaller software development company. After the project, he joined Camunda to set up a separate offering within Camunda to integrate it with an SAP background, and that made it pretty easy to deploy. The amazing thing for me was how easy it was to deploy new processes and changes in the process models. That was super easy, super efficient, and super quick. If you can change the content of your solution by amending one or two BPMN models, deploying those BPMN models to production, and then the new process, the content of the software has been changed by someone not a developer within a matter of minutes, that is very impressive.
What was our ROI?
For my big project, those were not long-running processes, but I think Camunda should manage that very well because their whole suite enables that, especially to look at every instance of the process and see where that is within the process, what stage it is at, and which actions are still pending. You can see all of that, so that is basically not an issue. It is working very well.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Regarding pricing, I think Camunda has a pricing model that only works for bigger companies. They are not looking at mid-tier companies or smaller entities like SMEs. Maybe the larger end of SMEs would be potential customers, but normally, they are looking at the big-ticket corporates because of their pricing. I do not know if it is just not possible to run the whole environment at a rate that would be affordable. It would be interesting if it was possible. For the project that I was working on, they were offering us a trial period for free, while other companies wanted quite a bit of money just for the proof of concept, where Camunda was very affordable. I think Camunda is fine price-wise but unfortunately a bit too expensive for smaller companies. That makes sense. The pricing depends on the circumstances. In my project, we were working with a big enterprise corporate. There is a lot of potential to help SMEs, and those are not in the pricing target range of Camunda at the moment. I do not know if that is ever going to change, whereas they just see the opportunities in corporates because that is where the impact of whatever you are building is much bigger. The price is always acceptable if you can create an amount of savings that is substantial; then the price is not the issue. But if you are a smaller company, then the savings automatically cannot be that big if you improve your processes, and then the pricing becomes more important.
What other advice do I have?
I have not personally implemented an AI agent in Camunda, but what I have seen in their demos and how they are able to demo that live on stage is very impressive. I would love to have a project where a client is willing to use the agentic AI and help them set that up and build that out. Also, the process OS, that is the new thing they are doing. I would love to be involved in a project about that, but I myself have no proper use case for that as a freelance consultant on my own.
I have been recommending Camunda since the first time I have used it, so I would always recommend it. Unfortunately, some of my clients do not have the budget or the strategic potential to use it. Mostly, it is a budget constraint, especially at the moment with many companies just not willing to spend. I rate this review overall as a ten out of ten.
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)