Camunda Reviews

Our company uses this product for the automation of core banking processes. I'm an enterprise architect and team manager and we are partners with Camunda.

We are system integrators, and the value of Camunda for us is that it's easy to integrate into the products and applications we provide for our customers. The product is based on BPMN and is closely integrated with that standard. It's not complicated and generally easy to use, particularly for students and junior developers who come to learn from us as part of their studies.

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

I've been using this solution for about a year. 

The product is stable.

The product is scalable. 

We use the Camunda community if we have any problems. We haven't needed to engage directly with any level of support from Camunda. The company arranged some learning sessions before we started using the solution and we already had a lot of experience with other platforms. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

We're using the open-source version of the solution. 

We evaluated Activiti as a possible alternative to Camunda but we decided to go with Camunda. 

If you're considering an open-source tool, I would recommend Camunda and rate it eight out of 10.

It is used in the same way that Azure and IBM BPM work.

We use the Camunda Platform for Banking services.

Camunda Platform is better than IBM BPM, and Azure. It is more elaborate. 

It is divided across the platform.

The integration is separated as well as the UI, and the internal work.

It also integrates well.

I would like to see better pricing.

I have been using the Camunda Platform for a couple of months.

Camunda Platform can be deployed both on-premises and on the cloud.

We are not using the most recent version, but an internet version while the Cloud version is being developed.

We are currently using the Enterprise Edition.

The Camunda Platform is stable enough.

Camunda is a scalable solution.

We have 10 to 15 users per site.

We have not contacted technical support.

The installation is quite straightforward.

You log into the Camunda website and download the folder to install it directly.

The installation process took 20 to 25 minutes.

We configured the integration and the UI.

Generally, the price could be better, as well as the licensing fees. 

We have not yet explored all that Camunda Platform offers.

We would recommend this solution to others who are considering using it.

I would rate Camunda Platform a nine out of ten.

We are currently concentrating majorly on our clients in telecommunication. We are also working with new and existing federal clients and proposing Camunda Platform to them.

We are using its latest version. We are currently in the development phase. It is in our local environment, but we are planning to be cloud-based. Going forward, we will create a Jenkins Pipeline and deploy it onto the Azure cloud.

It is open-source. It supports microservice orchestration. This is what we are really interested in. We can customize our products depending on the use cases.

They have a migration plugin that can be used to migrate from one BPM to another BPM. It is in the beta stage since last year. If they can make it available in the market, it would be great. We are going to have a couple of migration projects for migrating from IBM BPM to Camunda, and this plugin would be useful. I have already discussed this with them two weeks ago and asked them to look into this and add it as a feature. We are expecting this plugin to be available in the next version. This is the only requirement we have at present. They keep on coming up with different features, which is helping us a lot. Its latest release that came out last month was awesome.

I have been using this solution for five years.

It is stable. I didn't face any issues in the production or development phase.

I have interacted with their technical support, and they are very helpful. When I have to work on any POC, I also directly work with the product team.

Its initial setup is straightforward.

I would advise others to verify the technology stack that they already have in place. They should check the orchestration part and see if they need to take care of any redesigning.

I would rate Camunda Platform a nine out of ten.

We recently finished a proof of concept with Comunda, and it was successful.

Because it's a complete solution, you can start modeling to automate processes. We can also develop projects with a high degree of collaboration, which is precious for us, especially during this pandemic when we are often isolated.

Within our organization, there are roughly 20 employees using this solution.

The collaboration capabilities have proven to be a great asset during this pandemic. We can share, discuss, and develop the model together — from a distance. It's really helped us during these times of isolation.

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 have been using Camunda BPM since January 2020. 

As we are still relatively new to this solution, I can't really comment on the stability; however, I know some people in the government who use this solution and they are very satisfied with the stability.

We have actually never need to consult technical support, so I can't comment on them.

I know that the IT team needed some help, fortunately, we have a good connection with them, so we worked together to set things up. In the beginning, it was kind of hard.

As we experienced some difficulties in the beginning, deployment took almost a month.

My advice: try it because it's a great solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Camunda BPM a rating of nine. If the initial setup was easier, I would give it a ten.

We use Camunda for the automation of the workflow and business process designer. We use the module cockpit and the workflow engine to orchestrate the process. We are a consulting company and we're not doing this for internal purposes. We mostly do this for projects, and these projects are for our clients.

The environment where we work is very dynamic and is changing a lot. So based on the circumstances, we mostly work on the delivery parts, as in project deliveries. At the beginning of the year, we have a clear scope, clear targets, but down the road, we face a lot of challenges where we face many dependencies. We need to constantly go around the dependencies and change things back and forth.

We have a lot of experience in the development, on the ERP, and so forth. We have seen that investing in a tool like Camunda is valuable, especially because it's an open-source product. When you do the customization, you'll be enriching and increasing the automation possibility of the product. So, the value is always increasing.

The best feature is the automation.

Camunda supports microservices and you can do multiple things. The most important thing is that you can reuse components that you have within the product. For example, let's say that I developed a workflow for a quality review; that is a workflow that can be reused in any new process. I can just ship it, plug-and-play, copy it, and reuse all of the features and components that are there. It means that I won't be spending too much time in terms of development to put it in place. To me, that is the most valuable thing about the product.

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.

I have been working with Camunda BPM for almost two years.

I would say that it is stable, at least up to a certain extent. Whenever there is an update to the product available, we go ahead and update it to the latest.

This is a scalable platform. We have about 600 users and about 20 superusers. The superusers are developers, admins, and process engineers. They are a mix of process, business support, mobile app developers, and so forth.

Support is an area that is in need of improvement.

First, they don't have a strong knowledge center. If there is a challenge or there is an issue and you would like to look around, it's not straightforward. Their knowledge center does not address most of the challenges that a person who goes through the cycle from scratch. In building the process and building the products and building the workflow, a person will go through a painful process if they don't have enough experience.

When I say enough experience, I mean a minimum of 16 to 18 months. If someone doesn't have this experience on Camunda, it will be difficult and they will suffer to get things up to speed. The learning curve is too high, so they can do more if they enrich their knowledge center.

The second problem is that the support services from Camunda are not straightforward. When we communicate with them, they have to evaluate you. Sometimes they charge you per workflow, but there is no standard model. It is difficult for us because we have an agreement with the client that at the beginning of that project, we put in our estimation as to the required resources in terms of the infrastructure resources, and in terms of logistic resources, and support. With Camunda, because of the undefined or non-standard costing, that becomes a challenge.

So sometimes we go to a client and we see that the support costs will be much higher than the benefit of the digitalization. That's an example where we decide to do only the modeling for that client using Camunda and the classic workflow development will take place. This is the case, especially for small and medium businesses. For enterprise clients, definitely, we always go with full-fledged support.

I have limited experience with Appian and Pega BPM, but my most in-depth experience is with Camunda BPM. We did a pilot project with Appian for one or two months and we did one with Pega for about one month.

During our evaluation, we have seen that there are pros and cons to all of them.

We also used K2 as one of the platforms, as well as Microsoft BPM. The Microsoft product was a combination between Dynamics and SharePoint and so forth, it was really rigid. Similarly, K2 has a lot of limitations.

This is important because once we get the business requirements, we adapt to the system. We don't force the business to change, especially in this region. We are in the Middle East, Gulf area, and working with the government sector means that they have their own standards that we need to comply with. They have their own procedures where the tools, the IT, and the process have to be adjusted to meet their requirements. For example, consider a supply chain and the procurement process. This is different from one organization to another.

This is the main thing that holds us back from investing in a system like Pega. Pega, to a certain extent, is good. It has most of the capabilities. It also gives you the room to customize to the extent that you feel fit. However, the cost is too high. When we talk about the licensing costs and the customization costs, it's extremely expensive and out of reach.

The initial setup was not straightforward. The complex part was to load or update the backlogged events. So if I have a process, which is already past the flow to a certain stage, after the implementation, if I did not start from scratch, you would need to make the data or the workflow that you have current with the process. Making it current with the live process monitoring is a nightmare. It takes a lot of development effort, a lot of data validation, and a lot of workarounds to bring this up to speed.

I have not seen that there is too much support in being able to bring in existing services. For example, if someone has an existing process, an existing instance with existing data, which is not linked, there is no explanation of what the best approach is and how to load and how to bring this into the new process and make it current, covering the backlog.

This is especially true if the backlog is something that would be crucial for some of the processes that are down-line. For example, in the case where you have a successor process where it depends on the predecessor too much in terms of the decision, and also in terms of that project. Normally, we deal with delivery on projects, so we look at the delivery and the forecast and the delays. So to see the project delays, sometimes we need to go back in time to see whether the delay was in the first stage or on the second stage or on the third stage. Based on this analysis, we always create our baseline by the end of the year and reiterate on our scopes at the beginning of the year.

We have an in-house team of two resources that maintain the product.

The cost of this solution is better than some competing products.

My advice for anybody who is considering Camunda BPM is that they implementing a PoC first.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We use an open-source version of this product. In some cases we install on-premises, in some cases, we install on Dockers. How we install the product depends on the use cases and the needs of the projects that we engage in.  

One client may be in logistics. Another client may be involved with internal communication. Another one is in retail. Some will be in business project management. We have to treat each of these to fit their unique needs.  

I like the product since we are a Java-oriented company. Our solutions can be compact with Java. We found it quite useful because we can merge microservices together. It is a different kind of architecture but it is a flexible product that we can use to go live with solutions quickly.  

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.  

We have been using this solution for about one year.  

The stability of the product is quite good. You need to have the knowhow to work with it to optimize for best performance with the database and CPU and stuff. But it is a stable and reliable product.  

It is a scalable product. We do not have much on the cloud right now. It is less than 5 nodes. But we could expand that if we needed to.  

As I understand more of the benefits of using the product, I have more plans to increase usage. With any new customer that has a proper use case, Camunda will be my first choice. Even if it is just for the fact that we know we can deploy fast. We can start with a single instance and after that, we can scale without hesitating too much in the planning stages. It is very comfortable for the customer to see things happen quickly. From our experience, most new customers prefer to start small. Better to start fast and get them going and to build them a little at a time to more automated projects than to wait around with nothing seeming to happen.  

I have been around 10 years or more in this industry as a solution architect. With this product, we have the flexibility and speed to serve customers quickly and that is important.  

As for technical support, let's say we do not need it. We can cover any issues by ourselves with our team. We do not have any issues. If we do have an issue, we will compensate for it using Java.  

I prefer not to mention the other product by name because it seems like I would be saying it was not good enough and had to move on, but we did use a product as a solution before Camunda. Every product has its benefit in terms of what they deliver and we just decided that Camuda BPM fit our needs better than the other solution.  

For example, if we wanted to incorporate a solution in a situation where a client was using the Oracle family of products already, we might use Oracle SOA or Oracle OSB to stay within the family of products. Those choices would be a perfect fit.  

On the other hand, if your stack is Spring Boots and Java and open source, Camunda fits well. If you are stuck in an enterprise using Red Hat, there is Bonita and other Red Hat BPMs that may work best for you.  

What you use depends on a lot of things. It could change because of the recommendations of team members, it might depend on the current environment, it could be influenced by whether the company is new and needs to grow fast or if it is an established company with a predictable trajectory. At the end of the day what you use depends on the choice you make for what best fits your circumstance.  

The setup was straightforward. We need to have Java, and that is it. My team does the work on the deployments so I don't know exactly how long it takes anymore. But it is a simple concept that the more complicated the client's needs and use cases are, the longer it will take.  

We do deployments with just two people: one senior and one junior tech. But it depends on the complexity of the workflow. Sometimes we might bring an extra tech if the workflow is complex.  

Of course, we do not use an integrator, reseller, or consultant for the deployment because we are in that role. We know how to build it and we know how to run this kind of project. In the beginning, we did make a lot of mistakes, but at the end of the day, it works. Now when we have a new customer, we know what to do.  

We are using the open-source version so it is without cost.  

My advice about Camunda is I recommend this product when it fits your needs. It is that simple.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a nine because it fits my demands. Of course, there is always room for improvement in the interface, or performance, and stuff like that.  

I hope that people will work on Camunda and within the next releases we will have more connectors, we will have a much more powerful interface, and maybe we can have a mobile app as well.  

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.

We are using the product as an OAM that we have included in our software product. We are offering a private cloud solution and we sell it and deploy it to our customers. 

We are using it to create a low-code solution for strategic planning and performance management in order to automate the management processes such as planning, performance management, governance processes, and business process management as a whole.

We are using the BPMN engine of Camunda; we are not using the user interface. We are using just the engine, the back end of this. For us, it is working quite well.

The stability of the solution is quite good.

Technical support is good for getting alerts about bugs.

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.

The system is stable. This is why we selected it. Based on other products, we've found the most appropriate results coming out from the Camunda BPM engine. It's very good.

There are occasionally a few bugs, however, we are quite capable of dealing with them.

Since we are using Camunda as a core solution, a core engine of our system, we are going to continue using it. I'm not willing to change it down the line. There's no plan for us to change it and we are not thinking about changing it. It has all functionalities and we are using about 50% of the engine itself in terms of its capability. We will continue to invest in utilizing all Camunda functionalities in the BPM engine.

In terms of technical support, we are using basic technical support as we are a technical organization. We are a software house. Our team is professional and they have experience in Java and private cloud technology. They are able to fix any issue. 

That said, there are certain bugs in Camunda. They are publishing information about them from time to time. We study the tool very carefully. Support from Camunda doesn't mean too much to us actually, as, in our organization, we have about 380 employees, and the majority of them are Java developers. We take the basic support to track the bugs only.

Positive

I also have some experience using Visio as business process management and ARIS as well as Bizagi.

We are partners of Software AG webMethods as an automation tool. We are using Mendix and OutSystems as a low-code solution. ARIS, webMethods, Mendix, and OutSystems are what we mainly use. 

You cannot compare Camunda with ARIS since ARIS is only for our documentation, business process documentation. You cannot compare it with Camunda. It is a totally different scope. However, in comparison between Mendix, OutSystems, and webMethods, they are very expensive tools and ultimately provide the same functionality, yet they are not using a pure BPMN XML. Maybe transferring the workflow between those systems doesn't work. That said, the consistency between, for example, Bonitasoft and Camunda and Bizagi is a matter of import and export. Between other systems such as webMethods and OutSystems and Mendix, for example, in webMethods, they are only still using an enhanced BPM engine mainly, meaning that they are not using the pure or the standard BPM notation. The same applies to Mendix and OutSystems.

The initial setup, for business users, is complex. If you compare it with cloud systems and Mendix, it is complicated. It has a very strong and very rigid back-end BPM engine and it's more trustworthy if XML files have been generated from Camunda. The quality of the XML file being generated from Camunda, the XML files of BPMN, is more trustworthy than other systems. That's why we selected it. This is the main reason that we selected it.

With the Camunda installer, the deployment of just the solution is pretty fast.

However, the automation process with the current functionality, meaning with the missing functionality of data monitor and data binding and with the lack of proper UI representation, it took us a year to develop those components to have a low-code solution on top of it.

Now, with our low-code solution on top, it will take us one to two days to have a visible process automated.

We are an integrator and we are consultants in business process management, and we are developing a tool on top of it. Therefore, we help our clients to implement. However, when we originally installed Camunda, we handled the process ourselves. The way we do things now, we try to make it easier for clients.

We are using a developer license. I can't speak to exactly how much we are paying, or exactly what license type that we are using. I'm not the technical lead or the solution delivery team. Therefore, I can't answer this question.

We did a lot of POCs on available products in the market, such as Bonitasoft, Camunda, Bizagi, so on. However, based on that POCs, we found that the best way to go forward in our solution in terms of the functionality and the accuracy of the XML files. If they could be generated by Camunda it can be more useful for us to adopt in our solution.

We are users of the solution.

We are the latest version due to the fact that we are developing our own product based on Camunda. We are developing a solution based on Camunda. We are a heavy user of Camunda.

Camunda is not so popular in the market due to the UI (meaning the form builder, the way of developing the forms which would be attached to the process), and the data monitor (how to exchange the data between the activities).

A company would need to create an integration framework between Camunda and other systems. If they sold their offering with the UI and data monitor it would be the biggest automation tool ever.

For us, with our experience with using the tool, you need a good developer to be able to use the system effectively. Other than that there are no issues. For an organization that wants to adopt Camunda, they need to have the proper resources, and the proper training to use the system. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. There's a bug inside the BPMN monitor that knocks a few points off the rating. If the system is not saved, it will crash.