Camunda Reviews

We are a bank and use this solution for process modeling, organizing, and process architecture like line of business, and to be able to make process interfaces between each diagram. Activities include client enrollment, or a client account opening with a process for loan granting, which can't be done in Modeler. We are customers of Camunda and I'm a process analyst. 

The most valuable features are the ease of use and the ability to streamline a process model on a BPM diagram.

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. 

I've been using this solution for six months. 

The stability is fine although we did have some initial problems with it. 

The solution is quite scalable and functional. We have seven to 10 users doing process modelling. They're focused on archiving processes.  

Technical support is fine, although a little slow. 

The initial setup was very easy, I did it myself. 

As a process analyst, I'm into IT development, so my advice is not to make processes highly detailed. The value added here is the freeware version that can give you the best tool to get the job done as a process analyst. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

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 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.

The most valuable features are the management of internal processes, the ability to execute from design and the model for internal processes, the ability to make processes visible, and the ability to have information about the current state of each instance.

I've been using this solution for over five years.

This is a stable product - it works and doesn't disturb me or the IT director.

I previously used Activiti, but it had no well-developed tools to monitor administration or develop new processes.

Our initial setup was quite complex and took around six months due to some bureaucratic issues. However, I think that it could be faster for organizations without such issues.

This isn't a very expensive solution, and it's cheaper than its competitors in terms of licensing and resources.

Functional agility is the main reason we use this platform. I would rate this solution as nine out of ten.

We are using the Camunda Platform to build data models.

The solution is good for data models.

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.

I rate Camunda Platform for approximately two years.

We have many people in my organization using this solution.

I have not contacted support, we use our internal IT team for support.

I have used other solutions previously, such as Signavio.

We have an annual subscription to this solution.

I would not recommend this solution because I did not have a good experience.

I rate Camunda Platform a five out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for our clients. 

The flexibility is great. 

I appreciate the compact and clear source code.

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.

I've been using the solution for a few years at this point.

We've had some issues with the performance of the product, particularly on the cloud deployment. 

We have about 100 people using the solution at this time. 

We only have developers that use it. We are a development company.

We didn't buy Camunda enterprise support. We only use community support and we don't have, to be honest, enough community support. It's not very helpful. We have many unanswered questions.

We've worked with many different solutions, including IBM, BPM, Oracle, SAP, and VPN platforms, among others.

I like Camunda due to the fact that I can embed it into our infrastructure applications. The library, not the whole sales server.

We use the community version, which is free. I'm not sure of enterprise pricing.

You do need to pay for the enterprise level to get support. Otherwise, you have access to community support, and it is lacking. 

We are end-users of the solution. 

I'd advise potential new users to learn BPM notation. It is an issue due to the fact that we have to propagate BPM notation to our customers as a lot of customers don't know what is it and how to use and why BPM is a good solution.

Currently, this is the best solution compared to global JBPM and other open-source BPM platforms.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

I mainly use the solution for learning purposes.

I primarily use the solution in order to get a clear view of my customer, including what we are doing and what processes are being made making it easy to see everything that is happening.

Overall, the solution has been very solid.

The solution is very customizable.

We're currently using the community version, which is open-source and free to use.

The solution is stable.

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.

I've been using the solution for about a month or so at this point. It's still quite new to me. 

The stability of the product is very good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable. 

We haven't really experimented with scalability at all. We haven't used it for very long. The process we are running now does not have a large volume. Our processing is not too high today. I didn't push the framework to see how it goes with big volume data.

Currently, we have only three people that are using it in the company.

We haven't used the solution for very long and therefore haven't really had a need to reach out to technical support. As I've never been in contact with them, I can't evaluate how useful or helpful they are.

I have looked at Bonita Software a little bit, however, I haven't gotten too far in terms of studying it.

The solution's initial setup has a medium level of difficulty. It's not as easy and it's not hard. Maybe someone who is starting out and doesn't have any experience with any other framework may get into some headaches. However, I've worked with it now and for my level of expertise, it's got a medium level of difficulty to set it up.

We're testing the solution still and therefore we are using the community version right now. I wanted to take a look at the enterprise version, however, my customer would like to see more value before they agree to get into it.

We're just customers and end-users. We're currently still experimenting with the product and learning about it.

I'm using the latest version of the solution. I cannot speak to the exact version number, however.

I'd advise users considering the solution to stick to the documentation and go to their GitHub to view some staples. There is a lot of good stuff in there.

So far, we have been happy with the product and its capabilities. I would rate it at a nine out of ten.