Camunda Reviews

We used the solution in quite a simple manner. We were disappointed that the dictionary was missing. The hierarchy could not be shown, defined, or structured the way we like. We did not use all the features. I have used BPMN Modeler.

Camunda is really useful. That is why my colleagues and I use it in the company. The solution is useful for small projects.

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 have been using the solution for five years.

The tool is always stable. We have no troubles. I rate the stability an eight to nine out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a five out of ten. We have ten users. The product is used once or twice a week.

I rate the ease of setup seven to eight out of ten.

We use a community version.

All the business process management tools are quite similar. We have to get used to each application's individual ideas, thoughts, and intentions. We use BIC for our organization and Camunda for the projects. It is easier to use Camunda for small projects. Signavio is also a competitor.

It's not possible for us to define a process as deep as it is necessary to automate it. We tested but did not use DMN capabilities. I will recommend the solution to others. I just finished studying business process management. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for various application workloads, including the workflow for account management applications.

Process BPMN is an important feature where you can write your code.

The latency of API could be decreased.

I have been using Camunda for two years.

The product is stable.

The solution does not have high scalability. It can be useful for complex types of projects.

I rate the solution’s scalability a seven out of ten.

The initial setup is difficult to adapt. It takes two to three days to complete.

Camunda has saved around 30-40% of developers’ time, increasing their productivity.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

My company uses Camunda Platform as a business process optimization or business process engineering tool.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is flexible. I want to see if the tool is good enough for my company to continue with its use or if there are some limitations. If, at our company, we are sure that it would take us to complete your business processes engineering exercise up to the level of enterprise architecture, then we would really be able to appreciate the tool. I am unsure of the product's capabilities because I am unfamiliar. I want to get someone experienced enough to suggest to me which is the best choice for a BPM tool.

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.

I have been using Camunda Platform for about three months. I am a user of the product.

It has been a stable solution so far since it meets our needs, including data modeling, which we need to do before we embark on analyzing and optimizing the business processes.

My company has 6,000 employees, out of which around 100 people use the product.

I contacted the solution's technical support since I wanted them to give me some facts regarding the points raised by a person from GBTEC, a German company, who claims that Camunda Platform can't fulfill some expectations since its imitations in terms of capabilities, especially collaboration features. I dropped an email to Camunda Platform so that someone from the support can let me know about the product's data modeling and whether it can go up to the enterprise architecture level or if something is missing in it, because of which we might have to get a beta or higher version.

The initial setup was very easy and flexible.

The solution is deployed on-premises.

Camunda Platform is an open-source product.

We, the employees, had suggested the company authorities opt for Camunda Platform. I was looking into certain facts from Camunda's support team so that I can suggest a good way to help my company design business processes. Our company has to look after customs and domestic taxes, and BPMN in Camunda Platform has been done using the custom function.

We intend to do a few things with the product, and I am unsure if it would raise or drop the product's rating in the future.

So far, considering the modeling purposes for which we used the tool in the last month, I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

We use the product to automate business processes for our clients.

Camunda's most valuable feature is its ability to integrate with different products.

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

We have been using Camunda for more than five years.

I rate the platform's stability a nine out of ten.

The platform is more suitable for medium companies. Enterprises might need more automated and customizable solutions. I rate Camunda's scalability a nine out of ten.

We encounter challenges in finding examples for particular programming languages. Apart from that, the technical support documentation is good.

Positive

The setup process is easy. It was the primary reason to opt for Camunda.

The product is expensive for a small or medium-sized company. I rate the pricing a two or three out of ten.

Setting up or translating business processes using the Camunda platform is easy. It provides flexibility for integrating with different third-party systems. We have implemented the product to optimize internal business processes and improve API communication between different units.

I rate it an eight out of ten.

We process credit card applications using Camunda.

Camunda's process diagram creation and deployment is very easy. You can model the business processes very easily in Camunda.

The solution's pricing and scalability could be improved. It's very difficult to know how to really scale the solution. It would be nice if information is made available about case studies where people have scaled Camunda to a larger set of requests per second and how they did it. We really struggle to scale up the solution.

I have been using Camunda for one and a half years.

I rate Camunda ten out of ten for stability.

We have a back-end integration. So, no user logs in to Camunda on a day-to-day basis. One or two developers log in to the solution when there is some issue, or some application gets stuck.

I rate Camunda a five or six out of ten for scalability.

I posted some things on Camunda's community channel, and I found the community helpful and nice.

I previously used Apache Activiti. Apache Activiti does not have much community activity, but Camunda's community support is very nice.

It took around a week to deploy Camunda by one or two people.

Camunda is deployed on the cloud in our organization. I would recommend Camunda for low to medium-scale businesses. I would not recommend the solution to high-scale businesses because of the lack of documentation.

Camunda is the right choice for long-running business processes instead of ones that can be finished in a few seconds or minutes.

Overall, I rate Camunda an eight out of ten.

We use the Camunda platform for workflow management.

The architecture is good because it's a headless workflow. I can create my own frontend, and it's fully API-based. Our approach is more flexible, so I can use the Camunda API to generate my own workflow blueprint. 

Additionally, it's cloud-ready as we have deployed it on the Kubernetes container platform, which aligns with our cloud-first architecture. These are the aspects we like about Camunda from the IT side.

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.

I have been using Camunda Platform for a year. 

I would rate it around seven out of ten. We haven't encountered significant issues or unavailability of services.

In my organization, at least 100 users are using this solution. I would rate it an eight out of ten in terms of scalability.

It requires maintenance such as patching and other regular tasks.

I would definitely recommend it. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a six out of ten because Camunda does not provide a prebuilt interface. I have to develop it myself. To provide a comprehensive product to my business users, I need a frontend. The frontend provided by Camunda vendors is very basic. Most of the vendor's customers develop their own UI or frontend using technologies like React, React Native, or JavaScript frameworks. 

So I rate Camunda Platform a six out of ten due to the incomplete delivery of a frontend. Without a proper frontend, the business cannot effectively use the platform. This is an area where I'm still exploring how well the competition performs. That's why I'm giving a slightly lower rating. However, in terms of orchestration, API capabilities, and cloud compatibility, Camunda is very good.

I have used IBM BPM and Newgen in the past. We are still using IBM BPM alongside Camunda.

We are a fintech company located in Argentina, and most of our use cases are related to transferring money from one account to another and doing the orchestration with financial institutions. 

It is also used for the orchestration of all the documents for onboarding. We have electronic onboarding where you give some information about yourself, and then you take a selfie and provide photos of the front and back of your document. We have to orchestrate all this information in order to validate it with a third-party bureau of data. When we receive an okay from the bureau, we know that you are an active customer, and we can give you an account.

In terms of deployment, it is a public cloud. We have Amazon Web Services running inside a Kubernetes cluster. 

We are a startup with less than 200 people. We first started doing orchestration using code, but after two sprints or about a month and a half, it became very clear that we are just generating spaghetti code. No one could understand the code after one month because it had difficult logic based on what an engineer thought would be a good idea, such as creating a new branch of decision, and if it wasn't very well documented, you wouldn't understand what was going on. Another drawback of having such a code was that we couldn't make the business understand what was going on there. So, it was very difficult to do things faster. That's why we decided to look for an orchestration tool, and we decided on Camunda as a solution. The way we could orchestrate everything was transformative. We went from having to code to drawing our processes. As of today, Camunda is used for every process here.

It is very good as a universal process orchestrator for complex business processes. We are using it for microservices, not for a human process. We had thousands of processes happening per hour, and the tool was able to capture the data for this throughput. The thing that wasn't aligned was the pricing structure. Camunda On-Premises is more designed for a human process where you have to have some kind of manual processing. We had a lot of back and forth with the commercial team because of the price of the licensing due to the volume that we had to process. That's because every time we wanted to send $1, we had to start a new process or several processes. This was a drawback, but in terms of the project, the product was very good and robust. Process heatmaps show the process steps that are hanging or taking significantly longer. You can go there and see the values and debug those. So, it was very useful for not only orchestrating what we have but also in understanding where we have made a mistake with a production process.

When it comes to integration, because we are a startup, we don't have any legacy systems, but we use it to connect with the legacy systems of the general payment system in Argentina. It was very instrumental for this use case. We had our own logic for how to connect and how to do the interface inside our microservices, and we used Camunda to verify the correct logic and sequence of calling different microservices, getting the response, and handling the response.

The dashboards are helpful in making the business understand what we are talking about and what can we do in certain situations, such as, if the money doesn't arrive at its destination. We had the drawings, and we used them to ask, "For the arrow here, what should we do?" We were able to have the conversation in a clear way. If we had just the code, it would have been very difficult. To have the conversation with the business, we would have had to create a drawing on a whiteboard and hope that this drawing is exactly what is happening in the code.

It freed up the time of our technical leaders working on this part of the system. By using Camunda, we could have the application process design, and we could quickly deploy the system to production and have the product early on the market. That was our biggest gain. We didn't have engineers struggling to orchestrate microservices.

The BPMN diagram is valuable. For our use case of transferring money from one account to another, the connections have to be done in the traditional financial ways. There are a lot of unexpected errors and a lot of instability with this kind of system, and we are using Camunda in order to have clear flows. With BPMN, I can show a flow to my business partner, and the business team can easily understand what's going on. The technical team can understand what the implementation is, and we can model different errors and the process for recovering from these errors. For example, it is very common that you make a transaction, but you don't have a response from a bank. You sent the money, but the bank didn't confirm this. Such errors have to be handled because it may mean that you have to do a reverse transaction. We are able to solve a lot of orchestration problems by using Camunda. Most of them are related to payments or sending and receiving money.

The feature where you can have dynamic tables with values and actions inside the BPMN is very good when you don't have all the possible responses. We may think that the payment system is very robust, but it is not. Sometimes, we receive an error code that we weren't expecting, and this kind of solution helped a lot with that.

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 been using this solution since October of 2020.

In general, its stability is very good. 

Scalability is something that we have been worried about because everything that runs in Camunda is run using Postgres. It is very difficult to scale when the number of processes increases. Because Camunda uses Postgres, we had scalability challenges. We had to do a lot of fine-tuning in the Postgres database to support increased processes.

The main problem with scalability is related to the database. That's why they created Camunda Cloud, which is Zeebe. They know they have this dependency on Postgres, which is hurting its ability to scale up.

Their tech support is very good, but it also depends on which support team you get. You can get someone who doesn't understand the whole thing. 

They have been very supportive from the beginning. I believe that they didn't have our type of use case before where a fintech company is using Camunda for its microservices. We could see the same people who were committing the code in the open-source version providing the support to us. It couldn't get better than that. 

I would rate them a nine out of ten. Sometimes, we had a junior engineer, and it took a lot of back and forth communication to have the answers, but in general, we have had a very good support experience. 

Positive

We started with Camunda.

It is kind of straightforward. We have everything configured as infrastructure as a code. So, we got the best practices from Camunda, and we wrote our deployment instructions for Camunda's deployment as code by using Terraform. We did that on our side, but it would be very good if we can get it from them, but I understand that each client probably wanted to have their own method of deployment.

Camunda's deployment was easy, but fine-tuning the Postgres that we had as the backend database wasn't easy. 

After the deployment, it took us two to three months to wrap our minds around how to use it correctly. After that, it was a matter of creating templates that our team would be able to leverage and start using more and more. It isn't a very difficult product to understand. It has its quirks, and that's the part that you have to learn and has a steep learning curve, but when we did our due diligence, Camunda seemed to be more mature and straightforward than its competitors. I value it very highly.

Everything was done in-house. I built a very knowledgeable technical team. We had DevOps, and we had frontend and backend engineers. We had a complete team dedicated to making the startup grow. There were two to three people doing the work for a few weeks, and we have been able to make everything work.

It is easy to maintain, with the exception of the database. For the Camunda instance, for example, it is very easy to maintain the licenses. It is easy to attach a license to the container, and we are good to go, but we also have to take care of the database. We have grown so fast, and in order to not have a huge Postgres database, we have to delete some of the instances, such as instances from a day earlier. We are deleting the processing history because the database couldn't handle all the data that was passing through it. Maintenance-wise, that's what I remember the team complaining about.

We have definitely seen an ROI. We are using it for all critical processes in the company. The dashboard and the BPMN part have been instrumental to our success.

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.

The commercial team has been trying to find a way to have different licensing, and it seems that we have found a way. We're starting a conversation with them, but so far, our experience is that when you grow as a company, the cost increases very fast. It has been difficult for us. However, our use case was related to microservices, but that might not be the case with other use cases.

We purchased a license directly from Camunda. It was the first time that we were working with a process orchestration system, and the features or aspects of the paid license that appealed to us included support and dashboards. Having a dashboard helped us to understand which processes are failing and where they are failing. They have heat maps that show the paths that are more used in our process. It has been very useful to understand how things work in general, and then you can go and do a deep dive and select a specific process and debug it. You understand why it was failing. It has been very valuable for the engineers in understanding what's going on and how to fix a bug.

If you want to debug a process and also understand what's going on in different instances that are failing, the features in the paid version are very valuable.

The paid license features are instrumental for us. Because of the price increase, we are looking at alternatives. We are looking at just an open-source solution, but we really don't want to do that because we're going to lose a lot of features. The dashboard, heat maps, and visual administrative interface are not available in the open-source solution.

We did a little bit of research. We looked at Zeebe, which is their own. We also did research on jBPM, but it didn't have all the features. 

We were trying to solve a problem in our startup, and we just started to look for solutions. We didn't have a broad benchmark. We were looking for something that could work, and Camunda was fit for our needs. We couldn’t find anything that had the stability or robustness that we were looking for. So, we went ahead with Camunda.

I would advise comparing it with Camunda Cloud or Zeebe. If your use case allows you, go with Camunda Cloud because, this way, you can leverage this new system that has fewer scalability problems. It is not a straightforward recommendation because at least until last year, the set of features in Camunda Cloud wasn't the same as Camunda On-Premises. That's why we didn't use Camunda Cloud.

We didn't use any third-party connectors. We used Camunda and then we used just the HTTP connector to orchestrate our microservices. We didn't do a direct connection from Camunda to any outside or third-party system. With Camunda, we only wanted to orchestrate our microservices, which can then connect to third-party or other systems. We wanted to keep our architecture clean, and this piece of software was used to orchestrate microservices, which was great.

Camunda provides an interface where business users can create, update, and execute complex workflows, but we didn't use this feature. No one from the business side used it for creating their own processes or modifying anything. I used it only for microservices. Being able to have a diagram and being able to have a business discussion by using the diagram as a reference was good. It was very interesting because we could have all the teams and all the specialists on the same page, but I didn't have anyone from the business side or operation side directly using or connecting with Camunda.

It hasn't reduced the cost to design and implement critical processes. That's because we weren't using any other tool previously. So, I don't have a comparison. It also didn't have any effect on our TCO. We are a cloud company. We have a very modern infrastructure where everything is on Amazon. The team is very used to getting docker systems and running complex systems inside of Kubernetes. We haven't had any trouble running it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our deployment is not live yet. We are in the process of building it.

We make basic use of this solution. It is embedded within a code module that requires workflows. Essentially, Camunda is used to keep track of workflow activity. So, we're not making massive use of it. Rather, we're making use of it as an embedded microservice.

The most valuable features are that it's lightweight, can be embedded in existing Java code, and keeps track of the workflow state and the instances that we need.

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.

We have been building the Camunda Platform for approximately two and a half years.

We use it on a daily basis and apart from the timing issues, we haven't had any problems. We have been doing a lot of heavy testing because it's a big, National system.

Scalability-wise, it's fine. It sites within the Kubernetes nodes and scales with those.

I am the technical design authority that chose the product. A whole team of developers is working on it. As it's not live yet, the users are testers and developers, and there are approximately 40 of them.

When it goes live, there will be several thousand users, but that won't be until next year. In terms of expanding usage, potentially, we might because there are a lot of workflows that we could map out of the current one. The one that we are doing now is quite complex and we needed to embed the service. Potentially, it could go across the whole of this business area, which is something that we are thinking about.

We contacted technical support when we had the initial problems with timing, and they were below average. We ended up having to resolve the problem ourselves by writing a wrapper.

We did not use another solution prior to this one. It was all greenfield development.

Camunda is easy to set up. The initial setup was fine until we had an issue with execution times not being guaranteed. That took quite a number of weeks to resolve. 

We developed this platform on-premises and we deploy through AWS.

We brought some people in to assist with our implementation. They were supposed to be experts, but they weren't that great. They wanted us to make much wider use of it, and we only wanted to use it quite in a small way. So, we paid for a bit of consultancy, but then we didn't keep them on.

They were typical London consultants. At £1,800 (approximately $2,400) per day, they were ridiculously expensive.

It is only a small team that maintains it. Right now, we only have one person for that.

We are using the open-source version, free of charge. We didn't bother with the enterprise features. We did look at the enterprise features for the MI component but we ended up writing our own.

More than two years ago, we did a lot of work evaluating Camunda and other products. The two other solutions that we looked at were Pega and Appian.

Pega and Appian were much larger than Camunda, so they didn't meet the criteria of being lightweight. They had a lot of features, which is something that we took into consideration. However, if we were going to extend it to all of the other workflows then these other products were not quite right.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Camunda is to pay attention to transaction integrity. The biggest lesson that I have learned from using it is to do a little bit more architectural spike work before committing to all of the development.

Overall, it is a pretty good product but there is room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.