arjones - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at ank Platform
Real User
Top 10
Highly valuable for orchestrating complex business processes, solving many problems, and making the business side understand what we are talking about
Pros and Cons
  • "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."
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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. 

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

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Camunda
April 2024
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For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this solution since October of 2020.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

In general, its stability is very good. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and support?

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. 

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We started with Camunda.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

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.

What was our ROI?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Staff Software Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 20
Process diagrams help stakeholders understand processes, and connectors enable us to standardize our integrations
Pros and Cons
  • "The integration with almost any language, product, and even human tasks, is valuable. It's very seamless to integrate into existing systems. It doesn't require you to rewrite a lot of your existing system. That's where it really stands out."
  • "While it's very scalable, it would be great if auto-scaling capabilities were added to it... one area that really could help out would be to have dynamic resizing of the cluster. Right now, you have to do capacity planning."

What is our primary use case?

We have an event-based architecture and Camunda works as an orchestrator for our microservices.

Over the last three years or so, we have been using Kafka a lot. We wanted to bring in an orchestration engine to integrate seamlessly with our nesting system. We had a lot of existing applications that are not that old, and we did not want to rewrite software components that we own to get the benefits of orchestration. That was where there was a need. One of the factors that will decide if we will use it for more use cases at our company or not, is the ease of integration.

How has it helped my organization?

As an organization, we don't want to reinvent the wheel, so it's important to us that the connectors are available out-of-the-box and reusable. We don't want our developers to write boilerplate code. Having the connectors ensures that we have standardization in the way that we are integrating with other parts of our ecosystem. It also allows us to put some best practices into those standards. For example, we can implement three tries for a connector. That helps us be declarative. It provides a good tradeoff between low code and no code.

It has a ubiquitous language across stakeholders. When we are talking to stakeholders about how a process evolves over time, or about the complexity of a process, it's a lot easier to explain without having to go through Confluence pages or through a lot of sessions with product people explaining to them how a particular system works. They have a good amount of understanding by looking at the process diagram. That really helps me, personally, in communicating with them.

We have also been able to build out dashboards for our asynchronous processes. Those dashboards have been really helpful. Otherwise, we would have to rely on the data analytics team to provide us with any analytics data around the events that are flowing in our system. Now, for some of our purposes, we can build dashboards ourselves using Camunda.

In addition, we have built dashboards that show important statistics about our business process and key changes that happen in our process definition. Those changes communicate a business value to our business stakeholders. For example, in the last seven days, how much traffic have we ingested into our system, and where has most of it gone? That kind of information is now more of a self-service for everyone. The dashboards we have built are giving us a good amount of information about what's happening in our systems. We are also using the BPMN designs for our design discussions with the product team.

We have been more agile because we don't now have to keep the Confluence documentation up to date. When you put something in Confluence, it's hard to keep it updated and make sure that it's up to date with the latest implementation. Now, the business process flows are code. They are modeled as BPMN files, so we don't have to make extra effort to maintain the business process. And while we are discussing our product, we can communicate how the small things that are part of a process could build up and what role they are playing in the overall process. It also helps us find out, if some part of our process were to fail, what impact it would have on the overall process execution. That's something that teams have recently started discussing more.

Since day one, our goal was to build reusable components that can be used in other projects. We recently did a discovery for one of our projects and we found that we could reuse 80 percent of what we had developed on the Camunda platform. The microservices and the connectors were reusable and that really reduced the development effort drastically for that use case.

We are now spending more time looking at the bigger picture, and not just looking at a particular microservice. The developers can now see where their microservice fits into the flow and how their microservice responds, whether in a successful manner or in failure.

What is most valuable?

The integration with almost any language, product, and even human tasks, is valuable. It's very seamless to integrate into existing systems. It doesn't require you to rewrite a lot of your existing system. That's where it really stands out.

We have used a couple of connectors, including the Kafka connector a lot because we have mostly a Kafka-based architecture. The connectors are really seamless. They just fit in. They don't require you to make a lot of changes to your existing infrastructure. That's what connectors are primarily meant for, to enable enterprise-level integrations. We also build out custom connectors for our use cases.

In addition to Kafka, we can easily integrate it using any microservice or legacy microservice. All you need to do is include their library and put in a couple of annotations on your existing methods, and they can act as Camunda workers. You can transform your existing code into Zeebe components and that requires very minimal coding. We are also working on building more connectors, and that will smooth out further adoption of this technology within our ecosystem. We can orchestrate almost any remote system if it's accessible over the network and it implements any protocol. If it's reachable, we should be able to orchestrate it via the Camunda platform.

In terms of its ease of use for engineers, it's pretty easy. We have an engineer who joined us two weeks back and he has been onboarded. He's able to make changes in the BPMN. That's very important for modifying business processes.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Camunda Platform for a little less than one year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We anticipated the load for one year, at least, and we have done load tests. The system is pretty reliable. We have not had even a single issue in production using their product. It's very reliable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is very scalable. It's built on a similar architecture to Kafka, which we know is a very scalable platform. The scalability has been one of the most important features that they have designed their product with. They had scalability in mind from the start. 

We have tested it for thousands of process instances per second. There are some blogs from Camunda that show it even goes to millions of process instances per second.

While it's very scalable, it would be great if auto-scaling capabilities were added to it. We haven't seen any issues in production related to scalability, but one area that really could help out would be to have dynamic resizing of the cluster. Right now, you have to do capacity planning. You plan for the capacity that you need in the next couple of years and then size your cluster accordingly.

Having said that, I haven't seen problems with the product so far.

How are customer service and support?

I would rate their technical support a nine out of 10. The one thing that I feel there could be more of is their exposure to AWS. I'm not saying that they don't know about AWS, but I think a lot of their customers are using Google Cloud. I think they, themselves, deployed it on Google Cloud. But AWS is the market leader and there are a lot of customers on AWS.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We have used AWS Step Functions.

How was the initial setup?

They provided help charts, so it was pretty straightforward. But when you want to tune it or run it on an enterprise level, you will want to try out a few of the parameters they have provided, and play around with them, to ensure that the software components that your cloud provider has can be used smoothly for deploying Camunda. Initially, you might have to make some effort to set things up on your own cluster, but they have good documentation and help charts for deployment on your Kubernetes.

We have different environments, including development, testing, staging, and production. We could even implement a CI process for our workflow instances and BPMN files, as they can be deployed using a CI/CD pipeline. Microservices can be deployed at their own pace in a CI/CD pipeline. That was the strategy for deployment.

What about the implementation team?

We did it in-house, but we did use some consulting from Camunda during some of our initial days. One of their solution architects was really good in terms of technical knowledge. He knows the product really well and he guided us through some of the parameters and tuning of our clusters while we were deploying.

In addition to me, we had one more person doing the deployment. One of our senior people took care of the deployment on our side. I was overseeing things but he did most of the work.

What was our ROI?

So far, we have been very pleased with what we have achieved with Camunda. We are still within our initial one-year contract but we have seen value from it.

In the use case where we were able to reduce 80 percent of the development effort with reusable code, that equated to man-hours that are directly related to cost. If you reuse code for more use cases, the cost can be justified.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We have an on-premises, self-managed installation because of some internal decisions. There is a bit of scope for improvement in how the licensing and pricing are done. They are based on the number of processing instances you execute on the cluster. They have two modes of deployment, one is their cloud version and the other one is the self-hosted mode. For the cloud version, it definitely makes sense to have it based on the number of processing instances you run, but on the self-hosted mode, the pricing model should be customized. If it were customized a bit more, it would be better for us.

We purchased their workflow engine, Zeebe, and consulting. We also operate the tool with which you can monitor your process instances. There are a couple of more tools available in their product suite, but these three aspects were most compelling for us. If we are running mission-critical workloads, we definitely need support if things go wrong on a given day. We need their expertise, so the consulting is very important for us. The workflow engine itself is also very important, as that is why we evaluated Camunda in the first place.

If data privacy is not an issue, then definitely go for the cloud version of Camunda because then you don't have to worry about managing the cluster and capacity on your own. It's more seamless than having to manage your own cluster. But if you're considering upgrading from the free version, the consulting is definitely important. They also do BPMN consulting as part of the contract. You can ask for BPMN reviews and you can ask for sessions with their solution architects. They also have a 24/7 hotline that you can call in case there are any issues.

They have an excellent open-source community. I have not seen many other forums that have developers who are as active as Camunda's developers are on their forums. The technical advice that we get from Camunda is really helpful. They know best about the product they have built over the last few years. You definitely need to have expertise on a product that you're thinking of using. The people who have built it provide a great additional value.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did take a look at some of the options available in the market, solutions that allow you to do process automation, including Cadence/Temporal.

We selected Camunda due to a few important reasons. It's a product that solves a problem that many organizations don't even realize exists in their architecture: visibility. It gives us visibility into the complex processes that are often implemented in software or if some of the tasks are done by humans. Camunda, with its integrations and great tools for reporting, like Optimize, allows us to see where the bottlenecks are in our processes.

It also has companion tools, like Operate, that allow you to visualize the flow of a particular business process. And you can find some really cool statistics about how much of a process is actually done or where it is blocked. Those are some of the really important features that any workflow orchestration or engine should have, and Camunda supports them pretty well.

What other advice do I have?

Take a look at their co-founder and CTO, Bernd Ruecker's, blog. He has a lot of good write-ups about the platform where he explains the technical architecture. He talks about how to do performance benchmarking.

Another good piece of advice is to leverage the Camunda community and forum. Their team is very active on the public forum and they respond to your questions within a day, most of the time. They give very to-the-point answers. That is a really helpful resource. They also have a good set of tutorials on BPMN in what they call the Camunda Academy. It's worth taking a look at that when you are adopting the Zeebe workflow engine, which is their primary workflow engine.

One of the important things that we want to deliver is enabling business, developers, and operations. It's important that our non-technical stakeholders don't have to get into the nitty-gritty details of technical implementations. They can have a bird's-eye view of what's happening in a process, and they can suggest or even extend a process by themselves and then hand it over to us as a requirements document. That's the direction we really want to take. So far, the product team has been very enthusiastic about it. They like it. Camunda uses a language for modeling called BPMN and it doesn't require you to be a coder or an engineer. It's a simple drag-and-drop tool. It's really cool and it helps our stakeholders to be involved in working with workflows.

There is a bit of a learning curve with BPMN. It's an industry standard, not something proprietary to Camunda, but Camunda hosts an online academy where they have tutorials about it. They have videos and free courses on how to use BPMN. That helps out in the onboarding of users.

We have been using it for a little less than a year, so our entire organization is not using it. We are really into building our experience with Camunda by applying it to a few use cases. As we see more use cases in other parts of the organization, what we have built over this past year as templates—as reusable software—can be leveraged so that they don't have to set up everything from scratch on their own.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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Buyer's Guide
Camunda
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Camunda. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,886 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Adeilton Oliveira - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineering Manager at Ocean Batteries
Real User
Comes with a great BPMN diagram tool but improvement is needed in user interface
Pros and Cons
  • "Using the BPMN helps us to have a common shared communication language when discussing processes."
  • "The Camunda Modeler installation poses a challenge, requiring local installation, which doesn't help collaboration like other online tools, for instance."

What is our primary use case?

We have a team that analyzes our existing processes. We discuss the manual processes currently in place within our company. We work on defining and representing these processes through block diagrams. This helps us to automate them. The processes in which we use the solution include customer order processing and quotation requests. 

How has it helped my organization?

Using the BPMN helps us to have a common shared communication language when discussing processes.

What is most valuable?

The tool's most valuable feature is BPMN diagrams and the possibility to automate processes.

What needs improvement?

The Camunda Modeler installation poses a challenge, requiring local installation, which doesn't help collaboration like other online tools, for instance. Camunda needs to improve its user interface.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with the product for 4 months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The tool is very stable since we run it on-premises. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Camunda is scalable. At present, my company has three users. By next week, four more users will be added. Over a couple of weeks, a few more users will be added. 

How are customer service and support?

I have not contacted the technical support yet. 

How was the initial setup?

Camunda's deployment is easy. You need to click some buttons. 

What about the implementation team?

I did the tool's deployment myself. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We use Camunda's community edition, which is free. 

What other advice do I have?

I rate the overall product a seven out of ten. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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VP and Principal Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 20
Fully API-based, enabling easy integration and customization but lacks sufficient built-in dashboards and reports for operations and monitoring
Pros and Cons
  • "The architecture is good because it's a headless workflow. I can create my own frontend, and it's fully API-based."
  • "Without a proper frontend, the business cannot effectively use the platform."

What is our primary use case?

We use the Camunda platform for workflow management.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Camunda Platform for a year. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

What about the implementation team?

It requires maintenance such as patching and other regular tasks.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PedroPeres1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head Of Architecture at Syone
Real User
Top 10
Offers great flexibility and easy integration with the architectural environment
Pros and Cons
  • "Provides an easy way to integrate with the architectural environment."
  • "It lacks some preset features and configurations which would make it more plug-and-play for customers."

What is our primary use case?

We're using Camunda as an SI integrator. We are currently working on becoming partners with Camunda but for now, we're customers.

What is most valuable?

Camunda provides an easy way to integrate with the architectural environment and it offers us flexibility.  

What needs improvement?

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. 

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using this solution for six months. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable. 

How are customer service and support?

Camunda is not a huge company and they haven't yet reached a critical mass of users but the customer service is good and efficient. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

In my previous job, we used Appian and I've also used IBM BPM. When I switched jobs I chose Camunda because I found the initial setup to be easier and it's very user-friendly for the projects I'm working on. In some instances, it might not be suitable such as in a bank where there are over 300 processes. In that case, IBM BPM might be a preferable solution, but I don't see much advantage. 

How was the initial setup?

I was responsible for the deployment; we had one person dealing with the structure and another for the implementation. The initial setup was straightforward and fast. Everyone in the company uses it, we have around 200 employees. 

What was our ROI?

We've seen a return on investment in terms of processes and that was apparent quite quickly.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

There's a community version where you only pay for the support or you can choose the enterprise version depending on your needs. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated Appian for my current job but it's less beneficial if your aim is to have your customers at the front end. We took the middle road when we went with Camunda and the flexibility it offers is a big advantage for us. Appian and IBM don't provide a community version and for the enterprise version, Camunda is an affordable solution. 

What other advice do I have?

If you're looking for flexibility, this is the solution. There's no super bullet that does everything but the flexibility Camuna provides is a good start. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Senior Business Consultant, Managing Partner at sabi consulting
Consultant
Free version best for teaching how to develop process application
Pros and Cons
  • "I think that the positives of Camunda Platform are that our customers can start with the free version. I think it is the most important."
  • "There are a few things that I'm missing. For instance, the user interface creator, which I know other systems have, like Aurea or Lombardi, which are IBM solutions. The interface creator, including the data model creator or some module which would allow the users who are not programmers or business consultants and who are not technically skilled in database and Java programming, to create data models and user interfaces."

What is our primary use case?

I use Camunda Platform for trainings. I teach people how to develop process application. I am helping people understand what Business Process Management Suites are, what they can use it for, and their advantages. I am a trainer and a consultant, but not a reseller.

We use the open-source free version so we do not pay for support.

Because Camunda has various versions, there is the Platform itself, which contains the process server, and there is the Modeler, and it is distributed differently and used for different purposes.

What is most valuable?

I think that the positives of Camunda Platform are that our customers can start with the free version. I think it is the most important.

I do not recommend anybody use the free version for production without paying for a support subscription. I always recommend to use the free version only for testing and learning purposes. And I think for that purpose, it is perfect.

What needs improvement?

There are a few things that I'm missing. For instance, the user interface creator, which I know other systems have, like Aurea or Lombardi, which are IBM solutions. The interface creator, including the data model creator or some module which would allow the users who are not programmers or business consultants and who are not technically skilled in database and Java programming, to create data models and user interfaces. I used to use have this with Savvion and Aurea BPMs.

For how long have I used the solution?

I am using the Camunda Platform for about six years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Because we use it only for learning purposes and the solution is not used by more than four - six people at once, we haven't faced any issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Our purpose is very simple, it is only for trainings for our customers who come to us to learn how to create process application. I do about four trainings a year and they usually have from four to six attendees. So it's about 20 people per year who have access for only two months each.

They receive the access to their personal account for two months. They receive it when they attend the course and they have access two months after the course and then the account is closed and the tenant is deleted.

In terms of how much staff is needed for deployment and maintenance, it is just me and one programmer.

Hard to say if we will increase usage. I am in communication with another company which is developing their own process platform, so maybe I will switch from Camunda to their platform in the future.

How are customer service and support?

We have been using the community very often, but we haven't tried to contact support because we do not pay for the support.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I did use two platforms intensely in the past. I worked with the IBM Business Process Suite. It was later replaced by the Lombardi solution. Then I was working with and implementing Savvion, which was later bought by Banerjee and now is represented by Aurea Business Process Management Suite, which is still my favorite.

I met in-person with Mr. Ketabchi, who is the father of Savvion Business Process Management Platform and I really believe that it is a very well designed solution and very user-friendly for the business consultants and business process analysts. It is my favorite one. After Progress Software divested this solution and created the Aurea company and distributed it from there, Aurea managers decided that our market is too small for their interest, and we had to search for new solutions.

Then we switched to Cordys and we became a partner Cordys for Central Europe, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia Republic and Hungary.

We implemented Cordys to at least one important customer which is East European broadcasting, TV broadcasting corporation. But then Cordys was diverted by Mr. Baan, the founder of Cordys to OpenText, and again OpenText changed their sales policy. So again, our market is too small for them.

We were searching again for another solution. So the next in the queue was with Bonita and Bizagi, but finally I decided for the free version of Camunda because at that time I only needed something for training purposes because six years ago I started to concentrate on trainings for business process analysts and consultants and for trainings in the area of process automation.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is not too complicated.

We started with the analysis. The implementation depends on what you are asking for. We had a few discussions with the developers about what I expect and they developed and implemented it in about two months with about 10 days of work.

I have to say that the developers I cooperated with had previous experience with Camunda.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The price is for support, because as far as I know, Camunda doesn't sell licenses, it provides service support, not the licenses. It is a difference. Because you don't buy a license, but you do buy the support services. I think that for the support services, the price is very fair. And if I would go for the project, I would surely decide for Camunda because the yearly support price is very fair. I don't remember exactly. But at that time, when we did the calculation, it was about €20,000 per year.

What other advice do I have?

My advice to anyone considering Camunda is that I recommend to use the free version for trainings and for testing and for not very crucial process automation for pilot project purposes, but not for production and not for key processes. For key processes and for production, I always recommend to buy the support.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Camunda Platform a 10 for sure.

It's very good. But it depends on what you are expecting.

For other purposes, there might be something else which is preferable. It is not easy to say there is one business process management for all purposes, for all companies. I would recommend Camunda for either small or middle-sized companies.

I would not recommend it for corporate uses because to integrate in this scenario requires much more extensive and intensive technical work for integration with the usual applications, et cetera. Therefore, Bonita or IBM Business Management Suite, for example, already have many thousands of connectors to Salesforce, SAP, ERP Systems, Microsoft systems, et cetera, whereas with Camunda, you are almost in the beginning and you have to develop everything by yourself. So for larger companies, the implementation might be too long and too expensive.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Teguh Surya - PeerSpot reviewer
AVP B2B Business Process Excellence at Hutchison 3 Indonesia
Real User
Serves as a process orchestration platform and is useful in the area of process modeling
Pros and Cons
  • "Camunda is a scalable product."
  • "The product's initial setup phase is difficult for beginners."

What is our primary use case?

I use the solution in my company for process modeling and collaborations with other users.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the area revolving around process modeling. It is possible to take care of the process modeling with BPMN. I think the most beneficial feature of the product is that the tool serves as a process orchestration platform and also helps in the area of process automation.

What needs improvement?

Camunda should be able to automate the processes in any department, like the ones in HR that are related to procurement or any others, which are repeated in the same manner without any significant changes in the process, as it is one area where the product faces certain shortcomings.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Camunda for about three years. I am a customer of Camunda.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is a stable solution. I have not faced any trouble when using the product in my company.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Camunda is a scalable product.

Around 10 to 15 people in my company use the product.

How are customer service and support?

I have never contacted the solution's technical support.

How was the initial setup?

The product's initial setup phase is difficult for beginners.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The product's price depends on the number of processes that need to be automated or where the orchestration part needs to be used. The product is affordable for medium and large enterprises.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

My company chose Camunda since we wanted a tool for process modeling with BPMN so that we could automate some of our processes.

What other advice do I have?

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it, as it is a simple and practical tool with powerful capabilities.

The product helps achieve operational efficiency in our company since it helps with the process modeling area. The product also helps automate and orchestrate processes effectively.

Camunda's user interface's contribution to process modeling and deployment stems from the fact that it is pretty intuitive and simple.

It is easy for someone to learn to use Camunda.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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PeerSpot user
Yogesh Naik - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Software Engineer at Deserve
Real User
A highly stable solution that has an easy process diagram creation and deployment
Pros and Cons
  • "Camunda's process diagram creation and deployment is very easy."
  • "The solution's pricing and scalability could be improved."

What is our primary use case?

We process credit card applications using Camunda.

What is most valuable?

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

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I rate Camunda ten out of ten for stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and support?

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

What about the implementation team?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Camunda Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: April 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Camunda Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.