What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Camunda Platform?

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

The most attractive feature of the product is that it is open source.

Compared to some of the major players in the market, like IBM, Camunda is a cheaply priced product, making it one of its major USPs.

While the license isn't budget-friendly, careful consideration and calculated planning for a significant number of licenses can make it more cost-effective. The pricing structure hinges on three crucial parameters: process instances, how frequently processes are initiated, and the number of users. These latter two factors exert a considerable influence on the overall cost. However, for those looking to explore it, trying the cloud version is a viable option. The cloud variant starts at $200 per month. I would rate it six out of ten.

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.

Camunda Platform is an open-source product.

Compared to other software, Camunda Platform is quite cost-effective.

There were some features that were only available in the paid version, not in the community version we used. For instance, we implemented an interface ourselves to view the history of our process instances because the historical data functionality was not accessible. It is available, but it is part of the enterprise edition, which requires a paid license. We didn't have the option to purchase licenses as we migrated to open-source tools. So we had to customize our interfaces and tools using the Camunda API to replace the functionality found in the enterprise edition. That's how we managed it.

In Africa, the cost of deployment is an important factor to consider since it adds to the overall cost. This might be the only drawback to using it. Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis. It's an expensive solution.

The price is competitive with products like Bonitasoft and RHPAM (Red Hat Process Automation Manager). We have two versions of Camunda. The first version was open source, without support, but then we got a supported version. Other products, like Pega or IBM or Oracle, are very expensive.

We are using the paid edition because there is no separate support and service license yet. We are yet to find a suitable licensing model for Camunda because we only use the engine, and we have implemented our solution around Camunda Cloud. So, we are mainly interested in the support and service, and that's what we mainly use in the paid edition. It was a fairly new solution at the time, and we wanted to support the open-source community with that. So, we wanted to ensure that this product has some sort of backing so that it can continue. To someone who has the free edition of Camunda and is considering upgrading to the paid license, I would say that it depends on the use case and the criticality of their system. In our case, if we have production issues, we want to post them quite fast and we want to have quite fast feedback cycles. One of the reasons why we have taken the license is to ensure that we have a proper response in a meaningful timeframe. If that's not a requirement, probably the open-source license makes sense. It also depends on the appetite for having new features on the platform.

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.

We're using the free version. We used the Enterprise version for some time. If I compare free versus what we paid at that time, the Enterprise version costs a lot. For the additional functionality that we got with the Enterprise version, it was too costly. The feature that appealed to us in the Enterprise version was the migration plan. If you have a business process, for example, with an invoice, and you deploy a new version with a new invoice, for certain times, you will have two business processes running, but we wanted to have only one process instance running at a time. So, we have to migrate the old process instance to the new process definition. They provide the APIs for doing that, but it can be hard. If you are at the node in the old process, you need to tell the engine that you want to migrate it to another node in the new process definition. Doing that manually can be hard. If your business process doesn't change that much, it can be okay, but in the case where it changes a lot, the Camunda Enterprise version provides a user interface to help map the migration between the nodes. We have long-running processes. For example, we could have invoices that are stuck in this process for 10 or 20 days. So, to migrate, we can't wait for the invoice to be processed because it is taking too much time. So, the tool helped us to do this migration planning, and that was one of its greatest features. Another appealing feature was that if something happened in your process and you want to debug to see what is going on, the Enterprise version provides a user interface to easily follow the progression of your process. For each node, you can see what changed at what time. That was very helpful when we had a problem with our process. These were the two features that helped us a lot because, at some point, we had some problems using Camunda. Having the Camunda Enterprise version helped us to fix those problems and helped us migrate, but when you have something more stable, as we have right now, those features are less important. We are no longer using the Enterprise version. In terms of TCO, because it is an open-source solution, it was limited to the time that we spent integrating it. It took us a full year to integrate it into our system. It took a lot of time, which cost us a lot. The cost is also related to the infrastructure. For example, our database is getting bigger every day, but it is not much. Overall, it didn't have a big impact on our functional budget.

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.

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

Its price is decent. Everything is included in the license. The Community version is also good to start with. We are using the Community version.

The price of the solution is reasonable.

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.

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

Camunda has a free service as well as a commercial service. We are using the free service. In the future, we may pay for maintenance services. We haven't had to do any maintenance yet, but we plan to buy some package or product in order to handle the maintenance.

We have an annual subscription to this solution.

We're using the open-source version for now.

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

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

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 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.

There is an open-source version available, that in its core features (workflow and decision engine, modeler) is exactly the same as in the enterprise version. My advice is to think about what is most important to your business case and choose the right version. You can always migrate to Enterprise edition.

When compared with the proprietary products, the pricing costs are much less, even though it is an enterprise edition. It's very minimal. My customers and I are very happy with the pricing cost and the features. Pricing depends on the number of tasks we use.

I think Camunda BPM can improve their licensing costs. It isn't easy to find clients with Camunda BPM licenses mainly because it's quite expensive. I think the license for an on-premise system is about $50,000, and that's expensive when you have only 100 users.

We use the open-source version, which can be used at no cost.

Licensing costs are anywhere from $80,000 to $100,000 USD per year.

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

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

It's free, open-source. I use the open-source free version.

We are using the open-source version of this solution.