Item: Camunda
Rating: 9
Author: Scott Francis

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We leverage Camunda BPM as a process engine to build process-aware solutions for our clients. Typically this is to replace traditional monolithic applications that have not kept up with changes in the business and market, with applications that are designed around the workflows of the team members, and the processes that the business needs to compete. These solutions range from reservation systems, to construction management, to marketing automation plans, but that just scratches the surface.

Pros and Cons

Embedding a first-class process capability in your application.
Providing a standards-based modeling capability, backed by a standards-native engine.
Great support for developers and a developer community.
Great set of comprehensive APIs across a number of different design points
All of the code is available in GitHub as a great open source project with Apache licenses.
Comprehensive documentation of code and APIs and usage.
Innovative spin-offs like Zeebe.
Support for micro-services orchestration.
Support for both embedded and stand alone usage scenarios.
The company is innovative and focused on this space.

Camunda expects that you will develop your own user interfaces. This is either a benefit or a barrier depending on your perspective on packaged UI.
As an open source vendor, Camunda is under-covered in analyst reports.

Return on Investment

We've built a good business around developing and deploying Camunda for our clients over the last 7 years.
Our clients are finding it a cost-effective way to try before they buy.
There's an over-reliance on big offshore outsourcing shops, which hurts ROI and success rates.

Alternatives Considered

They're just different products with different target audiences. In different ways, IBM and Pega have offerings that are meant to serve processes in a platform-centric approach to their customers. An emphasis on unified development environments, including forms building, rules, processes, integrations, etc. is all baked in. There's a real emphasis on enabling citizen developers or subject matter experts, not just developers (at the cost of, potentially a less complete experience for developers). Alfresco Activiti is more targeted as an add on for those who use Alfresco's content management. Camunda is a great fit for embedded use cases or more developer-centric or developer-friendly initiatives. Camunda doesn't ship with all the bells and whistles because those things are available already in Java and other programming languages and platforms. e.g. you can build your best-of-breed solution. So, we use almost every product in this space, but we understand when to use each one.

Support Rating

Camunda provides pretty standard product support offerings.

Key Insights

Do you think Camunda delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Camunda's feature set?

Yes

Did Camunda live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Camunda go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Camunda again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

For clients with a need for mission-critical business applications, Camunda brings great process tech to those applications. For clients with good development capabilities, Camunda enables those developers to design around processes, instead of designing everything as a CRUD application that ignores processes. It's a great product for process purists and development purists, but it has appeal beyond these core groups. Camunda also provides good tools for having visibility into how the product works, which is also very valuable.

A great product to support developer's leveraging processes in their critical enterprise applications

Overall Satisfaction with camunda BPM