Camunda

We use Camunda for network orchestration, which is a combination of BPMN and DMN that we use in our implementation.

The best features of Camunda are the design time and run time aspects, as you can visualize the whole process and then integrate your network SMEs or allow business design and developers to collaborate on the workflow. This is the best aspect because everything is visual and leaves little room for error in terms of how requirements are being interpreted.

Camunda has room for improvement, and I believe some of this feedback has already been taken up in Camunda 8. We are currently running a Camunda 7 installation, and the external task management has room for improvement. With Camunda 8 moving to gRPC calls, I think that will help with the issues we have seen. For our implementation, the only issue we have encountered is that when it comes to scaling with external tasks, it struggles on Camunda 7.

I have been working with Camunda for almost five and a half to six years.

The stability of Camunda I would rate about a nine out of ten, as it is fairly stable. We have not had any issues; the only issues we have seen are around our own database or RDBMS layer, which is not really related to Camunda directly.

I would rate the technical support an eight.

It is easy to deploy Camunda 7. Camunda 8 is a bit more challenging, but the support we receive as part of the enterprise license helps us work around the problems we are facing. Camunda 7 is definitely straightforward, which is what we are currently running, and we are making progress with Camunda 8. It is obviously a different model of installation and how the services have been split, but with support, I think it is pretty straightforward.

The return on investment I see is probably somewhere around fifteen to twenty.

When we compare Camunda with other solutions such as Pega and Bizagi, we evaluated alternatives five to six years ago. Within our organization, there were other workflow engines in use. The benefit of Camunda for us at that point was that we started with the community edition, and there was an Open Network Orchestration Platform, which was an open source project for doing network orchestration that had a Camunda engine embedded as part of their framework. This is how we became aware of Camunda, and because of the ONAP aspect, we could literally plug and play a lot of code from the ONAP foundation into what we had to implement. We started with open source and then moved to the enterprise license. It is easy to start up, conduct your POCs, and get it into production, which is a differentiator for us against the other BPMN engines we have seen.

Our impressions of Camunda for orchestrating complex end-to-end business processes indicate that while my use case is not complex, I know other parts of our organization use it for more complex processes, so it is definitely capable of orchestrating complex processes.

We do not use the AI aspects of Camunda because we have our own AI framework.

The number of users who use Camunda directly is less than ten because we do not expose the cockpit or any of the Camunda apps directly to the end user. We have our own portal or UI from which the journeys are driven, so approximately ten users use it.

I would recommend Camunda. The approach we took was to pick the simplest use case, implement it, and learn while implementing, then think about more complex scenarios. On the enterprise support side, we used it more to review our models. Our development team writes the Java delegates and the actual code behind it, but the main benefits we see are reviewing the BPMNs and the use of external tasks versus other best practices. That is what I would definitely recommend people leverage if they are deciding to go ahead with Camunda as their workflow engine.

Camunda handles long running processes that run for days, weeks, or months. We have processes that run for months, and ultimately it depends on your implementation, but it is more than capable of handling long running processes and we do not see any issues.

I would rate this review a nine out of ten.

Camunda is focused on workflow automation and decision automation. We are using this in networks and for change management, assurance automation, and for cybersecurity automation.

In my opinion, the best features of Camunda are found in Cawemo, where we are forced to describe and specify what we are doing, enabling us to automate our processes. This is the most important thing, as we need to document what the business requires and make it zero touch. It is the magic.

Regarding orchestrating complex end-to-end business processes, we use Camunda especially for complex cases but also for simple ones. If we have sub-processes, we leverage Camunda to manage the complexity, including DMN decisions.

The coexistence that Camunda allows is important because we are connected, using it as an orchestrator for domain controllers and various automation platforms, both legacy and new, ensuring we are independent and can operate across domains.

In terms of areas for improvement, we are struggling with organizing the BPMN workflows. It would be great to have a structure, repository, or library to manage the hundreds or thousands of BPMNs, as finding the right BPMN in Cawemo or linking it to a business process information portal is currently difficult.

I have been working with Camunda for seven years. We started back in 2019.

We have encountered issues with Optimize, as its performance in version 7 is not what we expect, causing some trouble along the way.

For stability, most use cases depend on the workflow engine with Cockpit, which is stable about 98% of the time, and I would rate stability a nine.

I would rate the technical support for Camunda an eight.

Overall, deploying Camunda is not complex. Our admins know how to manage version 7, and while they are learning about version 8, I think they have only needed to make some optimizations and that in general, deployment is not a big deal.

At the moment, we are using Camunda version 7 and are waiting for version 8. In the meantime, we are focusing on the agents part, aiming to use agents as we use scripts or service tasks and APIs, allowing us to implement agents for very complex decisions using a digital twin for effective communication with humans.

As for the return on investment, we work cross-functionally within different silos and processes, with outcomes varying widely. It can range from a one-time job not yielding good business cases to cases we repeat thousands of times, which generates significant value.

Regarding pricing, I believe it is relative to the business value. While it might be too expensive for smaller business use cases, if we can automate and have high-value cases, then Camunda's pricing makes sense, although it is not a universal solution, as it depends on the business value.

When comparing Camunda with other solutions such as Appian, Pega, and Bizagi, we conducted an assessment and have different solutions across various businesses and countries. For us, Camunda is the best choice as it fits more generically, connecting business and technical teams effectively.

I expect that a few hundred users are using the solution currently, and we aim for that number to increase. I would recommend Camunda to other users because we consistently suggest it to different businesses within our organization and across various countries, promoting the exchange of solutions. I would rate this review an eight overall.