Camunda

About Camunda

Camunda is a BPMN-based process orchestration platform that lets engineering and process teams design, execute, and monitor long-running business workflows. The product is built and operated by Camunda Services GmbH, founded in Berlin in 2008 by Bernd Rücker and Jakob Freund, originally as a BPM consultancy and later as an open-source product company. The current product line, Camunda 8, is based on the Zeebe distributed workflow engine; the previous-generation Camunda Platform 7 remains in maintenance for existing customers but is not the company's active investment focus.

The platform centres on BPMN 2.0 process models executed by a stateful, event-sourced engine. Process definitions are visual diagrams that compile to runnable workflows; tasks within a process can be service tasks (calling external systems through Camunda Connectors or custom workers), user tasks (rendered through Camunda Tasklist or embedded into customer applications), business-rule tasks (DMN decision tables), and message- or signal-driven events. The execution model is durable: every step is persisted to an append-only event log, and workers can fail and resume without losing in-flight processes.

Camunda 8 is offered as Camunda SaaS, quote-only after a 30-day free trial following the withdrawal of the published Starter and Professional plans, and as Camunda 8 Self-Managed for customers running their own Kubernetes-based deployment. Camunda 8 Self-Managed is free for development and small production loads under the Camunda 8 Self-Managed Free Edition; production deployments at scale require an Enterprise contract. Camunda 7 remains available under the Apache 2.0 license for self-hosted use, with Camunda Platform 7 Enterprise providing commercial support.

Production customers named publicly by Camunda include Goldman Sachs, Allianz, Atlassian, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The company closed a $98M Series B in March 2022 at a stated $1B+ valuation led by Insight Partners and has reported triple-digit ARR growth across 2022-2024 driven by enterprise migrations from legacy BPM suites (Pega, IBM BPM, OpenText). Camunda differs from code-first orchestrators (Temporal, Apache Airflow, Prefect) in centring on the BPMN visual standard rather than language-native workflow code, and differs from no-code automation platforms (Zapier, Make) in targeting engineering teams with stateful, long-running, enterprise-grade processes.

Diagram source (Mermaid)

flowchart LR
  A[Start Event] --> B{Decision DMN}
  B -- Approve --> C[Service Task: Charge Card]
  B -- Reject --> D[User Task: Manual Review]
  C --> E[Service Task: Provision Account]
  D --> E
  E --> F[Message Event: Notify Customer]
  F --> G[End Event]

Editor's Note: Across 5 ShadowGen Camunda engagements in 2024-26, the Camunda 7 to Camunda 8 migration story is real and not trivial; a non-trivial Camunda 7 estate runs 12-20 engineering weeks to migrate with care, primarily because the Camunda 7 incident-and-history APIs map imperfectly to Camunda 8's Operate and Tasklist surfaces. For greenfield BPMN work in 2026 we recommend Camunda 8 Cloud unless customer regulation forces self-hosting; the operational burden of running Zeebe at scale is non-trivial. — Rafal Fila, ShadowGen