As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates Camunda 2.5/5 and Flowable 2/5 in Workflow Management. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 5 of the 6 judges pick Camunda and 1 picks Flowable. Camunda scores higher on 6 of 6 criteria (Connectors, API & on-premise reach, Process design, forms & approvals, European sovereignty, plus 3 more). Provenance — Camunda: EU-Made; Flowable: UK / wider Europe. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
Camunda leads the means on process design (6.2 vs 5.2; 4 judges lean Camunda), integrations and connectors (6.3 vs 3.3; 5 lean Camunda), governance and audit (3.7 vs 3.2), sovereignty (3.5 vs 2.5; 5 lean Camunda) and pricing transparency (2.3 vs 1.3). Hosting and portability is the genuine split — 5.8 vs 5.7, 2 judges lean each way, 2 tie — and run reliability sits at 3.3 vs 3.2 with 3 ties. The judges split on totals: the integrator, ops analyst and data protection officer score Camunda 6, 5.3 and 5.7 to Flowable's 4.6, 4.4 and 4.4; the head of IT scores Flowable 4.5 to Camunda's 0; the skeptic scores Camunda 5.6 to Flowable's 0. Camunda's sovereignty attributes read legal entity jurisdiction DE and data residency EU optional, with ownership and subprocessor exposure unknown; Flowable's read unknown for each of the four. That split is the bench's answer.
Choose Camunda if
You need connectors to SAP, Oracle and ServiceNow, where 5 of the judges lean Camunda on integrations and connectors (6.3 vs 3.3).
Your legal team requires the vendor's legal entity to sit in Germany — Camunda's legal entity jurisdiction attribute reads DE.
You need data residency with an EU option, which Camunda's data residency attribute lists as EU optional.
You model in BPMN 2.0 and need token-flow simulation with native escalation and compensation, where 4 judges lean Camunda on process design.
Your auditors ask for automatic audit capture and SOC 2 Type 2, areas 4 judges credit on governance and audit (3.7 vs 3.2).
Choose Flowable if
You need a free engine download to evaluate before any sales conversation, a hosting and portability strength where 2 judges lean Flowable and the highest single score recorded is 8.
Your team builds cases in CMMN and DMN alongside BPMN, which Flowable documents with dynamic routing and escalation and 1 judge credits on process design.
You want engine definitions the vendor calls portable by design with no vendor lock-in, another hosting and portability lean (2 judges for Flowable).
Your architecture relies on a catalogue of thirty connectors across six categories, which 1 judge credits on integrations and connectors.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Integration Engineer
Wires the ERP to the shop, the shop to DATEV and the CRM to everything else. Wants connectors documented by action rather than counted in logos, a generic HTTP step for the rest, an on-premise agent that reaches the SQL server without a hole in the firewall, and a failed run replayable from the step that failed.
Camunda
This judge's pick
Flowable
Criterion by criterion
Process design, forms & approvals
Camunda
This is a BPMN shop: ISO/IEC 19510 notation with XOR, AND, OR and event-based gateways, native user tasks, call activities and event subprocesses, escalation and compensation as first-class patterns, a Tasklist component for participants, a form builder, FEEL validation and token-flow simulation before deployment — approvals and escalation paths are built into the process itself. What I could not find: public information on substitutes, four-eyes rules, or what happens to instances already in flight when a new process version is deployed, which is the question a business owner will ask me first.
Flowable
The homepage documents an engine built on BPMN, CMMN and DMN — standards the vendor says it has run for 15+ years — with case management offering dynamic routing and escalation and agents kept "with people in the loop where it matters". That is a documented notation family rather than a flowchart toy; I found no public information on forms with validation, approval steps assigned to roles with substitutes, deadline handling, or how a new process version treats instances already running.
Connectors, API & on-premise reach
Camunda
Connectors are documented by name and category — SAP, Oracle, Workday, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, ServiceNow — plus protocol templates for REST, GraphQL, SOAP, gRPC, AMQP and Kafka, real-time inbound webhook triggers, and an open-source Connector SDK for any private API; the connector runtime can run in the customer's self-managed cluster, which is exactly the self-hosted runner I want for reaching internal systems. Marketplace ownership is stated for the community and partner-built portion. I found no public information on DATEV connectors, a dedicated database step, or connector changelogs and rate limits.
Flowable
The catalogue lists 30 connectors across six categories, with named entries — Salesforce, SharePoint, ABBYY, GenAI, Apache Camel via the event registry, and an RPA framework — each marked free or paid. The blurbs describe purpose rather than triggers and actions per connector, and I found no public information on a generic HTTP or webhook step, an API to start or query workflows, custom connectors, or connectors to ERP and accounting systems common in DACH such as SAP or DATEV.
Execution, error handling & monitoring
Camunda
Every exception is captured automatically with real-time runtime visibility in Operate, escalation and compensation are native process patterns, and Optimize covers process-chain monitoring — so an error path and an execution view exist. But for the 3 a.m. question I found no public information on configurable retries with back-off, replaying a failed run from the failing step, failure alerting, execution history retention, or a public status page.
Flowable
Traceability is claimed in strong terms — "Every decision, step, and override logged for full audit and replay" and an observability pitch that you can answer any regulator with a complete record — and case management is documented with escalation. I found no public information on retry behaviour, replay of a failed run from the failing step, failure alerts by email or chat, runtime or rate limits, or a public status page.
Governance, credentials & audit trail
Camunda
The audit trail is born from the process model — every step of every execution recorded automatically, agent decisions included, one runtime and one trail — and a SOC 2 Type 2 audit covering Security and Availability, conducted by Tevora, is published, with an Identity component listed among the platform parts. I found no public information on role-based permissions, SSO, where connector credentials are stored, or separate development, test and production environments with a publishing approval.
Flowable
The audit trail is documented at regulatory grade — every decision traceable, every action logged — and agent behaviour can be constrained with runtime policy enforcement setting "what every agent can and cannot do". I found no public information on user roles and permissions, SSO, where connection credentials are stored, separate environments with a publishing approval, export of the audit trail, or certifications such as ISO 27001 or SOC 2.
Hosting options & portability
Camunda
Production can run self-managed on your own infrastructure, free for non-production, and the engine's licences are published in unusual detail — Zeebe Community License 1.1 for broker and gateway, Apache License 2.0 for clients and the Exporter API, proprietary licences available — alongside EU hosting for Console and Modeler and BPMN 2.0 XML export that other tools can read. I found no public information on documented system requirements for self-hosting, versioning of definitions in Git, or a migration path between cloud and self-managed in both directions.
Flowable
The engine is downloadable free of charge and built on BPMN, CMMN and DMN — "you can inspect, extend, and own. Portable by design, no vendor lock-in" — with an Enterprise Cloud offering alongside. I found no public information on the engine licence by name, system requirements for self-hosting, versioning of definitions in Git, named cloud regions, or a documented migration path between cloud and self-hosted.
European sovereignty
Camunda
The contracting entity is Camunda Services GmbH at Zossener Strasse in Berlin (HRB 113230 B), with an external data protection officer for German data subjects, and the SaaS Console and Modeler are hosted in the EU with clusters creatable in other regions per the documentation; the privacy policy also states that personal data is processed in countries outside the EEA, including the USA, under standard contractual clauses. I found no public information on a data processing agreement, where execution logs with their payloads are stored, or the platform's subprocessor locations — the AI connector providers behind any AI steps included.
Flowable
Flowable AG in Zurich is the controller, Flowable Deutschland GmbH in Stuttgart acts as the Article 27 EU representative, and group entities exist in Germany and Poland alongside the USA and Canada; the privacy notice is GDPR-based, acknowledges third-country transfers with SCC and BCR safeguards, and names Google Ireland and Salesforce Pardot as subprocessors. Those subprocessors are website analytics tooling; I found no public information on where workflows and their execution logs run, on platform subprocessors including any AI model providers, or on a data processing agreement covering execution payloads.
Pricing transparency
Camunda
The free parts are public and precise: modeling free forever for up to five users, Self-Managed free for local development and non-production with no license required, a 30-day trial that is never billed, and a free Non-Commercial License for qualifying initiatives — but every paid tier, Enterprise SaaS and Enterprise Self-Managed alike, is a quote via sales. We found no public information on the billing unit, allowances, or any monetary figure, so no buyer can compute a monthly cost from these pages.
Flowable
The public pages show a free trial and a free download of the engine, and the connector catalogue flags which connectors are free and which are paid. I found no public information on tier prices, the billing unit and what counts as one, allowances per tier, overages, or the price of the paid connectors and add-ons — no monthly cost is computable from this.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
Camunda
Flowable
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Ownership
Not determined
Not determined
Data residency
Not determined
Not determined
Subprocessors
Not determined
Not determined
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates Camunda higher: 2.5/5 against 2/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 5 of the 6 judges pick Camunda and 1 picks Flowable. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is Camunda or Flowable European?
Camunda is European (EU-Made). Flowable is European (UK / wider Europe). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.
Do Camunda and Flowable have a free plan?
As of 28 Oct 2026, Camunda’s own pages state a free plan; Flowable’s pages as captured do not. Each product page links the pricing page it was read from.