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 Operations Analyst
Is asked every Monday why invoices took eleven days. Wants a searchable execution history, cycle times per step, alerts that reach a channel rather than an unread mailbox, runtime and throughput limits published before the month-end run hits them — and to know what a loop over 5,000 rows costs in tasks.
Camunda
This judge's pick
Flowable
Criterion by criterion
Process design, forms & approvals
Camunda
BPMN 2.0 modelling is the product's core, with exclusive, parallel, inclusive and event-based gateways, native compensation and escalation, call activities and ad-hoc sub-processes, a form builder, token-flow simulation before deployment, and a Tasklist component for participants. Approvals, policies and escalation paths are documented as built into the process itself. We found no public information on what happens to instances already running when a new process version is published, on substitutes, or on four-eyes approvals.
Flowable
The home page commits to BPMN, CMMN and DMN — standards the vendor says it has run for fifteen-plus years — plus case management with dynamic routing, escalation and people kept in the loop, and the connectors page speaks of a task context for participants. That is a real notation behind the process, not a flowchart toy. Forms, role-assigned approvals, substitutes, deadline handling and what happens to instances already running when a new version ships are not shown on the captured pages.
Connectors, API & on-premise reach
Camunda
Named connectors to SAP, Oracle, Workday, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, ServiceNow and the major clouds, SOAP among the supported protocols, inbound webhook triggers, and an open-source Connector SDK explicitly for private APIs and internal systems that can run in a self-managed cluster. Maintenance ownership is stated for the marketplace's community and partner connectors. We found no public information on rate limits per connector, a deprecation policy, connector changelogs, or DATEV.
Flowable
The connectors page lists a catalogue of thirty connectors across six categories, naming Salesforce, SharePoint, ABBYY, Apache Camel and an RPA framework, each marked free or paid. A generic HTTP or webhook step, a documented API to start or query workflows, and ERP or accounting connectors common in DACH are not shown on the captured pages.
Execution, error handling & monitoring
Camunda
Operate is documented showing process instances with a detail panel, every execution and exception is claimed captured automatically, and escalation and compensation patterns are native, which gives an error path and a viewable history. That is where the captured pages stop: we found no public information on automatic retries or replay from the failing step, failure alerts reaching email or chat, published runtime or throughput limits, execution-history retention, or a public status page.
Flowable
The vendor claims every decision, step and override is logged for full audit and replay and advertises a billion events per day — an execution history with replay is exactly what I want after a 3 a.m. failure. Retries with back-off, failure alerts reaching a chat channel, step-level input and output, and published runtime or throughput limits are not shown on the captured pages.
Governance, credentials & audit trail
Camunda
The audit side is strong: every step, every agent decision and every exception recorded automatically, the process model itself described as the audit trail, and a published SOC 2 Type 2 audit covering security and availability. We found no public information on role-based permissions, single sign-on, where connector credentials are stored, separate environments with a publishing approval, redaction, or export of the audit trail; the privacy policy states it does not cover Service Data uploaded to the products.
Flowable
Runtime policy enforcement — set what every agent can and cannot do — plus a complete record of decisions, steps and overrides that a regulator can be answered with is a genuine audit-trail claim, and the privacy notice states 30-day server-log retention and 3–12 months for operational data. User roles, single sign-on, where connection credentials are stored, separate environments and an exportable change history are not shown on the captured pages.
Hosting options & portability
Camunda
A production self-managed edition on the customer's own infrastructure, the Zeebe Community License 1.1 published with the vendor describing the engine as source available and proprietary licences offered, and BPMN 2.0 XML export with portability across vendors and runtimes claimed, supported by over a hundred tools. We found no public information on versioning definitions in Git, documented system requirements for self-hosting, or a documented migration path between cloud and self-hosted.
Flowable
A free engine download and BPMN, CMMN and DMN "you can inspect, extend, and own. Portable by design, no vendor lock-in" are the right words on portability, with an Enterprise Cloud offering alongside. System requirements for self-hosting, the engine's licence, definition versioning and a documented migration path between cloud and self-hosted are not shown on the captured pages.
European sovereignty
Camunda
Camunda Services GmbH in Berlin is the operating and contracting entity, an external German data protection officer is named, and the SaaS Console and Modeler are stated as hosted in the EU with clusters creatable in other regions. The privacy policy confirms processing outside the EEA including the USA under standard contractual clauses and names marketing, billing and event tools as third-party providers. We found no public information on a data processing agreement or a subprocessor list with locations covering the platform chain and any AI model providers.
Flowable
Flowable AG of Zurich is the named controller, with Flowable Deutschland GmbH in Stuttgart registered as the EU group representative under Article 27 GDPR, and the privacy notice works with the GDPR, standard contractual clauses and binding corporate rules. The captured pages do not show where workflows and their execution logs are stored, and the only named subprocessors are web analytics and marketing tools. A data processing agreement covering execution payloads is not shown either.
Pricing transparency
Camunda
The free modelling tier for up to five users, the free non-production self-managed tier and the 30-day trial that is never billed are public and clear. Every paid tier — Enterprise SaaS and Enterprise Self-Managed alike — is a quote via sales; we found no public price, no billing unit, no allowance per tier and no overage pricing, so the monthly cost of a given number of runs is not computable from public pages.
Flowable
The only public pricing signals are a free trial, a free engine download, and free-versus-paid flags on individual connectors such as Salesforce and ABBYY. No tier price, billing unit, allowance or overage figure is given on the captured pages, so I cannot price a month-end run from public information.
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.