Camunda 7 in production. Decision still open.
Ten Questions, Asked in a Fixed Order, Narrow Five Camunda 7 Paths to One.
They are called the Decision Spine — chapter 5.7 of a 79-page handbook. The first is the one question the whole market has a reason to blur: which edition are you on?
Start with the part that is not true.
Your Camunda 7 processes are not going to stop running. Community Edition is Apache 2.0 — legal in production forever, and nothing in it switches off.
What stopped was the patching. Final release 7.24.0 in October 2025, repository archived, no further releases of any kind, including security ones. On 10 April 2026 Camunda published Security Notice 157: an expression injection an authenticated user can turn into remote code execution. The fix, 7.24.7, is Enterprise-only. Community Edition 7.24.0 can never receive it.
Enterprise Edition is not finished at all, and this is the half almost every answer leaves out. Contracted security patching to 13 April 2030, extended support to April 2032, certified against Java 25, Spring Boot 4 and PostgreSQL 18. If you hold Enterprise, this is a planned programme, not an emergency.
That asymmetry is the single most important fact in the decision. Advice that does not begin by asking which edition you hold is not advice.
Underneath it sits what actually forces the decision. Not obsolescence. Licensing. Camunda 8 Self-Managed has required a paid licence for all production use since version 8.6, October 2024. No free tier, including the bare engine. So for a Community Edition estate, “just move to Camunda 8” introduces a licence line that was previously zero.
Which leaves one honest question nobody sells you: would you rather take on a licence cost you did not have, or maintenance responsibility you did not have?
Rather discuss this than read it?Finding this out is not expensive. Reassembling it is.
Camunda’s dates sit across its documentation, release notes, security notices and licence terms. The forks’ positions sit in repository metadata. Someone on your side pulls that together — usually several at once, because the question belongs to nobody yet.
Their hours, times their loaded cost, times how many. Then the larger number: months of evaluation, times people per meeting.
Those are your numbers. We have not guessed them.
Ten questions, asked in a fixed order. Each one closes options before the next is asked.
That is the Decision Spine. It opens with the edition, because everything downstream changes on that answer. Your minor version comes next, because on 7.23 a date is already fixed. Then the questions about your estate: CMMN in production, who actually reads your BPMN, whether your correctness depends on shared transactions with the engine, how many embedded forms carry logic.
By question ten, five credible paths have become one — and, just as usefully, you can say which four you ruled out and why.
What makes it different is how it is built, not how loudly it is claimed. Every vendor selling a destination has a mechanism for getting there. The Decision Spine does not go anywhere. It is a sequence of questions about your estate, and three of them can eliminate the destination of whoever is asking.
Charis’s own line in the handbook: “If you take one page from this handbook into a meeting, take this.”
79 pages, so that you can carry one page into the steering meeting.
The Camunda PATH — Platform Alternatives & Transition Handbook, 2026 edition. What is true about Camunda 7 today, in a dated timeline. The five credible paths: the case for, the case against, and who should not choose each. The thirteen candidates we ruled out, with reasons. The twenty Camunda 7 features with no Camunda 8 equivalent. The four forks side by side, from repository metadata rather than vendor pages. And the questions to put to each vendor before you sign.
Every material fact is traceable to a primary source, listed at the back.
Ten minutes gets you the executive summary and chapter 5 — the situation, the five options, the recommendation logic.
We sell Camunda 7 migrations. Read the handbook knowing that, and check it.
We have been working on BPMN engines for multiple years. We implement Camunda 8 and CIB seven. We work with Operaton and Flowable. And we regularly advise clients to stay on Camunda 7 Enterprise instead. That range is why we can write the comparison at all — a consultancy with one destination has to argue it is right for everyone.
What it costs us is in the document. Chapter 4 criticises products we make money implementing, and the recommendation that fits most organisations — stabilise on 7.24 — earns us nothing.
We have migrated multiple, different applications off Camunda 7. Our biggest case study is Aargauische Kantonalbank.
If you want a decision you have already made rubber-stamped, this is the wrong document.
The One-Click Exit: nothing reaches you until you confirm. After that, one click ends it.
- Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe. It works immediately and needs no reason.
- Your address goes to Brevo, on EU hosting, and nowhere else. Not sold, not rented, not shared.
- Double opt-in: nothing reaches you before your confirmation click. Never click, never hear from us.
- A stated cadence: the handbook immediately, then one email a week.
Nothing to claim, nobody to chase. Prefer erasure to unsubscribing? Say so and we delete the record.
info@peakcodeconsulting.ch · Peak Code Consulting GmbH, Schönenwerderstrasse 72, 5000 Aarau
Five paths, thirteen candidates ruled out, ten questions in a fixed order. Put in your work email, click the link in the confirmation, and the handbook is in your inbox. One click ends it whenever you want.
If you are on 7.23, one date is already fixed: 13 October 2026.
That is when 7.23 leaves maintenance. It forces an upgrade to 7.24 LTS, not a migration, and it applies to both editions — an Enterprise subscription does not extend an old minor. On 7.24 you have until 13 April 2030.
That forced upgrade is the moment to decide where you go next.
Camunda 7 Community Edition is finished. Enterprise runs to 2030. Neither changes the fact that the decision is in front of you.
The Camunda PATH is a 79-page handbook: five credible paths, thirteen candidates ruled out with reasons, the full gap between Camunda 7 and 8, the four forks from primary sources — and ten questions in a fixed order that turn all of it into one.
It costs a work email address and a confirmation click. Then one email a week; one click ends it.
Put in your address and click the link in the confirmation. The handbook follows immediately.
The handbook covers the general case. Your estate is a specific one.
Fill in the form and we contact you within 48 hours and book a 30-minute call. In those 30 minutes we work through our questionnaire with you. By the end of that call your path is named — Camunda 8, a fork, or staying where you are. Not “we’ll come back to you”.
No charge, and no proposal you did not ask for.
How we got to these five, what we threw out, and the ten questions in full. Read moreRead less
What follows is the working.
The part above tells you what we found. This part says how — which candidates we assessed and discarded, the ten questions in full, the layers the handbook is read in, what the nine sections contain, who it is not for, and what we actually get asked.
It is longer than the page above it. Anyone who scrolled this far wants the work, not the summary.
The reason this decision is still open is not you.
Do nothing and let it drift. The most common version, and the most expensive. The decision does not go away and the option set keeps growing — four forks appeared in eighteen months. What is researched today is half open again in a year.
Keep assembling it from published vendor material. Chapter 4 of the handbook describes that material directly: the fork question carries the highest ratio of confident assertion to actual research in published commentary. That is why section 4.8 exists — “How to read the advice you will receive”.
Download a competing gated asset. There are three serious ones: Camunda’s own Migration Lab, Holisticon’s Migration Assessment, and ONLU’s “In 5 Schritten zum Camunda-7-Zukunftsentscheid”. All three are committed to a destination. Camunda’s cannot recommend anything but Camunda 8. Holisticon’s assesses a migration it presumes. ONLU’s leans toward CIB seven. None of them is structurally able to write the comparison this handbook writes — and you can check that in one click.
Ask the incumbent integrator or Camunda partner. Whoever built your estate, and whoever sells the platform, is structurally unable to recommend away from it. Of roughly sixteen firms advertising Camunda 7 migration across German-speaking Europe, exactly one sells destination-neutrality explicitly, and it is not in Switzerland.
None of the four is a mistake. They are four reasonable responses to a market in which everyone involved sells a destination.
Ten questions. This order. From chapter 5.7.
- Which edition are you on? Enterprise means until 2030 and a planned programme. Community means unpatched since October 2025 with a documented remote-code-execution vulnerability — security remediation first, strategy second. Check free-licence eligibility before anything else.
- Which version are you on? On 7.23 the upgrade to 7.24 is mandatory before 13 October 2026. On 7.22 or earlier you are already unsupported. On WebSphere Liberty there is no certified Camunda 7 path, and this is a forced migration.
- Do you have all three prices in writing? The Camunda 8 quote at real scale, the Camunda 7 Enterprise renewal through 2030–2032, and a fork support quote. Without all three, every later judgement is guesswork.
- Do you have CMMN in production? If yes, Camunda 8 is a redesign rather than a migration. Flowable and the forks become the realistic destinations.
- Do non-developers read your BPMN? If genuinely nobody does, and there is no human-task workflow, durable execution is on the table. If anybody does, it is not.
- Does your correctness depend on shared transactions with the engine? If pervasively, Camunda 8 is an application redesign. A fork preserves this; nothing else does.
- How many embedded forms do you have, and do they contain logic? This single count frequently determines whether the project is the size you think it is.
- Can your change-control process absorb an engine upgrade every six months, indefinitely? If not, that decides which fork is viable.
- Do you need a contractable counterparty with indemnity and a service level? If that is non-negotiable, it rules options in and out on its own.
- Do you have Kubernetes capability, or genuine appetite to build it? If not, Camunda 8 means SaaS — or a path off the well-trodden route, priced accordingly.
By question ten, five paths have become one, and the other four are named.
Nobody reads 79 pages end to end. It is not built that way.
- Right now: an email address. No form, no call to book, no qualification questions.
- About a minute later: a confirmation email, one click. Nothing reaches you before that.
- Immediately after: the handbook, with the download link. That link exists only in the email.
- Ten minutes in: executive summary and chapter 5 — the situation, the five options, the recommendation logic.
- An hour in: add chapters 1 and 2. Enough to brief a steering committee.
- Before you commit budget: chapter 3 for the defensible estimate, chapter 4 for the forks, chapter 6 for the questions to put to each vendor.
The nine sections
| # | Section | What you do with it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The maintenance table that governs everything | Every date, May 2023 to April 2032, by edition and minor |
| 2 | The five credible paths | For each: for, against, and who should not choose it |
| 3 | The thirteen candidates we ruled out | With the reason, so you can close them off yourself |
| 4 | The Camunda 7 to 8 gap | The twenty features with no equivalent, plus the anti-patterns |
| 5 | What the effort data actually shows | Why 12,000 findings are about 30 real patterns |
| 6 | The four forks from primary sources | Governance, fork point, cadence, licence, schema, Java baseline |
| 7 | How Camunda 8 is priced | What it meters on, and why tenancy is now commercial |
| 8 | The Decision Spine | Ten questions, fixed order |
| 9 | What to ask before you sign | Question sets for each vendor — and for yourselves |
Price: one work email address and one confirmation click.
For you if:
- You run Camunda 7 in production and share the migration decision
- You need to name the options you ruled out, not just the one you chose
- You would rather have depth than a summary, or you have someone who will read it
Not for you if:
- You want a decision you have already made rubber-stamped. The handbook regularly recommends not moving, or a destination we do not deliver
- You want a two-page answer. There is not one here — that is what the call is for
- You run IBM DB2 on z/OS. That rules out a destination outright, and it belongs in the first question, not week three
- You cannot grant access to the code. No reading, no defensible plan
What we get asked
Camunda 7 isn't actually end-of-life for us. We're on Enterprise, supported to 2030.
Correct, and the handbook opens by saying so: contracted patching to 13 April 2030, extended support to 2032, certified against Java 25 and Spring Boot 4. On Enterprise this is a planned programme. The version question still applies, and it has a date.
We're on 7.24 already. The October date doesn't apply to us.
It does not. 7.24 LTS runs to 13 April 2030; 13 October 2026 belongs to 7.23. On 7.24 you have the most runway in the option set — the position from which to decide deliberately rather than under pressure.
Seventy-nine pages? I'm not reading that.
Most people do not read all of it, and it is not built that way. Ten minutes for the executive summary and chapter 5. An hour briefs a steering committee. Chapters 3 and 4 are reference material. And the ten questions applied to your estate is a conversation, not a document.
This is a vendor's document. You sell migrations — why would I trust your comparison?
You should not trust it unchecked, and page one says so rather than hiding it. We are not attached to a destination, chapter 4 criticises products we make money implementing, and every material fact is sourced at the back.
What are you going to do with my email address?
Send you the handbook, then one email a week. Brevo on EU hosting and nothing else — not sold, not rented, not shared. Nothing reaches you before your confirmation click; after it, one click ends everything.
Why is it free? What's the catch?
None. We would like you to think of us when you decide. Nothing is withheld, and it does not always point at us: the commonest recommendation is to stabilise on 7.24, which a Community Edition estate may get at no cost through the community licence programmes.
We already had a Camunda partner tell us to go to Camunda 8. Why is this different?
It may reach the same conclusion — Camunda 8 is one of the five paths and there are real circumstances under which it is right. What changes is that you can say why, and what the other four would have cost you.
Isn't a community fork a hobby project?
One of the five things most Camunda 7 decisions get wrong. Four forks are actively maintained, and the ranking on governance is close to the inverse of the ranking on engineering maturity. One runs in production across 43 German healthcare organisations, including all 38 participating university hospitals.
How much is this going to cost us in the end?
No web page can tell you, and the handbook is explicit that no published days-per-process figure exists from Camunda or any partner. What does exist is the method — and the correction that matters most: 400 BPMN files produce around 12,000 analyzer findings that deduplicate to roughly 30 distinct task types. Shown 12,000, a stakeholder concludes the project is impossible.
Is this going to be out of date in six months?
Partly, and it says which parts. Camunda 7's dates are fixed. Camunda 8 ships a minor every six months and the forks are similar or faster, so every version-specific statement names its version. And when a material fact moves, we email you.
You have just read the long part. Put in your work email and click the link in the confirmation, and all 79 pages are in your inbox. One click ends it whenever you want.