Camunda 7 in production. Decision still open.
Migrating off Camunda 7: which of the five paths fits your estate?
Peak Code Consulting in Aarau answers that with ten questions in a fixed order: the Decision Spine, chapter 5.7 of our 79-page handbook. The first asks: which Camunda 7 edition are you on?
Trusted by Aargauische Kantonalbank
Prefer to talk it through?Start with what is actually true.
Your Camunda 7 processes keep running. Community Edition is Apache 2.0 and legal in production forever.
The patching has stopped. 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 has years left, 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 calm, planned programme.
That asymmetry is the single most important fact in the decision. Useful advice therefore begins by asking which edition you hold.
Underneath it sits what actually forces the decision: 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?
Want to discuss this with us?The expensive part is reassembling it yourself.
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, and only you know 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 7.23 has already reached end of maintenance. 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. Just as usefully, you can say which four you ruled out and why.
What makes it different is how it is built. The Decision Spine is built to be neutral: 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, read straight from repository metadata. 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. 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: we moved the bank from Camunda 7 to CIB seven, start to finish.
This document is for decisions that are still open.
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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, maintenance has already ended.
Camunda 7.23 reached end of maintenance in October 2026. That forces an upgrade to 7.24 LTS, for both editions, and an Enterprise subscription does not extend an old minor. On 7.24 you have until April 2030.
Camunda 7 Community Edition is finished. Enterprise runs to 2030. Either way, 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.
The call is free. Proposals come only on request.
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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, when to start with a call, and what we actually get asked.
It is longer than the page above it. Anyone who scrolled this far wants to see all of the work.
This decision is still open because the market keeps it open.
Do nothing and let it drift. The most common version, and the most expensive. The decision stays, 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 there is a section 4.8, “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 necessarily recommends Camunda 8. Holisticon’s assesses a migration it presumes. ONLU’s leans toward CIB seven. This handbook sets all five paths side by side, and you can check that in one click.
Ask the incumbent integrator or Camunda partner. Whoever built your estate, and whoever sells the platform, necessarily recommends that platform. Of roughly sixteen firms advertising Camunda 7 migration across German-speaking Europe, exactly one sells destination-neutrality explicitly, and it is not in Switzerland.
All four are 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, with maintenance now ended, the upgrade to 7.24 is mandatory. 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 covering 2030 to 2032, a fork-support quote. Without all three, every later judgement is guesswork.
- Do you have CMMN in production? If yes, Camunda 8 means a full redesign. Flowable and the forks become the realistic destinations.
- Do non-developers read your BPMN? Durable execution is on the table only if genuinely nobody reads your BPMN and there is no human-task workflow.
- Does your correctness depend on shared transactions with the engine? If pervasively, Camunda 8 is an application redesign. Only a fork preserves this.
- 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.
79 pages, built to be read in layers.
- Right now: an email address. That is the whole effort.
- 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.
The handbook fits you if:
- You run Camunda 7 in production and share the migration decision
- You need to name the options you ruled out as well as the one you chose
- You value depth, or you have someone who will read it
Start with a call if:
- You want confirmation of a decision already made. The handbook often recommends staying put or a destination we do not deliver; on the call we test your choice directly
- You want a two-page answer. That is what the call is for
- You run IBM DB2 on z/OS. That rules out a destination outright, so it belongs in the first question of the call
- You cannot grant access to the code. A defensible plan needs read access
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 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: for 7.23 the maintenance end has already passed.
We're on 7.24 already. The 7.23 maintenance end doesn't apply to us.
It does not. The maintenance end in October 2026 applied to 7.23. 7.24 LTS runs to April 2030, and on 7.24 you have the most runway in the option set: the position from which to decide deliberately and calmly.
Seventy-nine pages? I'm not reading that.
Most people read it in parts, and it is built for exactly that. 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, are what we work through with you on a call.
This is a vendor's document. You sell migrations. Why would I trust your comparison?
Check it first, and page one says so openly. 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. Your address goes to Brevo, on EU hosting, and serves only the handbook and the weekly email. 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. The handbook is complete, and its commonest recommendation is to stabilise on 7.24 first, 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?
That depends on your estate, and the handbook gives you the method to estimate it, with 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. No published days-per-process figure exists from Camunda or any partner.
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.