Why CadenzaFlow?

Originated as a fork of Activiti 5.10 in early 2013, with a focus on enterprise-grade stability, better BPMN compliance, and stronger operational tooling, Camunda 7—while inheriting the original principles of being open source - has become a key player in the Enterprise Workflow Management (EWfM) market, with a significant number of organizations relying on it for mission-critical process orchestration.

For institutions that rely on the reliability, BPMN 2.0 compliance, integration flexibility of Camunda 7 as well as its operational manageability features, the upcoming end of support for Camunda 7 Community Edition in 2025 challenges many organizations with difficult decisions.

After the release of the final version (v7.24) in October of 2025, development of the system will be stopped by Camunda and the repositories will be archived and marked as deprecated.

Facts

• ‍Fact-1: This means that there will be no future updates or security patches, which poses a significant risk to the stability and security of your enterprise organization's business processes.‍
  
• Fact-2: After October 2025 - putting aside all other lack of operational manageability issues of Camunda 8 - Enterprise organizations utilizing Camunda 7 Community Edition in development/test and production environments are caught between a rock and a hard place.
  • If they switch to Camunda 8, since it is NOT fully open-source form production, they end-up with huge unexpected costs;
  • Even if they choose to bear the cost, depending on the as-is usage of Camunda 7, a huge refactoring on existing source code based may be enforced.
  • Even if they choose to bear the cost, still due to lack of many operational manageability features (suspend processes, skip tasks etc.) on Camunda 8, a huge refactoring on existing workflow definitions may bee needed as well as operational side effects, plus as-is operational UIs utilizing Camunda 7 operational APIs.‍
• Fact-3: Simply stated, Camunda 7 better at operational manageability, weaker at scale. Camunda 8 better at scale, but weaker at control. For an enterprise: Power and Scale without control is chaos and history is full of such distributed sytem failures.

In response to Camunda's recent strategic shift - including the discontinuation of support for Camunda 7 Community Edition and a Camunda 8 roadmap that departs from core principles of open source and enterprise-grade operational manageability - many PiA customers now face uncertainty in sustaining their workflow foundations. These changes directly challenge the values embedded in our Enterprise Workflow Management (EWfM) Manifesto.

To that end, we are proud to announce our decision to maintain and further develop our own product "CadenzaFlow" - a dedicated branch of the Camunda 7 engine. This move reaffirms our commitment to open, external, enterprise-grade workflow orchestration - and ensures that our customers remain aligned with a future-proof, transparent, and operationally robust process automation platform.

By doing so:

• As PiA Group we provide long-term strategic assurance to PiA customers who rely on robust, external BPM engines as a foundational layer of their IT ecosystems.
• For our flagship products, such as DNext, this path ensures continuity, stability, and alignment with the architectural expectations of modern digital business support systems (DBSS).
• More importantly, this move safeguards the open-source, enterprise-grade capabilities that our customers as well as our products - ensuring that customers retain both freedom and control without compromising on scale, governance, or operational depth.

Please refer to White Paper: Camunda 8 Architecture: Enterprise-Grade Critique for details.