So we spent three years dealing with Camunda’s licensing maze—per-instance fees, per-user tiers, and this constant negotiation with our enterprise account manager about what we could actually run. By the end, we needed a spreadsheet just to track which workflows were eating up which licenses.
Last quarter, we started piloting Latenode with our automation team, and what struck me wasn’t just the pricing (though $19/month base is pretty wild compared to what we were paying). It was how we could actually model our major workflows—invoice processing, customer onboarding, compliance reports—using their templates as starting points, and run them all under a single subscription.
We took three of our most complex workflows and mapped them out. One was pulling data from five different systems, running through AI-powered categorization, and populating a data warehouse. Under Camunda, that was spread across three licenses because of how the nodes and connectors were counted. On Latenode, it’s just one workflow in one subscription. The execution-time model means we’re paying for actual runtime, not per-operation or per-license tier.
What surprised us most: the templates weren’t just scaffolding. We started with their document-processing template, and it handled 80% of what we needed. The remaining 20% was custom JavaScript, which took our team maybe two days instead of the two weeks we’d budget for a Camunda workflow.
I know the big question everyone has is whether consolidating everything actually works in practice, or if you just hit walls later when your licensing gets complex again. We’re still early, but the cost transparency alone—knowing exactly what a new workflow costs in execution time rather than negotiating a new license tier—has been worth the migration so far.
Has anyone else actually gone through this kind of migration and run the numbers on true cost of ownership? I’d be curious what you found when you actually factored in everything—setup, customization, and the time your team spent tracking licenses.
We did something similar about six months ago. The licensing transparency is real—that part definitely delivers. But here’s what caught us off guard: we initially thought moving from Camunda to a single subscription would be straightforward, and for maybe 40% of our workflows it was. The other 60% had some quirks we had to work around.
One thing that actually helped us was using their AI copilot to describe what we needed in plain English first. It generated starter workflows that were maybe 70% of the way there. Then our team could refine them instead of building from scratch. Saved us probably a month of dev time across our five biggest automations.
The budget side of things is cleaner now. Instead of forecasting license tiers and annual negotiations, we’re tracking execution time. We’ve averaged about 150 credit-hours per month, and we can pretty easily predict that month to month. Camunda never gave us that kind of predictability—we’d burn through a license tier, panic, and negotiate mid-year.
One gotcha: make sure you understand how their execution-time model actually works. One credit gives you 30 seconds of runtime. That sounds short until you realize you can pump way more API calls and data transformations through in 30 seconds than you could through a single Camunda operation. We wasted two months over-engineering workflows thinking we needed to optimize runtime, then realized we were nowhere near our credit limits.
The real question I’d push back on is whether you’re comparing apples to apples on the licensing complexity side. Camunda’s licensing is opaque, sure, but a lot of that pain comes from how enterprise deals are structured. The moment you move to a per-subscription model, you’re shifting to a different cost structure entirely, not just simplifying it.
What actually matters is mapping your volume. If you’re running 50 workflows with 1,000 executions per month, the math works out differently than if you’re running 5,000 executions of a single workflow. Latenode’s execution-based model is genuinely cheaper at scale for high-volume, repetitive tasks. But if you’re managing lots of infrequent workflows, you might find Camunda’s per-license model was actually cheaper than you thought once you account for utilization.
That said, the consolidation benefit is real. We went from managing three different platforms and two BPM licenses down to one subscription. That alone freed up time for our ops team, even if the monthly bill didn’t change dramatically. Just the reduction in tool sprawl and key management was worth the migration.
The templates piece is worth dwelling on because that’s typically where teams either save huge amounts of time or waste it rebuilding anyway. We found the pre-built templates useful as documentation more than anything—they showed us the architecture pattern for common stuff like data enrichment or multi-step approvals. But we rebui lt them almost every time because our data structures didn’t match.
What actually accelerated things was the AI copilot. We’d describe a process in a Slack message, and it would spit out a working draft in two minutes. Maybe 60-70% of what we needed, but that head start was huge. Took our average workflow build time from two weeks to three days once we figured out how to prompt it effectively.
On the licensing forecast side, you’re right to dig into actual TCO once you factor everything in. The transparency is real. But don’t mistake lower monthly spend for lower total cost if your team is burning time customizing and reworking templates. That’s where the real ROI comes from—faster deployment and fewer people in the automation cycle.