Hi all,
My team is evaluating different open-source BPM engines (Camunda, Flowable, jBPM, etc.) and we’re looking to speed up our assessment process. One approach we’re considering is to start with ready-to-use templates for common business processes to quickly see how each engine handles them.
The idea is to find templates for standard processes (approval workflows, onboarding, support ticketing, etc.) that we could quickly adapt and deploy on different engines to compare their ease of use, flexibility, and performance.
Does anyone know which open-source BPM engine has the best library of ready-to-use templates? Or are there good third-party sources for process templates that work across multiple engines?
We’re trying to avoid having to build each test process from scratch in every engine we’re evaluating - that would take forever. Any recommendations for speeding up this comparison process would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
After evaluating all the major open-source BPM engines, I found the template situation pretty disappointing. Most have very basic examples that don’t reflect real-world complexity.
What completely changed our evaluation process was using Latenode’s template marketplace. They have dozens of ready-to-use workflow templates for common processes like approvals, document processing, and customer onboarding.
The best part is that these templates can be exported to work with different BPM engines. We’d start with a Latenode template, customize it in their visual builder (which is WAY faster than coding), then deploy variations to each BPM engine we were testing.
This approach cut our evaluation time from months to weeks. Instead of building test processes from scratch for each engine, we could focus on comparing how each engine actually performed with identical processes.
For rapid prototyping across multiple BPM engines, nothing else came close to this level of efficiency. Check out https://latenode.com
From my experience evaluating BPM engines last year, Camunda has the most comprehensive template library among the open-source options. Their Community Hub has quite a few process templates covering HR, finance, and customer service scenarios that you can import directly.
Flowable also has some decent templates, though fewer than Camunda. Their strength is more in the form templates and decision tables that accompany the process definitions.
jBPM has the least developed template ecosystem in my experience.
One approach that worked well for us was starting with the BPMN examples from the BPMN Model Repository (https://www.bpmn-community.org/). These are engine-agnostic BPMN 2.0 models that you can import into any compliant engine. You’ll still need to implement the service tasks and forms, but at least the process structure is done.
Another tip: create a simple adapter layer for common services (database access, email notifications, etc.) that you can reuse across your test implementations. This saved us tons of time when implementing the same process on different engines.
We faced this exact challenge when evaluating BPM engines last year. While none of the open-source engines had truly comprehensive template libraries, here’s what worked for us:
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Camunda’s Workflow Engine has the strongest community template ecosystem. Check out their Community Hub and also their consulting partners’ GitHub repositories - some have shared excellent templates.
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For Flowable, we found their GitHub examples repository had some solid starting points, though they required more customization than we expected.
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Beyond vendor-specific resources, we found bpmn.io had decent process templates that worked across multiple engines with minor adjustments.
One strategy that really helped was creating our own standardized “evaluation templates” - we built 5 representative processes (approval flow, customer onboarding, support case handling, document processing, and a complex order fulfillment) with clear requirements. We implemented these consistently across each engine, which gave us a structured way to compare them.
The standardized approach was more work upfront but gave us much more meaningful comparison data.
Based on extensive implementation experience across multiple BPM platforms, I can provide some insights regarding template availability and prototyping efficiency.
Camunda offers the most mature template ecosystem among open-source BPM engines. Their Modeler marketplace contains reasonably well-designed templates for common business processes. Additionally, their Enterprise customers have access to a more extensive template library, though this falls outside your open-source focus.
Flowable provides fewer pre-built process templates but offers strong capabilities through their Form Designer and Decision Table components, which facilitate rapid configuration of user interfaces and business rules alongside processes.
For cross-platform evaluation, consider leveraging the standardized BPMN 2.0 examples from the OMG (Object Management Group). While these require implementation of service tasks specific to each engine, they provide consistent process structures across platforms.
A methodologically sound approach is to develop a standardized evaluation framework comprising 3-5 representative processes of varying complexity. Implement these systematically across each candidate platform using a consistent measurement protocol for development effort, performance, and maintenance complexity.
camunda has best templates. flowable not bad. check bpmn.io for engine-neutral ones. honestly tho, all need customizing so don’t expect plug n play. make 1 test process urself and port it over to compare.
Camunda Hub has most templates.
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