Calando vs Zeebe

Hello,

We are thinking of migrating from Tibco BPM to an open source alternative because of performance and scalability reasons apart from the licensing cost of course.

I read about Zeebe architecture and felt that it has hit all the right spots for web scale microservices oriented workflows:

  1. its effective use of stream processing,
  2. event sourcing (avoiding rdbms bottlenecks)
  3. high performance pub sub broker (seems to be faster than kafka)
  4. Async flows

However, Zeebe is still dev preview and it does not provide the Tasklist, Cockpit, Optimize etc tools which are critical for our usecase of manual workflows.

So we need the tooling of Calando but we need the microservices orientedness and the performance/scalability of Zeeebe.

Any thoughts/guidance on what we should go with will be highly appreciated. Is there a compromise, where we can start with Calando and migrate to Zeebe later on. Will the migration be painful or shall we start with Zeebe straightaway?

PS: I did read the responses on this 6 month old thread: Understanding Zeebe - Tutorials - Camunda Cloud, powered by the Zeebe Engine

Thanks,
Samarjit

Hi Samarjit,

Thanks for the question, and we’re glad to hear you’re looking at Zeebe. Just to confirm, when you say Calando, are you referring to Camunda BPM and the related stack?

Here’s some detail for you that might be helpful:
• Our target is to move Zeebe out of its “developer preview” status to a production-ready release at end of Q2 / early Q3 2019.
• Our current state: we’re finished working on the feature set related to clients, BPMN symbol coverage, exporters, etc, and our focus as we prepare for production readiness is on Zeebe’s performance and stability when running in a cluster.

This production-ready Zeebe release in mid-2019:
• Will not integrate with Optimize
• Will not include a Tasklist type tool; however, it would be an option to build your own UI for manual tasks and connect it to Zeebe via a client

Regarding Cockpit:
• Instead of Cockpit, we’re building a separate tool called Camunda Operate that you could think of as a “Cockpit for Zeebe”. Operate will allow users to monitor running workflow instances in Zeebe and resolve issues / update payloads.
• We don’t yet have a publicly available version of Operate, but we plan to release a “preview version” (for non-production use) at the end of Q1 / early Q2. Operate will be available for production use under an enterprise license later in 2019, specific date TBD.
• You can get a quick preview of Operate in this webinar that we recorded in the end of 2018.

As for guidance on which is a better fit for your use case: if you’re a) hoping to be running in production ASAP and b) absolutely need Cockpit, Optimize, and Tasklist, then I’d recommend starting with Camunda BPM.

If you were to migrate to Zeebe, at a high level, you’d need to:
• Update your BPMN models (the properties in Zeebe are different than those in Camunda)
• Integrate Zeebe clients in your worker applications
• Configure and deploy Zeebe, which is its own separate engine from Camunda BPM

Hope this helps–let me know if you have any follow-up questions, and happy to schedule time to talk about your use case in more detail.

Regards,
Mike

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Thanks Mike, I have emailed you. Look forward to discussing our use case with you.