BPM suites and BPMN workflow engines in 2026
4 commercial products, ranked by how many people read about each, or about its maker, on Wikipedia's mobile site. Of those with an article of their own, Appian has the most readers, about 766 a month. 30 open-source projects, ranked by GitHub stars and how recently each was worked on. Activiti leads with 11k stars, ahead of Flowable-engine. 20 had code pushed in the last three months. Most common licenses: MIT (14), Apache-2.0 (10) and AGPL-3.0 (2).
Commercial BPM suites and BPMN workflow engines
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1
IBM Business Automation Workflow IBM
IBM Business Automation Workflow helps you automate your digital workflows to increase productivity, efficiency, and insights — on premises or on cloud
Framework or platform Production-ready A large enterprise already runs IBM BPM and wants to keep its workflows on supported IBM software.
Commercial -
2
Appian Appian Corporation
AI automation for critical processes. Appian orchestrates AI agents, systems, and people on an enterprise platform, without replacing your systems.
Framework or platform Production-ready A regulated enterprise or government agency needs complex case-management processes built quickly.
766 readers a month Since 1999 Commercial -
3
Camunda Camunda
Camunda is the open platform for agentic orchestration. Coordinate AI agents, people, and systems across end-to-end processes with governance and control.
Framework or platform Production-ready An engineering team wants business processes modelled in BPMN and executed reliably at scale.
338 readers a month Since 2013 Commercial -
4
Pega Platform Pegasystems
The world’s most influential organizations trust Pega to reimagine work - automating workflows, personalizing customer experiences, and modernizing legacy systems.
Framework or platform Production-ready A large regulated organisation needs complex case workflows and next-best-action decisioning.
Commercial
New open-source projects
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1
ApprovaPlat feng-shan-jian
基于 RuoYi Vue 3版本以及Flowable 8、Spring Boot 4 的开源流程中台。完全为爱发电，如果有用的上的地方，可以点点小⭐。（目前开源部分仅为实习中自己开发应用的技术基座，非实际设计的产品版本，仅作为技术参考使用，但后续出现问题会不断维护参考，提升框架通用性）
Template or starter Experimental You are building a Chinese-style approval platform on RuoYi and want a reference implementation.
★ 251 MIT Java Active, pushed 20 days ago
Open-source BPM suites and BPMN workflow engines
Complete systems you can adopt 1
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1
WorkFlow-Engine risesoft-y9
工作流引擎对内提供单位/机关流程管理规则和内部业务流程的数字化落地实践；对外提供自动化地第三方业务驱动、接口接入和算法单元驱动能力。工作流引擎在提供底层驱动引擎的同时对全局透明监控、安全防御和国产化特色功能进行充分考虑，是内部流程管理和业务算法驱动的不二之选。
Complete system Usable You are building office automation for Chinese public-sector organisations that need domestic software compliance.
★ 865 GPL-3.0 Java Active, pushed 35 days ago
Building blocks for your own system 6
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1
Activiti Activiti
Activiti is a light-weight workflow and Business Process Management (BPM) Platform targeted at business people, developers and system admins. Its core is a super-fast and rock-solid BPMN 2 process engine for Java. It's open-source and distributed under the Apache license. Activiti runs in any Java application, on a server, on a cluster or in the cloud. It integrates perfectly with Spring, it is extremely lightweight and based on simple concepts.
Building block Production-ready You maintain an Activiti-based system or need an Apache-licensed BPMN engine embedded in Spring.
★ 11k Apache-2.0 Java Active, pushed today -
2
Flowable-engine flowable
A compact and highly efficient workflow and Business Process Management (BPM) platform for developers, system admins and business users.
Building block Production-ready A Java team needs standards-based process automation with human tasks inside its own application.
★ 9.6k Apache-2.0 Java Active, pushed 16 days ago -
3
Viewflow viewflow
Reusable workflow library for Django
Building block Production-ready You build a Django app with approval flows or multi-step human processes.
★ 2.9k AGPL-3.0 Python Active, pushed 5 days ago -
4
SpiffWorkflow sartography
A powerful workflow engine implemented in pure Python
Building block Usable You need to run BPMN workflows inside a Python application.
★ 1.9k LGPL-3.0 Python Active, pushed 4 days ago -
5
Workflow durable-workflow
Core package for defining and running durable workflows and activities. Supports long-running persistent workflows, retries, queues, parallel execution, workflow monitoring, dedicated storage connections, and orchestration for microservices, data pipelines, sagas, agentic workflows, and other complex business processes.
Building block Usable Your Laravel app has long-running multi-step business processes that must survive failures.
★ 1.3k MIT PHP Active, pushed today -
6
Bpmn-engine paed01
BPMN 2.0 execution engine. Open source javascript workflow engine.
Building block Usable You want to execute BPMN models in Node.js without running a Java engine.
★ 973 MIT JavaScript Active, pushed 20 days ago
Developer tools 3
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1
Camunda Modeler camunda
A modeling solution for BPMN, DMN, and Forms based on bpmn.io. As a companion tool to your favorite IDE it supports you in implementing solutions with Camunda.
Developer tool Production-ready You build process automation on Camunda 7 or 8 and need the official modelling tool.
★ 1.7k MIT JavaScript Active, pushed today -
2
Modelio ModelioOpenSource
Modelio is a modeling solution offering a wide range of functionalities based on the main standards of enterprise architecture, software development and systems engineering.
Developer tool Production-ready An architect wants a free, standards-based modelling tool for UML and enterprise architecture diagrams.
★ 1.1k GPL-3.0 Java Active, pushed 2 months ago -
3
Drawio-ai-kit sparklabx
Teach your AI to draw correct, beautiful draw.io diagrams — declarative layout engine, ground-truth stencils, structural validator, vision self-check. AWS · Azure · GCP · Databricks · BPMN. Zero dependencies.
Developer tool Experimental You have agents generate architecture or process diagrams and want them to come out valid and tidy.
★ 667 MIT TypeScript Active, pushed 22 days ago
Compared head to head
Also under workflow automation tools
Open-source licenses
- Permissive: 25. Use it anywhere, including in closed products. You keep the copyright notice; Apache-2.0 also grants patent rights.
- Network copyleft: 2. Like GPL, and running a changed version as a web service counts as distributing it, so its users get the source too.
- Strong copyleft: 2. If you distribute the program or anything built on it, you must release the whole source under the same license.
- Weak copyleft: 1. Changes to the licensed files must be shared, but you can link them into a closed program.
Languages
Java 9, JavaScript 5, TypeScript 4, Python 3, PHP 3, Vue 2, Shell 1, C# 1, Go 1 and HTML 1.
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