Is Activiti or Soketi better?

Neither clearly leads. Activiti starts at Free and Soketi at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.

Which is cheaper, Activiti or Soketi?

Activiti starts at Free and Soketi at Free.

Does Activiti or Soketi run on more platforms?

Activiti runs on Linux, Windows, Docker, Kubernetes. Soketi runs on Linux, macOS, Windows.

Can I use Activiti for free?

Both have a free tier, so you can try either at no cost before committing.

What is Activiti best used for?

Activiti is most often used for an alfresco or hyland content services deployment where activiti is already the embedded workflow engine, a java application that needs to embed a bpmn engine as a library under a permissive licence, an organisation that has ruled out camunda 8 on licence grounds and needs an apache 2.0 alternative, document-centric approval workflows where the process engine sits inside the content management stack rather than beside it. Of those, an alfresco or hyland content services deployment where activiti is already the embedded workflow engine and a java application that needs to embed a bpmn engine as a library under a permissive licence are not what Soketi is typically brought in for.

What can Activiti do that Soketi cannot?

Activiti covers BPMN 2.0 engine, Activiti Cloud, Modeler, Java and REST APIs. Soketi covers Pusher protocol compatibility, Presence and private channels, Horizontal scaling, App management backends.

Automation Integration · head to head

Activiti vs Soketi

Activiti

Automation Integration

Apache 2.0 BPMN engine under Hyland, from which Flowable and Camunda were forked

From: Free
Rated: -

Full review Website

Soketi

Developer Tools

Self-hosted, Pusher-compatible WebSockets server with a stalled maintenance record

From: Free
Rated: -

Full review Website

The short version

Each has a real cost: Activiti the last stable release was 8.2.0 in January 2024, and while release candidate builds continue, a two-year gap between stable versions is a real risk signal for a production dependency.; Soketi maintenance has effectively stalled: the maintainer has said time is severely limited, releases are infrequent, and the community has been discussing whether the project is abandoned, which means security fixes may not arrive.
They diverge on capability: Activiti covers BPMN 2.0 engine, Soketi covers Pusher protocol compatibility.
Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Activiti and Soketi actually diverge.

Attributes where Activiti and Soketi differ
Attribute	Activiti	Soketi
Platforms	Linux, Windows, Docker, Kubernetes	Linux, macOS, Windows
Category	Automation Integration	Developer Tools

Identical on both: starting price (Free), pricing model (Open source, no licence fee), free tier (Yes), user rating (Not yet rated).

What each one covers

Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.

Only in Activiti

BPMN 2.0 engine
Activiti Cloud
Modeler
Java and REST APIs
Pluggable persistence
Identity integration

Only in Soketi

Pusher protocol compatibility
Presence and private channels
Horizontal scaling
App management backends
Webhooks
Prometheus metrics

What people use each for

The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.

Activiti

An Alfresco or Hyland content services deployment where Activiti is already the embedded workflow enginenot Soketi
A Java application that needs to embed a BPMN engine as a library under a permissive licencenot Soketi
An organisation that has ruled out Camunda 8 on licence grounds and needs an Apache 2.0 alternativenot Soketi
Document-centric approval workflows where the process engine sits inside the content management stack rather than beside itnot Soketi

Soketi

A Laravel application that already uses Echo and wants to stop paying a hosted realtime providernot Activiti
Realtime notifications or presence indicators where data must not leave your own infrastructure for compliance reasonsnot Activiti
A local or CI environment that needs a Pusher-compatible server without hitting a paid accountnot Activiti
A high-connection-count application where hosted per-connection pricing has become the largest line in the infrastructure billnot Activiti

Where each one falls short

Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.

Activiti

The last stable release was 8.2.0 in January 2024, and while release candidate builds continue, a two-year gap between stable versions is a real risk signal for a production dependency.
Both Camunda and Flowable forked away and took large parts of the contributor base with them, so the community, tutorials and third-party tooling around Activiti are much thinner than around either fork.
Commercial support is only realistically available by buying Hyland Alfresco subscriptions, so there is no way to pay for Activiti support on its own.
Activiti Cloud imposes a distributed architecture of several Spring Boot services plus Keycloak, which is heavy for teams who simply wanted an embeddable engine.
Documentation is dated and partly split between old Alfresco sites and Hyland Connect, and the transition between Activiti 6, 7 and 8 architectures makes much of the older material actively misleading.

Soketi

Maintenance has effectively stalled: the maintainer has said time is severely limited, releases are infrequent, and the community has been discussing whether the project is abandoned, which means security fixes may not arrive.
Dependency drift on Node and uWebSockets.js will eventually force you to fork or migrate, and that cost is unbudgeted at the point you adopt it.
There is no commercial support to buy, so a production incident at three in the morning is entirely your problem with no escalation path.
Scaling beyond a single node needs Redis and careful configuration, and getting presence channels correct across nodes is a genuine source of subtle bugs.
It implements the Pusher protocol rather than tracking it, so any protocol feature Pusher adds later will not appear, and the compatibility guarantee slowly decays.

Pricing, plan by plan

Activiti

Free

ActivitiFree
- Apache 2.0 licence
- Embeddable Java library or Activiti Cloud services
- No usage limits

Soketi

Free

SoketiFree
- MIT licensed
- Unlimited connections subject to your own hardware
- No vendor billing

Which should you pick?

Choose Activiti if

You need bpmn 2.0 engine.
You want to start without paying.
You work on Linux, Windows, Docker, Kubernetes.
You also want activiti cloud.

Activiti review

Choose Soketi if

You need pusher protocol compatibility.
You want to start without paying.
You work on Linux, macOS, Windows.
You also want presence and private channels.

Soketi review

Questions people ask

Is Activiti or Soketi better?: Neither clearly leads. Activiti starts at Free and Soketi at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Activiti or Soketi?: Activiti starts at Free and Soketi at Free.
Does Activiti or Soketi run on more platforms?: Activiti runs on Linux, Windows, Docker, Kubernetes. Soketi runs on Linux, macOS, Windows.
Can I use Activiti for free?: Both have a free tier, so you can try either at no cost before committing.
What is Activiti best used for?: Activiti is most often used for an alfresco or hyland content services deployment where activiti is already the embedded workflow engine, a java application that needs to embed a bpmn engine as a library under a permissive licence, an organisation that has ruled out camunda 8 on licence grounds and needs an apache 2.0 alternative, document-centric approval workflows where the process engine sits inside the content management stack rather than beside it. Of those, an alfresco or hyland content services deployment where activiti is already the embedded workflow engine and a java application that needs to embed a bpmn engine as a library under a permissive licence are not what Soketi is typically brought in for.
What can Activiti do that Soketi cannot?: Activiti covers BPMN 2.0 engine, Activiti Cloud, Modeler, Java and REST APIs. Soketi covers Pusher protocol compatibility, Presence and private channels, Horizontal scaling, App management backends.

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

Activiti: Is Activiti still maintained?

Yes, Hyland continues to publish builds, but the last stable release was 8.2.0 in January 2024.

Soketi: Is Soketi still maintained?

Barely. The maintainer has stated that available time is very limited and releases have been sparse; treat it as community-maintained.

Activiti: What is its relationship to Camunda and Flowable?

Both are forks of Activiti: Camunda in 2013 and Flowable in 2016, when core developers left Alfresco.

Soketi: Do I need to change my client code?

No. Pusher client SDKs and Laravel Echo work by changing the host, port and credentials.

Activiti: What licence is it?

Apache 2.0, which distinguishes it from Camunda 8’s source-available licence.

Soketi: What does it cost?

Nothing in licence fees. It is MIT licensed; you pay for the server it runs on.

Activiti: Should I choose Activiti for a new project?

Only if the Apache licence or an existing Alfresco deployment is decisive. Flowable and Camunda have far larger ecosystems.

Soketi: What are people moving to?

Laravel Reverb for Laravel applications, and Sockudo, a Rust reimplementation, for others.

Activiti vs Soketi

Activiti

Soketi

The short version

Where they differ

What each one covers

Only in Activiti

Only in Soketi

What people use each for

Activiti

Soketi

Where each one falls short

Activiti

Soketi

Pricing, plan by plan

Activiti

Soketi

Which should you pick?

Choose Activiti if

Choose Soketi if

Questions people ask

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

Related pages

More on Activiti

More on Soketi

Keep looking

Other head to heads