Activitivs
Temporal
Temporal: Temporal if durable code-defined workflows suit better than modelled BPMN processes.
Activiti
Apache 2.0 BPMN engine under Hyland, from which Flowable and Camunda were forked
As of 31 August 2026, Activiti is free to use. The Java BPMN engine that both Camunda and Flowable forked away from. Softwr lists it under Automation Integration. Activiti is made by Hyland Software, available on Linux, Windows, Docker, Kubernetes.
Overview
What Activiti does
Activiti is a lightweight BPMN 2.0 process engine for Java, embeddable as a library or deployed as a service. Activiti 7 and 8 restructured the project as Activiti Cloud, a set of Spring Boot services designed for Kubernetes: a runtime bundle holding the engine, a query service, an audit service and a cloud gateway. It remains Apache 2.0, which is now a meaningful point of difference given that Camunda moved to a source-available licence. The history explains the present. Activiti began at Alfresco and produced two significant forks: Camunda in 2013 and Flowable in October 2016, when a group of the core developers left Alfresco. Each fork took contributors with it. Alfresco was later acquired by Hyland, so Activiti is now a Hyland-sponsored project. Build activity continues, with release candidate artefacts published through 2026, but the last stable 8.x release was 8.2.0 in January 2024, which is a long gap for a project whose competitors ship regularly. Who actually buys it: organisations already on Alfresco or Hyland content services, where Activiti is the embedded workflow engine, and Java teams that need an Apache-licensed BPMN engine and are unwilling to accept Camunda’s licensing or Flowable’s commercial editions. The honest assessment is that for a greenfield project the developer ecosystem, documentation and hiring pool all favour Flowable or Camunda, and choosing Activiti means accepting a smaller support surface in exchange for licence terms.
What people use it 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
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about 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.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Activiti
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- ActivitivsConductor
Conductor: Conductor for language-agnostic orchestration with an active community and its own UI.
- Activitivsn8n
n8n: n8n if the requirement is visual integration automation rather than an embeddable Java BPMN engine.
Pricing
What Activiti costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Activiti
Free
- Apache 2.0 licence
- Embeddable Java library or Activiti Cloud services
- No usage limits
- Community support via GitHub
- Commercial support only through Hyland Alfresco subscriptions
Capabilities
Features
BPMN 2.0 engine
Standards-compliant process execution embeddable as a Java library
Activiti Cloud
Spring Boot services for runtime, query, audit and gateway on Kubernetes
Modeler
Web-based BPMN modelling for process definitions and forms
Java and REST APIs
Process control from application code or over HTTP
Pluggable persistence
Process state in any supported relational database
Identity integration
Keycloak-based authentication and role mapping in the cloud distribution
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Is Activiti still maintained?
Yes, Hyland continues to publish builds, but the last stable release was 8.2.0 in January 2024.
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.
What licence is it?
Apache 2.0, which distinguishes it from Camunda 8’s source-available licence.
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.
Keep looking
Where to go from Activiti
- Activiti alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Activiti pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Activiti badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Automation Integration softwareThe full category
- Best Automation Integration softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Automation Integration software for
Compare Activiti with
- n8n
- Temporal
- Flowable
- jBPM
- Camunda
- Nango
- Kogito
- Airbyte
- Windmill
- Meltano
- Zapier
- Microsoft Power Automate
- Census
- Decodable
- Dify
- Flowise
- Flowable
- Camunda
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Activiti, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
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