flowable/flowable-engine

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

9493 stars · 2882 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Flowable is an open-source Java workflow and Business Process Management (BPM) platform providing fast BPMN process, CMMN case, and DMN rule engines. It can run embedded in a Java application or as a standalone service on a server, cluster, or cloud, with rich Java and REST APIs and tight Spring integration.

Use cases

• orchestrate human and system tasks in business processes
• embed a BPMN process engine in a Spring Boot application
• model and execute case management workflows with CMMN
• evaluate business rules with a DMN decision engine
• automate approval and document workflows in the enterprise
• run a workflow engine as a REST service in Docker or the cloud

When to choose

• you need a battle-tested, standards-compliant BPMN/CMMN/DMN engine on the JVM
• you want to embed workflow orchestration directly into a Java or Spring application
• you need both human task management and system-to-system process automation
• you prefer Apache 2.0 licensed open source with an active community

When to avoid

• you need a low-code visual designer, reporting, or enterprise security - those are paid Flowable features
• your stack is not JVM-based and you cannot run a Java service
• you only need simple job scheduling or event-driven automation without process modeling
• you require guaranteed high availability and scalability, which the community edition does not support

Facets

framework · maturity stable

workflow-automation api-framework http-server sdk middleware backend developer-tools apis erp jvm cloud self-hosted cross-platform bpmn cmmn dmn business-process-management workflow-engine spring-integration rest-api process-automation case-management rules-engine automation docker

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="flowable/flowable-engine")