When managers review documents in a .NET product's own UI, the approval belongs inside your app, in an embedded engine such as Workflow Engine NEO, a commercial product by Optimajet. A Camunda 8 cluster beside the app pays off when several teams share one executable BPMN process and will use its Tasklist and Operate screens.
Jevgenije Betin, lead developer of Workflow Engine NEO, reached that verdict in a full comparison. Jevgenije modeled one approval in Camunda 8.9 Self-Managed and in Workflow Engine NEO v22. The comparison reviews both products' documentation as of 24 September 2026. No runtime benchmark was run.
This post is the short version. The full comparison goes through 16 criteria, with diagrams of both models and links to both products' documentation. It compares Camunda Self-Managed because in that setup your team deploys and upgrades both products. With Camunda SaaS, Camunda runs the platform, so running the cluster stops being your team's job.
Both products have had new releases since then. Camunda 8.10 came out on 13 October and Workflow Engine NEO 23.0.0 on 27 October. The comparison has not been rerun on either.
The same approval, modeled twice
In Workflow Engine NEO and in Camunda 8, the route is the same. An employee submits a document, a manager approves or rejects it, and a missed deadline escalates the review to a senior manager.
In Workflow Engine NEO, the route is a Scheme in the product's own Simple Process Notation, not BPMN. The Submit Command moves the process to the ManagerReview Activity. Three Transitions leave it. Approve and Reject are restricted to the Manager Actor, and a Timer moves the process to Escalated. The flow drawn in Workflow Designer is the flow the runtime executes. The notation has no modeling-only flow symbols. The Scheme is also where lock-in sits. Workflow Engine NEO's BPMN support is import-only, so a Scheme does not leave as BPMN. Moving off Workflow Engine NEO means rewriting the Scheme.
In Camunda 8, the route is BPMN. Submit document and Manager review are user tasks. The manager completes the review with a decision value, and an exclusive gateway routes on it. At the deadline, an interrupting boundary timer ends the review and starts the senior manager's route. All of these elements execute in Camunda 8.9. Some others that Modeler can draw, such as complex gateways, do not.
For this approval, Jevgenije would model the route in Workflow Engine NEO. There, Approve, Reject and the Timer all leave ManagerReview, so the decisions and the escalation are visible together. If several service teams need one executable BPMN process, Camunda's model serves them better. Both diagrams are in the workflow model section.
What runs where, and what stays with your team
With either Workflow Engine NEO or Camunda 8, the document stays in your .NET product. Workflow Engine NEO runs inside it; Camunda 8 runs beside it as a cluster.
Workflow Engine NEO runs inside the .NET service. Workflow Runtime executes the Scheme and stores process state through a persistence provider in a supported database. Workflow Designer can be embedded in the product's UI. Approval Plugin supplies Inbox entries and approval history, and Forms Plugin connects form data to the process. An HTTP API is there if you would rather run workflow as a separate service. What stays with your team is a Rule Provider that maps signed-in users to workflow Identities, the Actions that update the document or send notifications, and the task and support screens. Your team also keeps the workflow database available and recoverable. Workflow Engine NEO ships no task portal.
Camunda 8 Self-Managed runs as a separate platform. Its Orchestration Cluster holds Zeebe for execution, Tasklist for user tasks, Operate for inspecting and repairing instances, and Admin. Zeebe keeps its log and state in primary storage, and Tasklist and Operate read from a secondary storage layer. What stays with your team is running the cluster and both storage layers with their backups, and connecting the document service. If managers are to preview the document in Tasklist, your team also serves it through a protected endpoint. In return, if managers can work in Tasklist and support can work in Operate, nobody builds those screens.
The architecture section of the full comparison lists who operates what in production.
Four questions the comparison answers
Can a .NET service work with Camunda 8?
Yes. A .NET service talks to Camunda 8 through its APIs and external job workers, and the service can stay in C#. In 8.9, the version compared, the official C# SDK was in Technical Preview. Camunda's support status page lists it as fully supported from 8.10. Either way, Camunda 8 is not an engine you embed in a .NET process. The C# code talks to a cluster.
Does Camunda 8 Self-Managed need Kubernetes and Elasticsearch?
No. Camunda recommends Helm on Kubernetes and also supports Docker on Linux and a manual Java deployment. The Docker Compose quickstart is for development. In 8.9, the secondary storage can be a relational database as well as Elasticsearch or OpenSearch. The relational database does not replace Zeebe's primary storage. Optimize, Camunda's reporting tool, still needs Elasticsearch or OpenSearch.
Can a Camunda process move to Workflow Engine NEO unchanged?
Do not assume it can. Workflow Engine NEO imports BPMN by converting the supported elements into a Scheme. The runtime then executes the Scheme, not the BPMN XML. Task assignments, forms, Camunda extensions, decision models and worker behavior need their own migration review. The BPMN support page lists what converts, and the product comparison shows which Editions include BPMN import.
How is each one licensed?
Three of the four Editions of Workflow Engine NEO have published prices on the pricing page. The Enterprise Edition is priced by quote. The SaaS Edition licenses your own public application. Optimajet does not host Workflow Engine NEO. Camunda's pricing allows free local development and non-production use, and Self-Managed in production needs an enterprise license and a quote. For embedding in a product you sell, both offer negotiated terms, through the Enterprise Edition of Workflow Engine NEO and through Camunda's OEM program.
When to pick Workflow Engine NEO, and when Camunda 8
For this approval inside a .NET document product, Jevgenije's comparison picks Workflow Engine NEO. Workflow Runtime can run beside the document service, and the manager's form can live in the existing UI. The team builds the task and support screens around them. Form Engine Designer, which styles that form, is licensed separately except in the Enterprise Edition of Workflow Engine NEO.
Camunda 8 Self-Managed is the better pick when several teams need one executable BPMN process across their services and will use Tasklist and Operate as their task and incident screens. The trade-off is a separate cluster to run and an integration with the document service.
For a .NET team new to both, the learning differs too. With Workflow Engine NEO, the team learns how Triggers, Conditions, Rules and Actions shape a Scheme. It adds Workflow Runtime and a persistence provider to its .NET host and runs the migrations for a SQL provider. With Camunda, the team learns which BPMN symbols Camunda executes and FEEL expressions for conditions. It also deploys the cluster with its storage.
Before you decide
The full comparison of Camunda 8 and Workflow Engine NEO lists six tests to run on your own process before choosing. Here are three of them.
- Revoke access. Remove the manager's permission after the task exists, then try the UI and a direct workflow call. Try both again as a user of another tenant (another customer in a multi-tenant product).
- Interrupt execution. Restart the host or the cluster during the wait, then interrupt the work after the document update succeeds but before the workflow step completes.
- Repair an incident. Diagnose a failed instance, make an authorized repair and restore a backup. With Camunda, support does it in Operate; with Workflow Engine NEO, in the support screen your team built.
Then count what each product left to your team. For Workflow Engine NEO, that is the task and support screens. For Camunda, it is the document integration, the cluster and any service-task workers.
The deadlines, concurrency, versioning and multitenancy sections, with the other three tests, are in the full comparison of Camunda 8 and Workflow Engine NEO.
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