Flowable is a Swiss business process automation and workflow orchestration platform built on the open standards BPMN 2.0, CMMN, and DMN. The Flowable Open Source project started in October 2016 when a group of lead developers behind the Activiti workflow engine left Alfresco and forked the Activiti codebase to launch Flowable, led by CEO Agim Emruli alongside co-founders Micha Kiener and Paul Holmes-Higgin.
The platform separates a free, Apache License 2.0 core engine from a commercial enterprise edition that adds high availability, security controls, low-code app-building tools, and analytics dashboards on top of the same BPMN/CMMN/DMN engines. Recent releases position Flowable as an agentic process automation platform, letting teams combine deterministic workflow steps with AI agents for tasks like document classification or case triage inside regulated processes.
Flowable suits mid-size to large organizations in banking, insurance, and government that need auditable, standards-based process automation rather than a lightweight drag-and-drop tool. The open-source Community Edition costs nothing to run, while enterprise licensing (Silver, Gold, Platinum support tiers) is quoted per user through direct sales rather than published online.
