Zeebe: the orchestration engine built for enterprise scale.
The distributed engine at the heart of Camunda. Built for the long-running, mission-critical processes your business depends on, and ready for the durable multi-agent coordination that comes next.
Built for the work your business is measured on
The processes your business is measured on are rarely short. Claims span weeks. Onboarding stretches across systems. Lending and underwriting run for days, sometimes months. The engine that runs them decides whether your operations stay live through traffic spikes, infrastructure failures, policy changes, and the multi-year lifecycle of real enterprise work.
Customer commitments stay on track
Long-running cases hold their state across days, weeks, or months without dropping work or stalling. SLAs are met because the engine keeps moving when systems, agents, or people don’t.
Operations never go dark
If a node fails, another takes over automatically. No data loss, no downtime, no late-night incident calls to bring the orchestration platform back online. Mission-critical work continues uninterrupted.
Improvements ship without stopping the business
Deploy new process versions while current ones keep running. Migrate live cases at runtime. Run versions side by side and compare results before fully cutting over.
Distributed by design
Most workflow engines route every transaction through a central database. That database becomes the bottleneck and the failure mode. Zeebe takes a different approach. Brokers form a peer-to-peer network with no shared database. Processing is partitioned across nodes, so capacity grows by adding nodes rather than scaling vertical infrastructure. Millions of concurrent process instances run at consistently low latency.
Horizontal scalability
No central database to choke on. Add nodes to add throughput. Partitioned, event-sourced architecture handles enterprise volume without a redesign at scale.
Self-healing brokers
Peer-to-peer broker topology with no single point of failure. If a node goes down, another takes over automatically without manual intervention or state loss.
Continuous version migration
Deploy new versions while current ones run. Migrate in-flight work at runtime. Run multiple versions side by side. Upgrade continuously without ever stopping operations.
Native support for the patterns enterprise processes actually need
Real enterprise processes are not happy paths. They compensate, escalate, branch dynamically, correlate inbound events, and recover from upstream failures. Zeebe implements these as first-class engine primitives, not custom workarounds layered on a thinner runtime.
Compensation
Roll back a transaction cleanly when downstream steps fail. No bespoke saga implementations.
Dynamic parallel execution
Spawn branches at runtime based on real-time conditions and merge results when complete.
Message correlation
Match inbound messages from external systems to the correct in-flight process instance, even after long waits.
Time-based escalation
Automatically route overdue tasks to the next tier when SLAs are at risk.
Exception handling
Gracefully manage unresponsive systems and malformed data without breaking the process.
Long-running coordination
Hold durable state across days, weeks, or months for processes that wait on external events, human input, or scheduled triggers.
Durable coordination for multi-agent processes
Agentic processes need an engine that can hold state across long-running, multi-agent work. Orchestrator agents kick off work to sub-agents and wait for minutes, hours, or days without losing context.
Zeebe natively supports both handoff and supervisor agent patterns. It correlates messages between agents that don’t know about each other, and handles simultaneous waits across multiple agents with built-in timeout, retry, and human escalation.
No other framework provides this at enterprise scale.