# You Know n8n (or Camunda, or Zapier). Here's What's Different About Oumma > Source: > Published: 2026-10-22 06:31:21+00:00 *You've automated the easy stuff. The hard stuff — the stuff with patients, approvals, money and audit trails — still runs on email and "call me when it's ready." If you run n8n, Camunda, or Zapier, this article is the honest comparison: where those platforms stop, and what it takes to cross the line into regulated business processes.* You already know the category. **n8n** gave you visual automations with 400+ integrations. **Zapier** glued your SaaS stack together in an afternoon. **Camunda** gave you real BPMN in your production systems. All of them are excellent — for what they are: **automation of steps**. Oumma is a different animal: an **agentic workflow platform for business processes where humans are the primary workers and AI is the orchestrator around them**. Not the other way around. That one sentence explains most of the design. Here's the breakdown on the subjects that actually matter when a workflow touches real people. In n8n the human appears when the workflow runs out of machine: you bolt on a form, an email, an external ticket system, and then a **polling webhook** waits for a human to do something outside the platform. The human's work is *next to* the automation — and the state of that work lives somewhere else. In Camunda, human tasks are first-class (a `userTask` in BPMN) — that's the closest relative. But the task **assignment model is yours to build**: who can see it, who can act, what they can do on the artifacts — all of it is code you write against the Task API. In Oumma, the human is the **main loop of the process**: `complete` it, which can `comment`, which can `attach`. The engine re-checks all of it The practical difference: with n8n you *built a workflow that occasionally asks a human for input*; with Oumma you have a **process the humans work, with the machine doing everything else** — documents, routing, integrations, reminders. n8n and Zapier optimize for **developer velocity**: drag nodes, connect, run. The freedom is the point — and it's exactly why, at scale, nobody can tell you what a workflow actually *does*, who approved it, or what changed when. Your "processes" are node graphs with the semantics of a shell script: no gateways, no roles, no version, no audit of the design itself. Camunda has the formalism (BPMN 2.0) but you pay for it in modeling tools, a separate runtime, and a Java/Zeebe operational footprint. Oumma takes the **BPMN core of what regulated processes actually need** — tasks, exclusive gateways, parallel fork/join, start/end — and ships it as a product, with the controls an enterprise needs around it: The practical difference: an n8n workspace is a collection of clever automations; an Oumma deployment is a **set of governed, versioned, auditable business processes** — the difference between "it automates" and "the audit can trace it." This is where the no-code tools fall off the map. In n8n, "who can run/edit this workflow" is a **workspace seat** — there are no per-step roles, no claim that only a `manager` may complete the *manager_review* step of *your* process. In Zapier, it's an account. Your real org chart (the one in your IdP) simply doesn't exist inside the platform. Camunda has user/role groups, but wiring them into a real enterprise IdP — SSO, group sync, claims — is integration work you build and maintain. Oumma's answer: **the platform has no user database of its own.** Identity is Keycloak; the platform validates the bearer token, reads the groups and department from the claims, and that's it: The practical difference: in n8n you explain your org chart to the platform (or don't, and ship it); in Oumma the **org chart already exists** — the platform just reads it and enforces it on every single action. The three above are the headline; these are the ones people discover in week two: **The AI designs the process — and you still hold the pen.** Ask the designer chat *"add a manager review for orders above 1000 euros"* and it edits the actual design document: new task, gateway, condition, role, form — all in the one pending version, visible on the canvas instantly, draggable if you disagree, and only live when **you** deploy. In n8n the AI (where it exists) edits node graphs; here it edits a governed BPMN artifact with versions, semver and a deploy gate. **Every AI call is metered and attributable.** Tokens are captured per call, per user, per department, per process, with a monthly cost rollup. The badge in the UI shows what *this process* has consumed this month. No LLM invoice mystery — the ledger is a Postgres table. **One port, one binary, one Postgres.** The whole platform — engine, auth proxy, forms, documents, agent, designer APIs, even the Mailpit inbox (proxied at `/mailpit/`) — is **one Go binary on one port** with a Postgres database. No node cluster, no worker fleet, no separate identity service, no separate task service. You can read the whole backend in an afternoon; the entire source is Apache-2.0. **The app knows its place.** The React workspace has **zero LLM configuration** — no model names, no endpoints, no keys. Every AI capability (designer chat, AI Assist, document analysis) flows through the engine, where it's quota-gated and logged. That's why you can swap your LLM backend by editing one env var in docker compose and nothing in the app changes. | You're running… | You'll hit this wall… | Oumma is for you when… | |---|---|---| | **n8n / Zapier** | The workflow needs a real human step, a real approval chain, or an auditor will ask "prove who did what" | your automation is a *business process* (onboarding, claims, orders with thresholds) rather than an integration glue | | **Camunda** | You'd rather not operate a Java/Zeebe platform + build the identity and UI layers yourself | you want the same BPMN discipline with a working UI, IdP integration, metered AI and one-port deploy | | **Spreadsheet + email + "call me"** | Nothing above, and your process still works — at the price of every handoff | you want the process to exist *somewhere* — designed, versioned, audited, and mostly self-driving | The honest caveat: if you're gluing two SaaS tools together with no humans, no approvals and no compliance questions, **stay on n8n or Zapier** — that's their job and they do it well. Oumma earns its keep when the workflow *is* the business: regulated, multi-role, long-lived, and full of people. Everything in this article is reproducible from the repos: Both Apache-2.0. `docker compose up` — one port, one Postgres — and you can watch a human task get created, permission-checked, completed, and routed, with the AI handling everything around it. This is the first article of the **Oumma series** on [Dev.to](https://dev.to/tag/oumma) — the follow-ups take you inside the platform: the designer's tabs, roles & permissions, forms, the normal user's day, AI Assist, external integrations, versioning, the engine under the hood, and identity & quotas. New articles land on the series page as they publish — follow the tag so you don't miss them.