Ready to Break Up With Pega?

In our first blog in this series, The Compounding Cost of Staying on Pega, then you know the problem: Pega's lock-in compounds quietly, the real bill is hiding in services and knowledge, not the license line, and enterprises that want to break up with them get stuck. Not because they don't understand the alternative, but because leaving has historically meant an open-ended project that nobody wants to own.

This post picks up where that one left off. Now the question isn’t, “why leave Pega?” It’s, “what to expect once you do?”

Start with discovery, not a blank page

Migrating off legacy platforms has historically meant choosing between two bad options: a slow manual rebuild of every process, or an automated conversion tool that spits out something technically equivalent but still just as rigid as what you started with.

Fortunately, there is now a third option. Camunda built ProcessOS, Camunda’s AI-driven transformation offering, to avoid that choice. It discovers your existing process, pulling from documentation, system logs, and the people who actually run it, in about 10 days, rather than the typical 2-3 months for a traditional discovery phase. The result isn't a literal translation of your old process into new syntax. Rather, it leverages what you're doing today as context for the outcome you actually want, so the process you end up with is re-engineered, not just relocated.

The full cycle—discover, re-engineer, build, and improve—typically takes about four weeks for a given process. That turns, "we should probably migrate eventually" into a project with a real timeline, addressing one of the biggest barriers for Pega customers ready to move.

That speed isn't just the discovery phase. It carries through the rest of the work too.

Not every process needs the same treatment

Here's the part that's easy to miss: a realistic migration isn't an all-or-nothing bet on one tool. Some of your processes are a strong fit for ProcessOS: they're well-documented, stable, and legitimately worth re-engineering rather than just preserving as-is. Others might be simple enough that a manual rebuild is faster, or you might specifically want hands-on control over how a particular process gets redesigned.

For processes you don't run through ProcessOS, there are also migration tools on GitHub that Camunda's consulting team maintains. These are assistants, not a silver bullet. None of them turns automation from one platform to another with a single click. What they generate is a BPMN file that attempts to preserve the fidelity of your original process. Depending on what you're migrating from, you'll still need to add code and connectors to make it executable. You don’t have to choose one migration approach for your entire portfolio. You can decide process by process, based on what each one needs.

Running instances are still a real decision

Re-engineering the process model is one problem. What to do with the process instances that are already running is a separate one. And it's worth being honest that there's no shortcut.

Here are two approaches.

• With parallel operation, you keep the old platform running for existing instances while new ones start on Camunda. This means less migration work up front, but the overhead of operating two systems and routing logic between them for as long as that takes.
• With a big bang approach, you wait until existing instances hit a stable point, migrate everything at once, and then you're only operating one system going forward. This comes at the cost of more upfront engineering and some planned downtime.

The big bang approach can be appealing because it avoids running two systems for an extended period. But the right choice depends on how long your processes run, how much downtime you can tolerate, and what your environment requires.

The part that actually unblocks the decision

Let’s now go back to the two things that keep Pega customers from moving even when they want to: the sense that they've already paid for Pega once, and the lack of anyone willing to own an open-ended project.

Neither of those is a technology problem, so ProcessOS alone doesn't solve them. What it does is pair the re-engineering work with a bounded migration program: a scoped delivery team, a committed timeline, and a transition plan built around the reality that you're running two platforms for a while, not pretending that overlap doesn't exist. That's the difference between "we should migrate eventually" and an actual plan with a start date, an end date, and a team whose job it is to get you there. To learn more, watch the on-demand webinar to see how enterprises use ProcessOS to modernize complex process landscapes and build more flexible orchestration.

Ready to leave Pega, but not sure where to start? Qualifying customers get Camunda credit toward their remaining Pega commitment and a dedicated team that owns the migration from start to finish, so you’re not figuring it out alone.

Fill out the form to see what your switch would look like.