Tracecat
Tracecat 1.0 stable lands with workspace entitlements, SSRF hardening, and an open-source MCP skills catalog
Comparison · PM
Ellie Planner vs Camunda
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Ellie Planner and Camunda — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Ellie Planner vs Camunda: at a glance
What is Ellie Planner?
Ellie opens its task data to outside agents, eight months after its last changelog.
Ellie is a solo-built task and calendar planner spanning web, desktop, iPhone and iPad. After an eight-month gap, the catch-up release lands a real Week Calendar on iPad, Pomodoro sessions started from a task and restored across reloads, Quick Capture as a standalone window on a global shortcut, rich-text task notes with Markdown shortcuts, and MCP/API access in beta. Beneath the headline items sits the unglamorous work: recurring tasks, timezones, rollover, and calendar sync behaviour.
What is Camunda?
Camunda 8.10 alpha cycles through broad platform bug fixes while 8.7 gets routine security patches
Camunda is a monorepo platform spanning Zeebe (workflow engine), Operate, Tasklist, and Optimize. The 8.7 line is in maintenance mode—receiving dependency security patches and Jetty/log4j CVE bumps. The 8.10 alpha series is active, working through a wide backlog of correctness issues: Raft reconfiguration deadlocks, RDBMS physical tenant bugs, CSL authentication failures in Optimize, and a write-retry backoff regression that had slowed Zeebe processing 3–16x.
Ellie Planner vs Camunda: editorial side-by-side
Ellie opens its task data to outside agents, eight months after its last changelog.
◆ Current state
Ellie is a solo-built task and calendar planner spanning web, desktop, iPhone and iPad. After an eight-month gap, the catch-up release lands a real Week Calendar on iPad, Pomodoro sessions started from a task and restored across reloads, Quick Capture as a standalone window on a global shortcut, rich-text task notes with Markdown shortcuts, and MCP/API access in beta. Beneath the headline items sits the unglamorous work: recurring tasks, timezones, rollover, and calendar sync behaviour.
◆ Where it's heading
The consistent pattern across four years of releases is reach - Outlook and Google calendars, Slack, Notion, Todoist, iOS widgets - all aimed at making Ellie available wherever work originates. MCP applies that instinct to agents rather than apps, and the release frames it exactly that way. The in-app AI assistant from a year ago put a model inside Ellie; MCP inverts the arrangement and lets an agent the user picks hold the task data instead.
◆ Prediction
MCP access is explicitly beta and gated behind Power Features, so the open questions are whether it graduates and how it is priced. The entries do not say which clients have been tested against the endpoint.
Camunda
5.0PM
Camunda 8.10 alpha cycles through broad platform bug fixes while 8.7 gets routine security patches
◆ Current state
Camunda is a monorepo platform spanning Zeebe (workflow engine), Operate, Tasklist, and Optimize. The 8.7 line is in maintenance mode—receiving dependency security patches and Jetty/log4j CVE bumps. The 8.10 alpha series is active, working through a wide backlog of correctness issues: Raft reconfiguration deadlocks, RDBMS physical tenant bugs, CSL authentication failures in Optimize, and a write-retry backoff regression that had slowed Zeebe processing 3–16x.
◆ Where it's heading
The 8.10 alpha indicates Camunda is working toward a release that resolves accumulated platform debt across the distributed engine, secondary storage, and observability stack. The scale of the bug list—covering everything from Raft membership changes to Swagger UI regressions—suggests 8.10 is a stabilization release rather than a feature milestone. No major architectural or capability-surface changes are visible in this window.
◆ Prediction
8.10 will move to beta once the Raft, RDBMS physical tenant, and CSL authentication issues are resolved. The pattern of fixing fundamental distributed-engine correctness bugs suggests the team is clearing blockers before announcing a GA.
Alternatives to Ellie Planner and Camunda
Other PM products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either Ellie Planner or Camunda.
NocoBase
NocoBase adds an AI knowledge base retrieval API, connecting no-code workflows to external knowledge sources.
RentRedi
RentRedi embeds AI into its maintenance workflow end-to-end, handling tenant intake and drafting landlord replies.
Asana
Asana embeds AI into Slack threads and closes the rich-text gap with Notion
Rize
Rize pivots from solo time tracker to agency operations platform with invoicing, profitability reporting, and a ChatGPT integration.
Hive
Hive is building shared AI automation infrastructure into the core of its PM platform.
See all Ellie Planner alternatives → · See all Camunda alternatives →
Recent activity from Ellie Planner and Camunda
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 5d agoCamunda8.7.28-optimize
- 8d agoCamundaCamunda 8.10 CI dryrun (internal)
- 14d agoCamunda8.7.27-optimize
- 16d agoCamundaCamunda 8.10.0-alpha5: Raft, RDBMS, and Zeebe performance regression fixes
- 16d agoCamundaSecret resolution warmup for long-poll workers (internal branch)
- 16d agoCamundaLoad test baseline: long-poll path for secret resolution (internal)
- 23d agoEllie PlanneriPad Week Calendar, Pomodoro, Quick Capture, rich notes, and MCP ⚡
- 8mo agoEllie Planner🧹 Todoist integration, improved Slack/Notion integrations and more
- 1y agoEllie PlannerEllie AI, Task templates, "Add task" from calendar events and more ✨ ⚡
- 1y agoEllie PlannerNotion integration, Analytics, Rituals, Notifications and a ton more
- 2y agoEllie Planner🐹 Outlook Calendar Integration, iOS Widgets, Slack integration and more
- 2y agoEllie Planner📆 Mac menu bar, improved auto sync and more
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Ellie Planner and Camunda?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Camunda is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 5.0 vs 3.8), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 1. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is Ellie Planner better than Camunda?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Camunda is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 5.0 vs 3.8), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 1. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other PM products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to Ellie Planner?
Top Ellie Planner alternatives in PM are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Ellie Planner alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/ellie for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to Camunda?
Top Camunda alternatives in PM are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Camunda alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/camunda for the full list with editorial commentary on each.