What are the advantages and disadvantages between Flow Designer and Business Rules?

[Anmol Soldier1]

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[Community Alums · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anmol Soldier ,

Flow Designer will run in the background, similar to scheduled jobs and asynchronous business rules. There will always be a delay between the actual trigger and the start of the flow. So it's not a replacement for before or after business rules, but for use cases that you would previously have solved with an asynchronous business rule, I'd consider using the flow designer.

Business rules and Script Includes are still a bit more flexible, since you can create scripts of arbitrary complexity in Scripts Includes (this is offset somewhat by the possibility to use script steps in flows).. Flow Designer flows are more maintainable, since they are more structured. 

Flows created by Flow Designer are more comparable to "legacy" Workflows and are meant to replace these. There is a bit of overhead in creating and calling a flow compared to a business rule, but they also have the big advantage that you can later go back at an execution context and inspect what happened in a particular flow execution - this provides some good auditing possibilities that you don't have with business rules.

I don't think we have hard and clear rules on where flows are appropriate compared to business rules, but my philosophy is that wherever there is a longer running piece of business logic that doesn't directly have to interact with the user interface, try using the flow designer. (If for example you are just setting a single field outside the context of a larger flow, a simple business rule is probably better).

Mark my answer correct & Helpful, if Applicable.

Thanks,

Sandeep

[Community Alums]

Hi @Anmol Soldier ,

Glad to see my answer helped you, Kindly mark the answer as Correct & Helpful both such that others can get help.

Thanks,
Sandeep

[bigfissy]

Did you give credit to the original post you copied on this ?  

Julian Hoch provided the initial response in 2019 . Always give credit to original post owner : https://www.servicenow.com/community/now-platform-forum/flow-designer-vs-business-rules-which-is-per...