Difference Between Orchestration, Automaion and Flow designer or Process automation

[Vamshi Krishna2]

Hi Can anyone tell me difference between Flow designer or Process Automation

 & Orchestration and Automation. Is flow designer comes under orchestration? 

Much confused

Thanks

-Vamshi

[Amit Gujarathi]

Hi Vamshi,

Hope you are doing great.

In ServiceNow, there are several tools that can be used to automate processes and tasks:

1. Orchestration: ServiceNow Orchestration is a tool that allows you to automate the execution of tasks across multiple systems and technologies. It provides a graphical designer for creating automation flows, and includes pre-built integration connectors for popular technologies.

2. Automation: ServiceNow Automation is a tool that allows you to automate the execution of tasks within ServiceNow. It provides a graphical designer for creating automation flows, and includes pre-built activities for common ServiceNow tasks.

3. Flow Designer: ServiceNow Flow Designer is a tool that allows you to automate the execution of processes within ServiceNow. It provides a graphical designer for creating process flows, and includes pre-built activities for common ServiceNow processes.

The main difference between these tools is the scope of the automation that they support. Orchestration is the most powerful and flexible of the three, as it allows you to automate processes across multiple systems and technologies. Automation is focused on automating tasks within ServiceNow, and Flow Designer is focused on automating processes within ServiceNow.

Please mark the reply correct if you find it helpful.

Regards,

Amit Gujarathi

[sagarahire]

This Might Help -

https://www.servicenow.com/products/it-operations-management/what-is-it-orchestration.html

Automation

Although the term automation is often used to describe any situation in which a machine can perform functions with minimal human input, in a technical sense automation tends to refer most specifically to situations where a machine is performing a single task. Each individual task being performed is its own automation.

Orchestration

As previously mentioned, orchestration is automation scaled up. Effective orchestration tools allow organizations to automate and support entire interconnected workflows, computer systems, services, and middleware within their computing environment. Orchestration is versatile and may be applied to distributed systems either in the cloud or on premises. In other words, orchestration handles entire groups of tasks from start to finish

[sumityadav8]

Hi @Vamshi Krishna2 

The terms you've mentioned are closely related and often used together, which can understandably lead to confusion. Let's delineate them based on their technical function and scope within the ServiceNow platform.

Process Automation is a broad, high-level category that encompasses any technology used to automate business processes. It's a strategic concept, not a specific tool. Within ServiceNow, Process Automation is the umbrella under which various automation technologies reside, including Flow Designer, Business Rules, Workflows, and IntegrationHub. Its primary goal is to streamline operations, reduce manual intervention, and enforce standard procedures within the platform itself.

Flow Designer is a specific, no-code to low-code development environment within ServiceNow that allows you to build and manage these process automations. It is a primary tool for implementing Process Automation. You use its graphical interface to create a sequence of actions, triggers, and logic—called a flow—to automate tasks such as record creation, updates, notifications, and approvals. It is the modern successor to the legacy Workflow editor and is designed to be more accessible and powerful for a wider range of builders.

Orchestration, in the ServiceNow context, refers to the extension of automation *outside* of the ServiceNow instance to interact with external systems, applications, and infrastructure. It involves activities like provisioning cloud resources, resetting passwords in Active Directory, or creating issues in a third-party development tool like Jira. Historically, Orchestration was a distinct product that used a workflow-based activity designer.

Automation is often used interchangeably with Orchestration, but it's more accurate to think of Orchestration as a specific type of automation ,one that coordinates complex, cross-system processes. The capabilities of the legacy Orchestration product have now been largely integrated into Flow Designer through spokes, which are pre-built sets of actions for specific external systems. These spokes are a core component of IntegrationHub.

To directly address your final question: Flow Designer is the tool you use to *build* automations. When those automations use IntegrationHub spokes to interact with external systems, Flow Designer is effectively acting as the engine for Orchestration. Therefore, Flow Designer is not "under" Orchestration; rather, it is the platform that *executes* both internal Process Automation and external Orchestration activities.

If my response helped, kindly mark it as helpful. & accept as Solution 🙂

Warm Regards
Sumit
Technical Consultant

[yashkamde]

Hello @Vamshi Krishna2 ,

In Short : Flow Designer is the interface and engine used for both process automation within ServiceNow and, when powered by IntegrationHub, for orchestrating complex, multi-system workflows.

If my response helped mark as helpful and accept the solution.