Scripting vs Flow Designer

[Matthew Green2]

Hi All,

  As our company continues to enhance and standardize our ServiceNow configurations, I would like to understand team preferences and experiences regarding custom scripting versus Flow Designer for automation and logic.

Please share your perspective on the following:

• Which approach do you generally prefer (scripting or Flow Designer)?

• In what scenarios do you find one more effective than the other?

• Any limitations or challenges you have encountered with either option

Your input will help guide future design decisions, establish standards, and ensure we are balancing maintainability, scalability, and delivery speed appropriately.

Thank you in advance for your feedback!

[Mohammed8]

Hi @Matthew Green2 

1) I generally prefer to go to Flow Designer first , as it provides drag-and-drop data pills, Flow branches, Actions and testing execution which makes development faster and easier to follow.

2) I prefer scripting when the use case is more complex. With AI tools and a good understanding of scripting, now even scripting has become little easier to implement and maintain advanced logic. For simpler scenarios which has less number steps I usually choose flow designer for use cases like approvals, simple updates of record. Also for integration if spokes are readily available flow designer it makes for simple and cleaner approach

3) I’ve noticed with Flow Designer is that it sometimes does not auto-save and requires/ forces manual saving, which can be frustrating during development and personally I find flow designer scripting little bit challenging.

For scripting one should ideally include proper error handling such as try-catch blocks for easier debugging.

Thanks and Regards,

Mohammed Zakir