Are there plans to remove Workflow from Service Now?

[Tom Brown]

We keep hearing asides about Flow Designer replacing Workflow, and the extension of that is that Workflow will no longer be needed at all.  While I understand that it's great that SN is steering toward the no-code/low-code that they are advertising, I don't see Flow Designer being capable of replacing workflow when we need something particularly nasty.  I could see perhaps evaluating a new catalog item to see if it fit flow designer first, then workflow if it was likely to grow overly complicated.  What's the general feel for this?  Anyone have a roadmap of where they're likely to take it?

[Pradeep Sharma]

Hello Tom,

Let me know if that answered your question. If so, please mark the appropriate  response as correct so that others with the same question in the future can find it quickly and that it gets removed from the Unanswered list.

-Pradeep Sharma

[Joyce4]

Is there an article that explains when it would be better to use Flow designer and when it would be better to use Workflows?

[Allen Andreas]

Hi,

The basic agreement is that you should attempt Flow Designer first and if it meets your needs then that is what you go with, otherwise, use Workflow Editor. There are a few times where Flow Designer doesn't meet the need fully, so Workflow Editor is then recommended to use.

Please mark reply as Helpful, if applicable. Thanks!

[Mark Roethof]

Haven't seen an article for this. Though in general, I would say first look at Flow Designer. And like Allen mentioned, if it doesn't fit your case/not yet possible, then go for Workflow / Scheduled Job / Inbound Action / Business Rule. I am mentioning more than Workflow only... Flow Designer not just a replacement for Workflow, it's way more!

I must admit, Flow Designer is still not my first go to 🙂 Though Flow Designer is the new standard for ServiceNow. More and more is done with Flow Designer. Every release Flow Designer gets bigger, faster performance, more capabilities added, Flow Designer -> IntegrationHub which is really nice, easy debugging with viewing the executions (although it's best practice to disable this in production), etc..

Sure not everything still can be done properly with Flow Designer. I don't like the Inbound Mail part and am still sticking with good old Inbound Actions.

Kind regards,
Mark

[Tom Brown]

Flow Designer is getting better.  I see fixes every patch to remediate some of its problems.  I see it being useful, just not as versatile as Workflow.  It seems to be a little slower, and I was able to seriously slow down a subproduction instance by triggering some recursive behaviors that a new user might accidentally do.  Might have even shut it down if I had let it keep generating records.  I'd be very careful about letting people build in flow designer who aren't at least somewhat technically savvy.  They will likely need to understand at least the basics of table structure if they're going to be able to use table data and do some work with it.

We're planning to do what Allen and Mark said, to try Flow Designer if it seems to be capable of doing the work.  Likely it usually will be quite effective.  If it seems to require more scripting and special handling, then workflow.  Hopefully we won't get in too many situations where something starts with flow designer but outgrows it and needs to be redeveloped.  Flow Designer feels more like a Business Rule replacement to me.  Definitely more to it than catalog, as Mark mentioned.