Flow Designer vs Orchestration ?

[rahulyamgar]

Hello Friends,

I would like to get the suggestion/recommendation on what to use - Flow Designer or Workflow Editor (Orchestration)?

I can see that Flow Designer has the capability to carry out almost all of the activities which can be done in Workflow Editor. Also, i read (somewhere) that Flow Designer is future of the ServiceNow workflows. 

Personally, i feel that flows are easy to create and easy to manage/support.

Awaiting for your valuable guidance here.

Thanks,
Rahul  

[Brad Tilton]

Flow Designer/IntegrationHub is replacing Workflow/Orchestration and at this point there is basically feature parity. Flow designer gives you more logging and debugging options, as well as things like reusable actions and IntegrationHub. We're releasing more IntegrationHub spokes every month through the store, so using flow designer you're future proofing yourself a bit.

[sabell2012]

I agree with Brad on this. I like the future-proofing bit. However, there are several additional points that need to be brought out when considering which product to develop with:

(FD - Flow Designer, IH - Integration Hub)

1. As of Madrid ServiceNow is no longer is selling Orchestration as a separate product.

2. However, it is still bundled and used by several important ServiceNow products (Cloud Management, Event Management to name a couple).

3. A bit of history: Run-book was acquired mid-2012 by ServiceNow.  Re-labeled as Orchestration.  Product installed base is massive.  Fortune 500; 2012-2019.  Incredible investment $$$.  

4. There is no migration path provided by ServiceNow for this installed base.  This would require existing implementations to re-invest the same monies to recreate Orchestration workflows.  Not completely from scratch, of course, but the flow itself might actually change.  IH and Orchestration are not the same product after all. This will likely require re-thinking the solution.

5. Finding experienced people in Orchestration is pretty easy right now (for development and support).  Finding similar people with experience in IH is daunting at best.  There are just a handful of us who have experience working with the product.

6. A lot of the no-code solution does not apply to the parity.  In other words you will still have to do the specialty coding.

7. The training materials on saba point out a couple of interesting things:

a. You will need to use Orchestration instead of IH if IH does not have the functionality you need. 

b. If the spoke is not available you will have to use Orchestration (or wait; more spokes coming)

8. There is no separate training class for FD/IH yet (coming).  There are bits on FD in various new training classes.  There are still classes for Orchestration.  There is a self-study and micro-certification in saba (check it out).  However, it is a hands-on survey, and it barely scratches the surface with things like REST, and scripting.  It does cover a couple of the existing spokes.

9. With Orchestration are a number of how-to intermediate to advanced labs and articles on the community.  Nothing of this sort exists yet for IH (give it some time).

10. There are a considerable number of experienced people on the community available to answer your questions in Orchestration.  This is not the case with IH yet (will take time).

11. Watch out for limitations on IH that don't exist with Orchestration. Especially with large amounts of data across the web.

12. You might want to look over the licensing carefully as well. It is different with IH than with Orchestration.  If you already have Orchestration you will incur an additional expense implementing IH. This is not a long-term issue if you plan on migrating your existing Orchestration workflows.

IH is a very powerful tool, and with the New York release it actually has some never before had features compared to Orchestration.  Eventually all of this will all change.  It will take time.

Steven.

NOTE: MY POSTINGS REFLECT MY OWN VIEWS AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT THE VIEWS OF MY EMPLOYER, ACCENTURE.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/newyork-release-notes/page/release-notes/now-platform-capabilities/integrationhub-rn.html

https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow-assets/public/en-us/doc-type/other-document/snmc-ihf.pdf 

[Jeff Currier · Accepted solution]

I feel this is a personal choice and the decision can be based both on the developer themselves and the flow to be created.  This is the advice I have been giving, which is only my opinion.

When choosing between flow designer and the workflow editor, look at two things:  1) yourself and 2) the context of the problem.

1) Are you more comfortable with workflow editor or flow designer?  Most at this point will say workflow editor, but if you are interesting in learning more and you have enough time (no immediate deadline), that might make the playing field more level.  And it might be good to try one flow designer flow if the requirements don't seem too hard, which brings us to #2

2) Between Workflow editor and flow designer which has an example closest to your retirement?  If you can copy something that gets you 80% of the way there versus the other method which only gets you 50% of the way there, then the former might be the way to go.

Anyway, my 2 cents.