Understanding the process automation landscape

Processes and process automation take many forms. Here’s how to navigate the growing ecosystem of tools for automating everything from simple repetitive tasks to complex custom workflows.

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Sometimes, tool categories without specific support for process automation are also evaluated in the context of process automation projects. Data pipelines are a case in point. Because they can often be modeled graphically, people are tempted to use them for process automation.

Data pipelines (e.g. Apache Airflow, Spring Cloud Data Flow): These tools have a different focus and thus lack important features for the process automation use case, such as support for control flow constructs like loops. Additionally, these tools don’t have their own implementation of persistence, so the state of a process instance is the data item flowing through the pipe.

Of course, one could also simply hard code everything to automate a process, yielding a bespoke workflow engine, which you should definitely avoid.

Summary and conclusion

With the thoughts above in mind, I sketched the landscape shown in the figure below. The table lists the main tool categories described in this article, along with some exemplary tools. (I apologize in advance for all the tools I missed!)

I see developer-friendly workflow engines as the sweet spot to automate complex tailor-made processes. Low-code approaches also have their merits, typically when automating single tasks or simple processes in an environment that does not require much governance.


Bucket	Category	Description	Examples
Standard processes	Commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS)	Implement standard processes	Siebel, Salesforce, SAP
Low-code task automation	Robotic process automation (RPA)	Automate tasks in applications without APIs by controlling their user interface	UiPath
	Application integration tools and integration platform as a service (iPaaS)	Allow non-developers to automate single tasks by integrating apps	Zapier, IFTTT, Tray.io, Integromat
Developer-friendly task automation	Event-driven architecture (EDA)	Allow components to react on events provided on a central bus	Apache Kafka
	Integration frameworks	Help developers implement certain integration patterns	Apache Camel
	Batch processing	Automate tasks on data
Low-code process automation	BPMS or iBPMS	Allow non-developers to automate simple processes	Pega, Appian
	Integration platform as a service (iPaaS)	Allow non-developers to assemble simple processes from low-code tasks	Tray.io, Process Street
Developer-friendly process automation	Workflow engines and orchestrators (OSS product)	Allow developers to implement process automation solutions using their productive environment and experience	Camunda, JBoss jBPM, Flowable
	Workflow engines and orchestrators (SaaS, cloud)	Same, but operated as a service	AWS Step Functions, Google Workflow, Camunda Cloud
	Workflow engines and orchestrators (OSS project)	Same, but not backed by a vendor; open sourced by one end user company	Netflix Conductor, Uber Cadence
	Data pipelines	Allow developers to automate data flows, but without own persistence or the ability to model constructs like loops	Apache Airflow, Spring Cloud Data Flow

Bernd Ruecker is co-founder and chief technologist of Camunda as well as author of Practical Process Automation (O’Reilly). He likes speaking about himself in the third person. He is passionate about developer-friendly process automation technology. Connect via LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter or send him an email. As always, he loves getting your feedback.

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