Flowable vs n8n comparison

Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Automation Anywhere

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies category, the mindshare of Automation Anywhere is 6.3%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Flowable is 2.4%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of n8n is 3.6%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Automation Anywhere	6.3%
n8n	3.6%
Flowable	2.4%
Other	87.7%

Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash

Management Consultant at Accenture

Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions

Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.

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Simon Greener

Solutions Architect at Cohga Pty Ltd

Helps to control the workflow and business process components of customers' operations but OSGi integration can be challenging

I'd rate my experience with the initial setup of Flowable at about a three out of ten, but for our developers, it's probably closer to a six. I found it challenging due to the complexity of the user and help documents and the fact that much of the Flowable documentation and tutorials are focused on cloud-based implementations. Since we're primarily interested in basic components like BPMN models and form design, which aren't included in the product, the learning process was more difficult for me. In contrast, our developers are more comfortable diving into the code and technology stack, which allows them to be more proactive in their approach. The deployment took three months to complete. We're still in the deployment process. Our main challenge is integrating the Flowable process engine into our product, which uses OSGi. This has led to complexity in managing the Java versions and dependencies, as the tool has around 150 Java files. We could have chosen to interact with Flowable via a Docker container and the REST API, which would have isolated the OSGi Java dependencies, but we decided to integrate it directly. This has required resolving Java version control issues and upgrades, leading to various development challenges that must be addressed. It is a learning process for all of us. As an integrated solutions architect, I would have probably opted for the Docker route rather than the direct OSGi integration chosen by the developers. However, since they went with the OSGi integration, it's taking us longer to complete the deployment. Currently, we have one full-time developer dedicated to deployment, along with one part-time developer, and my involvement at about a quarter of my time. So, we have about two people working on deployment. As for maintenance, we're not entirely sure yet. Given our direct OSGi integration choice instead of Docker and REST, maintenance may be more challenging. However, we'll have a clearer picture once deployment is complete.

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Noach Ramallo

ERP recommendation specialist at a non-tech company with 1-10 employees

Automation has transformed complex workflows and has empowered non‑technical teams to build flows

Regarding improvements for n8n, I would highlight two areas. First, while there is a growing community, the ecosystem of pre-built nodes for niche or proprietary systems still lags behind some commercial competitors. I often have to build custom HTTP request nodes or create my own node packages, which is doable but adds to project timelines. Second, features for team collaboration and lifecycle management are still evolving. Moving workflows from development to staging to production can be a manual export-import process, and native Git integration and more robust user roles for larger client teams would be a game-changer. Regarding needed improvements, I believe much of the existing documentation is not peer-reviewed. There is definitely a big community, but if the documentation or tutorials were approved or at least had a badge from n8n, customers would feel that this meets the standards of n8n editors themselves, which would give more confidence in the flows.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The ease of use for the end user and the very low complexity in trying to build a bot are the big factors for us."

"Tasks or activities that were taking almost six hours a day have been reduced drastically to 30 minutes, which saves time as well as business costs."

"Object cloning with an option to enter wildcard selection was very useful when working in a web application that generated dynamic HTML content."

"Using Automation Anywhere has improved our company significantly, as we are doing over eight to 10,000 invoices a month, which people had to do before, while now the automated process is doing that without too much human intervention, saving probably about at least two to possibly three FTEs per week."

"It is very user-friendly. The AI capability that nowadays I am seeing in Automation Anywhere is very good. They have plug-and-play AI solutions."

"Without thinking twice, I would recommend going for Automation Anywhere."

"The product is easy to use. It is a good tool for developers and business users."

"It is a great solution."

More Automation Anywhere pros

"The tool's most valuable feature is the process engine. It allows us to define BPM-based workflows, deploy them into our process engine, and interact with them within our product."

"n8n is a really good automation platform where I can use it to automate my businesses and processes and also save money and time."

"The low-code interface and the quick code writing within n8n that we can do and utilize is very helpful; it brings in efficiency, better time to market, and actually helps us."

"n8n is pretty flexible when it comes to pricing, setup cost, and licensing when compared to other platforms such as Make and Zapier."

"We see roughly a 70% reduction in manual processing time on the document pipeline side, which means our clients can focus on higher-value audit and compliance work rather than data entry."

"The solution is absolutely efficient in terms of usage and is user-friendly."

"Our business is growing faster because we have created workflows that help us improve our business."

"For lead generation, I gave all the contacts to n8n and made it write the email and automated the email sending workflow for lead generation, and the conversion rate was around 70%."

"n8n has positively impacted my organization because we previously needed to write product descriptions manually for over 50,000 products on our website, so we created an automation that automatically writes all meta descriptions and titles, which significantly supports our growth and is very helpful and time-saving for us."

More n8n pros

Cons

"The setup is complex because there is a lot of customization."

"Automation Anywhere can include database commands like insert row, bold row, etc commands in 11.x"

"We have had so many stability issues."

"The Automation Anywhere University courses have helped us, but it could improve some things, like how the courses are designed."

"I suggest that they add some features in dashboard, where you can say, "These type of features are things that people like more." You want to add those to your project and showcase them to the client so they will be happier. Because you know what features people like if you give a suggestion, that is good for everyone."

"New versions keep coming up. The challenge for us is to have the downtime to do the migrations."

"The initial implementation of Automation Anywhere regarding the elastic search and database set connection can be a little difficult. However, I am skilled enough to get through it. There were some balancing issues that my other team members had to manage. They are having difficulty in balancing when I checked the architecture properly. We determined later that there was no need for a load balance to be done on the servers. We didn't do any load balancing and then the elastic search was not done."

"Sometimes, in Automation Anywhere, the recording process takes longer when capturing tasks on websites or applications, and there can be internal errors."

More Automation Anywhere cons

"In my opinion, areas of improvement for Flowable include the management and creation of forms within the open-source components and the documentation and examples provided. While the cloud-based Flowable implementation with no-code features is attractive, we prefer more control over integration, especially since we deploy our product onto AWS. We also want to avoid additional licensing fees for Flowable runtime user components on top of our software development and implementation charges."

"The localized implementation is a bit complex and we definitely need some developers involved within this process."

"The debug experience could be stronger; when a workflow fails partway through a complex multi-step process, it is sometimes hard to pinpoint exactly where and why, requiring manual stepping through each node."

"I have set up n8n on our local server, which is on a Contabo-based server, and sometimes it was losing connection."

"There are limitations in scalability."

"I think it is better if there is an improvement within the system, as sometimes responses are not being picked up fast enough and sometimes the system indicates whether I am there or not, even after I have given a response."

"n8n has a bit of a learning curve to it; you have to learn a lot."

"Because of that constraint, I used the way n8n itself flows and works to create an autonomous system that I designed for the marketing domain, making sure that the guardrails are executing at the commit boundary."

"Currently, most products nowadays include walkthrough or guide videos, short videos of 20 to 30 seconds that inform about any particular button or action, which n8n product does not have."

More n8n cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing cost could be improved. It costs a lot. At the very least, the developer licenses and the control panels should be made free to enterprises, and the production environment licensed."

"It is expensive. I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten in terms of pricing."

"Our advice is that anybody interested in this product should negotiate product bundles in order to reduce the cost of installation and setup."

"Automation Anywhere is expensive, making it suitable only for enterprise organizations."

"On a yearly basis, our licensing costs are about $80,000. There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

"We are not receiving the right information about their features, e.g. Automation Anywhere University, or anything that they are selling. They need to improve their documentation."

"One of the key features that we chose, the bot as a service or the BotFarm, when they launched version 11.3, they decided not to have the BotFarm anymore. This put us in a situation because we expected to have bots on demand, just like our cloud software. This would have been cost efficient for us to use. We hope to see this again being realized with A2019. I hope the scalability from an on demand basis improves."

"They sell it by license, but if they could charge by case or by interaction, that might be better. Right now, it's expensive when you want to scale or use them for simple processes."

More Automation Anywhere pricing and cost advice

"Since the tool is open-source, we don't have to pay anything for it. It's free to download and use, which is great for us. If Flowable hadn't been available as open source and required a license fee for us to integrate it into our product, we might not have chosen it."

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Construction Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

28%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Outsourcing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	157
Midsize Enterprise	81
Large Enterprise	558

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	2

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?

It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?

From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?

It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for n8n?

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

Since we self-hosted, we avoided n8n's SaaS pricing entirely. Our costs are primarily on the Hostinger VPS subscripti...

What needs improvement with n8n?

n8n could improve the onboarding and debugging experience for users who are not deeply technical. The platform is pow...

What is your primary use case for n8n?

My main use case for n8n is in the area of HubSpot marketing CRM AI agent project. I built and implemented CRM market...

UiPath Platform vs Automation Anywhere

Comparisons

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Power Automate vs Automation Anywhere

Compared 9% of the time

Blue Prism vs Automation Anywhere

Compared 6% of the time

AutomationEdge vs Automation Anywhere

Compared 2% of the time

WorkFusion vs Automation Anywhere

Compared 2% of the time

More Automation Anywhere Competitors

Camunda vs Flowable

Compared 25% of the time

Temporal vs Flowable

Compared 17% of the time

Pega Platform vs Flowable

Compared 9% of the time

Kognitos vs Flowable

Compared 8% of the time

Bonita vs Flowable

Compared 4% of the time

More Flowable Competitors

Inngest vs n8n

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Foundry vs n8n

Compared 5% of the time

Qlik Talend Cloud vs n8n

Compared 4% of the time

UiPath Platform vs n8n

Compared 4% of the time

Mendix vs n8n

Compared 3% of the time

More n8n Competitors

Product Reports

Download Automation Anywhere product report

Automation Anywhere

August 2026

Process Automation

Download Flowable product report

n8n

Download n8n product report

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)

No data available

n8n.io n8n

Interactive Demo

Automation Anywhere

Demo not available

Flowable

Demo not available

n8n.io

Overview

Automation Anywhere offers ease of use, robust system connectivity, and GenAI-driven document automation through a cloud-native platform, significantly enhancing productivity across multiple industries with advanced AI features.

Delivering a comprehensive suite of tools designed for easy integration and rapid deployment, Automation Anywhere drives efficiency by reducing costs and automating repetitive tasks. Its cloud-native platform supports broad industry adoption, including advanced AI features like process automation and Co-Pilot, streamlining complex workflows with minimal technical skills required. Users benefit from robust integration capabilities, which facilitate seamless interaction with multiple systems. However, there is room for improvement in areas such as user-friendliness for beginners, stability, flexible licensing, and enhanced OCR functionality. Organizations in sectors such as banking, finance, manufacturing, and healthcare gain from the improved operational efficiency and ROI Automation Anywhere offers.

What are the important features of Automation Anywhere?

Ease of Use: Simplifies automation tasks with a user-centric interface.
Robust Connectivity: Provides seamless integration with multiple systems.
GenAI-Driven Document Automation: Leverages AI to automate document management.
Process Automation & Co-Pilot: Enhances workflow automation with advanced AI.
Cloud-Native Platform: Enables rapid deployment and integration.

What benefits should be evaluated in reviews?

Time Savings: Automation drastically reduces manual processing time.
Cost Efficiency: Decreases overall operational costs by automating tasks.
Productivity Enhancement: Streamlines workflows with AI-driven tools.
Improved Integration: Enhances ability to work with multiple systems.
Scalability: Supports growth with a flexible cloud-native architecture.

In the insurance industry, Automation Anywhere is utilized for automating processes such as enrollment management and compliance checks. Its applications extend to supply chain management, financial transactions, and business performance monitoring across sectors like banking, finance, manufacturing, and healthcare, helping organizations to automate routine tasks, improve efficiency, and reduce costs.

Automation Anywhere

Flowable is a versatile software that streamlines and automates business processes. It is commonly used for workflow management, task automation, and digital transformation initiatives.

Users also utilize Flowable for document management, case management, and customer journey mapping. Its valuable features include efficient workflow management, seamless integration capabilities, and a user-friendly interface.

Flowable allows for smooth collaboration and task automation, and its ability to integrate with other systems and applications enables a seamless flow of information.

The intuitive and easy-to-use interface makes it accessible to users of all technical backgrounds.

Flowable

n8n offers a flexible, low-code automation platform connecting over 200 applications to streamline workflows and increase efficiency through visual configurations and real-time monitoring.

n8n provides a robust environment for automating tasks with extensive integrations, benefitting users through its adaptability and developer-friendly design. It supports AI model integrations like ChatGPT to enhance automation. While users value its configurability and real-time logs, they suggest enhancements in scalability, stability, and documentation. It serves a multitude of purposes, from billing and customer support to marketing and data management, by linking platforms like Airtable and Google Sheets.

What are key features of n8n?

Flexibility: Offers adaptable workflows and extensive customization options.
Low-Code Interface: Simplifies workflow creation through a drag-and-drop interface.
Real-Time Logs: Provides immediate feedback during task execution.
Integration Capacity: Connects with over 200 applications and AI models.
Data Privacy: Ensures strong data management to build user trust.

What benefits should users consider?

Time Savings: Reduces time on repetitive tasks, increasing productivity.
Cost Efficiency: Frees resources by automating various processes.
Enhanced Integration: Seamless connections across platforms boost workflow efficiency.
Customization: Tailored solutions through user-specific expressions.
Developer Support: Encourages advanced usage through a developer-friendly environment.

n8n finds use in industries like healthcare, supply chain, and education, automating workflows to improve efficiency. Companies leverage it for tasks from e-commerce to AI-enhanced customer interactions, enhancing operations with minimal technical input required.

n8n.io

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics

1. Adobe 2. BMW 3. Cisco 4. Dell 5. Ericsson 6. Ford 7. General Electric 8. Honda 9. IBM 10. Johnson & Johnson 11. Kia Motors 12. LG Electronics 13. Microsoft 14. Nike 15. Oracle 16. PepsiCo 17. Qualcomm 18. Red Bull 19. Samsung 20. Toyota 21. Uber 22. Visa 23. Walmart 24. Xerox 25. Yahoo 26. Zara 27. Accenture 28. Bank of America 29. Citigroup 30. Deutsche Bank 31. ExxonMobil 32. Facebook

Information Not Available

Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies