Salesforce is Retiring Process Builder & Workflow Rules - Here's What You Should Do

By: David Cheng

At the end of 2022, Salesforce will be retiring Workflow Rules and Process Builder automation. While your current Workflow Rules and Process Builders will continue to run, you will not be able to create new automation using these tools. Instead, you'll have to create new automation using Flow.

Feeling overwhelmed? Contact us for help transitioning to Flow.

Flows have some very important advantages over Process Builders:

Flow is more efficient and runs faster than Process Builder
Flow is far less likely to hit system limits when processing large numbers of records
Flow can do more complex sets of actions across multiple objects
Flow can delete records

Salesforce has released tools to convert Workflow Rules and Process Builders to Flow. However, there's no doubt that you'll need to edit and fine-tune the resulting Flows, as well as build new Flows for any new processes that you'll need.

The most important technical aspect of Flow is the ability to run a record-triggered flow "before save". This is extremely valuable because all Process Builders and Workflow Rules run "after save".

salesforce process builder retirement plan

What does this mean?

Let's say that when the "Stage" changes on an opportunity record, you want to update some other field on the opportunity (for example, the Description field).

With Process Builder or Workflow Rule, the system first saves the opportunity with the new Stage value, and then the Process Builder/Workflow Rule updates the other field and saves the opportunity again.

If your process builder has multiple steps that include different updates to the opportunity, you could end up saving the record multiple times.

Each additional save may also cause automations like Apex triggers to run another time on the record.

With Flow, the other field is updated before the opportunity is saved, so the single save contains both the Stage change and your desired field update.

Chances are, most of your Process Builders and Workflow Rules involve same-record updates, so converting these to record-triggered before-save flows should give you some immediate performance improvements.