If you’re a Salesforce admin, you very likely have heard that Process Builder and Workflow automations are destined for retirement.
If you’re a Salesforce customer that has only implemented within the last couple of years, you may not even know what Process Builder and Workflow Rules are. But long-time users may be anxious about this change. Fear not! Today we’re going to walk why Salesforce is ending support, what this means for your existing automations, and how to seamlessly migrate your existing work over to Flow to avoid any disruptions.
A brief history of Salesforce process automation tools
First there were Workflow rules, enabling admins to perform simple tasks like record updates or sending notifications when certain conditions were met. Eventually, Salesforce added the GUI-driven Process Builder, which allowed more complicated actions. In their day, Workflow and Process Builder were revolutionary–providing easy declarative (“clicks not code”) automation that let you customize Salesforce to meet your business needs.
In 2013, Salesforce added a third declarative automation tool called Visual Workflow–eventually shortened to just Flow. Since then, they’ve gone all-in to make Flow the best automation tool, greatly expanding its capabilities and enabling admins to build far more advanced automations than Process Builder and Workflow allowed. Just go back and skim through the Flow sections of release notes to see how major the focus has been.
This also meant the start of deprecating Process Builder and Workflow. Over the last few years, Salesforce has removed the ability to create new Workflow rules and Process Builders. The writing was on the wall that eventually, Flow was going to be the single automation tool on the platform.
Finally, after over a decade of development, they are officially ending support for Process Builder and Workflow as of December 31, 2025.
Why is Salesforce making the switch?
There are two main reasons: performance and user experience.
Workflow rules are nearly as old as the Salesforce platform itself and have received relatively little re-architecture over time as the platform has evolved. Although they performed well–given their limited capabilities–Salesforce estimates that some Flows execute between 10x and 20x faster than Workflow rules. And they’re even faster than Process Builders. Flow’s
If you’ve ever built Process Builders or Workflow rules, you know that the user interfaces are challenging to work with. They also have no real testing or debugging capabilities, which makes building reliable automations much harder. This makes admins’ jobs easier, and results in automations that cause fewer issues for users.
Flow is also more capable of performing multiple actions based on the same triggering action, with more complex logic. In the old days, you might have had to build multiple Workflow rules or Process Builders to accomplish a goal, whereas now a single Flow might do the trick.
What happens if I don’t migrate to Flow?
As of December 31, 2025 Salesforce will no longer support Workflow Rules and Process Builder. But this does not mean that they will stop working.
Existing Workflow Rules and Process Builder processes will continue to function in their current state, but they will no longer receive customer support, bug fixes, or updates.
Obviously, Salesforce will not release new features for either tool. Beyond that, there are two major implications:
- If you encounter an issue with one of your automations, Salesforce support will not provide troubleshooting or resolution steps.
- If a critical platform bug that affects either the Process Builder or Workflow engines arises, Salesforce will not promise to fix the bug.
In both cases, the official support stance will be that the affected automation should be migrated to Flow.
So, knowing that you may one day have to migrate to Flow, it makes sense to make your plans and begin your transition now.
First, make a plan and do some spring cleaning
Planning a transition to Flow is the perfect chance to inventory your existing automations and determine which ones are still necessary. You can also look for opportunities to combine older automations into a single Flow.
When making your plan, we recommend starting with an inventory of your current active automations. We’ve built an example tracking sheet that you can use to do this, enabling you to track the process through converting in a sandbox, testing, and deploying to production. Feel free to download the file to serve as your starting point.
How do I migrate my existing automations to Flow?
When you’re ready to get started, know that you may not have to rebuild everything from scratch. Salesforce has built its own internal tool for assisting in the migration process. You can find the Migrate to Flow tool from either the Workflow Rules or Process Builder pages in Setup. Just look for the info box at the top of each page:
Once in the tool, Salesforce will automatically provide you with a list of your current Process Builder or Workflow automations that are eligible to be migrated. It’s important to note that not all automations are eligible for migration using the tool. Salesforce has documentated the limations, but in general they include more sophisticated Process Builder features like time-based pathways. Remember: just because the tool can’t automatically transfer a legacy automation doesn’t mean Flow can’t actually perform the work you need. It just means that you may have to manually re-build those actions.
Once you’ve worked to clean, document, and identify the automations requiring migration it’s time to build some flows. Using the Migrate to Flow tool you can select the automations you wish to migrate to start the process. The tool will then walk you through the different criteria steps needed to migrate, and will help to call out whether or not they are migratable. Select the criteria to proceed, and click Migrate to Flow.
For additional context, here’s what the tool looks like when converting a process with slightly more steps. Each step within the process is it’s own node, allowing you to selectively choose which ones to migrate if you have any criteria you with to deprecate:
If successful, the tool will provide you with some next steps, including the name of and a link to the created flow. There are also additional reminders to activate the new Flow, and deactivate the old process. Before clicking Done, click the Test in Flow Builder to see, edit and activate the resulting Flow.
The Flow built as a result of this tool was a fairly straightforward and simple flow. However it’s always a good idea to confirm the steps were migrated correctly, comparing it with the old process, and running a few debug/tests to make sure everything is functioning correctly before activating. If everything looks good and was migrated correctly, click the Activate button and then navigate back to the tab with the Migrate to Flow tool and click Done.
Back on the Migrate to Flow tab, you can see the tool now displays the resulting flow that was created as a part of the process. This gives you a counterpart to the planning sheet in Salesforce so you can track your progress:
Conclusion
While your existing automations may continue to run past the support date cutoff, relying on unsupported tools is a risky long-term plan. Migrating to Flow early ensures your automations are future-proof, fully-supported, and built on Salesforce’s most up-to-date automation platform. Take the opportunity now to modernize and streamline your automations before before you’re forced to catch up under pressure.
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