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.net-coreworkflowelsa-workflows

What is the best workflow engine for ASP.NET Core project


We are evaluating and looking for a workflow engine which support .NET-Core and I'd really appreciate the community input. I would like to hear on the suggestion based on your guys implementation stories.

My main evaluation criteria, so far, are below;

  • open source and OEM friendly license
  • production installations (success stories are a great help)
  • technical support available
  • open standards support - BPMN
  • dynamic creation/assembly of the workflow based on input
  • embeddable

Currently I am evaluating Elsa, Workflow Core, Argo, and Airflow. Elsa seems like a good candidate as well but never used it. Do you guys have any successful deployments on Elsa workflow engine?


Solution

  • Full disclosure: I am the project lead of Elsa, but I will try and be as objective as I can.

    Elsa does not currently support BPMN, so if this is a hard requirement then Elsa might not be suitable for your project. At least not until it implements BPMN in the future.

    As for technical support, there is no official paid support available as of yet, but the community is very friendly & helpful, though still relatively small.

    Dynamic creation based on input is possible since you can programmatically define workflows. But you cannot update workflows while it executes (which would be more or less similar to being able to update your C# program statements as your program runs). Not sure if this is what you are looking for or not?

    Other than that, Elsa is OEM friendly, runs in production successfully at several companies that I know of and is embeddable.