With Salesforce pushing "Flow-first" development, my team is debating whether to move our complex multi-step approvals and cross-departmental tasks into Flow Orchestrator. Is the visual debugging and low-code benefit worth the potential overhead compared to a well-written, bulkified Apex trigger?
3 answers
The real value of Flow Orchestration isn't just "low-code"—it’s the ability to manage "long-running" processes that involve human intervention. Apex Triggers are designed for immediate, synchronous or near-synchronous database operations. Orchestrator, however, can handle a process that waits days for a manager to approve a step before triggering a background update in another system. It provides a much-needed bird's-eye view of where a business process is stuck. For pure data manipulation at scale, a bulkified Apex trigger is still more performant, but for end-to-end business logic involving multiple users and stages, Orchestrator wins on maintainability and visibility every time.
Have you encountered any issues with the execution limits when running hundreds of active orchestrations simultaneously?
The visual timeline in Orchestrator makes it so much easier to explain the process flow to business stakeholders.
I agree, Linda. Being able to show a non-technical manager a visual map of the process saves hours of documentation time.
We did run into some governor limit issues early on, James. The key is to offload the heavy data processing to "Auto-launched Flows" or Apex actions called within the Orchestration steps. This keeps the Orchestrator layer "lean" and focused solely on the sequencing and state management, which prevents hitting the element execution limits.