It has become commonplace for companies to look to workflow software to trim the fat and boost their productivity metrics. Savvy business owners are constantly searching for solutions to automate their workflows and push their business to that extra percentile of efficiency.
Multiple names get used for this kind of tool: business process management software, process management software, workflow management software, to name a few. Whatever you choose to call it, the proposition remains the same. Workflow software offers a centralized hub for overseeing and optimizing all of the moving parts that make up your workflow.
These workflows are made up of processes, sets of step by step instructions designed to guide you along the ideal path to a simple desired outcome.
This guide covers three things. First, an outline of the basics of workflow management and how it fits into your business plan. Then a look at some of the different workflow tools currently on the market, comparing what they do. Finally, the key features to look out for when you decide which tool is the best fit, and how to get the most out of workflow management software in your own business.
Workflow management, explained for your business
To begin, let’s outline what is meant by workflow management. It is essentially the act of organizing and optimizing the relations between all of the processes in your business.
Part of the task is to look at the complete map of all the interconnecting processes in a given workflow and decide which tasks are sub-optimal, which can be automated, and which areas of the process could be improved. Ultimately, the goal of workflow management is to continually tweak and modify a workflow to maintain an ideal state.
Why workflows sit at the core of a business
Workflows are used by everyone, from small and medium-sized businesses and startups to enterprises and freelancers. They all see workflows as a way to make their business more efficient, which is exactly why workflow management matters: it keeps you on top of the workflows currently deployed.
Workflow management software is designed to make it easier for humans to keep track of the potentially complex and overwhelming systems that result from large or multiple workflows. It also helps companies scale their workflows alongside their growth. Beyond that, it promises to increase productivity, reduce costs, improve communications, and create a more fluid exchange of information between the systems in a project.
There is no restriction on how, or at what scale, these principles apply. You can use them to monitor deadlines for an individual member of your team, automate tasks assigned to whole teams, or evaluate performance at a project level. With workflow software, you can automate many of the tasks that would otherwise slow down or bottleneck production.
BPM and workflow management are not the same thing
Depending on who you ask, some people will tell you they are the same thing, while others insist they are not. People often conflate workflow and workflow management, which are two separate ideas.
The clean way to think about it: workflows organize and run individual processes, while business process management and analysis is the wider discipline of mapping and improving how all of those processes fit together. Workflow management is best understood as one important part of BPM. Both Appian and Kissflow have clear explainers on how the two relate. BPM is a vital skill set for startups and SMBs and can improve your success rate exponentially. To go deeper, read our Complete Guide to Business Process Management or our overview of BPM software.
How to choose the right fit for your team
Different tools are built to solve different kinds of problems, and there is a great deal of software out there that calls itself workflow management. It can sometimes be difficult to know how to choose the best fit for your business, but there are a few things you can always consider:
- What are your business goals?
- What is your budget?
- What is the size of your team?
- Where do you plan to be twelve months from now, in terms of growth and roadmap?
With all of that in mind, here is a breakdown of some of the best workflow tools available right now, along with what each one is really built for.
Five workflow tools worth comparing
Process Street
Process Street is a workflow management tool designed to streamline recurring tasks in any business environment, and today it runs as a Compliance Operations Platform. It brings together Docs for governed policies and SOPs, Ops for turning those procedures into automated, trackable workflows, and built-in AI that helps you create, enforce, and improve how work gets done.
You build a process once and run it as many times as you need, with owners, due dates, and a full record of what happened, reducing human error and improving your success rate. Rich form fields store and display the data each run needs, and features like conditional logic and dynamic due dates let a single workflow adapt to five different outcomes without a detour. If you need to make a change, Process Street’s workflow editing system allows quick and seamless edits on-the-fly, without disrupting runs already in progress.
On integrations, Process Street has direct, universal integrations to 5,000+ systems. Need a new one? An AI agent builds it on the fly. Zapier, Tray, and Power Automate are supported too for teams already running on them.
Jira
Jira, from Atlassian, is a great workflow and project management tool with many features useful for development teams. Designed to help organizations by assigning priorities and creating tasks, it lets users manage the entire workflow of software development from start to finish. The interface is simple and intuitive, so teams can collaborate from the concept stage to project launch, plan development sprints, and follow work with real-time reports.
Atlassian has pushed hard on AI inside Jira, with assistants that break work down, summarize issues, and help run projects. Without a doubt it is one of the leading work tracking apps for agile software development available today.
monday.com
monday.com takes a different approach to most workflow tools on the market. It focuses on presenting simple workflow structures in a kind of Kanban style view that clearly lays out tasks and the processes attached to them, which helps clarify the sequence of work. The organization is somewhat similar to a spreadsheet, so if managing your workflows that way sounds appealing, monday.com might be the right choice. What began as a simple work tracker has grown into a broad work platform, and it now leans into AI agents that team members can configure themselves.
Workflowy
Workflowy is an ultra-minimal workflow mapping tool that uses a bullet point focused word processor to map out the structure of processes in collapsible hierarchies. These process maps let you create and navigate complex workflows and keep everything tidy with the collapse feature. Workflowy also has handy tagging and collaborative features for team use. As one of the simplest pieces of workflow software around, you will struggle to find a tool with a smaller footprint, though it is better suited to mapping and thinking than to running and enforcing a full team process.
SharePoint
Chiefly a web-based platform for business collaboration inside Microsoft 365, SharePoint is primarily targeted at big corporations looking to manage workflows around large databases of documents. It is highly configurable and sees a wide variety of use cases for that reason. Its workflow layer has moved on, though. The old SharePoint Designer and the classic SharePoint workflow engine have been retired, and automation now runs through Power Automate in the Microsoft Power Platform. If your company already lives in Microsoft 365 and needs document heavy processes, SharePoint paired with Power Automate is the natural route.
How these tools compare
The right choice comes down to the job in front of you. Jira fits software and agile delivery. monday.com suits flexible, visual team work management. Workflowy is a lightweight outliner for mapping and thinking. SharePoint anchors document heavy work inside Microsoft 365. Process Street sits where a recurring process needs owners, enforcement, approvals, and proof that each step happened.
Plenty of other names show up on shortlists too, from Asana and ClickUp to Wrike, Smartsheet, Kissflow, Pipefy, and Nintex, each leaning toward a particular slice of the work. The trick is to match the tool to how your team actually runs, not to the longest feature list. For a wider view of the category, see our rundown of workflow management solutions.
Features every workflow tool should have
Intuitive and easy to use
Workflow management software should not make processes harder. Well-designed software lets the people designing workflows think simply and easily translate their thoughts into working processes, with room for deepening complexity that does not require a software specialist standing by. You should be able to design and configure a tool around the process you already have, rather than bending your process to fit the tool.
A visual, drag and drop builder
There is no need for the software you use to design your processes to make you open a console and spend twenty minutes manually coding the logic behind a task’s due date. Drag-and-drop is a must, and a good WYSIWYG process designer gives you bountiful form fields and ways to combine them: text, images, drop-down menus, multiple choice questions, URLs, emails, anything. If your first impression of the editor is noticeably stunted, chances are it will not improve further down the line.
Deep integrations
Good workflows are rarely built on just one piece of software, so strong integration is necessary for any decent workflow tool. The processes in your business involve a wide variety of components dealing with documents, reports, analytics, calendar dates, email addresses, project management, electronic contracts, client onboarding, and more. All of this information needs to flow seamlessly between your different tools. If your workflow system cannot integrate widely, it is already obsolete.
Managing workflows day to day
Workflow management is a constant, ongoing process. You need to be constantly thinking about how to improve the processes and workflows in your business, and for that you must have the capacity to tweak and change them on the fly without breaking anything.
Automating your workflows
Automation is the lubricant that facilitates efficient, well-optimized workflows. By removing the need to labor over tedious manual tasks, you can focus your energy on more important things, like designing good processes. Your workflows should strive to be robust: when a workflow is prepared for five different outcomes and can resolve each one without a hitch, you save time and reduce complexity, avoiding multiple systems chaos.
Turn Process Street into a workflow engine with integrations
Process Street connects to the rest of your stack through direct, universal integrations to 5,000+ systems, and when you need one that is not pre-wired, an AI agent builds it on the fly. Take a look at this checklist for client onboarding:
Within a single process like this, you could set up a connection to pull information from your CRM into the run, another to automatically send an electronic signature and upload it as soon as the client signs, and another for an orientation survey. By automating as many tasks in as many processes as possible, you make your whole business more efficient and improve the experience for your client and for anyone dealing with that workflow.
Go deeper on workflow automation
Check out our free ebooks to learn more about workflow automation with and without Zapier:
- The Ultimate Guide to Business Process Automation
- The Ultimate Guide to Small Business Automation with Zapier
- The Complete Guide to Business Process Management
If a recurring process in your business deserves owners, enforcement, and proof that each step happened, that is exactly what Process Street is built for. You can create a Process Street account or book a demo to see it run.
The post Our Best Workflow Software List first appeared on Process Street | Compliance Operations Platform.
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