Apache Airflow vs Workflow Engine

Apache Airflow is a platform for authoring, scheduling, and monitoring workflows written in Python. It is designed for batch workflows with a defined beginning and end that run on a schedule. Its web application lets users manage and schedule workflows, trigger DAGs manually, inspect task status and logs, backfill runs, and rerun failed tasks. A modular architecture uses a message queue to coordinate workers and can orchestrate an arbitrary number of them. Built-in operators connect workflows to Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and other services. The community maintains more than 80 separately installable provider packages, which can be upgraded or downgraded independently of Airflow core. Airflow can read connections, variables, and configuration from secret backends, but those integrations do not support writes. JWT authentication is used for its public REST API and internal Execution API. From Airflow 3 onward, sensitive credentials are masked in logs, the interface, and API output. Airflow is free to download and use under the Apache License.

Workflow Engine is an embeddable.NET library for managing business processes while saving their state in your database. It supports timers, audit history, and process versioning, and includes an HTML5 visual designer that can be embedded in an application. Designer packages are available for React, Angular, and vanilla JavaScript, with a documented Blazor integration. The core package supports.NET Framework 4.6.2 through.NET 10 and is deployed on-premises or in a customer's cloud. Supported databases include SQL Server, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Azure Cosmos DB, MySQL, Oracle, and SQLite. It imports BPMN 2.0 diagrams as native schemes, but does not export diagrams back to BPMN. Workflow Engine Free is licensed for personal, non-commercial use and costs nothing; it is limited to 10 schemas and 4 execution threads. Paid options include one-time licenses and subscriptions. NEO adds an HTTP API and multitenancy, while Workflow Server is a standalone Docker service called over HTTP. The core engine has no user store; authentication is the host application's responsibility.