Windmill vs Workflow Engine
Windmill
windmill.devWorkflow Engine
workflowengine.ioSide by side
| Figure | Windmill | Workflow Engine |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $120/mo | $666.67/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 7 |
| Spec score · Workflow Orchestration Software | 8.6 (#11) | 7.8 (#25) |
| Company | Windmill says it was founded in 2022 and is based between San Francisco and Paris. | The product site identifies Optimajet Limited and lists its office at 14 Penn Plaza, 225 West 34th Street, New York, NY 10122. |
| Headquarters | San Francisco and Paris | New York, United States |
| Integrations | Windmill Hub lists more than 200 resource types, including Google services, GitHub, GitLab, Slack, Microsoft Teams, AWS, S3, BigQuery, ClickHouse, Datadog and Discord. | The maker lists plugins including Approval, Loops, File, Active Directory and Entra ID, Real-Time Tracking, and support for custom plugins. |
| Product | Windmill is an open-source workflow engine and developer platform for building endpoints, workflows and user interfaces. | Workflow Engine is an embeddable .NET workflow library that persists business process state in your database and supports timers, audit history, and process versioning. |
| Security | Windmill lists granular permissions, RBAC, secret management, OAuth, SSO and audit logs among its enterprise features. | The core engine has no user store and delegates workflow command authorization to an application-provided rule provider; authentication remains the host application's responsibility. |
| Support | The free self-hosted plan includes community support on Discord, while Enterprise lists 24/7 priority support with a 3-hour response time. | The maker directs existing customers to technical support under their support plan and offers public GitHub Discussions for questions. |
| Trial | Windmill's pricing page offers an Enterprise trial for a month. | The pricing page lists product trial periods from 30 to 90 days, depending on the commercial edition. |
Plans
Windmill
- Free and Open-sourceFree
- Free and Open-sourceFree
- Enterprise$120 a month
- Enterprise example configuration$170 a month
Workflow Engine
- Workflow Engine FreeFree
- Workflow Engine Team$2,000, paid once
- Workflow Engine Complete$5,000, paid once
- Workflow Engine NEO Subscription$8,000 a year
- Workflow Engine NEO Business$10,000, paid once
- Workflow Engine NEO SaaS$15,000, paid once
- Workflow Engine NEO EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
Windmill
Windmill is an open-source workflow engine and developer platform for building endpoints, workflows and user interfaces. It is aimed at teams making internal software across engineering, data, sales, support and marketing. Scripts can be written in TypeScript, Python, Go, PHP, Bash, C#, SQL, Rust, Ruby and R, among other languages. Windmill combines a script editor, low-code flow builder, and low-code, React or Svelte app builders. Scripts and flows can be triggered by webhooks, schedules, HTTP routes, queues or an open API. Its Hub lists more than 200 resource types, including GitHub, Slack, AWS, BigQuery and PostgreSQL; users can also define custom resource types with schemas. Local development through the CLI and Git sync support version control and deployment workflows. Self-hosting is supported. The free and open-source plan is free and includes three workspaces, 50 users, 10 GiB of workspace object storage and 100 guest app users per 30 days. Enterprise is $120 a month and includes a month-long trial. Enterprise features include granular permissions, RBAC, secret management, OAuth, SSO and audit logs.
Workflow Engine
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.