Groundhogg’s latest version of the Flow builder has been out for about a year now. Users love it, and it’s been incredibly reliable.
We often take the tools we use every day for granted. Especially automation tools, because they seem to be everywhere now. Every single one of our competitors offers some kind of automation workflow editor.
You might not notice it on the surface, but Groundhogg’s flow editor is actually quite different from those of our competitors in many ways.
We didn’t just copy the UX and UI of one of our competitors. We actually developed something new. We spent countless hours on graph theory and traversal optimization.
As a result, Groundhogg’s flows are…
- More reliable
- Faster to build
- Easier to edit
- Simpler to debug
- Offer more flexibility
Compared to the automation tools of our competitors.
Workflow builders typically fall into three categories.
Canvas editors.
In a canvas-type editor, you drag and drop elements into a canvas grid and connect each element manually. That’s amazing for flexibility, but the cost of flexibility is complexity you pay for later in performance, reliability, and clarity (ease-of-use).
- Pros: Ultimate flexibility
- Cons: Slow to build, easy to break, difficult to edit live, and confusing for novices
Tree editors.
Tree-type editors offer a more deterministic layout. They look flexible, but they’re actually one-directional trees. You can split paths, but you can’t meaningfully bring them back together (no merge), meaning you could end up with a lot of duplicated elements and complex logic for serious automations. Some tools skirt around this limitation by allowing you to create a manual connection between elements in different branches, but personally, I think that’s silly.
- Pros: Easy for novices, clear separation of logic
- Cons: Automations with many conditions can get messy and large
Linear editors.
Groundhogg’s own editor used to be linear-style. No/limited branching, or per-element conditions for logic. Very fast and easy to build and understand, but not as flexible for advanced automations.
- Pros: Limited logic, super fast, easy maintenance
- Cons: Lack of flexibility, no/limited branching
Some of our competitors actually offer a linear editor and “fake” the branching. You can tell if they’re faking it by whether you can nest conditionals within branches.
How Groundhogg flows are different!
We developed a new model and the underlying theory and math to prove it’s better. Our scientific designation is Structured Flow Tree (or SFT), and it’s what makes Groundhogg flows possible. It merges the best parts of a linear model and a tree model, giving you the pros of a canvas-type editor without the cons of maintaining one.
- Maximum flexibility without maintaining manual connections between elements
- Nested branches that merge later
- Multiple star conditions with trigger-specific actions
- Drag and drop elements anywhere without breaking connections
The SFT is just a better way to do workflows.
If you’re a nerd like me, I invite you to have a look at a write-up on how SFTs work and how they outperform other workflow models.
