Should SaaS companies build or buy a workflow feature? A complete guide

At some point, growing SaaS products hit the same fork in the road: users start asking for “automations,” “workflows,” or “integrations.”

Or, in a similar scenario, managers start looking for ways to enhance the product’s feature set to compete with more complex competitors, and land on “add workflows” as the answer.

Watch out – this can be a deceptively risky scenario to fall into. What sounds like a small feature request is usually not small at all. Before you know it, you’ve spent months of development time building what amounts to an addition to your product, not the product itself.

The core decision is pretty straightforward. Do you build a workflow feature yourself, or do you buy/embed one? It’s a decision I’ve been confronted with multiple times over my career, and one that ultimately led me to creating Embed Workflow in the first place.

In this post, we’ll take a deeper look at the buy vs. build dilemma. While we are obviously a natural proponent of the “buy” answer (since we sell embedded workflow software), there are definitely some scenarios in which building is the right option.

What “Build a Workflow Feature” Actually Entails

The first thing to be clear on is: what does building a workflow feature actually mean? It seems simple, but a closer look reveals a lot of less obvious details. Building workflows is not just “connecting a few APIs” or adding some extra lines of code to your app.

UI / UX

If your workflow builder is customer-facing, you need to make sure it’s legible and easy to understand. This includes functionality like:

• Where it fits in your product’s UI
• Triggers, actions, conditions
• Validation and configuration
• Error states users can interpret, fix, or get help with
• Versioning and editing existing workflows

This alone is a non-trivial product design problem – large enough for an entire company whose sole purpose is creating a workflow builder (like Embed Workflow.)

Execution Engine

Behind the UI sits infrastructure, where the actual magic happens. This includes, but isn’t limited to:

• Workflow orchestration
• Stateful execution
• Retries, delays, branching
• Composing dynamic placeholders
• Idempotency and failure recovery
• Long-running jobs
• Durable execution

This is backend-heavy, failure-prone work that can take up a considerable amount of dev time.

Integrations

Each integration with another third-party platform introduces:

• OAuth flows and token refresh
• Rate limits and throttling
• Partial failures and edge cases
• Ongoing maintenance as APIs change

Integrations are never “done.” Especially when your customers are constantly asking for new ones with the latest tools and platforms.

Monitoring, Logs, and Support

Once users rely on workflows, they will inevitably want more data. And with more data comes sensitive information and the need to sanitize it in logs:

• Logs they can understand
• Alerts when things fail
• Sanitizing sensitive information in logs
• Your support team has more put on their plate

In my experience, support cost grows faster than usage. Oftentimes, a small number of users will take up 60-70% of the support time and resources. 

If a single customer is a huge percentage of your revenue, it might be worth it, but otherwise it’s not an ideal scenario.

Long-Term Maintenance

Workflow engines do not stabilize and stop requiring development work:

• Users want more triggers, more conditions, more features
• More edge-case handling
• More integrations

By adding a workflow builder, you are committing to a permanent subsystem, even if the costs of maintaining it outpace the revenue you earn from its inclusion.

Engineering Resources

Developing a workflow builder isn’t a simple process, either. From my own experience, it usually means:

• One or more engineers tied up for months
• Ongoing maintenance indefinitely
• Slower progress on your core product

Alright, so now you know what creating a workflow builder entails. As I mentioned above, it’s never as simple as it might seem.

When Building Makes Sense

Now let’s talk about when building still makes sense, despite all of the downsides mentioned above. These are specific scenarios that don’t apply to most use cases.

Workflows Are Your Product

The most simple scenario is if your actual value-add is the workflow builder itself. Presumably if this is the case, you’re familiar enough with the market and the ecosystem for this to be obvious.

If you’re trying to create a competitor to Zapier, you’ll most likely want to just build the entire thing yourself.

Extremely Narrow Scope

The next logical reason to build it yourself: if you only need a very small number of workflows, none of which are likely to expand beyond their initial feature set. 

These should be extremely tightly defined and not have any planned future features. But again, be careful: what initially seems like a simple feature might expand once customers start using it.

Internal-Only Usage

If your users aren’t actually going to see the workflow builder, it might make sense to build it yourself. Poor UX or occasional bugs are acceptable if they only affect your team.

That said, don’t confuse poor UX with poor functionality. Minor bugs might not be a huge problem, but major ones can affect your actual front-end business.

You Can Afford 3–6+ Months of Focused Engineering Time

If you have the engineering resources and bandwidth, it might make sense to just develop it internally. Just be sure to truly calculate the costs of creating it. One engineer dedicating 20 hours a week = tens of thousands of dollars over the course of a year.

Be cognizant of the fact that it may harm the roadmap of your core product, so decide whether the added benefit of building it internally is worth that cost.

Now let’s move to the next section: buying a workflow builder.

When Buying Makes Sense

So far we’ve talked about building a workflow builder yourself. Now let’s discuss scenarios where buying one instead makes more sense.

When Workflows Are Not the Product

If workflows are not the reason users choose your product, they should not dominate your engineering roadmap. A custom-built system may be elegant, but elegance is irrelevant if it does not materially change user outcomes. In this case, workflows are infrastructure. Necessary, but not the “secret sauce.”

When You Cannot Justify the Ongoing Engineering Cost

A workflow builder is not a feature you “finish.” It demands continuous work: integrations break, APIs change, users want more flexibility, and edge cases accumulate. 

Without a team explicitly responsible for this surface area, the system degrades or quietly absorbs more time than anticipated.

When You Need Speed More Than Control

Smaller teams are not rewarded for owning everything. They are rewarded for learning quickly and shipping what matters, which drives new customers and more revenue.

Since building a workflow builder tends to take months of dev time, it’s not the best choice for moving quickly. The downside is that you don’t own the entire builder, but for most companies, the goal is growth, not complete ownership.

When the Opportunity Cost Is Obvious

The relevant question is not whether you can build a workflow engine, but what you are not building if you do. Spending months on a workflow builder might seem feasible at first, but not if it means you can’t build out other features on the product.

When the Cost of Buying is Less than Internal Development

Dedicating 3-6 months of internal development time can get very expensive, very quickly, especially if you have more than one engineering team member 

Oftentimes it’s simply a cheaper financial decision to outsource the costs to a third-party builder – even when that builder might cost tens of thousands of dollars a year.

What “Buying a Workflow Feature” Looks Like

So you’ve decided that buying a workflow builder is the right move. That does not narrow things down much. The market spans everything from consumer automation tools to heavyweight enterprise iPaaS platforms, and most of them were not designed to be embedded inside someone else’s product.

Broadly, tools like Zapier and Make optimize for non-technical end users automating their own tools. Others like n8n and Pipedream skew toward developers building internal automations. At the top end, platforms such as Workato and Tray.io are designed for large organizations with budgets, admins, and long procurement cycles.

If you want to compare Embed Workflow directly against these options, there is a separate breakdown for each on our Competitor page. At a higher level, the decision usually collapses into three dimensions that actually matter in practice: 

1. Complexity
2. Cost
3. Embed-ability (aka, “white label”)

Let’s take a look at each one:

Complexity

How complex is the workflow builder itself? How complex do you want it to be?

The best workflow builder software for your particular use case will in large part depend on the answer. 

If your end users are non-technical, using an extremely complex workflow builder is probably a bad idea, and you’ll want to use something simpler like Zapier, which most professionals are familiar with.

Likewise, if your users are highly technical, a simplified builder can annoy users, and so you should consider n8n or another dev-friendly tool. These are no doubt powerful platforms, but they do require considerably more development and maintenance hours.

A third approach is to focus on matching the complexity of your app itself. This is essentially what we aim to do at Embed Workflow; since our builder is designed to be embedded seamlessly inside your application, that means it will match the UI, feature set, and other elements users are already familiar with.

Cost

For many smaller companies, cost is ultimately the determining factor. Thankfully, in the workflow builder space, there are a lot of options, which range from low cost (free or $29 a month) to absurdly expensive ($50,000+ a year). Zapier is on the lower end, while Workato is on the extreme upper end. Others are somewhere in the middle, like Embed Workflow.

But watch out: cost is rarely just the sticker price. Zapier and Make appear inexpensive at first, but pricing can quickly spiral out of control as you scale. As soon as workflows are triggered programmatically or at scale, costs can spiral out of control. You’ll naturally have to push those costs onto end users, unless you want to cut into your own profits.

Open-source or developer platforms like n8n reduce up-front fees but introduce operational costs instead. Hosting, monitoring, maintenance, and engineering time all add up.

Enterprise tools like Workato and Tray are high-cost and don’t try to hide it. They assume automation is mission-critical and that your company has a serious budget for it. For most SaaS products, that pricing model only makes sense if workflows are a core revenue driver.

Additionally, many extra features (like white label) tend to be extra fees on top of the regular builder. But more on that in the next section.

Embed-ability (White Label)

The final factor is whether you need the workflow builder to be white labeled. In other words, do you need it to look like an integral part of your app – or are you fine with your users seeing the branding of another company like Zapier or Make?

If you don’t care, there are more options, and you should focus on complexity and cost. But if you do need your workflow builder to be white label, the choices narrow to a handful of options.

The first is to use a developer platform like n8n or Pipedream. You can build an embedded workflow UI on top of them, but you are effectively creating your own workflow product. The engine is outsourced. Everything else is on you, including the maintenance and development. If you have the dev resources and know-how, this isn’t a bad option, but it isn’t a simple one.

The second is to use a more managed platform like Activepieces. However, as I mentioned above, you’ll have to pay extra. For many platforms this means upwards of $30,000 a year, minimum, in order to use their embedded/white label version. This is obviously out of reach for smaller size SaaS companies.

The third is to use a platform like Embed Workflow. We handle the setup and integration for you, and make sure the builder is entirely embedded into your app. And unlike Zapier or Make, we have zero branding – so your users will only see the feature as a part of your app. Plus, our pricing is more affordable than the giant players, as we focus on tailoring integrations to our clients, rather than building a broad platform that tries to appeal to everyone.

Conclusion

Most SaaS products eventually face the same pressure. Users want automations. Teams want parity with more complex competitors. “Add workflows” starts to feel inevitable.

The risk is not that workflows are unnecessary. The risk is underestimating what they actually are. A workflow system is not a feature you tack on. It is a second product with its own logic, edge cases, and maintenance burden. Many teams realize this only after months of diverted effort.

At the end of the day, you really only have two options: you either commit to owning a workflow platform, or you accept that it is infrastructure best embedded rather than built. Half-measures tend to be the most expensive outcome (trust me from experience on this one.)

Building Embed Workflow came out of repeatedly watching teams hit this wall. Not because building is always wrong, but because the cost of discovering that too late is high. The point of this piece is not to push a default answer, but to make the tradeoffs explicit before the work begins.

Thinking about buying a workflow builder? Get in touch. We’re experts in the market and will recommend whatever we think is the best fit – even if it’s not our own product.