More than ever, companies are utilizing workflow management software to streamline their business activities and tasks in order to enhance employee productivity and optimize resources.
Due to the global pandemic, which is causing more organizations to work remotely, there is a greater need for collaboration software that facilitates smooth workflow across different departments and locations.
There is an increased variety of products available. However, determining the optimal workflow management solution for your business is essential.
First, we will outline the important characteristics and advantages to consider when selecting workflow software. Afterward, we will present the top workflow management solutions categorized accordingly.
We will now begin our procedure by thinking systematically.
What is Workflow Software?
Workflow software offers versatile tools to enhance your work processes. The majority of business activities encompass three fundamental elements:
- Work – the tasks we perform.
- People – colleagues, clients, partners.
- Processes – how work flows through the organization.
When cross-functional teams or departments are involved in business processes, it can sometimes result in a disruption of creative workflows as one team has to wait for another team to finish a task. Another issue that frequently arises is when a specific task depends on a single individual, known as the guru, who may be absent due to illness or taking time off.
Workflow software can be helpful in this situation.
The tool enables the creation and optimization of workflows, detection of redundant tasks, automation of work processes, identification of areas for improvement, and enhancement of efficiency.
Benefits of Workflow Software
Each workflow application offers a set of core benefits that can help you, although feature sets may vary widely depending on their target market.
- Automate and speed up internal processes by reducing manual entry and request processing.
- Reduce errors and re-work.
- Reduce the risk of approving requests, contracts, and hires incorrectly.
- Improve regulatory marketing compliance with audit trails.
- Track request status (completed, pending, or in-progress) in real-time.
- Identify individual and group performance trends over time.
- Identify redundancies and remove process barriers or bottlenecks.
- Align tasks with the correct skill sets and assign tasks to the most suitable staff members.
- Ensure staff members don’t circumvent organizational rules.
- Notify staff members with reminders and alerts whenever tasks are due.
- Approve and monitor requests and tasks 24/7.
- Allow management and staff to focus on more valuable projects and tasks.
- Automate decision making and handling with business rules.
- Provide a unified, personalized request experience for everyone.
- Reduce paperwork and associated costs and waste significantly.
- Increase output, efficiency, and productivity.
- Reduce license overhead for enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, etc.)
- Monitor team progress against Service Level Agreements.
Key Features to Look for in Workflow Management Software
When selecting workflow management software for your organization, these are the features that you must have.
- Easy setup
- Visual workflow builder
- Automations
- Collaboration
- Organization
- Tracking and reporting
- integrations
Easy setup
The most important thing is to find a workflow management tool that is simple to set up and configure. Anything that requires a lot of time or effort will be unappealing right from the beginning. For instance, search for software that includes pre-made templates that can be used or personalized for your business.
Visual workflow builder
By thinking in a logical sequence, rephrase the given text while retaining the original meaning. Avoid adding new details and do not omit any information: A workflow builder based on a drag-and-drop interface allows for the swift creation of workflow diagrams, consequently enhancing the comprehensibility of the process for all individuals involved.
Automations
One could argue that automation is one of the top features in workflow management software due to its ability to automate tasks and actions, including alerts, reminders, escalations, and routing.
By implementing Ziflow’s automated workflows, you have the ability to:
- Enforce consistent review processes by ensuring the right people are reviewing the right content as part of a pre-approved process.
- Demonstrate control and compliance for regulated industries by forcing the inclusion of required decision-makers in the approval process.
- Apply workflow and templates to individual users and predefined groups.
Automated workflows can effectively save you hours of time-consuming tasks if set up correctly. Nonetheless, certain tasks may require compatibility with third-party tools for automation.
Collaboration
Engaging in email exchanges or switching between multiple applications for team communication leads to inefficiency.
When choosing a workflow management tool, ensure that it includes collaboration features such as chat, commenting, annotations, document sharing, feedback collection, review and approval functions, as well as the ability to create review groups.
You can use Ziflow’s collaborative commenting and markup tools to:
- Stop wading through email threads from multiple recipients as you can see all comments, threads, and attachments within the asset being reviewed.
- Eliminate ambiguous feedback that causes confusion, errors, and rework with smart commenting and annotation tools .
- Accelerate project decision-making and progress confidently as all team members can view markups.
Furthermore, it is essential to ensure that team members receive notifications whenever new tasks are added to their queue.
Organization
If your teams cannot easily find and organize different workflows, then there is no benefit to using the software.
To maintain organization and stay ahead of schedule, you can utilize Ziflow’s filters, views, and folders to keep your workflows organized.
- Creating or moving projects to any folder, nesting folders within folders, and creating private folders when required.
- Finding proofs, grouped by your projects, quickly.
- Creating custom properties to match your internal naming conventions or tagging system and using them with filters and views.
Tracking and reporting
In its default state, workflow software should provide the capability to track and generate reports on any workflow process at any given moment. For example, you should have the ability to monitor the real-time status of any request (completed, pending, or in-progress).
Ziflow provides the convenience of tracking progress and prioritizing work by offering the ability to:
- Track progress and deliver project tasks on time.
- Focus on the important work and let the software chase reviewers automatically.
- Choose what proofs you want to display at any point, such as “Proofs to review” so that you don’t miss a thing.
Integrations
In order for workflow management software to be effective, it is necessary for it to seamlessly integrate with the tools you are currently utilizing. Failing to establish these integrations would result in the software increasing the complexity of your workflows rather than simplifying them.
Ziflow has integration capabilities with well-known productivity applications such as Asana, Slack, and Dropbox.
The importance lies in having software that can integrate with the tools you are currently using, rather than having thousands of integrations.
Best Workflow Management Software
1. Zapier: Best Software for General Workflow Automations
When it comes to automations, Zapier is the top workflow software. It automatically connects your web apps and transfers information between them, allowing you to concentrate on your most crucial tasks.
Key features:
- Connect your web apps with a few clicks so that they can share data. (Integrates with 3,000+ popular apps in millions of ways).
- Automate a cross-platform workflow based on specific triggers.
- Select from pre-built workflows to get started with Zapier quickly.
- Create workflows (called Zaps) to automate repetitive tasks and get more done without developer help.
- Start workflows from any app and finish routine tasks automatically.
- Go from idea to workflow in minutes with the simple, fill-in-the-blank setup.
- Build advanced workflows with custom branching logic and conditions.
2. Process Street: Best Software for Recurring Team Workflows
Process Street provides a straightforward and effective solution for overseeing your team’s repetitive assignments. Although it may not provide as many functionalities as other workflow management software tools, such as analytics and reporting, the software is well-suited for teams that rely on document-based workflows, checklists, and protocols.
Key features:
- Get started with over 1,000 pre-made workflow templates.
- Create templates, assign tasks, set deadlines, and automate processes to improve productivity.
- Avoid re-work by updating workflows in one click.
- Change direction, update live processes, alter tasks, and continuously improve workflows quickly and easily.
- Track performance, identify bottlenecks, and monitor progress on an individual, team, or department level via the dashboard.
- Design templates that your team can easily follow to increase consistency, reduce errors, and cut costs.
- Make process management more straightforward and keep your team progressing by adding approval tasks to your workflows.
3. monday.com
The project management and work platform by monday is both flexible and highly visual, offering teams a centralized workspace for planning, managing, tracking, and delivering projects. The software is user-friendly and can be easily set up, while also integrating with various existing tools to assist users in saving time through automation.
Teams can streamline business processes using monday.com’s workflow management system. The system is capable of storing data and files crucial to the process, automating repetitive tasks, and offering collaboration tools for effective project and day-to-day work management. Noteworthy features of the system include real-time alerts and notifications, due date management, readily available templates, time tracking, document creation, dashboards, and low-code/no-code workflow automations.
Key Features
- Workflow automation: monday.com takes a low-code/no-code approach to workflow automation and gives users the option to build custom automations or use prebuilt automations; it offers more than 200 prebuilt automation recipes to users.
- Workflow templates: monday.com has workflow templates for a variety of workflow types, including internal process management, creative process management, recruitment process management, and sales enablement workflows.
- Integrations: monday.com comes with more than 200 third-party integration options, so users can easily integrate their communications, marketing, and other business tools into their workflows.
4. Kissflow
Kissflow is an automation tool and workflow software solution that aims to improve productivity. It allows teams without coding knowledge to easily create their own workflows through a visual form and workflow designer. It also offers automated workflow routing, algorithmic task assignment, contextual collaboration, a range of workflow templates, and the ability to integrate with third-party applications.
The features of Kissflow workflow management software consist of dashboards that offer real-time information on all processes. Additional features include dynamic business rules and routing, ad hoc assignment, agile deployment, process audit and optimization, dynamic reporting, social collaboration, and APIs.
Key Features
- Workflow templates: Kissflow has a library of more than 200 workflow-specific templates. Templates cover a variety of industry areas, including finance, engineering, marketing, and healthcare, and a variety of more general operations and people management templates are also available.
- Various boards and workflow views: A variety of unique workflow view options are available, including role-based views, matrix views, kanban views, and metrics-based views; Kissflow has particularly helpful analytics and reporting features in its metrics view.
- No-code automations: Automations are available for building forms, designing workflows, assigning dynamic tasks, setting up SLAs, and enabling custom permissions with conditional logic.
5. ClickUp
ClickUp, a widely used project management tool, provides a variety of workflow management and automation features for its users. It offers easy-to-setup automations and integrations to all users, including over 100 prebuilt automations and customizable automations covering more than 50 action possibilities. By integrating with tools such as Slack, HubSpot, Dropbox, and Zendesk, ClickUp allows users to establish workflows that effectively manage communication, file storage, and other collaborative needs.
For users who are new to this kind of software, this is considered as one of the top workflow management tools. It offers easy-to-use features that can be accessed by larger teams. Its templates are comprehensive, covering various business operations, while its Whiteboards enable users to plan and implement visual workflows through collaborative efforts.
Key Features
- Whiteboards: Users can map out possible workflows in ClickUp Whiteboards; while Whiteboards work for individual use, they are ideal for teams that want to add notes, connect tasks, and work together on the process of building an optimized workflow.
- Process templates: In ClickUp’s template library, several process templates are available. Templates include the Large Account Management Process, the Process Map Whiteboard, and the Marketing Team Processes templates.
- Subtasks and checklists: Task management gets granular in ClickUp, allowing users to nest subtasks and checklists within individual tasks; this gives users the ability to create detailed workflows without overwhelming their collaborators visually.
6. Wrike
Wrike is a project management solution that is highly adaptable to different workflows and industries. It allows teams to personalize their processes and utilize automation for quicker project delivery. Users can access real-time information and employ various views to gain visibility into the workflow process from start to finish.
Wrike project workflow software offers the ability for users to automatically arrange and separate tasks, mark important to-do lists, and implement automation to plan projects, distribute tasks, handle files, and allocate work. Users are able to generate personalized request forms in order to obtain comprehensive information and automatically assign tasks to the appropriate team. Additionally, it includes templates, collaboration tools within the application, pre-established proofing workflows, and connections with other applications.
Key Features
- Proofing workflows: Particularly helpful for creative and highly collaborative teams, proofing workflows are available to help teams proof multiple file formats, manage multiple versions of tasks and projects, and approve each asset in a more timely fashion.
- Work Intelligence: Wrike’s assistive AI solution is available to recommend tasks, create subitems, predict project risk, process documents, and streamline communication in various workflows.
- Templates and blueprints: For prebuilt workflow support, users can access Wrike’s extensive template library. To build out and save tasks, projects, and folders for future use, users can create their own workflow and project blueprints.
7. Bonsai
Bonsai presents itself as a business management tool that sets it apart from others on this list by not solely concentrating on project or workflow management. Instead, Bonsai offers a comprehensive platform that integrates CRM, finance and billing management, and project management functionalities into a single tool. The inclusion of these inherent features makes Bonsai particularly beneficial for marketing, sales, and finance teams since the system already includes numerous forms, documents, and workflows that these teams typically require.
Key Features
- Billing and finance workflows: Billing and finance features include automated invoicing workflows and payment reminders, automated tax reminders and categorization, and automatic budgeting with the Envelopes feature.
- Contract and proposal management: Professional-looking contracts and proposals can be automatically generated and customized as necessary; both the sender and the receiver can clearly see what steps are next in the document process.
- Simple automations: Bonsai’s automations are simple to set up through the Automations page on the platform’s client tab; all workflow automations are trigger-based.
