Well, last one year lot of my team members and other Salesforce developers I interact with asked this question several times. Should we use Salesforce lighting flow or OmniStudio OmniScript?
This is not the first time we hear this kind of question. In past we have been arguing APEX vs Process Builder or APEX vs Salesforce Lightning Flow. Answer was not simple earlier also as we need to consider lot of things before taking a decision. Sometime configuration vs coding helped us taking the decision, but in this case, we are discussing two most powerful features of Salesforce that help us avoiding coding requirement.
Salesforce has been investing lot to make Salesforce flow more powerful. Every new release, Salesforce adding lot of new features to Salesforce lightning flow and we are going to see this trend for next several releases.
With acquisition of Vlocity, Salesforce introduced OmniStudio and one of the key capabilities of OmniStudio is OmniScript. If you are new to OmniScript, you can corelate OmniScript to Salesforce Screen Flow and this is where all the questions are raised.
Salesforce provides different types of flows like record triggered flow, platform event triggered flow, screen flow, auto-launched flow etc… OmniScript cannot be used to replace a record triggered flow or platform event triggered flow but there could be discussion on decision to use Screen Flow or OmniScript
In this article I would highlight some of the capabilities of Salesforce Scree Flow & OmniScript. I would also share my personal preference but decision to use Salesforce flow or OmniScript depends on lot of factors and not everything I can highlight in this article.
| Salesforce Lightning Flow | OmniScript |
|---|---|
| Salesforce native tool and always available | Part of OmniStudio and available with Salesforce Industry applications |
| Lightweight and relatively fast | Development, activation and deployment is not as easy as Salesforce flow. Generates LWC during activation. Salesforce is trying to integrate this with core, and it may not require LWC in future |
| Provides multiple types of flow like record triggered flow, platform event triggered flow, screen flow etc.. | OmniScript is used for guided user experience and you can consider this as alternative of Screen Flow for complex guided processes |
| Easy to learn and you would require learning Salesforce Lightning flow only | You need to learn DataRaptor, Integration Procedure and Flex Card to use advance features of OmniScript |
| Provides all basic actions like Query, Delete, Insert / Update, Decisions, Loop and several other actions to meet most of your requirements | It provides you everything you need to create a simple to very complex guided process with no code. DataRaptor and Integration Procedure makes it really very powerful |
| First option to consider for your guided experience | You should explore this if you think you are working on very sophisticated and complex guided process and you have OmniStudio |
As I mentioned in the beginning, both Salesforce Lightning Flow and OmniScript are great tools provided by Salesforce and they are not here to compete with each other but to empower us with choices to provide best solutions for our use case.
My recommendation is to first see if Salesforce Lightning Screen Flow is going to meet your current requirements and any future complexity and scalability requirements. If you think you need more power and flexibility and you have necessary, license and resource available for OmniStudio then you know you have OmniScript also as an option to explore.
Also, if you are going to use some of the industry features like Product Model, Shopping, Quoting, Rating etc… then you have to use OmniScript as lot of these features depend on services that work on OmniStudio only.