In a very simple way:
- Use Windows Workflow Foundation → Workflow within applications and human workflow
- Use BizTalk Server → Workflow across applications – B2B, EAI, communication protocol abstraction
📝 One-Minute Brief
Deciding between BizTalk Server and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) isn’t about which is “better,” but which fits your infrastructure needs. BizTalk is a robust, “all-in-one” Integration Server designed for complex B2B scenarios, high-level EAI, and out-of-the-box connectivity. Windows Workflow Foundation is a developer framework meant to be embedded within custom applications to manage long-running processes. Use BizTalk for enterprise-grade integration; use WF for flexible, application-specific logic.
BizTalk is a product for BPM (Business Process Management) and EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), designed to implement workflow (“orchestrations”) across disparate applications.
WF is a developer framework designed to expose workflow capabilities within your applications.
A few questions you have to ask yourself in order to choose between WF and BizTalk Server:
- Do I need to work with other systems/platforms? Can I benefit from using BizTalk Adapters? Because of its focus on cross-platform integration, a large set of BizTalk Server adapters is available, allowing communication with a range of other software. WF is focused solely on workflow, not EAI, and so it doesn’t provide these things.
- Do I need to change the message structure/schema? Can BizTalk Mapper help me do it? Messaging infrastructure? BizTalk provides schemas, tracking, reliable messaging, routing, transformations, etc.
- B2B services are required? WF doesn’t address this area, while BizTalk Server provides tools for working with trading partners.
- Do I want my solution to be able to scale out? WF runs In-Process and has thread limitations as a .NET application, while BizTalk is a very scalable, deployable solution.
- Does the business process being implemented require human workflow intervention? WF supports Human interaction with the progress of the workflow from approval to tracking, etc.
- Your process is typically a state machine workflow? BizTalk Server addresses system workflow, and so it lacks WF’s support for things such as state machine workflows.
WF is the replacement for BizTalk Server 2006?
No. WF provides only a small subset of this functionality: Workflow and Business Rules. While WF might be a simpler, more cost-effective solution for scenarios that do not require all of the other features that BizTalk Server 2006 provides, in no way does it supplant BizTalk Server 2006 for the core Enterprise Integration scenarios that BizTalk Server 2006 was designed to support.
BizTalk Server is going away?
No.
