Why Salesforce Flow is Eating Apex (And Why Thats Okay)

Tom Rook - 30 May 2026

If you’ve spent any time in the Salesforce ecosystem over the last few years, you will of noticed a quiet revolution happening. Salesforce Flow have gone from being a janky point-and-click tool that developers quietly despised, to a genuinely powerful automation platform that can handles most of what used to require custom Apex code.

This isn’t a post about weather you should use Flow or Apex. That debates been done to death. This is about understanding why flow has got so good, and what it means for the way we builds solutions going forward.

The Old World

Back in the day — lets say pre-Spring ‘21 — Flow was limited. You could do basic record updates, send emails, maybe kick off a simple approval. But anything remotely complex and you where reaching for Apex faster than you could say “governor limits.”

The tooling was also, frankly, terrible. The canvas was sluggish, debugging was a nightmare, and if you dared to open a Flow in a sandbox that hadn’t been refreshed recently, god help you.

!flow-diagram.png

Developers had good reasons to be skeptical. Flow felt like a toy. A expensive, governor-limit-consuming toy that required a lot of clicks to do things that 10 lines of code could do better.

What Changed

Einstein and automation capabilities has come a long way. But the real turning point wasn’t AI — it was three things:

1. Debug logs in Flow — suddenly you could actually see what was going wrong
2. Reactive Screens — Flow screens that responded to user input without a server round-trip, closing the gap with Visualforce
3. The death of Workflow Rules and Process Builder — Salesforce essentially forcing the ecosystem onto Flow by retiring the alternatives

That last point is underrated. When Salesforce announced the retirement of Workflow Rules and Process Builder, millions of automations had to be migrated. That migration wave forced the entire ecosystem to get comfortable with Flow in a way that voluntary adoption never would have achieved.

The Practical Reality

Here’s were it gets interesting for architects and developers.

Flow now handles:

• Record-triggered automation with complex branching logic
• Screen flows that replace a lot of Visualforce and LWC use cases
• Subflows for reusable logic (the equivalent of calling a method)
• External HTTP callouts (yes, really)
• Orchestration for long-running multi-step processes

Is it perfect? No. You’ll still hit scenarios where Apex is the right tool — complex data transformation, performance-critical bulk processing, anything that needs true unit testing with proper mocking. But those scenarios is getting narrower every release.

What This Means for Your Team

The skills question is the one I get asked most. “Should my admins learn Flow or should my developers write Apex?”

The answer has shifted. Flow is no longer the admin tool and Apex the developer tool — there both tools that either persona can use depending on the complexity of the problem. A senior admin who knows Flow well can now solve problems that would of required developer time two or three releases ago.

The real skill now is knowing when to escalate. Recognising when a Flow is getting to complex and would be better served by moving logic into an invocable Apex method. Treating Flow as the orchestration layer and Apex as the engine is a pattern that scales really well.

Wrapping Up

Flows rise isn’t a threat to developers — its an opportunity to shift up the value chain. Let Flow handle the routine, and use your Apex skills for the genuinely complex stuff that needs them.

The ecosystem is better for having good declarative tooling. And if you haven’t given modern Flow a proper look recently, you might be supprised at how far its come.

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