Show HN: I Built a Visual Workflow Automation Platform – FlowRipple
66 comments
·February 22, 2025halyax7
I thought this looked familiar - its a reskin of a fantastic full stack tutorial from a few months back:
shivsarthak34
It's not a reskin , I developed it on my own. It's just that these workflow builders are built using libraries such as React Flows. As you can see in the bottom right of the sheet of the flow builder. Also my application is built on Svelte, and I'm using Svelte Flow which is a fork of React Flow itself.
graypegg
IMHO, if someone made something while following along with a tutorial, I do think they should be free to turn THAT software they made (with a guide) into a product. The presumption being that the tutorial isn't just handing you a product that you sell with no changes. (I do see there's access to the source code in the description.)
Skimming the video, and this site, I'm not noticing a ton of differences other than some minor styling changes. Maybe the author could mention any of the changes they've made? If they're significant, IMO, it's fine.
MattDaEskimo
Yikes. I was wondering where all of these exact replicas were coming from. Thanks for sharing.
cjonas
How is the "code" represented in the backend? Can it be exported, checked into source control and deployed via CI/CD?
With the advances we are seeing in AI coding workspaces, "visual programming" seems like a dead end if the code isn't optimized for machine comprehension. I do think visual representation of code will become important to be able to more easily understand the AI generated systems, but it's just not an inefficient way to encode logic for AI (turns of code is a very effective at this).
IMO, for these low code runtimes to survive, they need to be "transpilable" to a simple DSL (or subset of a popular language) and have an LSP for agents to interact with.
wavemode
I take the opposite view. The semantics of visual programming are very simple compared to text-based programming. This makes it more amenable to AI autocomplete, not less. A visual IDE could just convert the blocks to text, then prompt the LLM API with "here are the current blocks, and here are the blocks available to you. Suggest some more blocks." and then insert the response.
cjonas
I agree the abstraction level is perfect for AI, but not having it accessible (or even just in a format that is well represented in the training data) is a problem. From a CTO's perspective, encoding our processes in something like this removes my ability to leverage the general AI programming capabilities of the future that billions of dollars are currently being invested in.
It's a technical debt dead end.
maximamas
Checks out, that’s definitely a CTO’s perspective.
shivsarthak34
This is a very interesting take. It currently cannot be exported but It sure can be achieved. Wow i think this is something i'll prioritise to implement. Thank you so much for the insight, it can be a good differentiator too.
nprateem
I really wouldn't bother if you're targetting non-tech users.
cjonas
I disagree...
What's the SDLC story? How do I move between environments, roll back, manage hotfixes alongside feature development, etc?
It's these "non-functional" feature that end up being the downfall of many of the integration projects I've been brought in to save.
John in accounting sets up a Salesforce to Netsuite integration that becomes mission critical and it works... Until it doesn't.
androng
Am I right in calling this a direct competitor to https://www.gumloop.com/ ? I would probably use that since there are more options right now unless you have an option exclusive to you
shivsarthak34
Yep , it seems to be a much mature product, they are have much more integrations going on. FlowRipple is at a very nascent stage and very much figuring out it's path. I've put together this project in a month along with my full time day job, so the motive to showcase it here was to just get some eyes and opinions on it.
rcarmo
This looks visually nice, but the feature set needs a bit of clarification - you seem to be in the same space as n8n.io or Azure Logic Apps, so a few use cases and differentiators would be nice.
shivsarthak34
Noted i'll update the website mentioning more about the features, and yes n8n.io is a similar product , i personally feel it's too technical and hands on, and havent tried Azure. About differentiators i'm still kinda on the lookout to find some, to double down on, that's why went ahead with the early access, to listen to feedback and implement what people actually want, rather than building something broad which people don't want. Thanks for the comment tho , really appreciated
nextworddev
What are the biggest painpoints among users when using n8n?
shivsarthak34
I feel it's too much dials and knobs thing which can scare away the non technical team members. I personally feel n8n is a great product , but for my non technical coworkers it's hard to navigate or keep track of.
SilentM68
I second that :)
bberenberg
Terrible debugging IMO.
_pdp_
5 years ago I built my own workflow programming environment to automate various security processes. What I've learned form this experience is that workflow tools kind of suck. They are effectively really bad scripting languages - fine for doing high-level composition but not remotely useful when it comes to putting simple algorithms. But I think this is just my own perspective coming from experience with various programming environments. There are plenty of users who find this style of programming essential to get something done. For me though, I rather write the code.
I think these types of workflow tools will be ultimately replaced by AI agents.
fock
For reasons I recently got acquainted with enterprise scheduling solutions. IBM/HCL workload automation specifically - the company is actively looking for a replacement but nothing except for the chinese sponsored open source comes close it seems to me (and that is a step too far for management...).
The thing you miss with scripting is that a good workflow engine essentially provides a simple and well-defined layer allowing you to couple many concurrent processes and providing ressource management. Curiously out of the box all the opensource workflow tools do so too - like you said people (Airflow has pools, but thrn ...) essentially built very weird DSLs to do high-level composition and there you can indeed rather easily code it yourself. I assume the companies originating these have integrations for the other bits too while everyone else does fake elastic scaling with some halfbaked workarounds. And from time to time someone comes up with a new DSL and some GUI - ignoring all the hard parts.
mrdoops
Main limitation of these kinds of products is that the graph/workflow itself is not very expressive of dataflow options. Eventually you need map, reduce, and state machines and likewise concurrency and durable execution. It's not easy to have a high level declarative tool but also expose powerful programming primitives; at some point technical need-to-knows cross the point where you might as well have the user write code.
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dexwiz
I think the last point is key. These tools are used by those who can’t program, too scared by the learning barrier, or trapped in a SaaS/Security ecosystem that bans user scripts. All three of these can be solved by an LLM putting together scripts in a sandbox environment.
shivsarthak34
Maybe a vision for this product could be to be that "Sandbox Environment" with the LLM. So you just connect your backend and triggers and just create flows telling what needs to be done in natural language (one time setup) and it creates the flow.
betimsl
From the demo on the homepage, I feel like, it would be much easier to call the trusty old mail(admin, new, registration) func on that trigger... than to go through all that hustle and bustle.
ghxst
Fwiw I'm getting a 404 error on your documentation at the time of writing this. Quick question, does your platform support logic like iterating over lists or handling loops? For example, if Snyk sends a payload with multiple reports to a webhook, could I iterate through them and create Linear tickets for the correct teams based on the contents of the reports? One of our non-dev teams ran into issues with a similar visual builder that didn’t support this kind of logic, which often results in them wasting time on something simple that could be solved with just a few lines of Python. If you support use cases like this, I think they'd be excited to give it a try.
shivsarthak34
Yeah , documentation is still a WIP. i'll remove the link for now because the project will go undergo a lot of changes. And iterating over a list is currently not implemented , but I can add support for it soon. Thanks for mentioning , really appreciate it
allthebestforus
FlowRipple looks very interesting!
Have you been inspired by Node-RED?
shivsarthak34
Hahah no but I remember trying to figure how Node-RED works at least 10 years back on my RaspberryPi. I work at a company called Spur, which is a Whatsapp Marketing Software, we have a workflow automation interface there, which is used to create chatbots. On weekends I was just experimenting on some different framework libraries on which we can rebuild our workflow builder. Stumbled across SvelteFlow and tried it out, one month later here we are :)
ajcp
Very nice. I have a lot of experience in this space (RPA/DPA/* Process Automation)!
Tne thing people fail to see -and makers sell on- is that the value proposition of these platforms is NOT the "low code, no code" capabilities that "any business employee can use, no experience required" (a disingenuous sales tactic at best).
The value prop is their orchestration, observability, and administration offering that is their "control room". If you nail that capability, make it user friendly, and fully featured (queues, credential vaults, pools, etc) you'll kill it! Good luck :)
yoouareperfect
To all the commenters asking how is this product different from another product:stop asking that question! Its a month old! instead why don't you chime in with your idea to help this founder out on how he can differentiate?
CharlesW
The peers asking them how this differentiates from the many, many other solutions for this are doing him an enormous favor. If he knows, it may prompt him to improve the messaging on his site. If he doesn't, creating a crisp answer to that question will improve his chances of success.
HalcyonicStorm
What's this built with on the frontend and backend?
ronbenton
That is a great demo video on your landing page. Makes it look very easy to integrate. Would also like to see what setting up a trigger looks like.
shivsarthak34
Ahah thank you i skipped that part trying not to make the video too long, Also it is easy to setup a trigger too , I've added option to either manually paste the payload that your backend will send , or actually make a live request and it will automatically detect and create a trigger for you . Mapping variables too are just one click setup, just click on the property you want to map as a variable and done , you can use them in workflows.
Also yes i'll try to accommodate all these things in future iterations of the website. thank you for the comment tho , really appreciate it
FlowRipple is designed to streamline and automate business processes with ease. Whether you're a developer, business owner, or marketer, our platform lets you build custom workflows that can be triggered by events from your applications, webhooks, or on a schedule. We’ve just gone live and are offering an exclusive Early Access Program with some incredible perks to get you started.