I keep seeing automation platforms advertise ready-to-use templates for common tasks. The idea is that you don’t start from scratch—you pick a template, customize it for your specific use case, and deploy. On paper, that sounds like a significant time saver.
But in practice, I’m wondering whether most templates are generic enough to be useful or too generic to avoid substantial rebuilding.
We’re considering migrating from Camunda, and one of the options is a platform that comes with pre-built templates for common business processes. The vendor claims templates can cut deployment time by 70%. That number feels aggressive to me, but I could be wrong.
My concern is that the time you save by not starting from scratch gets eaten up by customization. You have to understand what the template does, map it to your specific process, adjust fields and logic, test it in your environment, handle edge cases you didn’t anticipate. That might actually take longer than building something purpose-built.
I need to understand:
For teams that use templates, how much time are you actually saving compared to building from scratch?
How much of the template typically stays as-is versus how much gets customized?
Do templates reduce total implementation time, or mostly just reduce initial setup?
Are there certain types of automations where templates are genuinely valuable?
I’m not looking for sales claims. I want honest numbers.
We tested this pretty thoroughly before deciding to move forward. The honest answer is that templates save time in some scenarios and not others.
For straightforward stuff like data synchronization between systems or sending notifications when certain conditions are met, templates were genuinely useful. We could take a template, adjust field mappings and maybe one or two logic steps, and have something working in hours instead of days. That’s real savings.
For anything more complex—workflows involving multiple systems, custom business logic, conditional routing—we ended up rebuilding most of the template anyway. The template gave us a general structure to follow, which had some value, but it wasn’t the timesaver the vendor promised.
I’d say we saved time on maybe 30-40% of automations using templates. On the others, the template was more like a reference than an actual starting point.
What surprised us was that the bigger time saving came from having templates for process mapping, not just technical implementation. Being able to show stakeholders a reference workflow and ask “is this basically what you’re trying to do?” actually shortened the requirements-gathering phase, which we didn’t expect. So the template benefit was partly technical and partly about getting alignment faster.
The 70% claim is marketing. Real savings are more like 20-40% depending on complexity. Simple automations—templates cut the build time significantly because there’s not much to customize. Complex automations—you’re rebuilding half of it anyway. What helped us most was having templates for common patterns so our team had a baseline understanding of how the platform works. That reduced the learning curve, which indirectly saved time across all automations, not just the ones using templates.
Templates are most valuable early in adoption when your team is learning the platform. They’re less valuable once you have internal experts who can build faster from scratch. The real time savings isn’t from the template itself, it’s from not having to figure out the platform’s idioms and best practices. Once your team has done that work, templates become less critical. That said, templates for regulatory or compliance-heavy processes—approval chains, audit logging, data retention—those templates do save time because they handle patterns you might miss on your own.
templates help for basic stuff. 30-40% time save on simple automations. complex ones u rebuild half of it anyways. platform learning curve benefit is real tho.
Templates save meaningful time on standard patterns. Simple data sync or notification workflows—use the template, customize, deploy. Complex logic—more efficient to build custom. Value depends on your use cases.
We came in skeptical too. But here’s what actually happened: the templates saved us time upfront, but their real value was different than we expected.
For basic workflows—image processing, content generation, chatbot logic—the templates were mostly plug-and-play. We customized them, but it was straightforward. For custom domain-specific automations, we built from scratch, but having seen the templates, our team understood the platform patterns faster.
The bigger win was that having pre-built templates meant we could deploy pilots faster. Instead of spending two weeks building and testing a proof of concept, we could customize a template, run it in a day, and show stakeholders what automation could do. That accelerated decision-making and budget approval.
On complex automations, templates were maybe 15-20% of the work. On standard ones, they were 50-60%. But the soft benefit of faster pilots and pattern learning applied to everything.