I keep seeing this narrative that no-code builders empower business users to own their workflows. But in practice, I’m skeptical.
From what I’ve seen, when you push complex workflows into a visual interface, a few things happen:
- The complexity doesn’t disappear—it just gets distributed differently
- Business users who aren’t technical start building workflows, then hit the limits of what the UI can express
- Instead of developers writing code, you get citizen developers creating brittle configurations
- Maintenance becomes someone else’s problem when the workflow breaks in production
So the real question: are we genuinely reducing Camunda’s cost by letting business users own workflows, or are we just creating new problems downstream?
I’m not saying no-code is bad. I’m saying I want a realistic picture. What actually breaks when you let non-technical people build and maintain production workflows? Where do you still need developers? And most importantly—does the TCO actually drop, or does it just shift to different people?