Most tools let you save flows as templates for reuse, but I’m curious about platforms that have a real marketplace—where users can share, sell, or buy automation blueprints between departments or even companies. I haven’t seen this in action at scale, so I’m wondering if anyone here has real-world experience. Does having a marketplace actually help teams scale automation, or does it just add yet another layer of curation and review? How do you keep the quality high, and what stops it from turning into a dumping ground for half-baked workflows? What’s been your experience with internal or external marketplaces for BPMN-based automations?
We tried sharing templates on Google Drive—lots of noise, little value. A real marketplace with ratings and reviews changes the game. Good templates rise to the top, and you can see what others are actually using. We built a customer onboarding flow in a day by cloning and tweaking a shared template. Try it at latenode.com.
Internal marketplaces only work if they have strong governance. We set up a review team for every new template, and only approved ones go live. It’s a bit of overhead, but it keeps the quality high and stops people from uploading junk.
The best thing about a marketplace is discovering patterns you wouldn’t have thought of. We found a workflow for expense approvals that actually cut our processing time in half, just because someone else’s team had already solved the problem.
The biggest issue is documentation. If the template is poorly explained or comes with no error handling, it’s more work to fix than starting from scratch. I only use templates from people I trust, or ones with lots of stars and comments.
Having spent years in organizations large and small, I’ve found that a marketplace only succeeds when there’s clear incentive for teams to share and maintain templates—otherwise, updates and fixes lag and the marketplace decays. A good governance model and some form of gamification (e.g., leaderboards for most-downloaded templates) can help. The real value is in the network effect: as the library grows, teams spend less time on boilerplate and more on unique business logic. But without structured feedback and support, the marketplace risks becoming a graveyard of abandoned workflows.
marketplaces r good if its curated. if not, u waste times scrolling and testing untested flows.
good for reuse, but verify edge cases before go-live.