Nintex vs K2: Which Should You Choose for Workflow Automation?

Nintex and K2 are both workflow automation platforms, and since Nintex acquired K2 in 2020, they're now sold by the same company. The practical comparison today pits Nintex's core platform against the K2 legacy line Nintex is progressively consolidating under the Nintex Automation brand.

For K2 customers weighing their options, the choice today is less about Nintex versus K2 and more about staying inside the Nintex family or moving to a Microsoft 365-native alternative like FlowForma.

In this article I'll cover how Nintex and K2 actually compare today given the shared ownership, what the 2020 acquisition means for K2 customers thinking about their next platform, and how FlowForma fits as a credible third option outside the Nintex ecosystem.

Nintex vs K2 at a glance

Here's how the two platforms compare across the criteria most teams look at when they're evaluating a workflow automation decision.

Why Nintex now owns K2, and what that means for buyers

Nintex acquired K2 in October 2020, bringing the two most established Microsoft-adjacent workflow platforms under the same parent. For customers of either platform, the acquisition changed the practical thinking around vendor choice.

• The visible consequences have played out over the years since.

• K2 has been progressively integrated into the Nintex product portfolio, product names have shifted (K2 Five is now being rebranded as Nintex Automation On-Prem), and future investment has concentrated on Nintex's own platforms rather than the K2 legacy code base.

• K2 blackpearl reached end of support on 31 December 2025, and the direction of travel is clearly toward consolidation under the Nintex Automation brand, rather than continued parallel development of two separate product lines.

For buyers, this has three practical implications.

1. Shared roadmap

Product decisions for Nintex and K2 now come from the same company, so features you might have chosen K2 for historically may end up prioritized (or deprioritized) based on what fits Nintex's overall portfolio strategy. That's a reasonable business decision by Nintex, but it removes the leverage customers used to have from having two independent vendors to play against each other.

2. Consolidation risk

As Nintex continues rebranding K2 products into the Nintex Automation line, the K2 name and independent product identity are gradually disappearing. Customers on K2 today should assume that the product they signed up for will look substantially different (in both name and feature roadmap) over the medium term.

3. Third-party options become more relevant

For K2 customers who chose K2 originally because they wanted an alternative to Nintex, the acquisition removed that option entirely. Some of these customers are now actively looking outside the combined Nintex/K2 family for platforms that give them the independence they originally wanted from their workflow vendor.

Feature and integration comparison

On core workflow-building capability, Nintex and K2 have historically served similar audiences with different technical approaches.

1. Workflow building

• Nintex is designed as a low-code platform with a visual drag-and-drop workflow designer aimed at business analysts and citizen developers.

• K2 has historically required trained developer resource for anything beyond simple flows, with process logic built through configuration inside a more technical interface. For teams without dedicated Power Platform or K2 developer skills in-house, Nintex is typically the easier build model.

2. Form design

• Both platforms provide form-building capability, but Nintex Forms has generally been considered more accessible to non-technical users than K2 SmartForms, which reflects the broader difference in build philosophy between the two products.

3. Microsoft 365 integration

• Neither Nintex nor K2 runs natively inside Microsoft 365 in the way FlowForma does. Both integrate with SharePoint, Teams, and Outlook via connectors, and both require some form of separate infrastructure (SaaS tenant for Nintex Automation Cloud, on-premises servers or hosted service for K2).

• Integration depth is similar between the two, though the specific connectors and integration patterns differ.

4. Deployment

• This is the biggest single point of contrast. Nintex Automation Cloud is a modern SaaS platform, while K2 blackpearl and K2 Five are on-premises products (with K2 Cloud as the hosted alternative).

• For organizations moving toward cloud-native architectures, Nintex's own platform is architecturally closer to where most modern buyers want to be than the K2 line.

What’s the best K2 workflow replacement

For K2 customers looking for the best replacement, the honest answer is that it depends on what you're trying to achieve.

Stay within Nintex

The path of least disruption. K2 Five (Nintex Automation On-Prem) is the natural upgrade for on-premises customers, and K2 Cloud (supported indefinitely per Nintex's 2023 policy) suits customers who want to move to a hosted model without leaving the Nintex family.

This route preserves your existing K2 knowledge and vendor relationships. Worth being aware that Nintex has ongoing end-of-life work across its own product line too.

Our Nintex end of life page covers the current picture. Staying within Nintex doesn't give you a materially different platform, but for teams that specifically don't want to re-platform, that continuity is the whole point.

Move to Microsoft Power Automate

For teams whose K2 use is genuinely simple, Power Automate can handle the workload as long as you're prepared to pair it with Power Apps for forms and Dataverse for structured data. Our FlowForma vs Power Automate comparison covers when this fits and when it doesn't.

Move to a dedicated no-code platform

For K2 customers whose priority is modernization to a Microsoft 365-native environment with genuine no-code process ownership, a dedicated platform like FlowForma typically fits better than either the Nintex continuity path or the multi-product Power Platform build.

Our FlowForma vs K2 comparison covers the direct side-by-side, and our K2 workflow replacement guide covers the migration path in full.

Which of the three fits depends primarily on how much appetite you have for modernization versus continuity, and how much of your K2 use is genuinely simple versus structurally complex.

How FlowForma compares to both

FlowForma is a Microsoft 365-native no-code process automation platform that sits outside the Nintex/K2 family entirely. For K2 customers looking for a workflow platform with genuine independence from the Nintex ecosystem, it's typically the most direct alternative.

1. Native Microsoft 365 architecture

FlowForma runs inside your existing Microsoft 365 tenant, uses SharePoint as its data layer, and doesn't require separate infrastructure or a separate SaaS tenant. Neither Nintex nor K2 works this way, both are external platforms that integrate with M365 via connectors.

2. AI Copilot and AI Agents

FlowForma has native AI Copilot for workflow generation from plain-language prompts, alongside AI Agents for document analysis and AI Assistants for in-context user guidance.

Nintex has been adding AI features across newer releases, and K2 has limited native AI, so FlowForma's AI capability layer is currently the deepest of the three for workflow-specific use cases.

3. Flat process-based pricing

FlowForma prices per process bands, with no additional infrastructure, connector premiums, or per-flow charges.

Nintex uses subscription pricing that scales with volume and connector usage. K2 uses per-CPU licensing on-premises plus additional infrastructure costs.

4. No-code for business users

FlowForma is designed for business users to own their workflows directly, with IT providing the governance layer around them. Nintex is closer to this model than K2 (which typically requires developer involvement), but FlowForma's no-code build is designed specifically for non-technical process owners.

The trade-off is straightforward. If your priority is minimum disruption from an existing K2 estate, staying within the Nintex family fits. If your priority is modernization to a Microsoft 365-native platform with strong native AI capability and independent vendor positioning, FlowForma is a stronger structural fit.

Evaluate Nintex or K2 options 

If you're evaluating Nintex, K2, and the broader alternatives available outside the Nintex family, the fastest way to see whether FlowForma fits is to see it running on a workflow you're already managing (or want to manage) in Nintex or K2.

Book a demo, and we'll walk through a live process that mirrors your current setup, and show you what a FlowForma rebuild would look like end-to-end.