Nintex Replacement: How to Migrate Your Workflows To FlowForma

If you are lying awake at night unable to sleep, thinking about how to migrate hundreds or thousands of Nintex workflows to another platform, I think you've already made your mind up that it's time for a change.

If you're already thinking about a Nintex alternative, there is usually a trigger event that has sparked this thought. Whether it's licensing that has become difficult to predict, a platform that doesn't have the "hands-on" support your team needs, or challenges migrating from an end-of-life product, something has set the wheels in motion for you.

The good news is there are options available to make migrating off Nintex seamless, and platforms that support your workflows no matter how complex.

Let's get started by discussing the root cause of Nintex migrations.

Why Teams Are Moving Away from Nintex

Over the past year I have been involved in meetings with multiple organisations who were looking to migrate away from Nintex. The most common reasons why teams are moving away from Nintex include:

• Unpredictable, rising cost: Teams tell us the licensing has increased dramatically without much justification. Migrating from end-of-life products to new platforms has scaled costs.
• Stalled product roadmap: The platform is behind the curve with rolling out AI functionality and new features to support enterprise automation.
• Too much reliance on IT: While IT teams like the platform, they want it to further reduce their workload by giving business users greater ownership and control over workflows, which they struggle with due to technical constraints.
• End-of-life pressure: Teams running older Nintex on-premises deployments, often alongside InfoPath, which is being sunset, are not being supported with migrations to modern alternatives.

If this sounds familiar, we have written about Nintex end-of-life planning comprehensively, and if you're at the stage of looking for options, this Nintex competitors and alternatives article is a good place to start.

I also recently co-hosted a webinar, Modern Workflow Automation Without The Migration Headache, which discussed the reasons why organizations are looking to migrate away from Nintex. You can watch the recording of the webinar in the video below. 

What to Audit Before You Migrate

Okay, now it's time to switch gear and move from those workflow migration dreams into a real-world action plan. From my experience, the organisations that migrate smoothly are the ones that have done the groundwork. Before you move a single workflow, you need to create a detailed audit of your Nintex workflows.

Your pre-migration audit should cover:

• A workflow inventory, classified by complexity: List every workflow and split it into simple or complex. A simple workflow would be straightforward approvals and forms your own team can rebuild; complex would be multi-stage logic, heavy integration and regulatory-heavy processes.
• Integrations and orchestration: Map every connection to ERP, CRM, SharePoint lists and document libraries, and any line-of-business systems. A modern platform should orchestrate across these via REST, connectors or a staging database.
• Data and document export: Decide how data, forms and documents will be preserved, ensuring quality and audit trails are maintained.
• Governance and audit requirements: Document process approvals, versioning, and compliance evidence trails. A sandbox environment will be required to test safely before deployment.
• Data residency: If keeping data inside your own Microsoft 365 / SharePoint tenancy matters for compliance or auditability, make it a prerequisite in your vendor checklist.

If SharePoint is central to your tech stack requirements, our SharePoint workflow automation guide covers how existing lists and libraries map across without a full rebuild.

5 Common Nintex Workflows to Migrate

Onboarding is one of the most common use cases that we see automated during Nintex migrations. It is a daily friction point, where handoffs between HR, IT, facilities and new starters are critical to the HR department.

Rebuilt in FlowForma, onboarding becomes a single governed process. Data is captured and then flows to every downstream step between different departments. This usually includes accounts, equipment, access requests and compliance sign-offs, with automated escalations when a task stalls.

HR and IT collaborate and have full visibility into a workflow. Instead of chasing status over email, the whole workflow runs inside your M365 tenancy. The typical outcome is less admin time, faster time-to-productive for new hires, and a clean audit record of who did what and when.

Health-and-safety processes are different to other office-oriented processes, as they are usually completed in the field. This means users need to be able to submit forms, highlight any issues, or upload photos of hazards on site, and sometimes even offline.

This is where a modern, mobile-friendly experience matters. In the field, users need to capture inspections, incidents and permits-to-work easily, then route them for escalation so overdue or high-risk items surface. The result is fewer missed inspections, better data accuracy at source, and a complete evidence trail for auditors.

We recently published a case study featuring one of our customers, PJ Hegarty, where the team saw impressive H&S outcomes. You can read the full H&S story here and see a summary of the outcomes below:

• 45% increase in Safety Behaviour Observations
• 40% increase in participation in safety reporting across teams
• 25% reduction in EHS administration time

Procurement and supplier onboarding almost always involve people outside your organisation. We created a feature to handle procurement and supplier onboarding that enables organisations to bring in external organisations safely within a workflow.

The feature is called Engage, and it lets suppliers and clients complete their part of a process without an account, while the workflow orchestrates across your ERP and finance systems behind the scenes. Supplier due diligence, document collection and approval routing run as one connected flow, with a single source of truth for procurement and compliance reviews instead of a scatter of emails and spreadsheets.

Contracts are vital for the commercial side of the business. When contracts stall, or there is a technical blocker impeding progress, the deal can be delayed, and this can impact the business.

Contracts need to run in a streamlined digital workflow, with clear SLAs and visible RAG tracking so managers can act before something becomes a bottleneck. Automated escalations move stuck items on, and every decision is captured for the audit trail.

IT service requests and change management are a central part of the IT team's remit. But they can suffer from the same legacy problems they're meant to solve: inconsistent intake, manual triage, and poor reporting on what's actually happening.

In FlowForma's platform, this is a workflow designed to make IT leaders' jobs easier. Requests are captured through a consistent, user-friendly form, routed automatically by type and priority, and escalated against SLAs when they age. Real-time dashboards provide a 360-degree view of every workflow, with live visibility of progress, ownership and bottlenecks.

Morley College London, replacing both InfoPath and Nintex, went 100% paperless across these kinds of processes and saw faster processing, better data accuracy and a markedly better user experience. I'll discuss this case study in more detail below.

How Long Does a Nintex Migration Take?

How long your migration takes depends on the volume and complexity of your workflows. But it will take weeks rather than months to complete a full Nintex migration.

For simple workflow migration, customers are using FlowForma Copilot to instantly replace Nintex forms. This interactive demo demonstrates how fast, simple and intuitive Nintex workflow migration can be.

For more complex workflows, we do the heavy lifting and migrate workflows for you. The cost of this is covered in migration credits that we provide to support your migration. We have a full migration package which typically includes:

• Work 1:1 with a dedicated migration expert: An expert who has deployed several Nintex migrations and will work with you from project start to finish.
• Two days of training with FlowForma: So your team can build out workflows quickly and easily.
• Migration credits for the heavy lifting: FlowForma experts take on your most complex workflows, while your newly trained team rebuilds the simpler ones quickly in parallel.
• Go live in phases: We phase the migration and go live in line with an agreed deployment date.

One way to reduce risk is to ask a vendor to build a proof-of-concept of one representative workflow in a safe environment before committing to the full plan. If InfoPath is part of your tech stack too, our Microsoft InfoPath replacement guide covers those specifics.

Customer Story: Morley College London

Morley College London is a good example to showcase as part of this migration theme. Morley College London was running both InfoPath and Nintex but wanted to consolidate its workflow automation into one single, more user-friendly platform.

The challenge

Morley College London was running on InfoPath, which was due to be sunset, and Nintex, whose user experience presented some technical challenges. The result was a high administrative burden, poor visibility and reporting across processes, and inconsistent data that made reporting difficult.

The solution

Morley College London migrated to FlowForma and used the opportunity to improve its processes alongside the goal of platform consolidation.

The outcome

The migrated processes were improved, with faster processing, noticeably better data accuracy and an improved experience for the people using them every day. The results were:

• Administrative time significantly reduced
• Improved data accuracy and visibility
• Form data validation has improved the user experience
• Streamlined approvals and back-office processes
• Enhanced experience for both staff and students

Robert Kane

Solutions Consultant, FlowForma

Robert is a Solutions Consultant at FlowForma with nearly eight years' experience helping organisations move off legacy platforms and rebuild their processes as governed, no-code workflows, from first assessment through phased go-live.