Nintex turned 20 this year. Think back to tech in 2006, when we were founded: It was the first year you could register for a Facebook account without a .edu email address, the year Amazon launched its AWS cloud computing infrastructure, and potentially one of the first years you heard the term SaaS. Needless to say … a lot has changed.
That’s true at Nintex, too. We’re proud of the advancements, evolutions, and acquisitions we’ve made through our history, because each of them has gotten us a step or two closer to the truly unified, AI-driven, end-to-end platform we launched this month.
Most recently, Nintex CE has transitioned from a set of related tools to a single unified platform. It’s a better user experience, but the change is more than cosmetic: Now, workflows, forms, apps, documents, integrations, and AI agents live inside one connected experience instead of separate products.
If you’re new to Nintex, this is all you’ll ever know. But if you’ve been with us for a while, in any iteration, the change — regardless of how beneficial it is — is still something new. We encourage you to explore the platform on your own, but if you want some ideas on how best to get started, here’s what we suggest:
- Organize around capabilities, not org charts
The Nintex platform’s navigation is structured by function-agnostic capability — workflows, apps, document generation, tables, agents — each with its own consistent submenu for configuration. That’s a hint about how to structure your own build. A process that spans HR and IT shouldn’t live in two separate silos just because two teams own it. Planning your first build around capabilities rather than reporting lines will save you a rework cycle later, when the “IT workflow” turns out to need a table, a form, and an integration that HR also needs.
- Treat your build as a Solution, not a set of loose parts
One of the most common ways automation breaks in production is version drift: A workflow gets pushed live, but a field it’s dependent on hasn’t been added to the form yet, or it goes live depending on an integration whose structure later changes.
Nintex Solutions packages workflows, forms, integrations, and agents tied to one business outcome into a single governed container that moves through environments as one versioned unit, with built-in application lifecycle management.
That’s built around the same principle software teams learned from CI/CD (continuous integration, continuous deployment): When you treat a release as one artifact, not independently movable pieces, you eliminate an entire class of bugs that only show up at the seams. If something breaks, you can address it in the Solution — not the four separate assets you’re hoping you rolled back in the right order. Decide what belongs together based on what would need to change together, not what capability it happens to use.
- Start from a template or AI prompt, not a blank canvas
The Nintex Gallery and our starter solution templates exist because most business processes — approvals, onboarding, licensing and permitting — follow patterns that have already been built and refined elsewhere. Starting from a template both saves build time and front-loads architecture decisions (how many stages, what data model, which approvals gate what) that are much more difficult to change after a process is live. That means a new user can launch a proven pattern on day one, while an experienced team can still fork it into something highly specific.
- Design for agents as first-class citizens, not an add-on
With this launch, agents and agentflows are no longer a separate experiment bolted onto workflow automation. They’re a platform capability with the same governance expectations as everything else. Agent Designer now supports models from multiple providers with configurable reasoning behavior, agent guardrails catch input validation failures before they cause downstream errors, and execution history gives you a way to review how each action in an agentflow was processed. Tools that let agents work directly with files in SharePoint and OneDrive are rolling out as well.
That means if your first Solution might eventually need an agent, say, to summarize a document, categorize a request, or route based on sentiment, plan for it from the start rather than retrofitting it. Guardrails and evaluations are easiest to get right when they’re part of the initial design, not a patch applied after something goes wrong in production.
- Set environment and governance decisions early
Settings in the CE Platform split cleanly into two levels: environment settings, which handle capability-specific configuration, and organization settings, which govern audit logs, identity federation, and tenant-wide controls. That split exists because some decisions, like how many environments you need, who can approve production releases, how identity is federated, are expensive to unwind once workflows and Solutions are already built against them.
Getting environment and organization-level settings right in week one, rather than week twelve, avoids having to re-platform Solutions that were built against an assumption that changed later.
- Build in phases, not a fixed sequence
Traditional workflow tools assume a process runs start to finish in one direction: Step two only happens after step one clears, going back usually means starting over, etc. Nintex Orchestration takes a different approach, breaking a process into modular phases that can move forward, jump back, or repeat as real-world conditions change, without discarding everything that came before. A loan approval can return to underwriting after new information surfaces mid-process; an onboarding flow can loop back to a missing-document phase without restarting the whole sequence.
So don’t model your first Solution as one long linear path just because that’s the traditional workflow default. Break it into phases around the decisions and conditions that could realistically send the process backward or sideways, and let orchestration handle the movement between them. It also means deterministic workflow steps and AI agents can sit in different phases of the same process — agents handling judgment calls, structured workflow steps handling compliance-critical hand-offs — without forcing the whole process into either a purely rigid or purely autonomous model.
If you’re already a Nintex CE customer, none of these principles require rebuilding anything you’ve already started — they’re a lens for making the next decision a little more deliberate. And if you’re evaluating where to begin on the CE Platform, these seven principles are a reasonable place to start the conversation. Ready to give it a try? Start your free trial of the Nintex platform or connect with an expert for a demo customized to your organization.
