// the take
An embeddable workflow/approval engine for .NET that runs in-process against SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, MongoDB or SQLite, with a browser-based visual designer and BPMN import. It's aimed at teams building approval chains, state machines or long-running business processes inside an existing .NET app who want a GUI business users can open, not developers looking for an open-source library to read or fork.
Runs inside your own process with state persisted to a database you already have, so there's no separate cluster to operate (unlike Temporal). Process versioning keeps in-flight instances pinned to the scheme version they started on until you explicitly migrate them, which matters once a process definition changes under live data. Six first-class database providers including Oracle and MongoDB is a wider spread than most competitors bother with. The Free tier (10 schemes, 4 threads, no license key) is a real no-sales-call option for small internal tools, not just a crippled trial.
This is not an open-source project despite being on GitHub — the engine source isn't in the repo at all; what's here is designer assets, interface stubs and samples, with the actual commercial EULA'd binaries shipped via NuGet. The bundled ASP.NET Core samples target .NET Core 2.1, years out of date relative to the .NET 8/10 support claimed in the README. The README itself is mostly a landing page with UTM-tagged links to pricing, trials and blog comparisons rather than technical documentation — you'll end up on docs.workflowengine.io for anything real. Clustering (running more than one runtime instance against shared storage) is locked to the paid Complete edition or the NEO product, so scaling past a single process means a purchase, not a config change.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →