Elsa Workflows: free MIT-licensed workflow engine for .NET
If you’re running automations inside a .NET application and want something more structured than a hand-rolled state machine, Elsa Workflows is worth a look. It’s an MIT-licensed workflow engine written in C# that handles both fast-completing tasks and long-running processes that suspend, wait for input, and resume later.
What It Does
Elsa separates workflow definitions from execution instances, so the same definition can run as many concurrent instances without interference. A workflow can pause at a bookmark until an external event (an approval, a webhook callback, a scheduled trigger) arrives, then pick up exactly where it left off. That design handles multi-day approval chains without polling or cron hacks.
Workflows can be authored three ways: through a drag-and-drop visual designer in Elsa Studio, defined in code, or written as JSON. The runtime can be embedded directly in an application or hosted as a standalone server.
Feature Rundown
- Sequential, conditional, looped, and parallel activity execution
- HTTP endpoints, API requests, timers, scheduled triggers, and message-handling activities
- Custom activities for integrating application-specific operations
- Expressions and dynamic values for configuring inputs and branching decisions
- Output values passed between workflow steps
- Versioning, publishing, and management of workflow definitions
- Instance monitoring with execution status and variable inspection
- Persistence options: relational databases and MongoDB
- Administrative interface for viewing and managing workflows and executions
Pricing and License
Free and open source under the MIT License. No seats, no tiers, no usage fees. The project is maintained by the Elsa Workflows contributors on GitHub.
For .NET developers who need durable, stateful process automation without a paid BPM platform, this covers the core use cases cleanly.
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