Process Automation

Process automation is using software to carry out business processes with less manual effort, from workflows and approvals to robots that operate existing applications and AI agents that complete multi-step tasks.

Business process automation (BPA) automates tasks and flows, digital process automation (DPA) usually adds low-code design of end-to-end, customer-facing processes, and robotic process automation (RPA) uses software robots to imitate user actions on existing applications. Vendors often combine them. See the BPA, DPA and RPA pages.

Hyperautomation is the combination of automation technologies such as RPA, AI, low-code platforms and process mining to automate as many processes as possible. See the Hyperautomation page.

Typically by finding and modeling the process before automating it, using process discovery, process mining or task mining, and then choosing among workflow, RPA or integration tools. See the Process Discovery and Process Modeling pages.

Process automation is the broad goal, while workflow engines such as Temporal, Airflow and Camunda are infrastructure that runs durable workflows in code or from models. See the Workflow Engines page.

Vendors describe AI agents and large language models inside automated workflows, for example to triage inboxes or route approvals. See the AI Workflow Automation Tools page, and check each vendor's documentation for capabilities and governance.

Links were checked on 31 October 2026. Release facts come from GitHub and PyPI, and descriptions follow each source's own pages; they are not rankings.