As a Certified FME Professional, I often see people get confused about the roles of FME Form and FME Flow. They're not competing tools; rather, they are two essential components of a single, powerful platform. The key to unlocking the full potential of FME is understanding how they work together.
The Core of the Platform: The FME Engine
At the heart of every FME product is the FME Engine. This is the core technology that does all the heavy lifting - reading data, transforming it, and writing it out in a new format. It’s the brains behind the operation, and it's the same robust, reliable engine whether you're using FME Form, FME Flow, or FME Flow Hosted.
FME Form: The Development Environment
Think of FME Form as your workshop. Its primary application, FME Workbench, is where the magic happens. This is where you, the data professional, build your data integration workflows, or "workspaces."
With FME Form, you can:
- Design and author workspaces using its intuitive, no-code graphical interface.
- Read data from thousands of sources, from spreadsheets to complex databases.
- Perform complex transformations to clean, enrich, and restructure your data.
- Write data to your desired output format.
- Execute these workspaces manually with the click of a button.
FME Form is your hands-on tool for development and ad-hoc data tasks. If you need to quickly transform a dataset or build a new workflow, this is where you start.
FME Flow: The Automation and Integration Hub
While FME Form is where you build the solution, FME Flow is where you run it at scale and in an automated fashion. FME Flow takes the workspaces you've built in FME Form and turns them into services. It provides a robust framework for automating your data workflows without any manual intervention.
FME Flow excels at:
- Scheduling: Run your workspaces automatically at specific times or intervals (e.g., every night at 2 a.m. or every hour).
- Automations: Trigger workflows based on a wide range of events. This could be a file being uploaded to a folder, an email arriving, a webhook request, or a message on an IoT device.
- Self-Service: Create web-based applications (using FME Flow Apps) that allow users to run your workspaces on demand, without needing FME Form.
- Real-Time Processing: Handle data streams and respond dynamically to incoming information.
- Scaling: Leverage multiple FME Engines to run tasks in parallel, drastically reducing processing time for large-scale operations.
Key Differences: When to Choose FME Flow
The core difference isn't about one being "better" than the other it's about their purpose.
- FME Form is for development and manual execution. You need it to build your solutions.
- FME Flow is for deployment, automation, and enterprise integration. You need it to run your solutions without human intervention and integrate them into your wider IT ecosystem.
We used to talk about them being a ‘server-client pair’, but that just meant that if you were working with FME Flow in the enterprise, you also needed FME Form to build your processes!
So, when do you use FME Flow over FME Form?
You should consider moving to FME Flow when your data tasks move beyond a simple, one-off project and become a regular part of your business processes. Here are some clear indicators:
- You need to run a workspace on a regular schedule (e.g., daily data refreshes).
- You want a workflow to be triggered automatically by an event, such as a new file arriving.
- You need to provide non-FME users with a simple way to run a complex workspace via a web browser.
- You have a high volume of data to process and need to run multiple jobs concurrently for efficiency.
- You want to host an App to access your data or a transformation process.
- You want to create a central hub for your organisation's data integration services, making them accessible to other systems.
- You need to create an API endpoint to publish access to your data!
So, I hope you can see now that FME Form and FME Flow are two sides of the same coin. FME Form gives you the power to build, and FME Flow gives you the power to automate and integrate. A professional FME setup for any modern organisation will almost certainly involve both, with FME Form used for creation and FME Flow used for delivery.
Want to trial FME Form or FME Flow? Just get in touch and we can set you up with a trial licence.
