Classic Dataverse workflows automate background actions — sending an email, updating a field, creating a related record — triggered by record events, without any user interaction.
Real-time vs. background
- Real-time workflows — run synchronously, in the same transaction as the triggering event. The user waits for it to finish before the save completes. Used when the result must be reflected immediately.
- Background workflows — run asynchronously, queued and processed shortly after the triggering event. The user doesn’t wait, but there’s a small delay before the effect is visible.
On-demand workflows
Some workflows are designed to be triggered manually by a user clicking “Run Workflow” on a record, rather than automatically on an event — useful for occasional, deliberate actions like “Send Renewal Reminder” that shouldn’t fire automatically every time a record is touched.
Trigger conditions
Workflows can be scoped to specific trigger events (record created, specific fields changed, status changed) and further filtered with conditions, so they only run when genuinely relevant — avoiding wasted processing and unintended side effects on unrelated updates.
Workflow vs. Power Automate — which to actually recommend. Classic workflows are simpler to build and still fully supported, and are fine for straightforward, Dataverse-only automation. Power Automate is the better choice whenever the automation needs to reach outside Dataverse (Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, external APIs), needs more complex branching/looping, or benefits from a visual flow that non-developers can more easily understand and maintain. On new projects, Microsoft’s own direction is clearly toward Power Automate — classic workflows are a maintained legacy option, not where new investment is encouraged.