A Case for Replacing Nintex

As most folks know, a few different legacy Nintex products (mostly on-prem) are in different stages of an EOL cycle, mostly driven by a reliance on an underlying technology (e.g., SharePoint workflow) or hosting platform (e.g., SharePoint on-prem). As part of the EOL announcements, Nintex offered their Automation Cloud and Automation On-prem (K2) platforms as migration paths.

While I could drop a long list of things about either of those that I don’t like, the real problem with them IMO is they lack the SharePoint-centric-ness of the products that made Nintex into one of the largest ISVs in Microsoft’s partner ecosystem. When I worked at K2 back in the early days of their North American operation, we didn’t lose deals to Nintex because they offered more capabilities, we lost deals because Nintex was just so incredibly easy to setup, use, and maintain…it just plugged right into your SharePoint instance, inherited already established security contexts, self-provisioning configurations, and more.

While I completely understand Nintex’s desire/need to move beyond SharePoint, I’m not sure you can be successful with that endeavor by completely abandoning it as a surface area for your future offerings…especially if you expect your large customer base to overwhelmingly come along for the ride. Most customers we’ve spoken with in the past 18+ months would agree, citing some combination of cost, inconvenience, feature/functionality deltas, and/or inconsistencies/uncertainty around product roadmaps. Some form of “why the heck can’t I create a form without creating a workflow” regularly comes up when discussing NAC, with some opting for more colorful language. When speaking of K2, folks often point to a lack of accessibility (WCAG compliance) as an indicator that Nintex is not serious about modernizing the platform. And with the somewhat recent acquisition of Skuid, it’s not clear to a lot of folks (me included), what the near or long-term product roadmap is…and frankly, it’s probably a little too late in this replacement/modernization cycle to care.

At Kudzu, we’ve made significant investments around Nintex Modernization. We can take an InfoPath form and convert it to a NAC form or K2 SmartForm. We can uplift Nintex for SharePoint forms (classic and responsive) to the same destinations. Highlighting the power of Uniform, we can also move those old Nintex forms to Lightning Tools Lightning Forms or skybow . Our investments in Lightning Forms and skybow were born from customers wanting to keep their InfoPath forms (and data) in SharePoint…i.e., the same thing we’re hearing from Nintex customers. I won’t get into Power Apps here other than to say that SharePoint integrated Power Apps have some limitations that present challenges to InfoPath and Nintex replacement efforts. Kudzu can help overcome them, but it’s just not as seamless as Lightning Forms and skybow.

Given the title and subject matter so far, it won’t be a surprise to anyone that we’re going to focus on improving our depth and breadth around SharePoint-hosted form/app platforms and helping Nintex customers avoid the cost, complexity, inconvenience, and oftentimes confusion associated with moving to NAC or K2.

To be clear, we’re not abandoning efforts to improve our Power Apps offering, Generative AI capabilities, or add new sources and destinations to Uniform. We’ll also continue to maintain and support our NAC/K2 offerings. We’re just listening to the market and the market is saying “help us Replace Nintex”.

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