In the past 24 hours, I’ve experienced 3 strange behavior with bubble’s workflows which have caused me some concern:
A custom event with a “make changes to” action was triggering and making the changes, but the “show an element” action wasn’t running. Removing the “make changes to” action caused the “show an element” action to show properly
A “make changes to” action set to make changes to the result of another “make changes to” action apparently did not wait for the action to finish, resulting in a data race condition
A “schedule api workflow” action in a custom event did not fire, despite it being before a “return data” action which did fire
Minor issues like these are, sadly, fairly common on bubble, and I’m used to working around that. What concerns me is that I’ve run into 3 of them in such a short timespan, and that they seem to be affecting behaviors that I previously was able to rely on.
Has anyone else been experiencing workflow oddities recently?
I’ve been moving workflows out of Bubble because WUs are expensive, and workflows—especially backend ones—are hard to debug.
The fact that custom events fire in sequence but API and on-page workflows don’t, that API workflows trigger data triggers but backend custom events and data triggers don’t, combined with high WU costs, lack of JSON support, a poor API connector, and a host of known, reported, but never-fixed bugs… it all creates a maze of logic and workarounds I constantly have to remember.
It’s much easier, more reliable, and more debuggable to build complex business logic in other platforms that are purpose-built for this—like n8n or Make. They are significantly easier to build and debug in. The only downside is that changing field names can break API calls—but at least those don’t silently fail, and you get useful logs and notifications.
In Bubble, I often spend an hour or more sleuthing through logs and testing workflows. In Make or n8n, I just check the error log, pinpoint the issue, and fix it in under five minutes. For me, that’s well worth the slight increase in execution time and the occasional headache from field name changes. I still keep some things close to the server in Bubble—like data-based triggers—but anything complex I now build in n8n.
