Is Elsa the Right Fit for My Multi-Integration Authorization Architecture + Minimal Hello World Setup

[JoseSebastianGarcia]

Hi everyone,

I’m currently evaluating Elsa Workflows and I need both architectural validation and a minimal working setup example.

Architecture Context

Our system acts as an authorization layer between multiple external systems and their purchase request processes.

We receive purchase requests through Azure Functions (currently 4 different integrations).
From there, we apply a standardized responsibility model with three roles:

• Enricher: Adds business information.
• Approver: N+1 of the Enricher.
• Authorizer: N+1 of the Approver, provides the final decision.

Once the process completes, we send the approve/reject decision back to the originating system using Azure Service Bus and Azure Functions.

However:

• Each source system may enter at a different stage.
• Validation rules differ.
• Some steps may be skipped.
• The workflow structure itself may vary per integration.

This is not just rule variability — it’s structural variability.

What I Need to Understand

1. Is Elsa a good architectural fit for this kind of multi-entry, role-driven, long-running process?
2. Should this be modeled as:
   • One workflow per integration?
   • A single parametrized workflow?
   • Some kind of base workflow with variations?
3. At what point does a custom process manager become a better alternative?

Immediate Practical Need

I am struggling to bootstrap a minimal working setup.

I would appreciate:

• A minimal example of Elsa Server + Elsa Studio
• .NET 8 (preferred)
• A simple "Hello World" workflow visible in the UI graph
• A basic example of triggering execution programmatically

My goal is to demonstrate a working visual workflow to management before moving into deeper integration work.

Any snippet, template, or recommended starting point would be extremely helpful.

Thank you in advance.

This screenshot shows my first attempt using Docker. As you can see, the interface appears empty and I don’t see any option to create workflows or add activities:

[JoseSebastianGarcia]

I need to add another question:
Which packages would be most relevant for my scenario — the ones marked with the green icon or the ones marked with the blue icon? Could you also clarify the conceptual difference between them?

[jsuutari]

Green ones are for v2 and the blue ones for v3. Check out the documentation: https://docs.elsaworkflows.io/
It should pretty much give answers to all of your questions

[JoseSebastianGarcia]

Sure, first of all thanks for your response — the part about the versions clarified things a lot for me. I want to tell you that before coming here, I went through the documentation, and even while following the examples I wasn’t able to get a Server up and running. Either the solution would break, or I simply couldn’t even see an endpoint.
I also tried running the Studio in Docker pointing to my local machine (hub.docker.internal) to see if it would show anything, but that didn’t work either.
I’d really appreciate it if you could share a reliable source where I can see step-by-step how to implement it. I also noticed in the documentation examples that it mixes v2 and v3 — I was checking package by package and ended up mixing both versions.

[sfmskywalker]

The elsa-samples and elsa-apps repositories should serve as good examples of working setups.

Thanks for calling out the issues in the documentation, we’ll definitely want to get that fixed.

[JoseSebastianGarcia]

Thank you very much! I’ll review those sources you mentioned, which I assume are here on GitHub.