My experience with workflow engines (as a developer) has been ... not great. They are hard to debug, and difficult to code once the logic gets complicated.
First I'll say that I am nowhere near an expert on working with workflow engines. If you wouldn't mind, I'd love to chat with you about your experiences with them.
The main difference is it's an extended state machine, not just a workflow engine.
It's similar in functionality in a few ways, but quite different from a WE in many more ways. A workflow engine has a subset of a state machine's functionality, hid behind a layer of abstraction that complicates things.
These networked extended state machines can be composed and nested, and as such, I think they avoid a lot of the complexities of a WE. I'll be going into more details on all of this in subsequent posts + a video, hopefully soon.
My experience with workflow engines (as a developer) has been ... not great. They are hard to debug, and difficult to code once the logic gets complicated.