Guides by audience
Flowfile has several entry points into the same tool. Pick the one that matches how you work — every path builds the same flows, and you can switch between them at any point. (Not sure Flowfile is the right shape at all? Start with What is Flowfile.)
Find your starting point
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Build flows visually
Messy exports become clean tables others rely on — as visible, re-runnable pipelines.
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Coming from Excel
VLOOKUPs, pivot tables, and IF-formulas, translated into flows.
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Your data lives elsewhere
Warehouse, S3, Kafka, GA — work with data where it already is, and stop copying it around by hand.
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Analyze your data
From question to chart you trust: shape, publish, query, visualize — and let it refresh itself.
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Write Python
Polars-style code with less I/O boilerplate — and every pipeline gets a canvas.
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Run Flowfile for a team
Running it as a shared service: auth, secrets, sharing, backups, day-two operations.
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Build a node the palette lacks
A custom transformation, built once in the Node Designer — visually, no code file — and reusable in every flow.
Visual and code are the same pipeline
A flow built on the canvas and a pipeline written in Python construct the same graph underneath:
- Write code, then inspect it on the canvas with
ff.open_graph_in_editor(df.flow_graph). - Build visually, then export the flow as Python — pure-transformation flows export as Polars with no
flowfileimport (some formula, fuzzy-match, or graph nodes pull a smallpolars_*helper); flows with I/O nodes keep anffimport for their connections. - Hand a visual flow to a colleague who prefers code, or the other way around — both are views of the same graph.
import flowfile as ff
SALES = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/edwardvaneechoud/flowfile/main/data/templates/supermarket_sales.csv"
result = (
ff.read_csv(SALES)
.unique()
.filter(ff.col("quantity") > 7)
.group_by("city")
.agg(
ff.col("gross_income").sum().alias("total_income"),
ff.col("gross_income").median().alias("median_income"),
)
)
This is the same pipeline the Quickstart builds visually — read, deduplicate, filter, aggregate.
New here?
The Quickstart installs Flowfile and walks both paths in a few minutes: a visual flow that ends in the catalog, and the Python version of the same pipeline.