Winter ’26 is almost here! Learn more about Flow features and check out Be Release Ready to discover more resources to help you prepare for Winter ’26.
The improvements to Flow are coming—and fast. To help you keep track, let’s break down the new features into some key categories.
Let’s start off with some of the goodness that all Flow lovers can rejoice in, with features that improve the overall builder experience.
The resource menu is faster and easier to use than ever, with a new Quick Resources section that intelligently surfaces the resources you’re most likely to be searching for, such as automatically showing the Triggering Record resource at the top of the menu in record-triggered flows. The menu also now shows a filtered list of options based on data types and context position within the flow. For instance, the Current Item from Loop resource is only displayed when you’re within a loop, and values that don’t match the data type you’re assigning or comparing to are automatically hidden. Expanded Search is also now Generally Available (GA), letting you quickly find deeply nested fields while prioritizing whole-word and word-initial matches. This all translates to less searching and more flowing!
Decision elements are at the heart of process automation, but inputs like unstructured text don’t lend themselves to clean deterministic logic. For example, in a customer service flow that processes emails, you may want to determine which action to take based on sentiment and key phrases, not just on structured fields such as Case Type. Flow builders can now leverage generative AI within Decision elements to intelligently determine the outcome based on natural language prompts.
This is one of those nice quality of life improvements that makes you lean back in your chair and think, “They get me, they really get me.” Now, after a Create Records element, you can immediately access fields from the newly inserted record without having to do a separate Get Records operation. Sometimes it’s the little things in Flow, right?
In Summer ’25, we released the new beta capability of getting related records within a single Get Records element. Now it gets even beta (yes, that’s a hilarious pun, but to clarify, this new feature is also in beta) with the ability to loop through those multiple levels of relationships. For example, you can now use a single Get Records element, select Also add related records (beta), and pull in not only an Account but also all Contacts related to that Account, and all Cases associated with each of those Contacts—then use nested loops to perform updates, calculations, or any other processes you want on the entire hierarchy of data! This is fantastic because it’s faster and easier, and it avoids requiring multiple Get Records elements nested within loops, which is a big no-no due to governor limits.
Flow is built first and foremost for admins, but let’s not forget what a boon it is to our developer friends! Invocable actions are a hugely powerful way to extend from low-code to pro-code, and they’re getting two powerups in this release. With new Action Extension Metadata, developers can specify the order of their actions’ inputs, group them together, and apply conditional visibility. This will make it much easier for the admin consumers of those actions to successfully utilize what they’ve built, without the work of building a Custom Property Editor. With the new Transform Data Mapping feature, admins can use the Transform UI to configure complex data for actions’ inputs. This has the same benefit that Transform is bringing to other areas of Flow: Eliminate the need for additional loops and assignments.
Everyone loves building flows (Right? Right!?), but it’s just as important for your organization to effectively manage and maintain those flows on an ongoing basis. Winter ’26 adds some fantastic new tools to the Flow admin’s toolbelt.
It’s tough to overstate how big a deal this one is. For the first time, you can now visually compare the changes between flow versions! Easily determine exactly what’s changed between them, including flow properties, elements, resources, and connectors. The comparison results can be easily shared by URL, enabling others with Flow access to see the exact same report for seamless collaboration. This is great for reviewing new changes before deployment and troubleshooting issues. Try it today with autolaunched, schedule-triggered, platform event-triggered, and record-triggered flows.
As actions become an ever more important part of the automation landscape, admins need new tools to track and manage those actions. We’re thrilled to release the new Action Hub (beta) within the Automation App, which is a single place to manage all standard and custom actions in your org. You can view and search among your actions, making it easier to tell exactly what capabilities already exist in your org to prevent reinventing the wheel. Even better, you can also see which flows are using which actions.
Ah, debugging. It’s right up there with flossing: important AND fun! The debugging experience gets several improvements in Winter ’26. First, the debug setup modal is moving to a resizable side panel, giving greater workspace visibility. There’s also a handy, new View on Canvas button within the debug pane that lets you jump directly to any element on the canvas, making it easier to navigate while you debug.
The Data Table component is one of the most powerful screen components to be released in years. This release brings one of my personal most long-awaited improvements: Data Tables can now display Apex-Defined Types (ADTs) in addition to sObjects. If you’re not familiar with ADTs, they allow developers to create Apex classes to represent complex data structures that don’t already exist in an org as custom objects (and admins, I promise—it’s genuinely doable with some copy and paste!). A classic example is when you want to display fields from multiple objects, say Opportunity and Account, in a single Data Table. Until now, you’d either need a workaround like custom formula fields, some hacky assignments within your flow, and multiple tables—or you were simply out of luck. But now, you can create a very simple ADT that combines data points from multiple objects and display that in a single table. If you got scared at the mention of Apex, I hear you, but I promise there are some great blog posts (this one’s my favorite) that make this very powerful concept accessible to complete non-coders. Do yourself a favor and take a look!
This release also brings some other quality of life improvements to Data Tables, such as automatically updating them if you change the label or API name of a field (previously you had to manually make those changes in your Data Table configuration), and blocking deletion of fields that are used within them.
Display Text is one of the most used flow screen components out there, and it’s getting multiple long-awaited, new features this release. These are big wins from an accessibility standpoint, but also just for admins who like making their display-only text and images easier to manage and consume.
Let’s start with the new ability to add heading and paragraph styles within Display Text. This brings stylistic consistency to your text and makes them easier to read for both humans and screen readers.
And we all know a picture is worth a thousand words, which is why embedded images are getting an upgrade as well. You can now add images via Static Resources instead of just as files. This means they’ll be packageable for deployment across orgs and accessible via Experience Cloud sites. Images now also support Alternative Text to improve accessibility for screen readers.
Preview how your screen flows appear to users when the flows are added to Lightning Experience or Experience Cloud sites. Use the new Preview Style feature to ensure your flows seamlessly match the look and feel of your apps and pages before you activate the flow. When flows align with your site’s branding, users experience them as a natural extension of the site, boosting trust and reinforcing your brand identity.
For a while now, testing and debugging screen flows has been a slightly different experience than debugging other flow types, such as autolaunched. Now it’s all coming together with screen flows using the same debug side panel as other flow types. This lets you see (and search!) detailed run information about a flow, like its screens, components, and actions, in the updated debug panel. It also lets you quickly switch between your flow’s runtime screen and the flow canvas while staying in the debugger, helping you maintain context. In addition, there’s a huge improvement to the display formatting of complex values, making it much (much, much) easier to see the details for collections, components, actions, and more.
Ring the bell! Debug mode is coming to Orchestrator! Now you can test your orchestrations before deployment and ensure that they work as intended and avoid disrupting business operations, just like you’re used to with other flow types. Orchestrations involve complex workflows with branching conditions, making it essential to identify logic errors, missing configurations, or performance bottlenecks early in development. Running an orchestration in debug mode helps to streamline development, reduce time-to-deployment, and build trust in your solutions.
Hopefully, by now, you’ve seen the incredible power of Flow Approval Processes. Since these are built with Flow Orchestrator, and now that Orchestrator allows Debug mode (see elsewhere in this post), that goodness comes right along with it, so you can debug your Flow Approval Processes as well.
This is two exciting updates packed into one. First, business users can now view, create, and change Flow Approval Processes without needing the Manage Flows permission (which is usually more permissions than this user needs; think least privilege access). Simply give them the Approval Designer system permission and the View Orchestration in Automation App user permission, and they can design their own approval flows without having to add it to the admin’s backlog. Note that the background step flows will still need to be created by admins with the Manage Flows permission, but think of it like creating building blocks that these business users can combine to form their own approval processes.
These users cannot, however, activate these approval processes, which brings us to the second related update, which is basically approval-ception: using Flow Approval Processes to approve Flow Approval Processes 🤯. When a user without the Manage Flows permission is ready to activate their approval process, they can submit it for approval directly from the Flow Builder, setting it to Under Review status. It will get sent to the selected admin for review, who can then approve it or return it to Draft status.
Record retrieval is now more powerful with the new record search capability available for several key connectors, including Salesforce, NetSuite, Jira, and QuickBooks. This enhancement gives you a native, Flow-like experience for querying external data, making it easier to find and retrieve the exact records you need for your automation without complex workarounds.
Integrations are now faster and more precise with trigger enhancements that facilitate data sync use cases. New connector triggers and an increased polling frequency allow flows to respond to external changes more quickly, while conditional triggers ensure that automations only run when specific criteria are met, reducing unnecessary API calls and improving efficiency.
Each release brings tons of amazing, new functionality and it can be a lot to digest. To help you make the most of Winter ’26, be sure to explore our Be Release Ready page, where you’ll find valuable resources for Salesforce Admins. Bookmark the page and check back for any updates as we continue to provide helpful insights!
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