The Lightning Process Builder is a modern way to develop state machines within a graphical representation. This is because a picture is worth a thousand words.
This modern tool is basically an If This Then That (ITTT) tool and like workflow rules and other automation processes (such as approvals or entitlements), it holds a conditional statement (IF), along with the corresponding actions to perform (THEN).
Do you remember what workflow rules can do? They can do the following:
- Update one of the fields of a source object or of a parent record (with a master-child relationship)
- Create a task
- Send an email
- Send an outbound action
What can a Process Builder do instead?
- Create a record (not only tasks)
- Update related records or the source record itself
- Launch a quick action
- Post to Chatter (A Salesforce collaborative tool. For more information...