---
title: "When to use a standard agent or a workflow agent"
slug: "when-to-use-a-standard-agent-or-a-workflow-agent"
abstract: "Overview of when to a standard agent or a workflow agent."
---
# When to use a standard agent or a workflow agent

You influence how an agent processes information and which information is taken into account by adding [agent skills](https://doc.sitecore.com/sai/en/users/sitecoreai/working-with-agentic-studio/understanding-agents/agent-skills.html "Agent skills") to your request. This provides additional knowledge and context to an agent. When you use a [standard agent](https://doc.sitecore.com/sai/en/users/sitecoreai/working-with-agentic-studio/understanding-agents/create-a-standard-agent.html "Create a standard agent"), you can associate a skill. When you use a [workflow agent](https://doc.sitecore.com/sai/en/users/sitecoreai/working-with-agentic-studio/understanding-agents/create-a-workflow-agent.html "Create a workflow agent"), you can associate skills to a step in the workflow.

| Key feature | Use a standard agent | Use a workflow agent |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Control | When you want the AI to decide how to execute the instructions. This is ideal when you want the agent to be creative or adaptive. | When you want to explicitly define the execution path or when you need deterministic, predictable behavior. |
| Resilience | When the skill-based executions carried out by agents are completed in a single run. This means that if there is a failure, the entire operation must be run again. | When you want to have checkpoints that allow execution to be paused and restarted. This means you can resume the workflow from the last successful step after a failure. This is particularly important when the cost of re-running the entire process is high (for example, when generating large artifacts, or calling external systems). |
| Impact | When you can run the same operation multiple times with the same input and the end result is the same or when the impact is low-risk. | When steps results in an action, such as sending emails, charging payments, writing back to Sitecore at scale, that should not be repeated on retry. |
| Complexity | When only one agent is required for focused, single-domain tasks. | When you have multi-step business processes that coordinate multiple agents, human approvals, or external system integrations. |