Workflows overview
Understand stages, routes, ownership, and valid actions.
A Unitlab workflow is the operational state machine for project work. It determines where a task is, who can act, which actions are valid, and where accepted, rejected, failed, or escalated work goes next.
Use this area when: you are designing production operations, adding review, introducing a model, or changing how work is assigned and completed.
How this area fits into production
The canvas makes stage ownership and routing visible; a production workflow should expose normal, rejected, failed, invalid, and escalated paths clearly.
What this area controls
Workflow canvas
A new project receives the default workflow:
The six stage types currently released in the editor are:
Project — the single entry point;
Annotate — human labeling;
Review — human quality review with approve and reject routes;
Model — automated inference on entry;
Archive — terminal set-aside state;
Complete — terminal successful state and release-readiness destination.
The released stage catalog contains Project, Annotate, Review, Model, Archive, and Complete. A team that needs specialist or expert review adds and names another Review stage, then configures its eligible reviewers and routing rules.
The canvas supports:
adding stages;
drawing connections;
naming the workflow;
binding the reusable workflow to a project;
configuring eligible annotators or reviewers per human stage;
allowing or preventing self-assignment;
allowing manager override;
hiding unassigned work where required;
configuring whether the stage can be skipped;
selecting a model, thresholds, generic type, queue scope, and class mappings for Model stages;
accepted and rejected review branches;
Save and Apply with impact validation;
zoom, reset, and canvas navigation.
The workspace Workflows page displays reusable workflow cards and a Create Workflow action. Opening a project’s Workflows tab goes directly to the editor for that project’s active workflow.
In the full-page editor, users drag released stages from Add Stages onto the canvas, connect or remove edges, select a node to edit its configuration, and use one explicit Save & Apply action. The Project entry node embeds project progress. Stage names are editable except Project; duplicate display names are numbered consistently in both the canvas and Task Queue.
Replacing an active project workflow while items are in flight prompts with the number of items that would reset to Project. An unsaved-changes guard protects navigation away from the editor. Workflows can also be duplicated, archived, and restored.
Start with the right page
Build a graph
Configure stages and routes.
Define human action
Set assignment and stage actions.
Add quality control
Configure review, rework, and escalation.
Introduce automation
Use a Model stage with explicit failure and human-review routes.
Change live operations
Run a workflow impact review first.
Operating boundary
Rejection is a route back to corrective work, not an unexplained terminal state.
Invalid annotation state is different from workflow rejection or processing failure.
Queue visibility and actions are consequences of stage, role, assignment, and task state.
A production-ready handoff
Every state and transition has a name, owner, valid action, success condition, exception route, and observable queue representation.
Explore related Unitlab capabilities: AI training-data annotation