How to migrate from Pega to Tallyfy

Migrating from Pega to Tallyfy starts with a hard truth most migration guides dodge: you can’t really migrate Pega, and for most of it you shouldn’t want to. Pega is a model-driven platform for case management and decisioning, the kind of system a bank runs claims on or an insurer runs underwriting on. Tallyfy doesn’t replace that engine, and trying would wreck the project before it began. So the honest version of this guide is deliberately small. It’s about the slice of Pega that’s just human approvals and sign-offs, the work that ended up on an enterprise platform because that’s where the license already sat.

That slice is real, and it’s usually larger than people guess. A credit-line increase waiting on a manager’s yes. A vendor exception that needs a director. The little review-and-approve flows that got modeled in Pega next to the serious case types. Those lift out cleanly.

Anything wired into the decisioning engine, the rules, or a genuine case lifecycle stays exactly where it is. Telling one from the other is the entire job, and it’s the same judgment call you face in any honest shortlisting workflow software exercise.

Why teams move off Pega

Pega is a powerful platform, and it’s only fair to say that before talking about leaving any corner of it. For model-driven case management at enterprise scale, with decisioning and next-best-action built in, few tools match it. That said, the organizations that genuinely need that depth usually aren’t the ones reading a migration guide. The friction lives somewhere else.

It shows up at the edges, where the platform meets ordinary work. Someone in finance or operations has a three-step sign-off to run, and the only workflow tool with a seat already paid for is Pega. So the approval process gets modeled there too. Now a plain yes-or-no lives inside a system that needs a Pega-certified developer to change, priced and shaped for case management it will never touch.

What nobody warns you about leaving a platform this large is how much of what’s modeled in it isn’t really case work. Plenty of those flows are really human approvals in expensive clothing: a messy form, a couple of sign-offs, a notification at the end. They don’t need a rules engine. They need to live somewhere the people who run them can edit a step without that painful loop of filing a change request and waiting a sprint.

So what’s the real aim in moving?

To get the simple human approvals out from under the platform, so the people who own them can run and change them directly. Nothing grander than that.

What a Pega export actually gives you

Here’s the detail that decides how the move really works: Pega lets you package an application, but the package is built to stay inside Pega. That distinction shapes everything that follows.

When you bundle an application to migrate it, you build a product rule. Pega packages that as a RAP archive, short for Rule-Admin-Product, a ZIP or JAR file holding the rulesets, data, and objects that make up the app. It’s a real export, and it’s the standard way Pega applications travel. The catch is where they travel to. Deployment Manager promotes that archive across your own environments, development to testing to production, along what Pega calls a Route To Live. That’s a deployment pipeline, not a portability path.

So there’s no clean export out of Pega to a different vendor. A RAP file is Pega-shaped, and only another Pega system reads it, the way a file saved by one program rarely opens in a different one. That makes this a re-author migration: you read the case type and its flow to understand the human steps, then rebuild those steps in Tallyfy by hand. For a developer-grade case type that’s serious work, which is the whole reason to keep it in Pega. For a plain approval it’s quick, because once you set the platform aside there wasn’t much underneath.

There’s an upside folded into that, though. The flow you open to understand an approval is, in effect, the spec. It spells out each human step, who signs off, and the order things run in, which is exactly what you need to build the same thing again. You’re not prying open a black box. You’re reading a model and recreating the people-part of it somewhere the people can own it.

How Pega concepts map to Tallyfy

For the human-approval subset, the mapping is direct, because those flows were always just people and steps. The skill is keeping the orange parts out of the move.

Walk through a real one. Picture a customer dispute review in Pega: an agent opens a case, a flow action captures the dispute details, it routes to a supervisor for a sign-off, and once approved the case moves toward resolution. In Tallyfy the human spine of that becomes a blueprint where the form that opens the request captures the same details, an approval step routes to the supervisor, and a final step records the outcome. The shape is identical. What you leave behind is the case itself, the decisioning that scores the dispute and the rules that drive next-best-action, because that’s Pega’s job, not Tallyfy’s.

Now the reverse case. A dispute case that pulls a risk score from the decisioning engine, applies a dozen business rules, and writes to a system of record isn’t a candidate. There’s no clean human spine to lift out, and the engine is the entire point. A regulated loan approval workflow with scoring and compliance logic sits in the same bucket. Those stay in Pega.

A realistic migration timeline

Give it a few weeks, and spend the first one drawing a line rather than building anything.

Week one is triage. Walk your Pega case types and split them in two: the ones that are genuinely human approvals, and the ones that are really applications with a sign-off bolted on. The first list is your scope. The second isn’t moving, and being strict about that line is what keeps the project small and honest.

Week two, rebuild one approval. Read the case type and its flow, then build the same sequence as a Tallyfy blueprint by hand, since there’s no file to import. Pick one high-volume sign-off, get the form fields, the approval chain, and the routing right, and resist doing five at once.

Then run them in parallel. Keep the Pega version live while the rebuilt one handles real requests on one team, so the owners can confirm it holds up before anything gets switched off. Because you’re moving simple approvals and leaving the platform intact, this stays a contained project instead of a migration of everything Pega does.

After that it’s a gradual roll-out, not a flag-day switch. Once a team trusts the rebuilt approval, new requests start in Tallyfy, the open Pega cases finish on their own, and you move to the next item on the triage list. Pega keeps running its case work the whole time, so nothing about the platform is at risk while you lift the approvals off it one at a time.

What Tallyfy won’t replace

Here’s the line, said plainly, because it matters more than anything else here: Tallyfy is not a case-management or decisioning platform, and it isn’t pretending to be.

Enterprise platforms treat every process as a developer artifact. Tallyfy treats it as something a business team runs.

Tallyfy doesn’t do model-driven case management. It has no decisioning engine, no Customer Decision Hub, no next-best-action scoring, no rules engine, and none of the App Studio machinery Pega is built around. It won’t run the integrations that tie Pega into your core systems, and it won’t host the case applications your team built. If you need those, you need Pega, and the right call is to keep it. That’s the heart of what Pega does, and it isn’t what Tallyfy is for.

What Tallyfy does is the human layer: forms, approvals that gate the next step, sequential steps, and rules a business user can change without writing code. That’s why it sits beside Pega rather than competing with it. Run your case management and decisioning on Pega. Run the cross-team sign-offs that never needed an engine on Tallyfy. Trying to make one tool do both jobs is how you get simple approvals trapped inside enterprise software, which is the problem you started with.

Common questions about migrating from Pega

If you’re still weighing the decision rather than ready to move, our Pega alternative comparison lays out why teams pull their approvals off a case-management platform, point by point. The comparison covers the why; this is the how, without breaking the case work you keep.

When you’re ready to scope the move, the best place to start is a quick call where we read your case types together, separate the human approvals from the genuine case work, and confirm which ones rebuild cleanly in Tallyfy.

Book a 30-minute migration walkthrough and bring the sign-offs your team runs by hand. That’s the surest way to tell where the line should sit.