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anandasaia1666
March 9, 2026
Question

Difference Between Amazon S3 Utilities and AWS S3 Bucket Management

  • March 9, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 0 views

Hi Everyone,

I have few questions regarding the two AWS S3 related plugins available in Appian.

Currently there are two plugins that appear to provide similar functionality for uploading and downloading documents to Amazon S3:

  1. Amazon S3 Utilities (Smart Services)
  2. AWS S3 Bucket Management (Connected System / Integration based)

Both plugins seem to support operations such as uploading documents to S3 and downloading objects from S3. However, they follow different approaches in terms of configuration and usage.

My questions are:

1. What is the main architectural difference between these two plugins?

2. Are they intended for different use cases (e.g., process-based vs integration-based)?

3. Is the AWS S3 Utilities plugin considered a legacy approach compared to the Connected System based plugin?

4. For new implementations, which plugin is generally recommended by Appian?

I would appreciate any insights on when to use each approach in the real time.

Thanks in advance!

Ananda

    1 reply

    shubhama926776
    shubhama926776
    March 9, 2026

    Answers ->
    S3 Utilities = Smart Service nodes embedded in process models (credentials per node). AWS S3 Bucket Management = Connected System (centralized auth) + reusable Integration objects.
    Yes. S3 Utilities = process-only flows. AWS S3 Bucket Management = works in both processes and UI/expressions.
    Yes. Many modules are already deprecated.  It's the old approach.
    AWS S3 Bucket Management (Connected System) - always for new projects due to centralized credentials and reusability.

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