What Makes Code Effects the Superior Rules Engine
Code Effects is known for its speed and ease of implementation, requiring just a few days to integrate into any new or existing .NET project. While our online documentation offers more in-depth information, what truly sets Code Effects apart is its exceptional performance, rich feature set, and revolutionary user interface.
Other qualities that make Code Effects stand out become especially clear when compared to current business rules formats and user interfaces used across the BRM industry.
Let’s explore some of those examples and see how Code Effects measures up.
User Interface
Decision Tables
This is the type of business rules format commonly used by most Business Rules Management (BRM) software today. At first glance, the decision table shown here may appear straightforward, but it actually represents a very basic—and arguably outdated—approach to rule definition. Despite its simplicity, understanding and working with this format often requires more than just business domain knowledge.
In most cases, a rule author must possess a deep familiarity with the vendor-specific decision table structure, syntax, and logic conventions in order to create, modify, or maintain rules without error. This steep learning curve makes it difficult for non-technical users to manage rules independently.
As a result, decision table management is rarely a task handled solely by business users. Instead, it typically becomes a shared responsibility between business analysts and a dedicated IT team, slowing down the rule development process and reducing overall agility.
This dependency highlights one of the major limitations of traditional BRM tools—and one of the key problems that Code Effects was designed to solve.
Open Source Business Rules Engines
This clickable screenshot demonstrates a rule created with Microsoft’s latest open-source business rules engine. Although the rule is very simple, it lacks any visual representation—what you see is just the raw, text-based definition.
While this approach may suit developers, it’s not practical for business users. There’s no visual guidance, no intuitive interface, and no way to preview or safely modify rules without technical knowledge. Even minor changes require IT involvement.
This creates unnecessary bottlenecks and keeps rule management out of reach for non-technical teams.
Code Effects solves this by offering a fully visual, user-friendly interface designed for both business and IT users.
Drag and Drop Desktop Interfaces
Can you truly visualize the business logic behind the typical drag-and-drop interface shown above? While on-screen manipulation of rule elements may seem convenient at first, in real-life scenarios this ease is often overshadowed by the editor’s complexity. Users must carefully arrange each condition of the rule and then define every action or value setter—either by navigating through numerous dialogs and panels or by writing code in a proprietary programming language.
Having to deal with this type of UI, it’s often easier and more effective to write the rule directly in code and redeploy the project rather than trying to craft even a simple rule through the editor.
Many BRM vendors claim their products "require no IT involvement." However, the reality is that rule authors often need some programming skills to accurately express complex, real-world business logic within the constraints of various user interfaces and rule formats. This reliance on technical expertise limits true business user independence and slows down the rule management process.
Code Effects' User Interface
This screenshot shows the Code Effects rule area, captured directly from the Live Demo on this website. In this example, we’ve entered a quick, fictional rule one that may not make perfect business sense, but effectively highlights just how easy and intuitive our web-based interface really is. At a glance, anyone can read and understand the logic of the rule without needing technical training or coding experience.
The interface is designed to feel natural, even to non-technical users. Every rule element is readable, interactive, and easy to modify. Plus, the editor can display and even dynamically translate the entire rule into any language of your choice—making it ideal for global teams and multinational operations.
Most modern BRM vendors focus on building feature-heavy interfaces tailored to developers—if they offer a rule editor at all. This approach often sidelines business professionals and forces companies to depend on IT for even the smallest rule changes. Over time, that leads to slower processes, higher costs, and reduced agility.
Code Effects was built to change that. Since 2009, our mission has been to empower business users—product owners, data analysts, compliance managers—to take full control of the logic that drives their systems. With Code Effects, rule creation is no longer a technical barrier but a strategic asset.
Publicly Accessible Web-Based UI
One of the most powerful and unique features of Code Effects is its fully web-based rules UI. Unlike other business rules solutions that attempt to build complex web forms — like the ones shown here — in order to give public users the ability to define their own rules, our streamlined interface can be embedded directly into any web page. This enables even public users to define and manage their own business rules without any knowledge of your data structure and without struggling with overly complicated forms.
This capability is especially critical for applications that require user-defined logic, such as customer-facing platforms or self-service portals. Traditional rule formats like decision tables or drag-and-drop editors are far too complex for non-technical users. Before Code Effects, companies had no choice but to build custom web editors in-house, typically pairing them with an open-source engine. That process — developing the form, integrating it with the host system, implementing rule evaluation, testing, and deploying — often took weeks or months, not to mention the time spent on discovery, planning, and design. And even then, the result was rarely user-friendly.
With Code Effects, all of that complexity is eliminated. Implementation into any .NET project typically takes just a few days and costs a fraction of what it takes to build a comparable in-house solution.
If you’ve been researching the BRM space, you may have already noticed something else: Code Effects is the only vendor that offers a real, live demo right on our website. Why? Because we trust you — the public user — to explore the interface, create a basic rule, and understand how it works without needing a sales rep to guide you. No hidden features. No hand-holding. No confusion.
That alone speaks volumes about the usability and maturity of our solution.
Capabilities
Having the simplest and most intuitive web-based UI doesn’t mean Code Effects lacks the key features commonly found in other BRM solutions. In fact, we offer powerful capabilities that many other engines don’t.
Support for collection data types, built-in numeric calculations, in-rule methods and rule actions with optional parameters, logic separation with parentheses, reusable rules, rule templates, multiple evaluation modes, automatic rule validation, dynamic help, and automatic detection of circular dependencies and mutually recursive rules — these are just some of the advanced features available in our Rule Editor.
But the editor is just one part of the platform. Rule evaluation is handled by our high-performance Rule Engine — a thread-safe, .NET Standard library that runs on any .NET platform. It compiles your business rules into native machine code just before execution, making them an integrated part of your application’s runtime. As a result, rule performance is limited only by your hardware.
We offer performance testing demo projects, so you can see the engine’s speed and efficiency for yourself. Request access through our Support form.
Performance
The Code Effects rules engine is built for exceptional performance. From the very beginning, our focus has been on delivering speed without compromising accuracy, stability, or flexibility. Whether you're evaluating a single rule or running millions of evaluations per day, the engine is designed to process logic with near-native execution speed — making it ideal for high-volume, performance-critical applications.
One of the reasons Code Effects is so fast is that it compiles rules into machine-native code just before evaluation. This means that instead of interpreting rule logic at runtime like many other engines, Code Effects turns each rule into actual executable code that becomes part of your application's execution flow. As a result, your rules run with the same speed and efficiency as the rest of your compiled codebase.
The engine is delivered as a thread-safe .NET Standard library, which makes it easy to scale across multiple threads and cores. This design ensures maximum efficiency in multi-threaded environments, allowing you to evaluate multiple rules in parallel without bottlenecks or locking issues. It’s optimized for speed and responsiveness, whether running on a local server or in a cloud-native microservices architecture.
In real-world performance tests, Code Effects consistently outperforms other commercial and open-source rules engines — often by a wide margin. We provide demo projects specifically designed for performance benchmarking, so you can test the engine in your own environment and see how it handles your actual workloads.
Ultimately, Code Effects gives you the power to execute complex business logic at lightning speed, enabling faster decisions, smoother user experiences, and better resource utilization across your systems. When performance matters, Code Effects delivers.
Deployment
One of the key strengths of the Code Effects rules engine is how simple and flexible it is to deploy. Unlike many other BRM solutions that require complex installations, configurations, or hosted services, Code Effects is delivered as a set of lightweight, self-contained .NET assemblies. This makes it incredibly easy to integrate into any new or existing .NET project — whether it's a desktop application, web service, cloud-hosted platform, or enterprise solution.
There’s no need to install anything on your servers, set up dedicated infrastructure, or configure special environments. Just reference the assemblies in your project, and you're ready to go. The engine does not depend on external services, databases, or platform-specific configurations, which means it works equally well in on-premises environments, cloud deployments, containers, or hybrid systems.
Security is also streamlined. Because everything runs within your existing application stack, there are no separate user access controls, network permissions, or elevated privileges to manage. You remain in full control of your deployment and data, with no external communication or dependencies to expose vulnerabilities. This is especially important for industries with strict compliance requirements or sensitive data policies.
Whether you're building a small internal tool or a globally distributed system, Code Effects fits seamlessly into your workflow. Deployment is fast, integration is straightforward, and there's no hidden complexity—just reference the assemblies, and your rules engine is live.
Cost
Code Effects offers several perpetual licensing options as well as a Monthly Subscription, with the most popular and cost-effective being the Engine Unlimited license. With all of our licenses, you pay once and own it forever — regardless of how many rules your organization evaluates or how many developers are involved. There are no hidden fees, usage limits, or recurring costs.
Each license covers your product and everything associated with it — unless you plan to distribute your solution with the embedded Code Effects engine to end users, or you need access to the full source code to modify, extend, or compile it against different frameworks.
We’re also very flexible in our licensing terms. Please use this form to request our price list or ask any questions related to licensing.