When should you use Chat, Workflows or Sheets?

Pencil gives you four ways to take an idea and turn it into finished creative: the Ads Editor, Chat, Workflows and Sheets (the spreadsheet approach, which includes feed Variations). The Ads Editor is the hands-on surface where you compose and refine a creative directly. Chat provides a way to produce ads conversationally, via an iterative back-and-forth exchange with one or more of the various AI agents in Pencil. Workflows is an open-architecture, node-based surface in which you can map out more advanced flows and sequences of tools, references, prompts, models and agents, wiring them up to fit precision needs. Sheets and Feed Variations are a spreadsheet-based way to scale creatives to arbitrary numbers across specific variations, defined as references and interconnections between cells, rows and columns in the sheet.

All of these can be used to create ads, and the latter three can also be used to populate an ad template and produce variations. The capabilities of the various methods and surfaces overlap, and Pencil's overall system design is deliberately open-ended and non-prescriptive.

The real difference is less about what each one can do and more about how you prefer to work; what stage you are at in the creative development from concept to deliverable; and how accustomed you are using the various methodologies for creating with AI: Workflows and Sheets are recommended for experienced users, whereas Ads Editor and Chat may be more intuitive for first-timers.

The surfaces discussed above are parallel ways of working rather than steps in one pipeline. You pick an approach for a given piece of work; a Workflow and a Sheet do not plug into each other. Agents, though, are available inside both Workflows and Sheets, so the conversational building block of Chat can still be put to work within the other two. Any creative generated in Chat, Workflows or Sheets can be opened in the Ads Editor for refinement, or built into a template.

They also tend to suit different ways of thinking. Someone who reasons in structured data and spreadsheets often feels most at home in Sheets; a visual thinker who maps things out spatially tends to prefer the Workflows canvas; and someone who works ideas out by talking them through gravitates to Chat. None is more correct than another, and most people use all three at different moments. As a rule of thumb: explore and iterate in Chat, build and refine a repeatable process in Workflows, and scale finished production in Sheets.

The Ads Editor is Pencil's dedicated environment for composing and refining a single creative by hand, and will feel familiar to those who've worked with traditional design tools. You work directly on a canvas, arranging and adjusting design elements as re-orderable layers, with asset panels, layer controls and export options all within easy reach. Generation and editing tools sit together, so you can produce a visual and refine it in the same place.

Whereas Workflows and Sheets are built to generate and produce, the Ads Editor is built for direct, precise control over one creative. It is the surface you reach for to lay a creative out exactly as you want it, fine-tune type, imagery and composition, and finish an ad ready for export.

It suits considered, hands-on work on individual creatives: building or polishing a hero ad, or making precise adjustments that are quicker to do directly than to describe. It's often the space where a particular creative vision is locked down, before converting to a template, creating variations and scaling (with Feed Variations or Workflows).

This is where you'll find AI Auto Resize, for scaling an ad across all the formats you need, with layering preserved. The trade-off is that it works one creative at a time, so for other sorts of variation scaling - besides basic resizing and re-formatting - you'd need to move into Sheets, Feed Variations or Workflows.

Chat is the most open-ended of the methods discussed here. You can iterate on visual ideas conversationally with agents, chaining the agents together by swapping which agent responds as the conversation develops, with your context carried forward at each step.

Agent chat suits exploring, riffing and iterating: trying an idea, reacting to what comes back, and refining through a natural language back-and-forth. This is the most intuitive and easiest way to create ads in Pencil, and is a good place to start if you're a beginner.

The downside is, agent chat tends to produce only one or a small batch of images or videos at a time, and then iterate or refine. It's therefore not suitable for scaled ad production (generating large, organised batches of variations across specific vectors like colour scheme, product, audience, season).

Workflows is a visual, node-based canvas, often favoured by designers and creative technologists. You connect inputs, models and agents into a sequence by dragging between nodes, so the logic of a multi-step process is laid out in front of you. It combines production-scale capability with an approachable, code-free interface, which makes it a natural surface for building a repeatable creative engine tailored to a specific use case or campaign.

The canvas gives you a great deal of architectural freedom. A single workflow can chain any compatible combination of node types and branch down different paths with the If else node, which routes work on a number such as a score, or on a text value from an upstream node. To bring a person in, an Email node sends a reviewer a link to the work, and the review itself happens on the item rather than inside the run. Once built, a workflow is reusable: re-run it with fresh inputs without rebuilding the structure.

Much like sheets and Feed Variations, Workflows is also a scaled production engine in its own right. The Iterable list output on the List, Collection and Table nodes fans a single workflow out across many variants without leaving the Workflow surface. Work you might otherwise push into a Sheet or feed can stay in one place, keeping the granular, step-by-step logic of a workflow alongside feed-style scale. Workflows has rapidly become many users' favourite way to work in Pencil, offering the sheer scaling horsepower of Sheets, but with more freedom and fine-grained control, as well as a more intuitive visual UI.

The trade-off is more upfront building than Chat, and steps run in sequence with inputs fixed for the duration of a run. Choosing between Workflows and Sheets is therefore less about how much you can produce and more about how you prefer to model the work: as a visual architecture, or as a spreadsheet.

That said, since Workflows allows for unconstrained multi-faceted branching and listing of variants, it may be more effective than Feed Variations for certain complex scaled production tasks.

Sheets is the spreadsheet approach to producing creative at scale. You work in rows, columns and formulas (which include Generate Video, Generate Text, Generate Image, and Agent), reference cells, and generate text, images and video across many variations at once.

Feed Variations are Sheets tied to one particular creative, where the columns map to that creative's layers; a plain Sheet is the freeform version, started from a blank sheet rather than from a specific ad.

Sheets suits people who think in structured data and need volume: localisation, resizing, personalisation and A/B testing at scale. The trade-off is that it is the most structured and least visual of the three, so it is built for scaled output rather than loose creative exploration.