Why Apex has much lower limit of simultaneously scheduled actions comparing to Process Builder?

Question

From Apex DeveloperGuide: Apex Scheduler Docs:

• You can only have 100 scheduled Apex jobs at one time. You can evaluate your current count by viewing the Scheduled Jobs page in Salesforce and creating a custom view with a type filter equal to “Scheduled Apex”. You can also programmatically query the CronTrigger and CronJobDetail objects to get the count of Apex scheduled jobs.

From Automate Your Business Processes: How Does Salesforce Process Scheduled Actions? Docs:

• An org can have up to 50,000 pending schedules and paused flow interviews at one time.

What's the reason for that? Shouldn't Apex, as the tool dedicated for the most complex solutions in Salesforce, offer broader scope of possibilities than Process Builder?

Answer 1

The Scheduled Flow actions are actually more similar to Time-Based Workflow Rules, not Scheduled Apex. In that sense, they're actually incredibly limited compared to the feature they're based on, which can have an unlimited number of scheduled actions. The reason why you can only have 100 scheduled jobs is because those jobs can repeat, meaning you could have as many as 2,400 jobs running per day (100 jobs running hourly). Scheduled Flow actions can't repeat indefinitely on an hourly schedule, so there's a higher limit to how many you can have in the queue.