Blue Prism Cloud vs Microsoft Power Automate comparison

SS&C Blue Prism and Microsoft are both solutions in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category. SS&C Blue Prism is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.5, while Microsoft is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.2. SS&C Blue Prism holds a 1.4% mindshare in RPA, compared to Microsoft’s 21.1% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of SS&C Blue Prism users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 4, 2024

Blue Prism Cloud and Microsoft Power Automate compete in the automation software category. Microsoft Power Automate seems to have the upper hand due to its seamless integration within the Microsoft ecosystem and a cost-effective licensing model.

Features: Blue Prism Cloud is valued for its stability, robust backend office automation, and support for security controls, appealing to high-security sectors like banking. Its Object Studio tool allows users without programming expertise to automate tasks. Microsoft Power Automate excels in its integration capabilities with Microsoft applications like Excel and Outlook, providing a low-code environment that makes automation accessible to non-programmers. It also offers a wide range of connectors and templates.

Room for Improvement: Blue Prism Cloud needs to enhance its user interface for more intuitive use, improve AI capabilities, offer clearer licensing terms, and provide better integration and training resources. Microsoft Power Automate should focus on streamlining complex tasks, improving integration with non-Microsoft systems, and enhancing its documentation and training offerings. Additionally, its pricing model needs clarity, especially concerning the cost related to handling large datasets and using premium connectors.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Blue Prism Cloud supports various deployment models, including on-premises and private cloud strategies. Microsoft Power Automate, primarily a cloud-based solution, provides simplified setup within the Microsoft ecosystem. In customer support, Blue Prism Cloud generally receives positive feedback but has slower response times, while Microsoft Power Automate offers responsive support with significant community-driven resources.

Pricing and ROI: Blue Prism Cloud is viewed as expensive due to its high initial licensing costs, but it promises substantial ROI through effective automation. Its pricing structure is deemed complex. Microsoft Power Automate offers a cost-effective licensing approach, especially for users of the Microsoft Suite, making it a valuable choice for simple automation tasks. However, premium connectors could lead to increased expenses based on usage levels.

To learn more, read our detailed Blue Prism Cloud vs. Microsoft Power Automate Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Blue Prism Cloud vs. Microsoft Power Automate

March 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Automate

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category, the mindshare of Automate is 1.5%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Blue Prism Cloud is 1.4%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Power Automate is 21.1%, down from 21.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Featured Reviews

Anabel Marco

Account Director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Automates processes efficiently with cost-effective scaling and robust customer support

Web scraping is quite good since it offers a lot of possibilities. Another important feature for me is its compatibility with MBI, the Power that is ISEQUADO Centers. I appreciate the ability to scale and increase the number of bots or studios without additional expense. Automate's non-reliance on additional orchestrators makes it quite cost-effective.

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Keith Mcdowell

Chief Executive Officer at Keith F Kube and Associates

It helps us save on staff costs

I rate Blue Prism Cloud eight out of 10 for ease of setup. It's a cloud-based solution, so it isn't hard to set up. The deployment time is hard to quantify because I work for the government, and we need to go through all these internal reviews, but the technical part takes three to four weeks. The biggest challenge is security because we need to integrate it with Active Directory and set up VPN tunnels, security profiles, etc. We deployed Blue Prism in-house and used three people to set it up. One solution engineer is enough to maintain it.

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Nilesh Pundkar

IVR Developer at Orange

Good for email routing and management features but additional costs for plug-ins

Power Automate has fewer features and more limitations in general. It's not as mature a product as some of the others, like UiPath or Automate Anywhere. One of the main issues I've found is that Power Automate struggles with accessing Excel or other Office documents on servers. Even though it's a Microsoft product, we often have to log in through remote systems, and syncing can be problematic due to the way we use servers. At the very least, they should provide access to Office 365 directly, without requiring additional logins on servers. Most people utilizing Power Automate are already working within the Office 365 environment. Any proof of concepts (POCs) using Power Automate would naturally be built on top of Office 365.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"I like the interface; it makes managing automation easy. We can set different schedules and templates for each task."

"This product is quite easy to install, learn, and use, with our new employees being able to start using it in projects for clients after only two weeks of internal training."

"I actually quite liked the no-coding functionality."

"I would rate the technical support as a nine out of ten because it is quite fast and courteous."

"Fortra's Automate performs the job effectively and has the capability to alert us of any issues."

"We have tried other RPA solutions like UiPath or Automation Anywhere. They are fantastic products but complex, and it's hard to understand everything. It would be best if you had a skilled developer or several. Automate is easy to implement, administer, and use. It's appropriate for us because our cases are simple and easy to automate. We don't need complicated tools with many features; We prefer to get a significant ROI quickly."

"The ability to connect to websites and pull data is the solution's most valuable feature."

"Compared to other vendors, it's the scheduling tool because a lot of vendors want to charge you extra for their enterprise-level license to have a scheduling tool built in to give you the ability to set up regular schedules to run and do certain data checks."

More Automate pros

"I would say that the stability of Blue Prism is superior to any of the competing products because of the maintainability of the features and the openness of the tool."

"This product has additional functionality over Blue Prism Cloud Enterprise."

"The most valuable feature is security."

"It is secure and supports unattended mode of operations."

"It automates our accounts payable process, requiring no human interaction and saving us a hundred percent of the time."

"There is no latency in the product."

"Its AI features allow customers to find specific documents via an index."

"The reusability of the solution is excellent. It's a superior feature - far superior to any other tool on the market."

More Blue Prism Cloud pros

"This product has an easy-to-use interface with nice detail in the features."

"The technical support is good."

"The most valuable feature is that it is pretty low-code, so you don't need much coding expertise to use it."

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Power Automate is the ability to automate tedious tasks."

"The most valuable feature is that it easily integrates with other Microsoft products, so it has multiple connectors. You can create solutions that connect to Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, and OneDrive."

"This product is the best in terms of price and capabilities."

"From my personal experience of using Microsoft Power Automate, I think that the automatic document processing feature is helpful for many organizations in streamlining administrative processes. It is a very good feature. It has helped many enterprises to process documents without spending much time on them."

"The most valuable features of this solution are the cost and ease of use, it's very simple."

More Microsoft Power Automate pros

Cons

"I would prefer not having to log in to update a ticket; being able to respond via email would be beneficial."

"I find that most important features are strong, however, there is a lack of good development for artificial intelligence, such as machine learning."

"The workflow for variables could be better. The input and output of task-level variables could be made a little clearer in terms of passing those around from one task to another upon success, etc. Things like that could be a little easier potentially."

"It would be an improvement if Automate had better stability tools, whether by recommending a certain amount of memory because it can be a memory hog at times."

"The documentation is not that great."

"Fortra's Automate is not as reliable as I would like it to be."

"Error messages should be better. For error status, there should be better documentation because a lot of times, error messages that you get are quite vague. For example, you get a message saying that the workflow has run into an unknown status, which is vague. It just tells you that it failed, but you don't know how or why it failed. It makes debugging difficult."

"We really need a free development environment for customers. Building and testing automation on production isn't ideal."

More Automate cons

"The AI part is currently missing in Blue Prism Studio... It would be good if the AI part is included in Blue Prism Studio, which can make it much more efficient and good to work."

"Blue Prism should adopt a low-code approach. Most RPA vendors only provide what they call a "form builder." A low-code designer would enable us to build a custom UI."

"The product’s licensing cost is expensive compared to other tools in the market."

"Blue Prism Cloud is a solid product that fulfils its intended functions well. Although there is room for improvement, it has integrated various cognitive and intelligent document processing features into a single product. But needs to effectively automate RPA processes despite some initial challenges addressed through product updates and new features."

"The cost is a bit high. Other tools are much cheaper."

"The version control could be improved and made consistent. There is a discrepancy between the versions on premise and the cloud versions."

"Blue Prism could be more efficient in its resource use. Having one LPR agent per virtual machine wastes resources. If we could execute many applications at the same time, it would improve and optimize the resource used."

"Pricing for Blue Prism Cloud is a pain as it's a little higher."

More Blue Prism Cloud cons

"Not suitable for connecting other applications like browsers and third party applications."

"The solution could have more integration with different platforms."

"Microsoft could offer more AI education and training."

"I would like to see better data integration with different sources."

"While Microsoft has a way of integrating well with itself and its own internal tools, it could do more to include external options and add them to the mix."

"Sometimes it can be difficult to share flows for multiple users to edit."

"More OCR and AI capabilities are needed to improve the solution. Other solutions have better features, such as Blue Prism and UiPath."

"I had some experience in the past with the solution having some difficulties with large loads, it is already better but it could still be improved."

More Microsoft Power Automate cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Compared to other products, the pricing model for this solution is much more convenient, flexible, and adaptable to the Portuguese reality."

"The pricing is quite reasonable. We can run the process with one bot. The limitation is at the server level because they have some resources, and sometimes that is enough. It isn't too expensive, so you can get a good return off of one, and you can also have a pack of five bots that is quite competitive."

"I like the way this solution is priced because you can buy a license, or you can buy the software outright."

"It comes with a package that costs approximately $20,000 USD per year."

"It has gone up in price. The price of Fortra's Automate has increased since we first started using it. It does a lot but also costs a lot. It was a lot more affordable before Fortra owned the software."

"From a distributor's perspective, one of the biggest selling points of Automate is its price point."

"From a distributor's side, one of the biggest selling points is its price point. Without going into any numbers, compared to UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism, we're significantly cheaper. The main difference is that other competitors usually charge you per process. However, in Automate's case, it's priced per bot. So, a bot can run multiple processes at the same time, but you are only priced for a single bot."

"While solutions like UiPath and Blue Prism cost around $11,000-$12,000 for each license, this product costs around $7,000 and you can keep it forever."

More Automate pricing and cost advice

"Pricing can be negotiated in situations where there will be heavy usage."

"There are costs for the machine to run the robots."

"This solution comes at a medium to high price point. They need to work on their pricing to enable smaller enterprises to get the benefit of using the product."

"It is highly-priced."

"Blue Prism comes at a higher price point compared to other solutions on the market."

"Annual licensing costs were somewhere between $5,000 - $10,000 for the development tool. For the control tower, I think fees were about $50,000 annually."

"The licensing of the solution is on a subscription-based model and costs around 4,999 for one bot's license. If someone wants to increase the number of bots you want from Blue Prism, then they provide a discount."

"The default configuration does not include large-scale log injection, but if you require, such integration, it may incur additional costs per gigabyte. I don't have the exact pricing information for log injection, but it is possible that it varies depending on the volume of data. While there may be a basic service included, additional features might come at an extra cost. When working with cloud environments like VMs, calculating costs involves considering factors such as usage duration, network traffic, inbound and outbound data transfer, as well as network access control. The pricing structure for cloud coverage solutions follows a similar pattern, although specific pricing details would need to be obtained separately."

More Blue Prism Cloud pricing and cost advice

"When we purchase the Microsoft Dynamics license, the Power Automate license is often free, albeit with some limitations, such as a certain number of transactions per user."

"You can have two types of licenses, one is user-based, and the other is app-based in the Power Platform."

"The price of the solution is reasonable."

"It costs us nothing because we use it on the built-in cost that is a part of our existing license for 365. To use it more extensively, there are different pricing models. Its licensing is complex. It is complex to evaluate the cost in advance. As a result, people don't use it because they don't know what overall cost they are going to incur. There are too many criteria to figure out how much it is going to cost you to use the product to its full extent. Its licensing model should be improved, and the pricing should be more visible and transparent."

"There is a per-user licensing model for individual users."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing two to three out of ten."

"The price of the solution is reasonable. I rate the pricing a five out of ten."

"There is flexibility in pricing."

More Microsoft Power Automate pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Educational Organization

10%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about HelpSystems AutoMate?

We use it for specific cases, mainly secure file transfers, which are vital for us. And it works for us.

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What is your primary use case for HelpSystems AutoMate?

I am a consultant and I am making a lot of processes in human resources, payroll, certifications, trainings, web scra...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortra Automate?

The pricing is quite good compared to its competitors. Competitors are often more expensive than Automate. I would ra...

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What do you like most about Blue Prism Cloud?

It's easy to use, the interface, the the the the queries is which we use. It's user friendly.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Blue Prism Cloud?

If we utilize Blue Prism's full capabilities, then it is cost-effective. Otherwise, the pricing can seem high. It req...

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What needs improvement with Blue Prism Cloud?

Decipher, one of their solutions, is a waste of time. Other than that, there's nothing specific I can think of.

See all answers

RPA that Bots can run without centralized control?

Yes, Attended Bots which can run without centralized control Module. RPA Tools like Automation Anywhere, uiPath ,Pow...

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How do I choose between UiPath and Microsoft Power Automate?

Microsoft‌ ‌Power‌ ‌Automate‌ ‌is‌ ‌intuitive‌ ‌and‌ ‌easy‌ ‌to‌ ‌integrate‌ ‌and‌ ‌use.‌ ‌I‌ ‌like‌ ‌that‌ ‌there‌ ‌...

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How is Automation Anywhere compared to Microsoft Power Automate?

‌Neither‌ ‌solution‌ ‌requires‌ ‌any‌ ‌coding‌ ‌experience,‌ ‌and‌ ‌both‌ ‌are‌ ‌easy‌ ‌to‌ ‌use‌ ‌and‌ ‌have‌ ‌great...

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Comparisons

UiPath vs Automate

Compared 38% of the time

Automation Anywhere vs Automate

Compared 9% of the time

Blue Prism vs Automate

Compared 6% of the time

VisualCron vs Automate

Compared 5% of the time

More Automate Competitors

UiPath vs Blue Prism Cloud

Compared 20% of the time

Blue Prism vs Blue Prism Cloud

Compared 17% of the time

SAP Intelligent RPA vs Blue Prism Cloud

Compared 15% of the time

Robocorp vs Blue Prism Cloud

Compared 14% of the time

ServiceNow Automation Engine vs Blue Prism Cloud

Compared 8% of the time

More Blue Prism Cloud Competitors

UiPath vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 27% of the time

Automation Anywhere vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 16% of the time

Blue Prism vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 16% of the time

IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 8% of the time

ServiceNow Automation Engine vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 2% of the time

More Microsoft Power Automate Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Automate

March 2025

Download Automate product report

Buyer's Guide

Blue Prism Cloud

March 2025

Download Blue Prism Cloud product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power Automate

March 2025

Download Microsoft Power Automate product report

Also Known As

HelpSystems Automate, Automate

Blue Prism Thoughtonomy Virtual Workforce, Blue Prism Virtual Workforce, Thoughtonomy Virtual Workforce

Power Automate, Microsoft Flow, MS Power Automate, WinAutomation by Softomotive, ProcessRobot by Softomotive, Minit

Overview

Automate offers a user-friendly solution with a drag-and-drop interface for efficient task automation and integration with major platforms like SAP and Azure, making it ideal for quick deployment with minimal coding and training.

Automate provides powerful features for businesses seeking efficient automation, offering compatibility with databases, email integration, and cloud platforms. Its simple interface supports both beginners and experienced users, simplifying tasks like invoice processing, HR automation, and data transformation. Cost-effective pricing and flexible licensing enhance its appeal while integration capabilities and scheduling tools ensure smooth workflow automation.

What are Automate's Key Features?

Drag-and-Drop Interface: Simplifies automation with intuitive design.
Integration Capabilities: Connects with platforms like SAP and Azure for seamless data flow.
Database and FTP Triggers: Enhances automation potential through direct data interaction.
Efficient Scheduling: Automates tasks with precise timing and control.
Web Scraping: Automates data extraction for quick analysis and reporting.

What Benefits and ROI Should Users Expect?

Rapid Deployment: Minimizes coding efforts for quick implementation.
Cost-Effectiveness: Offers flexible pricing models to suit budget constraints.
Operational Efficiency: Reduces manual workloads and enhances productivity.
Comprehensive Integration: Facilitates improved data management across systems.
Scalability: Adapts to growing business needs with ease.

In industries such as healthcare, banking, and logistics, Automate is used for tasks like invoice payment automation, data transformation, and task automation. This leads to streamlined processes and reduced manual workload, illustrating its value in enhancing operational efficiency through diversified workflows.

Fortra

The Thoughtonomy Virtual Workforce is a highly flexible intelligent automation platform. It uses software to replicate the way people work in existing applications and systems, the processes they follow, and the decisions they make, to deliver automation without disruption.

SS&C Blue Prism

Microsoft Power Automate is a powerful tool that streamlines and automates tasks within an organization.

It is used for workflow automation, data integration, and creating automated notifications and approvals.

Power Automate connects different applications and services, such as SharePoint, Excel, and Outlook, to automate data transfer and synchronization.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Aldergrove Financial Group, Preferred Health Professionals, Mindbeam Technologies, First Credit Union in British Columbia, Vestcom International, Prime Liberty Benefits, University of Tampa, CNLBancshares, World Precision Instruments, BJ's Restaurants, Globe Pequot Press, Accudata Technologies, Norton Healthcare, Pacific Toxicology Laboratories

Cabot Credit Management, Hovis, Utilita

1. Coca-Cola 2. General Electric 3. Siemens 4. Accenture 5. Deloitte 6. Johnson & Johnson 7. Ford 8. Nestle 9. Procter & Gamble 10. IBM 11. Amazon 12. Google 13. Microsoft 14. Adobe 15. Cisco 16. Oracle 17. SAP 18. Intel 19. HP 20. Dell 21. Verizon 22. AT&T 23. T-Mobile 24. Walmart 25. Target 26. Home Depot 27. McDonald's 28. Starbucks 29. Nike 30. Apple 31. Facebook 32. Twitter

Buyer's Guide

Blue Prism Cloud vs. Microsoft Power Automate

March 2025

Free Report: Blue Prism Cloud vs. Microsoft Power Automate

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