No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

IBM Datacap vs Microsoft Power Automate comparison

Why PeerSpot?
Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
668
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (2nd), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (2nd), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
IBM Datacap
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (6th)
Microsoft Power Automate
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (4th), Process Mining (4th), Agentic Automation (3rd), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (10th)
 

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at Accenture
Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions
Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.
DeekshithShetty - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Development Senior Specialist at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
High-accuracy document processing with easy integration and good image enhancement
The OCR extractions are very good, almost 100% accurate now. The integration with other tools is very easy, with inbuilt actions to configure and directly export to multiple depositories. It is also good at image enhancement, including the removal of lines, which is helpful in processing and automation and ensures very little user intervention, thus saving time.
BK
Sr. General Manager , Global IT Services at a non-profit with 5,001-10,000 employees
No-code workflows have streamlined daily operations and support seamless cross-application automation
Microsoft Power Automate's no-code workflows help my team in daily operations to a great extent. Automating a particular activity may not be so useful, but when you connect the whole workflow, then it starts helping a lot. I cannot say much about the best features in Microsoft Power Automate because I have not used it personally, but first of all, it is very easy, it is a low-code platform, and Microsoft has a lot of integration with Microsoft technologies, making it very easy to connect with MS Teams and different Microsoft products, including MS Azure. From that point of view, it provides a lot of connectivity options. From a cost point of view, Mendix is much more costly compared to Microsoft Power Platform, allowing us to develop applications very quickly.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We had some business users who created their first bot four weeks back, and they were thrilled; it was very easy for them because of the drag and drag, and they understood the process very well."
"This is a great platform, and we are implementing the logic into the bots that they are using to automate."
"Automation Anywhere is scalable and capable of adapting to any new requirements and technologies."
"Automation Anywhere (AA) is easy to use and understand, even if the user didn't have previous experience with RPA (robotic process automation) software before."
"Automation Anywhere offers valuable features, including command packages for PDF, Windows, XML, and Excel, as well as universal recording capabilities."
"The OCR feature in Automation Anywhere is the best I have encountered, even better than Google."
"It is easy to code. While you have developers, somebody with a development or workflow mindset can logically build a bot in Automation Anywhere by understanding how to put a process in a workflow. If you have that, then you can logically build a bot in Automation Anywhere. Even a non-IT or business user can just look at the bot language and understand what the bot is doing, and that's the easy part."
"We have saved around 90% of the time that would be required to perform tasks manually."
"The second thing that I like about Datacap is the fingerprint capture which is easy to configure on Datacap. From the form of the document, if a document is redundant in the same department, we can configure the capture based on the form of the documents"
"Datacap has all of the features that we need."
"The most valuable features of IBM Datacap is the capturing and recognizing of pages, documents as well as the scanner and barcodes."
"There's something that's very unique about IBM DataCap. It provides me with a good solution for extracting, reading the QR codes, and scanning them. In this stage, we are working in a UIT phase before implementing this protocol in all our branches. From my initial observation, IBM DataCap is good, it is not working too fast, but in a good manner for us."
"Datacap will help you to streamline and automate your document driven capture processes, saving time and effort on manual, error-prone tasks."
"One valuable feature of IBM Datacap is the OCR capability, along with its ability to read fields from documents."
"The installation of the solution is very simple."
"The OCR extractions are very good, almost 100% accurate now."
"The product is very reliable and very easy to use."
"So far, based on the development calculators that we've been running, it's running far smoother and far more efficiently and faster."
"Power Automate is good for automation."
"The integrations that are built into Power Automate for those different Microsoft functions are good."
"The solution integrates well with Microsoft Office and other Microsoft solutions."
"WinAutomation is very handy to use, and it has the power to interact with multiple systems, such as SAP, Oracle, or .NET systems."
"We have a cockpit that shows us all the workflow for all automated tasks in place, and we have a good overview of our processes now thanks to Power Automate."
"Power Automate Desktop allowed me to quickly visually identify parts of a screen and record it. So I can see that I know I'm going to have to click this button here, this field there, and this tab here, and I can literally go and quickly just record all of them and identify them and have them in a list that I can see and say - there's my list of things."
 

Cons

"The initial setup for the program was not straightforward. It was definitely complex."
"Version 11 is a bit heavy. At times, it takes a toll on the computing resources. It consumes a lot for computing power. We have seen multiple instances where computers or the client has crashed because of this particular problem. Automation Anywhere can improve this a lot."
"I would like to have a command that allows me to add code, like C#. As a developer, this would be helpful."
"The debugging tools need to be included, for where and why it has failed to execute the bot in a clear manner."
"The scheduling is a little difficult at times."
"Migration is a little challenging since it requires direct integration with DB, credential vault and all that."
"Having some more pre-mapping and pre-setup analysis of what you're going to be doing with it would be helpful."
"We have used the technical support. I am quite unhappy with the support part."
"We have page requirements where some values must be copied on each page. For example, say I need to scan a bunch of documents, and the name will be a field on every page. We don't have a default functionality in Datacap to copy the field value on the first page to all the pages. That feature would make the documents easy to prepare."
"IBM needs to improve on scanning and reading accuracy for unstructured documents. Additionally, an important missing feature is the ability to merge documents and present data across different UI screens."
"We had more experience, and we knew a lot more about the product than their first-line support did, and that's a really bad sign."
"We used an integrator for the deployment, and our experience was very bad. They gave us an unreliable, broken solution which did not work, then they would not work with us."
"I would like to see the product have the ability to process more documents in parallel."
"I would like to see the product have the ability to process more documents in parallel. Right now, it is a single queue. Therefore, if you want to really test the load and stress test it, having multiple instances and the ability to scale it up would be great."
"The solution's scalability needs improvement."
"The technical support is horrible. They have downsized the support teams too much. They've outsourced some of them along with some of the development, and they're just stretched too thin."
"I would like to have chatbot assistance available, where you can open it and receive help on the spot."
"In an upcoming release, the exception handling mechanism could improve. The issue that we are facing is whenever there is a failure in any of the middle execution and if you wanted to navigate it to the end of the last line of execution, we do not have this feature available. If we had this feature it would make it even more stable."
"The licensing price is too high."
"The connectors and the integration capability can be improved. Microsoft RPA is a growing platform, and it is not yet particularly mature."
"It is not yet stable. It is a new solution, and it is not completely stable."
"Execution of workflows could be improved."
"When we create a support ticket on the Microsoft platform, it takes a good amount of time in certain cases, especially when we get stuck, and at that time, Microsoft's response can be much slower."
"From an improvement perspective, Microsoft just needs to make sure that they have a real enterprise RPA tool."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The setup cost for this is onetime and licensing is based on your choice of product."
"Overall, the pricing of Automation Anywhere is good."
"Cost is the biggest area in need of improvement for Automation Anywhere. Annually it's $250,000. That's what deterred us right away."
"The price is very reasonable."
"The setup cost depends on multiple factors, so you need to get details before choosing."
"In the Indian market, I feel that for mid-size companies, such as ourselves, that having multiple bots costs a lot. If Automation Anywhere wants to expand in the Indian market, they will need to look at their pricing."
"It is not cheap, but we are able to get an ROI."
"I am using that Automation Anywhere Master Certification for version 11. Recently, this has been updated in Automation Anywhere University. Until this month, it's free to use. There are no charges. That's why I would like to complete it this month."
"It varies, and it depends on the client's requirements and negotiations. Nowadays, Datacap is also included in the IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation."
"It is an expensive solution."
"This solution offers seamless integration with other enterprise products, which is my area of responsibility, focusing on government sector projects. Larger enterprise projects don't pose problems. It might be suitable for small businesses as well."
"We were using the User Value Unit licensing, which means we get charged per active user of the system, and if I'm not mistaken, we also had it for the rule runner service. They had a PVU license model, which is a processor value unit. For each process that we have in our system, we pay a certain amount of money. We found the pricing to be quite steep. It was really an expensive solution in comparison to Kofax, which had a different licensing model and was actually cheaper overall because they charge per page and not per user and per process."
"You save a lot of time and money, but the benefit is you have people who are able to run the systems, check to see if there are any errors at all, and there are a lot less errors than a human system."
"Pricing needs to stay competitive."
"This solution offers seamless integration with other enterprise products, which is my area of responsibility, focusing on government sector projects. Larger enterprise projects don't pose problems. It might be suitable for small businesses as well."
"If you want IBM Datacap on cloud, which is a service run by IBM, the price can be quite expensive, but if you want to just purchase the licenses and own those yourself, then the price is very competitive."
"Power Automate is a much less expensive product than the competition."
"There is a per-user licensing model for individual users."
"Good price-quality relationship. Its features for its price were the best fit for our company."
"We use Office 365 and this solution is free for me to use with the package we have. We have plans to increase the usage of Microsoft Power Automate."
"I give the cost a three out of ten."
"Currently, we are using the free license for testing. After everything is done, we'll buy the license."
"Its licensing is flexible."
"When accompanying customers, we discuss the license requirements. Based on these requirements, we suggest whether a per-user plan or multiple platforms per-user plan would be best."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions are best for your needs.
920,574 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business162
Midsize Enterprise86
Large Enterprise565
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business50
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise67
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Datacap?
Pricing is in the mid-range but could be more affordable, rated at four point five.
What needs improvement with IBM Datacap?
IBM needs to improve on scanning and reading accuracy for unstructured documents. Additionally, an important missing ...
What is your primary use case for IBM Datacap?
I primarily use IBM Datacap ( /products/ibm-datacap-reviews ) for data capture and scanning documents with OCR. Speci...
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...
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 ‌...
How is Automation Anywhere compared to Microsoft Power Automate?
‌Neither‌ ‌solution‌ ‌requires‌ ‌any‌ ‌coding‌ ‌experience,‌ ‌and‌ ‌both‌ ‌are‌ ‌easy‌ ‌to‌ ‌use‌ ‌and‌ ‌have‌ ‌great...
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
Datacap
Power Automate, Microsoft Flow, MS Power Automate, WinAutomation by Softomotive, ProcessRobot by Softomotive, Minit
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Turkcell, PowerSouth Energy Cooperative, Central Nacional Unimed, Conqord Oil
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
Find out what your peers are saying about UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Fortra and others in Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Updated: October 2026.
920,574 professionals have used our research since 2012.