Microsoft Power Automate Reviews

Internally, we're doing a lot of workflow automation. This includes creating documents inside of SharePoint, updating SharePoint lists, taking templates in Microsoft Word, and then pulling data from SharePoint to populate different fields in the Word doc using the approval workflows.

When somebody is done reviewing a document, they click a button, and then it goes to the next person in the workflow. It sends me emails, sends notifications, posting from an email, stripping out all of the extra content in the text message, manipulating it, and then posting it to Microsoft teams, channels.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the native integrations with other Microsoft products. These include SharePoint, Office 365, and Microsoft Teams. 

The integrations that are built into Power Automate for those different Microsoft functions are good.

This solution has many areas that have room for improvement.

There are many features that are lacking compared to other Automation tools.

There is an inability to group different variables. When you have to establish all of your variables, you can't group them all.

The notifications when there are failures need improvement, as well as being able to start a process midstream.

The licensing is convoluted in understanding what license is needed.

There's just not enough error handling natively, so you have to build in a lot of workarounds for error handling. 

When compared to other workflow automation tools out there, it's just not as mature.

I have been using Power Automate for one year.

We are using the latest version, it's a cloud solution.

For the most part, it is pretty stable. We made one change that created a licensing error just out of the blue that stopped all of the processes that were in progress.

It created a problem, where we had to restart all of them and do a lot of manual cleanups, and backtrack to the ones that were canceled.

If there's a licensing issue, there should be some notification versus saying, "your licenses are out of compliance," and shutting down that process. When we checked the licenses, there was no issue.

I don't know if it was a bug or what that was, but that happened one time. Luckily it was when we started the rollout, and we didn't have as many processes in flight.

If we had hundreds of different processes in flight and that canceled my flow, that would not be acceptable for a production-type solution.

It's not scalable.

For some of the processes that we're building right now, we are asked to add a button for this additional piece, and it adds so much more complexity with the way that I have to build it out. It doesn't allow me to break up a process into multiple processes, and then call sub-processes, which would make it a lot easier to scale. When I break up these different processes, I have to redefine every variable. 

I can't take information from one process and then pass those variables to the next process.

Your workflow then becomes this very long, single process, that can't be started from the middle. It has to be long and convoluted, and it doesn't make it simple to scale and have sub-processes to make it more complex.

Currently, we are limiting the number of additional features and functionality. 

We don't want to add to it because it adds complexity and doesn't give us the ability to call a sub-process.

The couple of times that we have called, they haven't been able to solve anything.

In many cases, we try to figure it out ourselves or rebuild the workflow, if we can't reproduce the issue. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

We built out the workflow, completed the testing, the user testing, and completed a production rollout. 

I would say part of the challenges was with the production rollout. The tool is not as easy to work with because it's a hundred percent cloud-based.

A lot of the error handling and some of the things you would normally have aren't built-in, and so we ended up finding a lot of bugs and issues and things after the fact.

For example, it was set up where we needed to send an email, and if you put the two email addresses, but you don't put a semicolon between it, then it was just killing the process, saying, "that it couldn't send the email," so it just failed. The entire process failed.

It didn't send a notification and we had to find out two days later.

Those are the types of things where it just needs to have better handling for those types of situations to be able to say, "this is an error that happened," or let me kick off that same process from that point, and then restart the process from there; whereas, right now I have to restart the entire process.

All the steps that happened before, need to be able to go manually and clean up. It eliminates the point of automation.

The price depends on the features that we are using.

The licensing cost for us at this time is between $8 and $20 per user, per month.

It's a monthly cost for every user that touches one of the flows or is kicking off a workflow.

Licensing can get expensive.

There are premium connectors, where if you want to connect to external data sources, there is an additional cost for that.

I think one of the big issues was for an Azure SQL database or for SQL databases that used to be part of the standard connectors, and then they converted those to premium connectors, which increases the cost and limits the functionality for what you would be paying for it.

Use it for basic workflows, but I wouldn't recommend it for anything that is mission-critical. I don't think that it is ready for mission-critical type processing. 

It's a good product. They just have a lot of functionality they need to add.

People have posted on their feature request board, and on their community board.

The vast population that is using it asks for the same features. They are either very slow to implement those features or they are not interested.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We carried out a successful POC on Power Automate Desktop. It was right after they launched and we were the first to demo it. We used it in a project for one of our clients. We used the desktop version but it's stored in Power Automate cloud. The solution is used for banking processes such as credit and debit transactions. We are partners with Microsoft and I'm the CTO.

We jumped onto this solution because it's very reasonably priced. The solution was for a medium size organization and they didn't want to spend a lot on such a product. It's a good solution for small to medium size organizations. 

Looping can be a bit tricky in Power Automate. In addition, the solution doesn't provide an option to view two to three conditions, you can only view one condition. It's not like that in UiPath. Deployment should be improved so that it integrates with WinAutomation. We can't write .NET code and we can't schedule the bot without using WinAutomation. If they could include that it would be helpful for our users. Right now we do the development in WinAutomation and later integrate with Power Automate.

We had good technical support. 

Installation is pretty straightforward. As mentioned, we were the first company so we had a call with Microsoft and worked with them. We're a start up so we had a maximum of six people using the solution. 

We use it to monitor the net flow of all the emails. It is really helpful.

It is stable. 

It should be faster and more user-friendly. 

I have been using Power Automate for around three years. 

It is stable and scalable. We have around 300 users. It doesn't require any dedicated IT to help run the appliance. 

We don't need much of their support. We have opened a ticket and their support was handy. It's very easy for us to communicate with them via email. 

The initial setup was easy. It was very easy for people to pick up. The deployment took a few hours. 

I would recommend it.

I would rate Power Automate an eight out of ten. 

We are a solution provider and this is one of the tools that we implement for our clients.

We have been automating several tasks using this product. They include things like comparing Excel worksheets with the contents of databases, automation in database security, and we have internal logs that can be used to help developers pinpoint errors.

This is a cost-effective RPA solution.

WinAutomation is missing a lot of options that are available in UiPath. One limitation is that for logs, the only option is a CSV file. There is no option, for example, to work with an Excel file.

There is a limitation in setting up loops, where it does not support multiple conditions.

We would like to be able to write code, the way you can inside of UiPath.

We have been using WinAutomation for the past two months.

This solution is stable.

This is a scalable product, although it is best for mid-sized industries.

The technical support is good. We had an issue and they were able to resolve it.

The installation and initial configuration were straightforward, taking not more than 10 minutes.

I deployed the product myself.

WinAutomation is cheaper than competing tools.

Our choice for using WinAutomation depends largely on the client. We will continue to use it, although if our client does not agree then we would have to use another tool.

This is definitely a product that I can recommend. The price is cheaper than other tools and it has a lot of features.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We are a solution provider and one of the services that we perform is to build automations for our clients. Softomotive is a product that we use to automate multiple processes for use by our customers on their data, based on their needs.

The interface is user-friendly.

This product is cost-effective, which is the main reason we are using it.

We are looking to see more features implemented there are already available in UiPath or Automation Anywhere. This is one of the main drawbacks.

We have been using Softomotive for between three and four years.

It is stable, and we don't have any issues with this particular product as of today. We plan to continue using it in the future.

We have more than 600 customers who use this product.

We get very good support from Softomotive.

We have used Softomotive for the past four to five years, although in the interim we tested Blue Prism. The cost of that product is too high.

The installation is straightforward and we haven't seen any complexity. It will take 15 minutes, maximum, to deploy.

This is a product that I can easily deploy on my own. We have less than 15 people on-site who are responsible for deployment and maintenance.

This is a cost-effective product and now that it has been acquired by Microsoft, we don't expect the cost to increase with the next release.

Considering the kind of experience that we have had with Softomotive, we would always recommend this product.

Since this product was acquired by Microsoft, naturally the expectation has gone up. We are not expecting too much of an architectural change, but rather, a few of the small features should be added. The reason is that you like to stay competitive in terms of cost. We have already deployed it to more than 600 customers and if we are going to charge them more, then they'll be inclined to use another product.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I'm a strategy consultant and we are partners and resellers/integrators of Microsoft. 

I like the power automate side of the platform, which I'm using as well all the core applications to include a human loop in the process. I'm quite relieved now because they have the Power Automate desktop platform which is good.

One of the frustrating things is that you can't use a lot of connectors without having a premium license. I would like them to increase the AI capacity. Currently they are using AI Builder which is significantly reduced because it's based on models which are not similar and it's really narrow. Surface information, like going through Citrix, would also be good.

I've been using this solution for four months. 

This is a stable solution. 

The product is scalable, we have around 40 people using it in our company. 

We are integrators so we generally don't use the technical support. 

We still also work with UI Path and in the past we worked a lot with Blue Prism. We're losing business with Blue Prism because their entry ticket is quite high. With Blue Prism you can increase your capacity quite easily and then there are no entry costs. Most of our clients already have Dynamics or Office 365 licensing so it's quite easy for them to implement Microsoft Power Automate or alternatively the UI Path system. My conviction is that UI Path is the most complete platform, including the entire operating model and the COE, accelerators in opportunity identification, accelerators in maintenance and monitoring as well as the community services. So that why it's quite good. It's coming with extensions as well. It also comes with extensions. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

I'm quite sure that they will increase their licensing in the next few months because the platform is getting better and better. The big advantage for them now is that a lot of organizations already have Office 365 licensing, so it's quite easy to sell.

My advice on this product would be to focus on the human in the loop. That's because Power Automate is really great when you want to communicate with users in the middle of a crisis, or if you want some interaction with different people or want to orchestrate workflow between different departments. It has quite an impact when you implement user interactions.

For now, I would rate this solution a six out of 10, but I am sure it will improve in the next few months. 

I was using this product to create a basic workflow and trying to integrate it with Outlook.

We use it along with Microsoft Power Apps to help identify and automate tasks. We have many tasks in Outlook, SharePoint, Calendar, and Teams, and we use Apps to manage the tasks.

We are also using a feature in Microsoft Power Apps, which is the productivity backup

It has some basic components that are able to communicate with different platforms within Microsoft.

The interface is simple and it's easy to use.

It servers our purposes in bringing together all types of applications, being able to automate them with the right intelligent output from the data that we plugin.

While using this solution, we found it to be basic.

The integration with other applications can be made simpler. That said, it has almost everything in it.

I have only been using Microsoft Power Automate for a couple of weeks.

We were using an older version. A version from when it was first released, to help with the learning process.

This a stable solution

Microsoft Power Automate is scalable. We have a very large organization with at least 70 people who are using this solution.

Recently we have engaged with Microsoft to conduct a four or six-week training period. During the training session, there were approximately 180 participants.

I have not contacted technical support from Microsoft.

They do have support on their website and have documentation available for learning through the portals, which is very helpful.

I have experience with UiPath for RPA. I am leading and heading a small team that is building automations, and we have been primarily working on UiPath for this.

The initial setup was simple.

It only took a few minutes to deploy.

I completed the installation on my system myself.

I am not aware of the recent pricing model, but during the time that I was using this solution is was reasonable.

They have certain options that are available at a minimal cost and I am sure that if you buy more components of the Power platform then there are certain pricing models that are catered to the needs of all kinds of companies.

What happens in the Microsoft platform is that users cannot be self-sufficient with one product. You require Power Automate, PowerBI, Power Apps, and different components of the Power platform. If you have the entire set of applications then things become easy, and they can rate this tool highly. If, however, they don't have all of the tools, then the capability is reduced.

We have plans to continue using this solution in the future. We will continue by integrating all of the Microsoft components. This is very helpful, and we can also use different platforms for different clients.

This is definitely a product that I can recommend.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The solution seems to have a good drag and drop functionality. 

It's very well automated.

The solution is pretty customizable. Even big automation tasks are done rather simply. If you want to do more, we've found that anybody can do it. Even a business user that has no knowledge of IT can jump on and figure it out.

Two or three years ago, in all IT products, there were a lot of standards that were missing. Now, using the cloud and using some EA tools, there is a huge scope of possibilities. It's much better.

The biggest problem right now is the fact that, when you use only the trial version, you don't have the whole power or capacity of what you can do with the Power Automate. 

The price of the license isn't that cheap. We want to see what it can do, fully, before purchasing. 

If you get a license, you can only have one developer or one user on it.

If you want to be more precise and the jobs to be more complete, it's somewhat complicated and there are some complex tasks that can't be done so easily by a business user. You'll need to get someone that's more highly skilled.

You need to pay for the ability to customize the solution. That's not an option on the free trial. You also have to be able to read some code in order to customize it. You need to be slightly skilled. You can only customize it on your own, only for you, and not for the other users.

When it comes to using UiPath or Blue Prism, there are more tools you can use. For example, Java or tools. It's easy to interact with them with UiPath and not so much on Power Automate. 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.

I've been using the solution for one to two months. It's pretty new for us.

It's largely stable. When Microsoft updates, it tends to update everything at once. Your Excel, Work, Power Automate, etc., everything updates automatically. That makes everything align so that nothing is out-of-date and affecting the stability of everything else at any time. In general, stability seems to be absolutely fine.

If it's on the cloud, it's generally easy to scale. The volume of data is viable. However, we haven't really attempted to scale anything. I haven't put everything onto Power Automate at this time.

I haven't really reached out to technical support yet. I don't have experience with them, so I can't gauge if they are better than other options.

From my experience, for example, UiPath technical support was not that good. I've used Automation Everywhere and I didn't find them to be very good either. Each time we have a problem with Automation Anywhere, they wouldn't give any explanation. They would always blame the issue on a problem with Microsoft and never with their own problems. Therefore, historically, we haven't had a good run with support at other companies. I'm not sure if this will be the case with Microsoft.

We've looked at and worked with UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere. We're doing comparison POCs with UiPath and Power Automate now. We're not likely to just choose one solution; we may end up using two. We'd like to have options to choose a few depending on the needs.

The initial implementation is not that difficult. It's on the cloud, so there's nothing to install. It's not exactly user friendly, however. UiPath is much more user friendly if you compare it to Power Automate.

In any case, you just connect it with your Microsoft login. If you want to automate a task, it's easy as everything is connected due to the Mircosoft account. It's easy to set up and concentrate your automation tasks.

Since we are on the trial version, we haven't bought it yet, or paid for anything.

If you are a small company, you can have a Power Automate license for as low as $30/month if you want to run one bot per month. It's pretty inexpensive.

With solutions like Blue Prism or UiPath, you need to think in one or five-year terms and many small companies can't just throw down $10,000 upfront.

We're a Microsoft customer. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

We're using the trial version of the cloud deployment model. We haven't paid for it yet as they have to do a benchmark within or the solution for some POCs on UiPath and on Power Automate to see the differences. 

In a lot of companies, they use Microsoft products. It's easy to demonstrate how it's important to have a Power Automate type of solution on hand.

Overall, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. Power Automate definitely offers the best automation scenarios due to the fact that it's a Microsoft product for Microsoft products. I tried automating something, for example, in SharePoint, using both UiPath and Power Automate, and Power Automate was the clear winner. It was just so easy and seamless.

It's also great from the perspective of a small company as there aren't high costs up front.