Microsoft Power Automate Reviews

I use Microsoft Power Automate as part of my job as an RPA developer. The solution is part of everyone's Office 365 account at our organization. 

The solution is used as a primary tool for providing RPA solutions. We've created an automated desktop flow for the whole process. It includes three platforms.

We use the solution as an extension of Power Apps. We create files and SharePoint using flow by converting HTML code into PDF.

The authentication provided by Microsoft is very robust.

We have automated a process for our HR team that handles a lot of immigration-related activities. Rather than this individual having to ask others for information, we created a solution running different flows that centralized the whole system.

Another impactful project was where we used power apps to create office visitation. This solution helped manage the allowable workforce limitation placed by the government during the pandemic. We created an application where users submitted a request which prompted the validation of vaccinations and determine parking availability and sitting capacity. The headcount is provided to the departments that are impacted, such as the canteen, or bus monitors.

By creating in-house solutions, we had a high impact on the organization. Using an out-of-the-box solution would have been very expensive.

Microsoft Power Automate is easy to use. There are lots of libraries and connectors to browse from.

The users are very happy with the processes that we have automated completely end to end.

The solution is difficult to customize. I would like to see more flexibility when it comes to using different kinds of activities, particularly the kind of interaction they can have with Excel. This is also limited to the number of activities, making extension not possible.

Other areas of improvement include Microsoft Power Automate's ability to work on power desktops. It would be helpful if we could access external activities. 

I have been using Microsoft Power Automate for one year.

The solution is scalable. You can create a flow, and it can be shared across different environments. 

Technical support could improve. I am not sure that they exist. I would like to be provided with more awareness regarding the tech support that is available from the platform.

There is ample documentation available for the solution and all the different components.

Positive

Prior to adding Microsoft Power Automate, we used UI robotic process automation. We now use both solutions in parallel. Power Automate is used for office-related apps and UI is used for all other platforms.

Microsoft Power Automate is part of our Office 365 package, there are no additional licensing costs.

I would recommend other large-scale enterprises to look into Microsoft Power Automate as a solution for their organization.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I'm using Microsoft Power Automate to automate some of my processes. Before using this solution it took me sometimes one day to complete tasks and now I can perform them much faster.

The most valuable features of Microsoft Power Automate are the ease of use and the templates that are provided. I no longer need to make the document from scratch. I can search for what template I want and then it only requires me to modify it a bit for my needs. Additionally, it's helped improve my productivity and efficiency, and at the same time, it's quicker.

Microsoft Power Automate could improve by adding more features to the free version it would be good because there are many features that you have to pay for. There are some functions that IT personnel, like myself, have a difficult time using and could be made more user-friendly.

In a feature release, it would be a benefit if Microsoft Power Automate could integrate with Google. I'm dealing with a lot of external systems, and it would be great if the site was able to connect with Google, because some of the flow requirements use Google. It is very difficult to do it.

I have used Microsoft Power Automate within the last 12 months.

Microsoft Power Automate is stable.

There were several people using this solution in my previous company, and in my current company, I am the only one working with Microsoft Power Automate.

The support from Microsoft Power Automate is good.  If I do not know how to use it they have the Microsoft community. I can ask questions on that platforms and straight away they provide me the answer.

I have not used other solutions previously.

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.

Microsoft should market Power Automate more to companies' operation personnel, it would be better because then the operations personnel would know there is a solution to make their life and tasks easier.

I rate Microsoft Power Automate a ten out of ten.

We are using it for automating legacy systems as well as email verifications. I haven't touched on the APIs yet, but the use case is for user accessibility to and from data sources.

The solution is still in the development phase. It is not in the production run at the moment. Therefore, at the moment, there is not a significant visible improvement.

In terms of deployment, it is a mix of hybrid cloud and on-premises. Microsoft is the cloud provider. It is a single environment deployed over multiple branches in each province of the country. Currently, the version that we are using is the latest Microsoft release.

Its ease of use is most valuable. A lot of the bulk functionality is done either through standalone or custom connectors and standard API processes. 

There are two versions of the automation suite. You've got your cloud functionality, and you have got your on-premises functionality for legacy systems. There are a lot of functionalities between the two systems that don't cross-correlate with each other. A lot of the functionality in the cloud system is not there on the production side in the on-prem system. If they could implement some of the similar functionalities and streamline them for integration, it would be a lot easier. There should be seamless integration between the two systems.

I have been using this solution for three months.

It is highly stable with good performance.

It is extremely scalable. It integrates with a lot of existing systems, both Microsoft-related and non-Microsoft-related, and it is extremely extensible. The additional support validation and software integrations that are available are limitless.

Our experience of the technical support on the solution has been minimal because there have not been a lot of technical issues with the implementation. The turnaround time for any type of technical query is usually a day to two days, but before that time period is up, they either have a solution or a guaranteed workaround.

We previously used Automation Anywhere. We switched because of the ease of use. The functionality of Automation Anywhere is for a very specialized use case scenario. They focus on a lot of areas, but Power Automate has a lot of simpler solutions and easier approaches. For example, we have a solution in place that has three or four RPA scripts for a single process. With the Power Automate solution, we have a single script running for maybe five sub-processes. It is a lot more streamlined and consistent.

At the moment, it is still in development and is a matter of integration. It does require a bit more technical know-how, but it is mainly done from the environment perspective and from an administrative point of view. 

From a development point of view, the crossover is pretty much the same for going, for instance, from Blue Prism to UiPath, or UiPath to Automation Anywhere. There's a transition period level of difficulty. So, from a development point of view, it's fairly the same, but from a technical point of view, Microsoft does require a bit more technical know-how to get the environment set up.

With some of the integration conversions we've done from one platform to the other, from a development standpoint, it has taken us close to a month in the development environments, and this is interrupted. If we had an uninterrupted conversion, I would estimate a maximum of a week. We just need to get it converted and implemented.

We've been doing everything in-house with direct help from a Microsoft representative. We have a single person to take care of it. It doesn't require a massive deployment team.

So far, based on the development calculators that we've been running, it's running far smoother and far more efficiently and faster. So, the estimated return on investment over the past three months that we've been calculating has been looking far higher than the Automation Anywhere solution.

At the moment, from our experience with the two, Power Automate is a lot more expensive solution than Automation Anywhere, but it is also a far more reliable solution. 

With the price increases and with the current pandemic situation going on worldwide, a lot of the prices have fluctuated, but the packages and the all-encompassing features you get with the Microsoft package far outweigh the benefits from the Automation Anywhere side. Each package on the Automation Anywhere side is cheaper, but we need to continuously purchase subsequent packages to continue with our automation to the extent that we require. So, the Power Automate solution is a bit more pricey, but it does offer us a far better range of capabilities.

There are different development plans that you can use. Additional licenses might be required for additional features, such as your Azure Logic or your Dataverse capacity. There is a limited capacity package that you can purchase, and then you have to have an additional license for added capacity.

I would advise paying critical attention to the environment that you're setting up. User access roles, either through Active Directory or through the database control method, should be the key focus. After that, you need to assign roles and licenses as necessary. From there on, you need to integrate the system. 

The Microsoft documentation portal for both cloud and on-premises is going to be the easiest to follow. All the solutions are there. For technical assistance from the Microsoft side, contact details are available on the documentation portal for any type of query.

I would rate it a solid eight out of ten. For me to give it a ten, there should be seamless integration between both the cloud and the on-premises solutions. There should be the exact same or similar functionality between the two to make the entire automation process a bit more streamlined.

We use Microsoft Power Automate when we need to automate manual processes in our automation, or when we need to send a document for approval, or when we need to integrate some beams channels and messages.

It's quite simple to use. You can automate almost everything in your organization by simply dragging and dropping and selecting a few options, whether it's an Excel spreadsheet or other on-premise data.

Power Automate is integrating artificial intelligence into the product, allowing us to automate future aspects, such as in pharma companies, medical agencies, and even banks, which are now using these products to automate their manual processes. And because robotic process automation is already built into Power Automate, these features make this product fantastic and accessible to everyone.

These products are intended low-code, no-code solutions. As a result, even a strategic developer can create and automate your day-to-day tasks at their workplace, whether it's management work or a developer is dealing with day-to-day issues with APIs.

In terms of IT, everything can be automated, but other things can also be automated. We can automate the reporting process, as we can with the help of an AI builder. Using Power Automate and Power Apps, we can generate sales reports on the fly.

In terms of issues, I haven't had any until now because automation requires you to complete a task in less time. These products have some limitations, such as the need to build some custom controls in PCF or use the JSON format. There are some limitations, but it's a mature Microsoft product, and we can do almost everything.

Third-party systems can also be added. We can create a beautiful dashboard if another software provides open APIs. Even when discussing complete Power platforms, four components must be mentioned: Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, and Power BI. When we use all four, we can create a complete solution, whether it's a visualization dashboard, automated chatbots, or the rest, which we can achieve using Power Apps. Power Apps is also divided into three types of apps: canvas apps, model-driven apps, and data-driven apps. Another option is to use open-source, which refers to open projects known as portals. So we can actually do the same thing. When someone is creating a website, we can do the same thing here in the portal. So the things we can do with Power Apps are the same as the things we can do with the Power platform.

I have been working with Microsoft Power Automate for almost two years.

There are some limitations with the calls and other things, but it is a stable product.

Typically, we raise technical support through the Azure portal. If we have a basic plan in place, we can submit a request to Microsoft. 

Microsoft also provides Twitter support. If you have any questions or encounter any technical difficulties while deploying your Power App or configuring your Power Apps or Power Automate environment, you can raise a ticket on the portal and Microsoft will respond directly to you.

I also work with Power Apps.

The initial setup is a very simple procedure. We can deploy in any organization depending on their needs,  we can look into licenses to see what kind of license will meet their requirements. 

As it is in the cloud, it's very simple to deploy. It's ready-to-use software as a service, and we can use various connectors. In addition, if something is outside the scope of Power Automate, we can create a custom connector. How it is deployed is entirely up to the organization. If for example, they have three environments: development, testing, and production, we can easily switch, and we can use Azure DevOps to create CI/CD pipelines, and we can deploy that solution in any environment in the organization.

It is not a costly solution. You can have two types of licenses, one is user-based, and the other is app-based in the Power Platform. 

I work as a senior consultant for Microsoft technology as a developer, mains power developer, but I would love to explore other options.

It's a genuine Microsoft product, which is the main reason I would recommend it to someone.

I would rate Microsoft Power Automate an eight out of ten.

I am a solution provider and I implement RPA products and automate processes for my clients.

With this product, you create your workflows on the cloud. We've used this product for integrating with Microsoft solutions. For example, one of them is a document approval solution, where documents are sent to SharePoint and then pushed to different users within Active Directory for approval. This is done according to rules set by the client.

There is also a COVID application that was built around Power Automate and the Power Platform, where users within the organization can raise a request for a test and this would be pushed to managers for approval.

We are also looking at financial processes around bank reconciliations and interbank transfers.

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.

There are templates available for you to create your own flow, and it is easy to start creating a flow and automating a solution.

There are some bugs or intermittent behavior in the Excel activities that require using workarounds. For example, there is an Excel activity called Collect that fails once in a while. When you want to choose or select a particular cell, once in a while, it fails to do so. It doesn't happen all of the time and I don't know if it's a bug, but it's something that they can look into.

I have been working with Microsoft Power Automate for approximately one year.

This is a very stable product.

The scalability is amazing. This is a cloud-based resource, and there is no limitation in terms of scale or size. You can easily increase the scope of processes being handled.

The COVID use case is available for all of the employees, which is approximately 2,500. The documentation approval use case is used by managers and people making requests, which is approximately 2,000 people. The use case involving financial reconciliation is only for a small team that consists of about five people.

The technical support is good. They are available and you can just call them. We have Microsoft Office online support, as well. This means that you can call them, or instead go to the forum and search for activities and resources. They have a lot of resources available online.

There are good tooltips available within the product itself. You can look at something and the tooltip will explain how it works and what you should do.

Overall, the support resources are good and I would rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

I also work with UiPath and WorkFusion.

The initial setup is straightforward. Power Automate is a cloud-based tool, although I downloaded the Studio to my local machine.

The deployment takes one day. You just switch environments from UAT to production. You can easily export your solution and import it into the production environment.

We were working with another company to implement the solution but we completed the implementation and deployment ourselves.

The licensing model is flexible in that you can pay per automation or per user. My client receives a discount because of the large number of users and pays approximately $15 for each one.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees unless other resources are being used. For example, Office resources are available on Azure, but that is a different product. It is related to Azure, rather than Power Automate.

Our client chose this solution. They already had Microsoft enterprise licenses, and they felt it was better to use a Microsoft product for their automation solution.

Overall, this is a good solution and I like it. It's very scalable and easy to do so. Also, there are many connectors and they are quite useful. This is a product that I recommend.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Power Automate is to be cautious about how they distribute their flows, just to manage the licensing cost. Because it is cloud-based, it is an easy-to-use tool for both small and enterprise-wide solutions. There are no complications when integrating with Active Directory or the cloud platform, and this is good, in particular, because everybody is moving to the cloud. This product makes it easy to integrate things that people are already working with, such as Teams and Outlook.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I use it for robotic process automation.

It is a low-code platform. It is easy to use and good for automating small tasks such as expense approvals, timesheet approvals, etc.

I would like more integration with other tools. It integrates well with Microsoft products, but there should be more integration with other platforms and tools, such as chatbots.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It is stable.

It depends on the use case. For my use cases, it is scalable.

We have over 10,000 people in my organization. In my branch, we have 100 people, and almost all of us in this branch have Microsoft Office, Microsoft Teams, and other solutions. We have approximately 20 users who use Microsoft Power Automate.

Any increase in its usage would depend on our clients. I work for a consultancy firm, so it depends on what our clients want. For our office work, we will keep using it.

I have not had to ask for technical support because the tasks that I do are easy.

I also use UiPath.

My company has a Microsoft package, and it was a part of the package. I didn't have to do any installation.

They have the community edition that people can use for free, and they also have the enterprise edition. My company uses the enterprise edition, and I don't know how much they pay.

It has been good so far. I would rate it an eight out of 10.

The most common use is for digitizing Excel forms or Excel spreadsheets. We use Power Automate to digitalize all Excel-based processes on a SharePoint page and link the libraries with the transactional data from the client.

It is cloud-based. It can be deployed on a public, private, or hybrid cloud. It depends on the client. It is linked with the Microsoft license that a client has. If the license is hybrid, then Automate is hybrid as well.

By digitizing Excel spreadsheets, we reduced the errors in information transactions. We also reduced the time for the internal processes and improved operational efficiency.

The cloud solution on Azure makes it easy for us to take care of the security, which is a big deal for us. We can use the same permissions that we already have in place in Azure Active Directory and just duplicate them for the forms in Power Automate and the SharePoint page, so managing security is very easy for us.

Workflow management is what clients select the most. It is very intuitive and pretty much drag-and-drop, so we can create escalation, decision flows, and if-else conditions pretty much by dragging and dropping boxes. Even someone who is not technical can develop a workflow for the business.

It is very easy to use. It doesn't need a technical resource to create and maintain forms. The UX/UI is very similar throughout the Microsoft platform, including SharePoint and Office 365. 

It integrates with all sorts of databases, such as SQL Server and Oracle Database, which is a plus. 

While working with non-structured data (like logs and user tracking information that usually fits the criteria of big data), all the data sources must pass by a data quality process via any ETL tool before linking and publishing any information to the automation workflows and forms. This process is important to standardize all the content and format types for the columns and fields in the tables that will be used to show data in the front end.

 The ability to read non-structured data and provide insights into how to sanitize and organize data automatically is something that I'd like to be covered in the next releases.

I have been using this solution for two and a half years.

We never had any downtime, so it is pretty good.

It is very scalable. We are working with hundreds of forms at the same time, and some of our clients have thousands of people working simultaneously on the same form, so it is very scalable.

Most of its users are function-based. They are process leads in their companies. We currently have more than 1,000 users.

It is being used a lot. It is currently our most important tool for team efficiency. We plan to increase its usage in the near future. We have lots of other internal applications and processes in the pipeline, especially for functional areas, which can be moved from paper and Excel to a SharePoint form by using Power Automate.

The response time depends on your license level. If you are a gold partner, the response time is in a couple of hours, which is pretty decent. If you are an individual user or a company that doesn't have any L1, L2, or L3 licenses, the response time is up to 48 hours. So, it all depends on your license level with Microsoft, but whatever they say in the contract, they do respect that, which is good.

We were already users of other Microsoft solutions such as SharePoint and Teams, so when Power Automate became decent for the market users, we just adopted it naturally. Our experience with their technical support was good. They were able to answer our questions and solve our issues within the response time in our contract.

I used Blue Prism a couple of years ago, and now I'm using Power Automate. Blue Prism is bigger and way more expensive, and they charge by the number of users. Microsoft was cheaper, and they charge by the number of forms. So, it was way cheaper for us to move to Power Automate from Blue Prism.

It was pretty straightforward. Microsoft had two solutions: Microsoft Flow and Power Apps. Microsoft combined these two solutions and called it Microsoft Power Automate. It is pretty seamless because if you're already using Microsoft licenses, everything integrates with Office 365, SharePoint, and Teams. So, it is very seamless.

It took some days to create the front end of all the forms. Creating a whole page takes a couple of hours for a SharePoint administrator or developer or even a functional person, and we have hundreds of those. It took a few weeks to create the entire front end, but the connections were done in minutes. They were very simple.

It was done in-house. In terms of maintenance, once the forms are created, we have just one full-time employee taking care of the maintenance of those 100 forms, and that's enough because it is pretty much adding or deleting fields. It is pretty simple to maintain.

I don't know the exact number. It depends and varies a lot according to the licensing terms.

There is no cost to maintain if we have less than 10 forms. Microsoft only charges if there are more than 10 forms. So, most of the companies can survive without paying anything extra. It is included in the Office 365 licensing.

I would advise others to first look at the process and then the technology. The biggest issue is that people think that whatever they have in the current system can be digitized and automated, but it is better to first do the roadmap, understand the process from A to B, and then design the flow on paper. After the flow on paper seems okay, then go to the tool and create the form.

I would rate Microsoft Power Automate a nine out of 10. Big data support is something that I'd like to be covered a lot. The other piece that my business needs is already taken care of by the solution. Big data support is the only piece that is missing currently.

We have been using Power Automate specifically for the COVID situation. The use case is mainly to automatically fire an e-mail every Monday morning requesting the employees of our firm to provide a response regarding their well-being. After the data is captured by using an MS form, the subsequent workflows get triggered through Power Automate. If somebody has mentioned that they have a fever or shortness of breath, we send this person's entry to our health and safety officer and our plan manager. All this is automated.

We also have another use case related to procurement where an automated flow was required for invoice processing for an external vendor.

We have been able to automate the form filling, form dispatch, and data collection activities, specifically for the COVID situation, across all offices within our firm. It is a global process covering all zones such as Europe, India, and Australia. We have also been able to define workflows for particular use cases, such as when there is a high volume of cases in a specific zone, such as India. We have created workflows so that our emergency team is directly able to connect with the R3 team that directly connects with the employee to provide the required support.

We have also gone a bit far with respect to the access part. The Power Automate flow also connects with the physical gates of our offices. Last year, we were able to control our physical gates with the data generated by the Power Automated workflow. We were prohibiting or allowing the entry of the people based on their responses that they had put in the Monday morning form. It was quite a complex use case, but we were able to roll it out globally, and it has helped a lot with the COVID situation.

The best part is the automated workflow, which is quite good and easy. It is just drag-and-drop. We are able to create workflows quite quickly. 

We are able to directly integrate the data that it generates with Power BI dashboards. Its integration is quite good with other Microsoft tools, such as Power BI. The visualization of the data has become helpful for us.

Microsoft shouldn't charge extra for the database license if you want to store the data in the database during the trial. We wanted to have a historical trend of the data, and we started with the trial version of the tool. The database license is not included with the trial version, and you have to purchase it separately. Because we had a budget constraint, we had to pull all the information manually from the system, massage it, and push it to the dashboard. About two months ago, we have upgraded to the full-fledged version in which the database is integrated. The database license should be there in the trial version, but they have totally decoupled it. They should have provided a bundle, at least for the trial version, so that once a person or a firm gets a sense of it, they can start building. It might be because they wanted to sell additional licenses or premium licenses, and that's why they have added it in the premium version.

It should have more cognitive features. Automation Anywhere and UiPath are different because they have cognitive functionality plus intelligent automation. The cognitive functionality is currently not there in Microsoft Power Automate. It is just for workflow automation and basic bot-level tasks. It should have more cognitive features, which probably will be launched in a couple of years.

I have been using this solution for the past one and a half years.

It is quite a stable product.

It is scalable. There is no doubt about Microsoft products in terms of scalability. Because of its scalability, we are able to have use cases that require a higher load.

From the build perspective, only our team builds it. We have around 10 to 12 developers who create and support Power Automate solutions. In terms of its usage, we are currently using it only for two use cases. We also have other tools, but we are using Power Automate for the use cases with less budget. Its license cost is comparatively less as compared to Automation Anywhere.

We have annual support, and there is also a community. My team connected with the community forums, and most of the things got resolved there. They connected with the support once for an issue, which got resolved. Their support is good.

We are also using Automation Anywhere, but we needed a tool that is cheaper than Automation Anywhere. Power Automate fits there well.

Its deployment was quite easy. We already have Microsoft suite across our company. Our complete ecosystem is Microsoft-based, so it was not a challenge. It took one or two days to get things in place. For complete documentation and implementation, it hardly took two weeks.

As per our current agreement, Microsoft is supposed to provide support. So, we had an external consultant who helped us out.

Its licensing cost is comparatively less as compared to Automation Anywhere. We have bought a two-year license agreement.

I would recommend this solution to others. It is one of the powerful tools. The best part is that it fits very well with the Microsoft ecosystem. It is not at the same level as Automation Anywhere and UiPath, but being a Microsoft product, I see a bright future for this. In one and a half years, it will be one of the key players in the RPA industry.

I would rate Microsoft Power Automate an eight out of ten.