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Microsoft Power Automate vs VisualCron comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 4, 2024

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

Microsoft Power Automate
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
3rd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
133
Ranking in other categories
Process Mining (3rd), Agentic Automation (3rd), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (4th)
VisualCron
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Managed File Transfer (MFT) (15th), Workload Automation (17th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Power Automate is 11.5%, down from 20.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VisualCron is 1.1%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Microsoft Power Automate11.5%
VisualCron1.1%
Other87.4%
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
 

Featured Reviews

Ayobami Shobaloju - PeerSpot reviewer
Customer Solution Provider at Wema Bank
Automating processes has saved time and improved communication
Something frustrates me concerning Microsoft Power Automate, and that is about the integration with Microsoft Forms and Excel. The issue now is that I don't get my responses synchronized automatically, and that frustrates me a lot. If the team could take this as feedback, the synchronization of the feedback responses from the forms and the Excel sheets should be seamless. This synchronization issue happens frequently, and it causes a lot of delays in the sense that the mails that ought to go out to the agents fail at some point. I have to reload these responses so that the agents can get their responses as when submitted. What I notice is that the responses don't go out without proper synchronization, so I reload the field responses, and this works afterwards. I would say probably a seamless walkthrough process for new users would be beneficial. For those using it for the first time, a seamless walkthrough process would be fine.
Sourav-Dutta - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead - Database Administrator at SMART ENERGY SYSTEMS LLC
It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process
We use VisualCron for all our automation needs, like connecting to FileZilla, calling APIs, generating PGP keys, creating encryption files with the PGP key login to Azure, etc. It can automatically log in to SQL Server and execute SQL script jobs in bulk. We had 2,000-3,000 users at my previous…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We use Power Automate for applicant tracking and automated around 80 percent of the process."
"It is a great solution for simple automation activities or simple automation of simple tasks. It is also integrated with Office 365. Integration is an absolute breeze with any RPA software."
"Overall, I would give Microsoft Power Automate a nine out of ten."
"Currently, we are mostly using the desktop part of it for data. We are basically extracting the data and then putting it in."
"Microsoft Power Automate's no-code workflows help my team in daily operations to a great extent."
"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."
"Microsoft Power Automate has positively impacted my organization as it has saved a lot of time and effort."
"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."
"'ve only had a few cases where I've had to request support in the past 12 years of use, but the support response time and resolution were was extremely quick."
"What I like about VisualCron is that like its name, it's a very visual tool. In my previous company, there were a lot of scripts for all kinds of services, and through VisualCron, you get to group all flows and get a nice visual overview. VisualCron also has an alerting feature, so you receive alerts from it. VisualCron makes everything clearer and easier to maintain. Every other solution that I was looking for almost always needed a programmer, but with VisualCron, you can do what you need to do without programming skills, so this is another valuable feature of the tool."
"I love VisualCron because we previously spent a lot of time writing Power switches to connect to SQL Server. VisualCron makes it easier to execute services or connect to FileZilla by only adding the credentials to the master credentials stored in the solution."
"The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%."
"VisualCron is a very powerful program to automate different steps in your business processes. We use it to automate replacing files and inform departments about the replacement."
"We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works."
"It helped us reduce manual steps."
"The ability to clone jobs to shorten the time it takes to implement a process has been invaluable, but its flexibility also gives us the ability to create a job that can handle a multifaceted process with a complex workflow."
 

Cons

"These products have some limitations, such as the need to build some custom controls in PCF or use the JSON format."
"While working with big data, when we have structured data like logs, we have to work with an ETL tool before manipulating the data and creating the workflows and the forms. This can be improved. Big data support is something that I'd like to be covered a lot."
"From an improvement perspective, Microsoft just needs to make sure that they have a real enterprise RPA tool. PowerApps and Power Automate are still not at the level of UiPath and Automation Anywhere. It could be because Automation Anywhere and UiPath have been in the market for quite some time. It's just about Microsoft increasing their focus in terms of product reviews and development and making them competitive products that one can consider at an enterprise level. Right now, their use cases are limited as compared to what one would consider doing with UiPath and Automation Anywhere."
"It should be more stable, and their technical support should be faster. It should also have more integration with tools from other vendors, such as SAP and Oracle, and technology partners, such as Salesforce."
"We expect Microsoft Power Automate to work like any other RPA software, but at present, it is fairly lax, especially in the RPA space. We have a very limited set of use cases today for Microsoft Power Automate. Microsoft should make it a full-featured RPA product like other solutions that we use, such as Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath. This is predominantly the area that they need to improve on. Microsoft Power Automate is quite complex to use as well, especially if you want to do advanced workflows or advanced automation. The regular simple workflows are quite easy and straightforward, but the moment you want to do something complex, it is almost impossible for one of our employees to work on it."
"The tool must be more stable."
"I need to have more integration capabilities from this solution."
"If someone was just about to start using it, it would be better if it was a bit more user-friendly in terms of understanding function references. I come from a bit of development background. To me, it all makes quite a lot of sense, but someone using it for the first time would probably battle understanding how the functions work. This might be something they could improve on. It would be really useful if it could publish data to Power BI. We like to use Power BI for our reporting, but we can't directly integrate the data across. If there was a way to automate the collection of the data and push it straight into the Power BI platform, it would be quite useful."
"The error timeout and info could be better. When making web request calls, it will time out sometimes and we won't get any useful info out of the error response."
"VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve."
"There are some conditions in the mail trigger, but you can only use them as an "AND" condition, not as an "OR" condition. This is an improvement that could be useful. For example, some people put "invoice" in the subject and others put "invoice" in the body. If I want to make a trigger for everybody whose sending invoices, I have to make two jobs for this now."
"I want to improve the UI in VisualCron, as it's not as user-friendly, particularly when setting up the task scheduler. If you're familiar with the tool, then no problem, but if not, you'll have a problem typing text because sometimes, the cursor points to other places, so there's an issue with text box alignment in VisualCron. That was painful for me when I was just a VisualCron novice, but when you become used to it, there won't be a problem."
"The documentation is a bit weak."
"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."
"The only problem I face when I use the tool is that it doesn't contain much documentation or it doesn't have many video tutorials on its features."
"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution is reasonably priced and offers a free trial period."
"Licensing is on an annual basis."
"Initially, we had a Microsoft account for Office 365. Later, we discovered that our license included access to Power Automate at no additional cost. There was a small fee for additional features, but it was negligible compared to the benefits. There are not any additional fees required to use the solution."
"This is the cheapest option among competitors. You can choose to have the RPA with attendance at $40/month with add-on's totaling about $190. There are standalone options that require someone to run the process and there are fully automated options that are integrated within the cloud."
"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."
"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."
"This solution is bundled with our Office 365, so there is no additional licensing fee."
"Power Automate is comparatively less costly than UiPath."
"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
"ROI is one month."
"We are fine with a rather cheap setup. Licensing with VisualCron is fair. You have a simple one-year licence in different sizes. There isn't a licensing jungle with hundreds of options and opt-ins."
"ROI is 95 percent."
"The price is a bit high."
"VisualCron is correctly priced because it wasn't very cheap, and it wasn't overly expensive, so the price for it was set correctly. When my previous company bought VisualCron, it was €800 per server per year. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing for VisualCron a five because it was just right. The tool was affordable, and it has one of the most competitive pricing in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Insurance Company
5%
Computer Software Company
28%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Insurance Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business50
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise66
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

RPA that Bots can run without centralized control?
Yes, Attended Bots which can run without centralized control Module. RPA Tools like Automation Anywhere, uiPath ,Power Automation they do support this.
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 ‌is‌ ‌no‌ ‌coding‌ ‌experience‌ ‌necessary,‌ ‌and‌ ‌appreciate‌ ‌the‌ ‌automated‌...
How is Automation Anywhere compared to Microsoft Power Automate?
‌Neither‌ ‌solution‌ ‌requires‌ ‌any‌ ‌coding‌ ‌experience,‌ ‌and‌ ‌both‌ ‌are‌ ‌easy‌ ‌to‌ ‌use‌ ‌and‌ ‌have‌ ‌great‌ ‌drag-and‌ ‌drop‌ ‌functionality.‌ ‌The‌ ‌training‌ ‌and‌ ‌resources‌ ‌for‌ ‌A...
What do you like most about VisualCron?
The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%.
What needs improvement with VisualCron?
The documentation is a bit weak. The tool must provide a better set of documentation.
 

Also Known As

Power Automate, Microsoft Flow, MS Power Automate, WinAutomation by Softomotive, ProcessRobot by Softomotive, Minit
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
7 Eleven, ABB Sécheron SA, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Amazon Europe Core, Apple, Assa Abloy, Aston Martin, Banco Santander, BMW (Australia)
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Power Automate vs. VisualCron and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,565 professionals have used our research since 2012.