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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

"The solution offers a lot of documentation and tutorials for users to learn about various aspects and features."
"Its complete integration with Microsoft tools and the inclusion of the CRM are the most valuable features. It is embedded directly in the Office package, so clients have direct access to it. It has a lot more functionality than other standalone solutions, such as UiPath or Blue Prism."
"This product has an easy-to-use interface with nice detail in the features."
"The product is very stable."
"Microsoft Power Automate offers over 200 connectors that enhance the user experience."
"It helps with the feedback mechanism, where we need to determine the relevant team and obtain their email addresses."
"Power Automate is not complex and is very easy-to-use in deploying most development projects."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Power Automate is the many functionalities, and ease of use. We had summer interns from college in their second year of engineering and they were able to start the building process quickly within a day."
"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."
"'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."
"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."
"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 has improved our organization with more automation within the business departments and less administration and development in the IT department. Usually, as the IT department, we are the bottleneck for many requirements within the business. With this tool, the business departments are able to perform many task themselves."
"What I found most beneficial from VisualCron is that you can directly connect it with different databases, user accounts, and credentials. You can run queries from one machine to another using the credentials, unlike PowerShell, that's run by the machine itself. With VisualCron, you can directly ask other machines and run requests through user credentials. Suppose you have an AWS or Azure environment. In that case, you can maintain the connection between on-premises and cloud-based machines, which is the type of setup in the organization I'm working for. You can directly call some of the services via VisualCron on your local on-premises machine, and I found that an excellent feature of the tool."
"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."
 

Cons

"Something frustrates me concerning Microsoft Power Automate, and that is about the integration with Microsoft Forms and Excel."
"There is an RPA feature gap between this solution and other more mature products."
"They can improve the description of errors and provide more details. Sometimes, when I receive an error, I can't understand what is wrong. It would be useful to have a desktop version to modify or edit workflows. Its scalability can also be better."
"I need to have more integration capabilities from this solution."
"The integration of our system into Power Automate was a bit tricky. We had to put a data lake in place before automating anything because we were not very structured in terms of data. Our major issue was cleaning up the data."
"During their merger, some key functions were eliminated which no longer allows it to run independently from the cloud as a standalone for other companies. For example, options to schedule and trigger have been removed. It would be nice to have these capabilities back. The flow and the connectivity between databases and so on is a bit complex as well."
"Its licensing model should be improved. The pricing should be more visible and transparent. When you consume services, there are too many criteria to figure out how much it is going to cost you to use the product to its full extent. It should also support visual process editing, which is a standard feature for BPMN 2.0 compliance. They should improve the visual designer."
"Microsoft Power Automate could improve by offering recurring execution on the desktop."
"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."
"The documentation is a bit weak."
"An area for improvement in VisualCron is its cluttered interface. It isn't always easy to find all functionalities, so what VisualCron needs is a user interface expert who can improve the interface. There's a learning curve in terms of finding what you need from the interface of VisualCron. The technical support for VisualCron also needs improvement in terms of response time. Currently, there's no live support or hotline you can call to get quick answers, so this is what I'd like to see in the next version of VisualCron. A less cluttered and more streamlined interface, where you don't need to hunt for some of the features, is also what I'd like to see in the next VisualCron update."
"VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve."
"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."
"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."
"VisualCron seems to operate like an efficient machine when it comes to improvements and enhancements and new features. I always appreciate the quick response I get when bringing up an issue or coming up with suggestions. I've mentioned before that it would be great to see a move away from SQLCE and XML configuration files."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Power Automate is comparatively less costly than UiPath."
"It's more fragmented licensing, where every little thing that you add, you get an extra license cost."
"Currently, we are using the free license for testing. After everything is done, we'll buy the license."
"There should be increased transparency about which features attend the pricing."
"The solution is free with Microsoft 365."
"There is zero licensing cost. It comes with our Microsoft Office subscription."
"I am not aware of the recent pricing model, but during the time that I was using this solution is was reasonable."
"Its licensing cost is comparatively less as compared to Automation Anywhere. We have bought a two-year license agreement."
"The price is a bit high."
"ROI is 95 percent."
"ROI is one month."
"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
"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."
"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
9%
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.
881,455 professionals have used our research since 2012.