Microsoft Power Automate pros and cons

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.

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.

With the desktop version, we can automate many things. The ability to do a lot of things is one of the most valuable features.

Overall, it is a great service at the given price. It is very modern, and it integrates in a great way with pretty much anything. It is also fast.

I believe document reading has been beneficial when dealing with Microsoft.

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.

The initial setup is very simple.

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 a better and more cost-effective solution compared to Automation tools.

We have a good overview of our processes now thanks to Power Automate.

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.

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.

The debugging tools require improvement as well as the monitoring which goes along with it.

They can provide a deeper level of feedback about running processes. When I compare it to Blue Prism, the control room has slightly less information about the running processes and possible errors. I'm not a pro, so I am not entirely sure if this is a core feature of the product or if it is because of the way our partners have developed it or set it up.

The technical support has room for improvement.

There are some bugs or intermittent behavior in the Excel activities that require using workarounds.

It's not as user-friendly as a solution such as UiPath, which is really easy to use.

These products have some limitations, such as the need to build some custom controls in PCF or use the JSON format.

Microsoft Power Automate requires some knowledge and understanding of nuances for setup and security approvals.

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.