Microsoft Power Automate Reviews

We are resellers and sometimes we implement solutions.

It's a component of Microsoft 365.

We use this solution to match some documents or spreadsheets, to match data from one spreadsheet with another, and to download and load invoices.

We also use it for an approval flow.

The most valuable features of this solution are the automation interface and the RPA automation.

The BPM component needs improvement.

Microsoft doesn't have certification training for Microsoft Power Automate, like other solutions such as UiPath, Kofax, and Automation Anywhere. All of these products have certification training available.

Power Automate is part of a suite called Power Platform.

Power Automate can integrate into a business intelligence component like Power BI, a flow component like Flow, and a bot component like Virtual Agents. 

Power Automate can make that cross to these components for better results of all the data that the client wants to see, and wants to automate.

I have been working with this solution for almost two years.

It's very stable, it doesn't have any crashes. 

The only issue is when we don't have an internet connection, it crashed because it's a cloud solution and not on-premises.

It has many connectors to other vendors or other components or other programs that make the solution scalable.

It is very easy to deploy with other vendors like Power Automate versus SAP. You can connect SAP with Power Automate very easily and extract information from the SAP environment.

It's a scalable solution.

Our clients are medium-sized companies. We have anywhere from 16 to 100 users.

Microsoft has the team to analyze every incident. In my experience, they have teams that can process incidents for my clients.

I am satisfied with technical support.

The initial setup was easy and it took a week or two weeks to deploy.

We have a team of two or three people to deploy and maintain this solution.

Our clients also evaluated UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

UiPath and Automation Anywhere are leaders in Gartner Magic Quadrant. Microsoft is the challenger. 

Our clients are aware of these evaluations.

I would recommend this solution to others, but first, they should evaluate it. Do a PoC of the tool and evaluate the business purpose. Review the results before making the purchase.

In the beginning, Power Automate was called Flow, and it was very basic to easy to manage. During the last year, there have been many improvements from Microsoft that have taken it to the next level and can compete with UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

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

We are using Power Automate to send notifications when working with items in SharePoint. It is used to send notifications when a document is moved or needs to be approved. When a document needs to be approved in SharePoint, we send a notification to the user who needs to approve that document. I also use Power Automate to create a work item in another system, such as Azure DevOps.

I like Power Automate because it is very easy to use for users who don't have IT knowledge.

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 have been using this solution for five months.

It is stable.

It is scalable, but its scalability can be better. We have 10 to 20 users of this solution.

We have a contract with Microsoft for premium support. We have support all the time, and they are good.

Its initial setup is easy. The deployment duration depends on the complexity of the deployment. It can take a week or a month.

To know about the best practices for this solution and how to make it more secure, I would advise others to read the information on the web.

I would rate Microsoft Power Automate a seven out of ten.

We are using it for simple invoice management processing. We are using it for just storing documents with some workflows attached.

It is Microsoft. So, you get the integration capability.

The connectors and the integration capability can be improved. Microsoft RPA is a growing platform, and it is not yet particularly mature.

We just started to use Microsoft Power Automate. It has been a couple of weeks.

We haven't used it on a major scale at this stage. We're at the start of the journey. We have around 100 users.

Their technical support is okay.

Its initial setup was straightforward. It is a Microsoft product, so it is as simple as it can get as long as you've got the right licenses and permissions.

We use a third-party Microsoft partner. We have two developers for its deployment.

We are just using the free products at the moment. We are using the ones that come with the license that we have got.

We evaluated Automation Anywhere as RPA. We chose Microsoft Power Automate because Microsoft is part of our strategic solution. We've just implemented Dynamics, and that's why we started to investigate this solution.

I would recommend this solution. We are just at the start of our journey, and we are trying to understand its true capabilities. We plan to keep using this solution. We'll look for use cases.

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

It is very easy to learn and use. It is quite useful for any sort of back-office work. Any kind of work with low and medium complexity is very doable in ProcessRobot. For higher complexity, some refinement is required, but it is doable.

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.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It is not very stable. They're working on the refinements. I would rate it a six or seven in terms of stability.

It is scalable but not to an optimum level. It is more scalable than WinAutomation, but it is not as scalable as UiPath or Automation Anywhere where you can scale to 50 bots at a time.

We have 20 to 30 users of this solution. In terms of increasing its usage, it depends on the customers. Customers who already have this solution will keep using it. 

Their technical support should be faster.

We also use WinAutomation. ProcessRobot is any day better than WinAutomation. It is newer and has more capabilities than WinAutomation. ProcessRobot is also better than WinAutomation in terms of scalability.

Its initial setup is easy.

Licensing is on an annual basis.

I would recommend this solution for small to medium deployments but not for very large-scale deployments.

I would rate ProcessRobot a seven out of ten.

Power Automate is a quite powerful tool. It helps you automate your daily processes. Being an RPA tool, it allows you to define certain logic and execute certain tasks at a scheduled time or for a certain event. I use it in conjunction with our SharePoint site to let our stakeholders know that something has been done or updated, and it kicks off another flow. We use it quite regularly.

Its usability is very valuable because it has a quite simple flow. It is very user-friendly. It provides you templates. I started learning with the help of Teams templates, and then I started providing them. It is always good to start with a template so that you understand how it works.

Its branches are quite user-friendly. You can put expressions in it. It allows you to link and test the flow so that you can check whether everything is running properly. From a business standpoint, Power Automate is quite good for a non-tech person. It is not like Java, HTML, or C++, which are very developer-driven. Power Automate is a more business-oriented kind of tool.

They can build more templates and more connectivity with other platforms. They can provide a more user-friendly way to connect with other platforms. They have their own in-built plugins for certain third-party vendors, but there are still a lot of third-party vendors that are not there.

I have been using this solution for over a year.

It is a stable product.

It is definitely scalable. If you want to integrate Power Automate with third-party software and other platforms, a technical person is needed. If you just want to connect Power Automate with Microsoft's suite of services, you can easily do it. They also have their own in-built plugins for certain third-party vendors. More and more plugins will come in the future because more and more people want to connect to Power Automate. I can already see Trello and Jira creating the plugins. There are still a lot of third-party vendors that are not there on it, but we can basically go ahead and create our own if needed.

Power Automate is a connectivity tool, so it has the ability to connect to other platforms. If they're able to do that, other platforms start making more money because I can get a flow that directly connects to another vendor and helps me achieve what I want to do, rather than having a tech person give me estimates and getting that done, which takes a longer time.

In terms of the number of users, we are a big organization with around 15,000 people globally. I don't know how many people use it, but the awareness is coming slowly within the organization and more and more people are becoming aware. I will continue using this solution.

I haven't actually reached out to technical support, which speaks for the usability of it. It is quite user-friendly, so I didn't really have to reach out to technical support.

I did attend a one-day workshop for Power Apps, which was great. For Power Automate, we actually have regular IT sessions. Our IT team has set up regular training sessions for learning different services from Microsoft, and one of them was Power Automate. That's where we got the awareness of Power Automate. That was a year and a half ago, and that was when we basically said, "Oh, wow, this is great!" At that time, it was called Flow. Now, it is called Automate.

We have it on our system. I don't really know if we need a separate license.

I would highly recommend Power Automate to anyone who is quite keen on RPAs and wants to automate certain processes from a business standpoint.

Microsoft is doing really well in this space. There are very few RPA tools, and Microsoft has been successful in penetrating the market. There are very few of them who are on every single PC. Any business, bank, or enterprise that has Microsoft on their PCs and has subscribed to this at an enterprise level are given Power Automate. The market penetration of Power Automate is really good. As more and more users start using it, they will obviously come up with issues. I definitely found a few challenges, but nothing with which Google Search couldn't help. More and more people are using Power Automate, and I can easily find answers on the web. It is already great, and it is going to go quite well if Microsoft goes ahead and starts building more of these tools.

I would rate Power Automate a nine out of ten. It is a great product.

We use Microsoft Power Automate for various personal initiatives of people to automate their own work.

It is used in a laboratory environment to connect the laboratory systems and to automate the connections between them.

The most valuable features are that it is low-code and simple.

For simple use cases, it is easy to use but as soon as it becomes complex then it doesn't fulfill the requirements.

It doesn't have any OCR capabilities. It doesn't really work with our ERP system, where we can log into the ERP system and have a robot updating it directly.

Microsoft is early on in this game and not really very far yet. They just need to mature their solutions.

In the next release, I would like to see a centrally-governed system, where you can access fully automated processes. This would include the ability to connect to other systems and log into them.

I would like to see it as a centrally managed solution.

I have been using Microsoft Power Automate for six months.

We are using a local partner of Microsoft in the Netherlands, and it's going quite well.

At the moment, we're using both Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Apps. We also use Kofax.

If you are using it as a user, I'm not aware of how complex it is for setting up central governance on it. But with proper RPA, you very much need the central-governance to ensure that things are conforming to standards. 

As soon as it starts being involved in business-critical use, then governance is very important.

I haven't seen that the central governing of it to be easy.

We use a local partner to help with the implementation and it's going quite well.

I am not aware of the pricing, but the problem is something we run into often. As soon as you want to use a data service, all of a sudden the license cost goes up. 

It's more fragmented licensing, where every little thing that you add, you get an extra license cost.

Microsoft is gradually becoming better, but for RPA, it's not fully there yet.

If you are looking for a low-code, simple to deal with email and extract a spreadsheet, then Microsoft is a good option. However, if you have a complex RPA use case where optical character recognition or PDF ingestion is needed then Kofax is a better choice.

I'm responsible for the center of excellence running Kofax as an RPA solution, and not for the Microsoft Power Apps.

I would rate Microsoft Power Automate a seven out of ten.

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 started using it just three months ago. These three months also include doing the proof of concept. We use it for IT operations where users can request for a software push by using a Microsoft Office 365 form. Using Forward Automate, I initiate the process. I have another department that is using it for requests for the PC team or for a contractor's visit to the main plant here in Panama.

It is basically free for me because it comes with my Office 365 subscription. The main feature is that there is abundant learning material on platforms like YouTube. You can find information about whatever you want to be done in Spanish or English without a problem. 

It is very easy to learn. Users can start using it on their own without any former training, which is something I like about this solution. 

It would be good to have some kind of on-premises solution for BPMN users, but I don't think Microsoft will ever go back to the on-premises solution. They all train their clients to use their online services.

It is easy, but it doesn't follow the industry-wide standards. I can only use the processes that Microsoft gives us. I can't map a business process by using other standards or notations, such as Business Process Management (BPM). I have to use whatever Microsoft gives us. I would like to have support for some standards because if we decide to use another BPM tomorrow, we will have to remap everything in notation to transfer from this solution. This is the only block or obstacle that I see in using this solution. It is closed in its infrastructure.

I have been using Microsoft Power Automate for three months.

I can't evaluate their technical support because I haven't had any issues. We have an enterprise license and subscription from Microsoft, which gives us 24/7 support in case we have any problem with the solution.

The most complex thing was setting up Microsoft Exchange Online. Our email solution was Google G Suite Email. Switching over to Microsoft was very difficult, and it took at least one week. We are a small company. We did everything in one day, but we had issues for at least one week after the migration because we transferred all mailboxes from Google to Microsoft. 

It is free with Office 365 subscription.

We have just started to use this solution. The next step is to have a dashboard to polish the KPIs from the data stored through this application.

I would suggest using this solution if you don't have any budget restrictions for automating processes. If you are a subscriber of Microsoft and you use Microsoft Office 365, I will advise using it right away. If you have a budget and you want a solution that designs specifically for business profits, I will suggest implementing some other solution such as the one from Pega systems.

I would rate Microsoft Power Automate a seven out of ten.