Microsoft Power Automate Reviews

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're currently exploring the solution. We're doing some planning and testing. We're looking at data transformation and flows.

There's the potential to save a lot of time by reducing the time it takes to do processes. It may even save us costs.

We're looking to monitor more projects in the future, however, right now, we're mostly in the testing phase. 

The tool is very good at implementing automation within processes. It's saved us from doing a lot of manual processes.

The tool is very effective. 

The features on offer are very good.

The product gives us a lot of very useful metrics that we can use.

The entire solution is extremely user-friendly.

There's good documentation online and I find the solution offers pretty good overall communications.

There are some gaps and a few areas of the solution that are still a bit complicated and confusing.

I've had issues with reordering columns. When I tried to do it, it seemed to take a long time, and then, later, it gave me some kind of error. 

We've only been using the solution for the last two months or so. 

The solution is quite stable. We haven't had any issues in that sense. It's reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's not buggy. It's been good.

I'd say the solution can scale. We haven't had any issues in that sense. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so.

In our case, right now the users are minimal. We have maybe five users in total. Some are in IT and a few are in other departments.

We likely need support at this time. Mostly we've been dealing with online assistance and documentation. We're testing the product. To get it up and running, we'll likely need some help and may need to reach out to technical support to get asssitance.

The initial setup isn't as straightforward as we hoped it would be. We had some issues specifically with the initial configuration. It was a bit difficult.

Deployment times vary. For us, it might have taken about four weeks or so.

We handled the implementation ourselves. We did a bit of research and tried to tackle it internally. It was just to get started. When we do a bit more of a complicated setup, we will get some consultants to help us with the process.

I'm not sure of the cost of this solution. Licensing and billing are not aspects of the product I deal with at this time.

While we know there are other tools on the market, currently, we're just playing with this particular tool to see what we can do.

We have looked at UiPath, however, we haven't tried implementing it yet. We just know it is an option.

We have a partnership with Azure. 

I'm using the platform from the desktop version coming with Microsoft 365. I assume it's the latest version of the solution.

Based on our preliminary usage, I do recommend the solution. It is easy to start with and to try out. It's pretty user-friendly and, and there's so much documentation on how to use it. There is other information about use cases as well and some pretty good videos on how to do certain things. The community seems to be pretty strong, which is helpful for when you are starting out.

In general, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

I primarily use the solution for automation. I also use it for invoicing.

To automatically register some data has saved me a lot of time. In the past, I would look in an Excel sheet every day at 8:00 am and I would have to download a spreadsheet and match some values with another spreadsheet. That kind of task took me almost three hours. Now in almost three minutes or two minutes, it's done.

I also find that it's helped with invoicing in relation to taxes. I can download the invoice, and match it with my ERP system and they match the values with the invoice and the system. If it matches, it gets saved in a spreadsheet with many invoices. I could have 10, 20, or even 30 invoices a day or 100 invoices a week. With this solution, I don't need a person to review that. The robot handles that task.

One of the most valuable feature that Power Platform has is the integration with Power BI and the AI Builder, in the firts one, you ca create visualizations and show indicators of revenue, execution, progress, ranges, of whats going on in the solutions, in the second one, you can create an intelligent model to show projections in a matter of minutes, it's so ieasy o create a robot in these software

The issue lies more in how you learn the solution. The information is very generalized. It could be extremely useful to have more specific information about how to use various features within the platform. The solution has a lot of moving parts and aspects that need to be understood. Making the training process easier would help people onboard faster.

The desktop interface is a little rough to manage. You can't view the bottoms or the menu or the characteristics of what you need to use. It's very unclear in the desktop application. That said, the cloud application it's more useful. It's much neater and more organized.

Their AI builder has improved, however, it could be interesting to look into how to build a project that can make projections about a task or a process. If that feature could be more user-friendly, that would be ideal. Right now, it's not very clear how to use it. Maybe a person that has more knowledge wouldn't be as confused. I'm not like a developer. I'd need it simplified for me.

I've been using the solution for about a year to a year and a half so far. It hasn't been an extended period of time.

I haven't experienced any issues with the stability of the solution. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't seem to crash or freeze. It's been good so far.

The product can integrate with other solutions, and therefore it can work with high workloads or low workloads. It's very scalable. 

We have anywhere from 100 to 500 users.

The technical support of Microsoft has been good. It's not often that we call into Microsoft directly, however, at least, not so much for this particular solution.

The initial setup is not complex. It's quite straightforward. We found the process to be very easy.

The deployment is very fast. It only takes a minute or two.

It's a subscription. Therefore, you only need to log in and make a project, and if you already know how data deploys it's within minutes that you can start.

The solution is subscription-based.

I have evaluated Automation Anywhere, among other solutions. There are many, however, I'm more comfortable with Microsoft.

We're a Microsoft partner.

I have used Flows and it's very easy to use it, however, not in advanced terms.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. It's my understanding that it is the latest, however, I don't know the exact version number.

I'd warn new users that they have to know about the concept of RPA. It's very difficult to get on board with this kind of solution if you don't know about RPA. You have to make everything step-by-step. You have to know how to make a diagram flow. You need to understand what comes first and what's in the middle, and what's next. In order to successfully dive into using the solution, a user must be familiar with these kinds of concepts and labels.

If you don't know about the process or haven't read about BPM, it could make it very difficult to implement RPA. I suggest new users if they aren't familiar, read a little about RPA in the beginning and then learn about the processes.

It's a good product. I would rate it nine out of ten.

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 are a solution provider and one of the services that we perform is to build automations for our clients. Softomotive is a product that we use to automate multiple processes for use by our customers on their data, based on their needs.

The interface is user-friendly.

This product is cost-effective, which is the main reason we are using it.

We are looking to see more features implemented there are already available in UiPath or Automation Anywhere. This is one of the main drawbacks.

We have been using Softomotive for between three and four years.

It is stable, and we don't have any issues with this particular product as of today. We plan to continue using it in the future.

We have more than 600 customers who use this product.

We get very good support from Softomotive.

We have used Softomotive for the past four to five years, although in the interim we tested Blue Prism. The cost of that product is too high.

The installation is straightforward and we haven't seen any complexity. It will take 15 minutes, maximum, to deploy.

This is a product that I can easily deploy on my own. We have less than 15 people on-site who are responsible for deployment and maintenance.

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.

Considering the kind of experience that we have had with Softomotive, we would always recommend this product.

Since this product was acquired by Microsoft, naturally the expectation has gone up. We are not expecting too much of an architectural change, but rather, a few of the small features should be added. The reason is that you like to stay competitive in terms of cost. We have already deployed it to more than 600 customers and if we are going to charge them more, then they'll be inclined to use another product.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I'm a strategy consultant and we are partners and resellers/integrators of Microsoft. 

I like the power automate side of the platform, which I'm using as well all the core applications to include a human loop in the process. I'm quite relieved now because they have the Power Automate desktop platform which is good.

One of the frustrating things is that you can't use a lot of connectors without having a premium license. I would like them to increase the AI capacity. Currently they are using AI Builder which is significantly reduced because it's based on models which are not similar and it's really narrow. Surface information, like going through Citrix, would also be good.

I've been using this solution for four months. 

This is a stable solution. 

The product is scalable, we have around 40 people using it in our company. 

We are integrators so we generally don't use the technical support. 

We still also work with UI Path and in the past we worked a lot with Blue Prism. We're losing business with Blue Prism because their entry ticket is quite high. With Blue Prism you can increase your capacity quite easily and then there are no entry costs. Most of our clients already have Dynamics or Office 365 licensing so it's quite easy for them to implement Microsoft Power Automate or alternatively the UI Path system. My conviction is that UI Path is the most complete platform, including the entire operating model and the COE, accelerators in opportunity identification, accelerators in maintenance and monitoring as well as the community services. So that why it's quite good. It's coming with extensions as well. It also comes with extensions. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

I'm quite sure that they will increase their licensing in the next few months because the platform is getting better and better. The big advantage for them now is that a lot of organizations already have Office 365 licensing, so it's quite easy to sell.

My advice on this product would be to focus on the human in the loop. That's because Power Automate is really great when you want to communicate with users in the middle of a crisis, or if you want some interaction with different people or want to orchestrate workflow between different departments. It has quite an impact when you implement user interactions.

For now, I would rate this solution a six out of 10, but I am sure it will improve in the next few months. 

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.