Microsoft Power Automate Reviews

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.

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.

We have clients in a number of different industries. We were evaluating Power Automate for a hospital in Kansas City. We were looking at a couple of different use cases with regards to their vendor onboarding and some of the back-office processes. 

The initial setup is pretty easy.

The entire product is pretty easy to pick up and learn. We've got some developers and some software engineers that have picked it up. We have RPA specialists that are are deep specialists in UiPath, and they picked up Power Automate relatively quickly. We have guys that are trained in multiple platforms such as Automation Anywhere or Blue Prism and they got it right away.

The solution lacks maturity. That will come with time.

The complementary suite of capabilities with regards to task capture and being able to self-document a process needs improvement. The whole document handling aspect, OCR recognition and capabilities, need to incorporate some more of an AI type of approach with document extraction and document handling. 

Being able to handle various types of forms and complex documents is important. Obviously, we handle a lot of documents like invoices that could have multiple formats and multiple pages of content, and very complex material contracts. That area is where it shows that UiPath has come a long way and Microsoft has a ways to go. 

If I look at the suite of tools that UiPath has, it's very robust and extensive. There are complimentary tools that help determine the applicability of a process. Being able to have tools that help assess things like a business case, savings, applicability, etc., relatively quickly, which we see with UiPath, for example, is integral to a good product. 

I've been using the solution for less than a year.

A criticism of Microsoft is that they typically bundle everything together, like with the Office 365 or Dynamics 365 or whatever the package of all the different options are. You get it whether you want it or not. The problem with that is, the content that you're giving away in the bundle is either not fully baked, or fully thought out or all that valuable. Some might be buggy or not do exactly what they are supposed to.

Clients are frustrated that they're getting stuff that they don't want. They'll ask us "why am I getting all these other packages as part of my bundle, that don't make sense?". I would rather see a really innovative and leading tool, rather than a whole bunch of tools that do lots of things. 

We haven't really reached out to technical support. We haven't really gone into production. Most of the issues, anything that we've had to do technically, we've figured out.

The initial setup is very straightforward. Our team picked it up really quickly. The question is if it's really solving the trickier problems on not. The more complex problems, is where the value is going to be. Process automation is becoming a commodity. Therefore, the differentiation is in really being able to handle the more complex problems, especially at an enterprise level.

We're able to handle implementations ourselves. We're a reseller and gold partner with Microsoft.

I'm unsure as to what the licensing costs are. It's not something that I generally deal with.

We're a vendor, therefore, we tend to use various solutions according to our client's needs. We've evaluated UiPath against Power Automate, for example.

We have evaluated Power Automate and we're trying to get some competency there. I don't believe it's to the same level as where you have the maturity as UiPath.

We've also looked at Blue Prism and found their capabilities quite mature.

I'm using the latest version of the solution.

We would typically evaluate the solution as an on-Cloud deployment. However, we would use either cloud or on-premises deployment models, depending on the situation. It's not implemented in our organization. We're a vendor or a partner. We provide services to implement it.

I'd advise other organizations that if you are looking for industrial strength, I don't think this solution is quite it. However, if you're poking around and are going to use it lightly, it might be a way to venture into process automation. It would allow you to try it out without a big commitment. If there are companies that are serious about it, it's probably not the right option. It's not ready yet. Microsoft is maybe trying other ways to build out the capabilities, through acquisition avenues. Therefore, I'm not sure if that's the platform to get. There will be too many growing pains.

Overall, I'd rate the solution five out of ten.

Microsoft Power Automate is a part of the Office 365 environment. Currently, 5% to 7% of our 19,000 employees use Microsoft Power Automate. It has already been connected to all the applications that our employees use, such as Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, and the ecosystem of applications that come with Microsoft Office. This is one of the primary reasons for using this solution. We are also using it for workflow approval and automated signature use cases to deploy a digital signature solution for some documents. It is all automated, from the client all the way to signing and storing the documents. 

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.

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.

We have been using Microsoft Power Automate for about a year or so now. We are using the latest version.

It is absolutely stable.

It is definitely not scalable because we don't see this kind of use case. Scaling comes with the flexibility to use it everywhere, but we don't see that flexibility today. Therefore, scalability is definitely a question. We hope to see the product improve so that we can scale it, but today, we really can't do so. 

We don't usually call Microsoft for anything. There is absolutely no need for technical support. It is relatively easy. 

There is no installation because it is a part of our size offering purchase from Microsoft Office, so it was relatively straightforward to install. 

Microsoft deployed it for us, and they had a fairly large team. It took a long time, but I don't think it generally takes a long time. We had a very large deployment for around 19,000 employees. When I say deploy, I specifically speak of Office 365, which is the installation of Microsoft Office on these 19,000 end-user computing devices at the same time by using a new Active Directory. If you are specifically talking about deploying in Office 365 or Power Automate alone, it can be done in a matter of hours. You would need only one person to deploy it.

There is zero licensing cost. It comes with our Microsoft Office subscription.

We use both Automation Anywhere and Microsoft Power Automate.

I would recommend this solution for simple automation. We plan to continue using this solution if it gets better in terms of use cases, features, and scalability. It needs a full check-up in terms of functionality to be a fully functional RPA. 

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