Microsoft Power Automate Reviews

We primarily use the solution for testing. For example, we made a website solution and we're open to trying new things because it's not on production yet. We use your flows in order to make some data automation. We fill our flows with some data and test to see if it's all correct.

The RPA robotic process automation is a good feature. We can make a flow within a flow. We just made a UI flow. The flow is to run every day so far it's been quite helpful.

There's good Microsoft documentation that makes setup easy.

I am now a member of the digital transformation team, so we are making various products. We are just making the new projects, and developing them in the store. However, everything is new to us. We have are not working with this tool for more than six months. Therefore, it's hard to really know how well it works or what is lacking.

The solution needs more features so that it can better compete with competitors that have been on the market longer and are more mature.

Tech support could be more hands-on. Right now, they simply direct users to documentation instead of directly dealing with issues.

We've only just started using the solution. We have been using it for six months so far. It's been less than a year.

The stability of the solution is quite good. We're not in production, so we can't verify it 100% as we're just testing its capabilities. It's a rather new tool as well, so I don't know how much it's been tried and tested overall. However, overall, from what I've witnessed, it's been good.

The solution is quite new, both for us and on the market. I can't speak to the scalability as we haven't tried to scale it, and I don't know if many companies have really tried.

Although we have about 1,500 employees, we're still testing the solution, so not everyone has access to the product. Maybe five or six of us are actually on it and trying it out. We're all programmers.

As a developer, I can open a ticket with Microsoft, even though our DBA did teach us a lot about the solution. There's a lot of documentation and support online, so there's rarely a reason to have to actually open a ticket. So far, we've been satisfied with the arrangement, although, for the most part, their assistance is simply directing users to specific documentation.

Currently, we're just testing this solution, however, our organization is also using UiPath.

The initial setup isn't too complex. It's rather straightforward. You can just follow the documentation provided. Microsoft makes it very easy.

The solution is offered as part of a larger Microsoft license. It came as a solution in a bigger package. I'm not sure what the exact cost of it it, as it's not my area of expertise.

We have the Microsoft Dynamics Customer Enterprise license, and that covers for Automate and VI. Right now, we are doing some tests.

We're just working with four workflows. We're just really starting and haven't begun any big projects yet. We have 15 ongoing small projects.

I'm not sure of the exact version we are using.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. We're still testing it in production. We need more time with it to really get a sense of what it can do.

The reason why we are using this product is that we like to use it where we have automation projects specifically for Microsoft products. We can automate to improve productivity and for those applications and simple tasks, it is easy to use.  

For example, suppose I get my email with Outlook. There are certain times I will get specific Excel files from a pre-determined output which I have to always place into a particular SharePoint folder. From there, some other automation gets triggered and the file is processed in a certain way. Those are the sort of things we can automate with Power Automate. It is very good at working with those simple Microsoft-product-related processes.  

We use it wherever we have workflow processes in which Microsoft products are interacting. Before using this solution, people would get those emails and the recipient had to download the file and then manually put it into SharePoint. Now, as soon as it comes into the inbox, Power Automate gets triggered and it automatically copies the file to the correct SharePoint. There is no reason that a repetitive task of this sort needs to be done manually.  

It offers a different option than using UiPath which is much more complicated and more expensive for simple tasks that Power Automate can do more easily.  

It is very hard to say what the most valuable features are in Power Automate because we are still exploring the product and utility. I like the simplicity of how we can create those automated activities quickly. For now, the most valuable feature is that it is very easy to use.  

There is definitely a lot of enhancement that Microsoft can incorporate into Power Automate. For example, we have quite a lot of .NET applications that we created. These are custom applications that we created using something like VB.NET or C#.NET. These are obviously applications that are not published by Microsoft. I would like it if Microsoft could enhance the capabilities of Power Automate to allow users to connect to other tools and applications in some way. That will help us create better processes without making them more complicated or having to use another automation tool. Right now, we have to use UiPath to help us make processes such as the one described. I have not seen any way that Power Automate can do that type of integration. So if we could get better integration with non-Microsoft solutions as a feature for Power Automate, that will be very useful.  

We have been using Microsoft Power Automate (formerly Flows) for the last three months.  

We have not created anything complex, so we have not faced any issues in the form of glitches or any bugs to this point. When we start doing more sophisticated workflows, that may end up being a different story.  

I have not really had much of an opportunity to test the scalability of the solution yet. If we find a particular workflow that requires a change or something, it is easy to drop that version and recreate something new from scratch. It does not take much time. Scaling the number of processes up or down at this point does not seem to be an issue.  

The number of users in our company right now remains pretty small. I think there are only around 15 to 20 of us are actually exploring the capabilities. Eventually, that group should be much larger.  

We have not had any reason to work with the technical support team at this point. One of my colleagues did drop them a note asking if there is a way we can use Power Automate to connect to any of the custom tools that we created. I do not believe that we have got an answer to that question yet, so it is taking some time.  

The initial setup was quite good and went smoothly. It was not complex at all. It is good that it was relatively easy because we understood that it would mostly be used for easy processes to do some small tasks. We went that way and are using the tool only for working with simple automation processes. We did spend some time trying to automate more complex processes, but as the processes became more complex the tool became more complex to use. It is much easier to use it to do non-complex things. The setup for the processes themselves is fairly easy to do.   

This solution can save money when used for simple tasks specifically using only Microsoft products.  

We are currently working on evaluations of various products. The thing is, we have just started to embark on our journey into RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and we have brought in UiPath to act in that capacity. We are very much, at a nascent stage of the discovery of what we can do and what the product is capable of. We are identifying processes that can be automated and we are planning to work mostly with UiPath on those solutions. We have already engaged in a contract with UiPath for use of their product at this point in time.  

Most of our work is going towards UiPath currently but we also have this Microsoft Enterprise licensing. There seems to be no reason we should not use that as well if there are ways it can provide an advantage. We are also exploring if the enhancements we would need to tie in other applications and processes to Power Automate are something that we could do internally. At this time we are working with a combination of solutions that falls somewhere between our existing processes and new capabilities with automation tools.  

I have a few comments and advice for people considering the addition of RPA in their workflows. I would suggest that they do as much streamlining of their processes as possible. If they can get smaller things up and running by creating the process with a simple tool it may help their efficiency as well as their bottom line. When you go for big tools like UiPath and all the other robust RPA solutions, the cost of creating those smaller processes will be higher than they need to be. If people have a Microsoft Enterprise license, they could actually use the Power Automate tool to make their processes much more lean and efficient. Doing the same thing by employing any of the RPA-related solutions and tools might be a lot more effort.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Power Automate, overall as a product as a six-of-ten at this point. It has got a lot of room for improvement.  

I really like the Excel operations and the templates that the solution has available. If you're looking for 10 items, chances are there are templates already for six to eight of them. We just have to download or integrate that template and our work has been done for us, in a sense. 

It's really user friendly. One of the coolest features that I've found is when we are writing some functions or some custom line of code, there is specific virtualization that we are working with that we are utilizing for recording. 

In just in one click, we can see any documentation, etc., that we need. It makes it very easy to navigate. 

I'm still new to Microsoft. I don't know if there are features or aspects of the solution which are lacking. I need more time to work with it to really decide if there's anything I'd like to have on the solution that's not already there.

All the services on the Microsoft platform are great. If we want to try something like with SharePoint or Azure or the 365 CRM, then we can't with the everyday community edition of the Microsoft Power Automate. It would be a good thing if there was some sort of trial period. Let's say you have 14 days. That way, can log into the loading screen with Power Automate, and get to utilize services like SharePoint, OneDrive, 365 CRM or etc. to see if they like them. It would be a good way for Microsoft to cross-sell or up-sell.

Otherwise, it's expensive, to buy all these extra applications, without knowing if or how you could use them or integrate them into your work.

One thing that I would really like to recommend is that they should get an actual learning environment or LMS where we can go and find all the different tools, how to utilize the different tools of Power Automate, and documentation or tutorials in video form on how we can create our own custom templates. 

Right now, what we have to do is we have to navigate to a different platform, for example, YouTube, and search on YouTube to see whether there are different kinds of techie guys that have updated their information about the Microsoft Power Automate. Microsoft Power Automate needs its own in-house LMS, where we can get the entire knowledge of the product from beginning to end. 

I've only been using the solution for two or three weeks.

I have not tried any kind of real-world problems so I can't say too much about the solution's stability. 

I haven't used the solution long enough to really test the scalability. I'm not sure how scalable it is.

The initial setup is very straightforward. Even a person who has one or two years of coding skills can install the solution quite easily. It's pretty simple. You don't have to be a Microsoft expert. I, for example, would be able to handle it, and I am very new to Microsoft.

I'm using the latest version of the solution. I tried to follow some YouTube tutorials from different people who are actually doing some good work with Microsoft Power Automate, however, they're using different versions as compared to the latest version that I'm using. The layout and the modules and everything is different as compared to the previous versions.

I use the cloud deployment model because it has some free storage or free allocation with the subscription.

I would definitely recommend the solution. Even small businesses would benefit from the solution. Any company would be able to integrate it. There are a lot of tasks you could handle with the solution. It's great for handling customer inquiries, for example, if you had a business with inquiry forms on sales sites.

It also offers one of the cheapest rates as compared to other automation tools. Other automation tools charge a huge amount for license fees. Microsoft Power Automate offers decent fees for the automation tools they offer. 

The solution is also excellent for businesses due to the fact that it's totally based on the cloud. You can use it in anywhere and you can execute your flows from your mobile. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. If they offered some better tutorials, I'd rate them higher. No one wants to go and read through dozens or hundreds of web pages. The tutorials need to be interactive or video so that it's easy and engaging. If Microsoft was able to offer that, they'd be close to perfect.

The primary use we have for this product is a solution we created for a client to download daily data from a big company's website. It is a website tool for helping the company monitor the channel for managing their associate or partner responsibilities. They needed to visit the website every day — or as often as possible — so they could get information from the parent company, or collect orders or complaints from there.  

The most valuable thing about the product is that it is simple. When you go into the UI — and probably because Softomotive has about a 20-year long history in the IT industry — there are small details in the features that simplify how you work with it. It has all the big features like competing products but the detail is the kind of thing that makes users feel more comfortable using the product than if the details were not there. So those kinds of ease-of-use details are good things for Softomotive. The design is a GUI interface which is really for non-programmers. There is only the graphic user interface so it is simple to use.  

I think the primary thing that needs improvement in this product is the stability. It looks like it is easy-to-use and that is very nice, but it is more important to have a stable product and not just one that is easy-to-use. If I am working to create a simple process, odd errors occur quite often and in the middle of creating the process.  

The additional features I might like to see in the next release would be adding in some capabilities that other products already have. For example, some RPA process management framework. UiPath has something like that, RE Framework (Robotic Enterprise Framework), which is something in Softomotive we have to develop by ourselves. They have some premade processes in WinAutomation, but in running a process they should have some kind of error handling. For example, if there are tasks that should be run like 100 times and maybe it will freeze up at the 50th cycle, then the process should start again from 50, not from number one.  

If they can come up with some kind of framework and error handling, that will enhance the stability of the running processes made out of their solution. Right now I cannot resolve these main issues on my own and they should be added to the product.  

I started testing it out three months ago and have been using it for about two months.  

The stability of the product is not always good even when working on simple projects. This is not a bad product — I still use it — but the stability is something that they need to improve.  

Scalability is just buying more licenses. I worked for RPA consulting company and a development company and then I worked as an RPA developer. Then I was dispatched to a company to develop a process for that company. That company at the time purchased ProcessRobot, and then recently WinAutomation — I think five copies. They tested it and they are now trying to expand usage.  

I have been in touch with the technical support for WinAutomation by Softomotive a lot, really. The support is good and they provide the information or answers I need.  

I have used other products in the past. For example, by comparison, UiPath might be a little bit more stable but it is also a little bit more complicated in the UI/UX (User Interface/User Experience) than Softomotive. UiPath has not got some of the fancy features — just the basic ones. You just collect your UI elements or web elements and use the basic features. But say you maybe run a process 1000 times in both tools. UiPath seems to me in our testing to have fewer errors than Softomotive. But the complexity of the project or the stability would make me choose one product over the other.  

The setup in WinAutomation is kind of straightforward. I did not experience any trouble in the installation. ProcessRobot is a bit different and then UiPath is a little bit more complicated in the installation, but I think it is manageable as well.  

To actually get the product to work from the point of installation to where I could start running some processes took maybe a month the first time. But this included learning the product. Development with a little experience using the tool usually takes 15 days or about two weeks.  

We did the deployment of this by ourselves.  

Because I am in this industry, I am gathering information about different tools all the time. I use mainly WinAutomation and ProcessRobot and maybe UiPath for only a month. It is sometimes just to collect information and other times to consider other products.  

I think the advice I can give someone considering this solution has to do with making a smart choice. If someone wants to do some RPA project without already knowing a product, then he or she needs to take quite a long time to learn about RPA. You can look at the subject to learn about it and then learn a little bit about programming. There is not just one place to find this kind of tutorial and educational material. A single vendor will only provide what you need to use their product. Each vendor has different educational materials from different perspectives and different methods of teaching.  

If they want us to use Softomotive as a solution, they may have to do less work in learning about RPA because it is easy to use. But they should probably also visit the UiPath website or maybe AutomationAnywhere to compare the products and features. In many ways, the products are the same with the ultimate goal being that of creating a working RPA process.  

But I think there is a difference in the availability of information and user communities. UiPath has a little bit more structured education system and their community is larger. Because Softomotive is not as widely used it is more difficult to ask other users questions. You may have to direct your questions to the software team. But with UiPath, they can ask questions through a web portal like forum.uipath.com. It is less stressful to ask a question and get an answer from other users.  

ProcessRobot users also have a smaller community but they cannot ask questions from support unless they have the license for the product. WinAutomation is different. It is kind of a semi-commercial product but it is not totally free like open-source. There is also a little restriction on which questions you can ask of support before you invest in the product. They are very responsive and also helpful and their company helps people directly. You go through a sort of process. Maybe Softmotive might not always find an answer or give you a particular solution. Then you can also be a little creative and look for how something is solved using other RPA tools like consulting UiPath Academy. This might give you some hints about what you are trying to accomplish.  

Sometimes I have found that I kind of I reached a dead end. I had no answer as to where to go. I was just confused and then I could not find any answer from the Softmotive website and there was nowhere to ask the question that I had. Other vendors also have wonderful features and then I tested those to see what they could do. It is kind of a long process to develop a stable process and you have to continue to learn.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a seven. Of course to rate this software higher, they would need to work on the stability issues, enhance the available resources for users, and fill in some of the features that are missing which other products already have. 

* Added on 2020-07-17 : Now that Softomotive is acquired and WinAutomation have become a part of PowerAutomate and the price has gone down almost to half of its original price, the future is quite promising for this product.

The primary use case of this solution is for process automation.

With regards to the process on the server-side, you are giving the client the opportunity to run from a very small deployment and to take it from one office location to another, and globally.

The most valuable features of this solution are the cost and ease of use, it's very simple.

They have many, easy-to-use features.

When this solution is sold to the clients there is no automated process in place as many other RPA products have. I have to fully understand the product so that I can go over the processes with the client and all staff they may have. 

It would be good to record all of the processes and automate them.

The Kryon product has that option, where when you are doing something automatically it can record it on an AI interface. If they could have that feature included, it would benefit the client.

They need to come up with a little more on AI and precision discovery path to be able to record the processes.

I have been working with this solution for nine months.

This solution is scalable. It allows you to expand not only from one geography, but across as well.

I have not contacted technical support. I am not a part of the technical support, but an advisor. I have been asked to go in for implementation analyzing.

The deployment depends on the requirements of the client. For most of our clients, I recommend it in two processes.

A smaller process with approximately 50 users using it would take one and a half months to develop, depending on availability and time.

There is flexibility in pricing.

I studied five to eight different tools and narrowed it down to the two or three tools that I felt would suit our client's needs.

Some of the other products that were included in my narrowed down studies were Kofax, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath.

There is a very different approach when it comes to Kofax, and I wouldn't recommend UiPath because there is a lot of coding in terms of implementation. UiPath was one of the first ones to have the market and has now lost market share because there are too many available that are smaller, such as Kryon and Kofax.

One other solution that I am studying is NICE. I am trying to get a better understanding of it as an option for my clients.

I am a consultant who advises his clients about the solutions that are best for them. I make recommendations based on their requirements.

Clients have two options, one is the desktop solution and the other is an enterprise version.

For smaller clients what I recommend is to start with the desktop version. I ask them to try it out and if they think that it works in their organization and it's helping, they will get better ROI after proving it to them in the trial POC that I conduct. I have them try it out for six months to a year and then suggest they move to the enterprise version.

My philosophy is value addition. I have seen that with most of the products that we have purchased, we may use only 40% to 50% of the features. I want to change that and cause a disruption in the consulting industry. What I want to do is recommend products to my clients where I see value addition and minimum utilization of features and functionality of the product to 80%.

It's a very different approach and very difficult for clients to understand at first. I am using the years of experience that I have and doing what is in the best interest of the client.

My advice would be not to go directly to process robot. Instead, try the desktop version with smaller processes, small implementation, and get comfortable with it first. 

Start off small then go big. Going big is a huge investment if you are not sure.

Do it one step at a time. Get a few processes, try it out, develop the methodology of implementation, and make it a small mini project or a work in progress then decide. If you are in a hurry and you take a big bang approach without doing it systematically, however good the product is, it could be disastrous.

At the end of the day, this is going to cost you, not only in terms of dollars but in terms of time invested. You will be running with your production environment and existing systems, and there is going to be a lot of effort required to do this, so you have to be convinced that this works for you. Do a POC from three different vendors.

In terms of cost, ease of use, and comfort, I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this solution to automate small parts of procedures in our workflows. Particularly, linking when emails are received, as well as picking out documents and loading them into SharePoint folders. From there, it feeds things like Power BI dashboards.

In general, they are specific things that we automate in order to reduce manual tasks. We have not applied it to any sort of more sophisticate process, like an approval process, or a supplier engagement process.

Implementing Microsoft Power Automate has made our development team more efficient. They are the ones who tend to have used it and applied it to help automate micro-tasks. It has made their life easier. We have not deployed it beyond our development teams.

The most valuable feature is that it is pretty low-code, so you don't need much coding expertise to use it.

I like that Power Automate is bundled with Office 365 and that it integrates with it pretty well.

The user access level and user account part of this product needs to be developed.  For example, if I'm a line manager and I have multiple approvals that are automated then I can't log into a dashboard and see all of my requests. I would like to have a user account so that the staff can see all of their requests, including the status and other details for each one, on the dashboard.

This solution does not work well with external people who are outside of the organization, like suppliers. It needs support for external email addresses. It would be difficult to do a supplier onboarding with Power Automate, whereas you could do it with Nintex, and this is a big drawback.

I would like to be able to set security and permissions on who can see request-specific details.

I have been using Microsoft Power Automate for less than six months.

In terms of stability, I think that it is going to be fine. We use Power Automate on a daily basis.

I think scalability is kind of limited by its features. If you're doing lots of little bits and pieces then it's fine. However, if you want to scale it to engage external suppliers or vendors then you can't really do that.

The security aspects and lack of user accounts in the interface are challenges for scalability. For what it can do is fine, but if you want to scale out across a business then I think it will struggle to have that breadth of features that enable you to scale it properly.

We have fewer than ten people who use Power Automate in the company, and they are all SAP HANA developers.

I have not been in touch with technical support.

We use Nintex, which does the same thing, but better. We have not switches solutions. We are dabbling with Power Automate to see if it can do a better job, or alternatively, be a cheaper solution for the really simple stuff.

The initial setup was very simple. The deployment probably took about half an hour. It isn't deployed as much as you pick a process and automate it.

We did not have a deployment team for this particular tool. Rather, we have business users who just picked it up themselves. They were SAP HANA developers to start with, so they were predisposed to knowing about this technology and having some kind of technology skills.

The number of people required for maintenance depends on how widely you've deployed it. In our case, it is self-maintained because people have automated their own workflows and they just tweak them as they need to. If you have a widespread deployment then it would depend on how many processes were changing that needed to be updated. It really depends on the situation. In general, it is not difficult to maintain, but it does require maintenance.

This solution is bundled with our Office 365, so there is no additional licensing fee.

We did not evaluate other options before using Power Automate.

We suspect that Microsoft is going to invest pretty heavily in this area. It might be strategic to start using Power Automate now because I suspect it will develop a lot of features over the next few years.

The suitability of this solution depends on how complex the processes are. My advice to anybody who is considering Power Automate is to make sure that it has the capabilities to support that, particularly versus a more established player like Nintex or AgilePoint.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

I really like the built-in integrations with other applications like Teams. The product is also straightforward and easy to use.

Sometimes it can be difficult to share flows for multiple users to edit. So, it is a potential area of improvement.

For additional features, it would be helpful to have a more collaborative building of flows.

I have been using this solution for four years.

It is a stable solution.

I never needed customer support for this product. It is easy to use.

The initial setup is easy.

Overall, Microsoft Power Automate is an eight out of ten.

We use the solution to reduce costs by automating repeat processes.

The solution helps automate manual tasks and interacts with multiple applications.

Automation is the most valuable feature. We can do so if we want to automate the gateway process, such as tracking data from SharePoint, Outlook, or Excel.

The initial setup is complex and has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

The initial setup is complex. I give the initial setup an eight out of ten.

When accompanying customers, we discuss the license requirements. Based on these requirements, we suggest whether a per-user plan or multiple platforms per-user plan would be best.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

The solution is easy to maintain.

Microsoft Power Automate is a cross-platform solution and I recommend it to others.