Microsoft Power Automate Reviews

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 most valuable feature is that it is integrated into the browser, which means that you don't need a development environment.

Power Automate is intuitive and easy to use.

There is a broad community so you can find a lot of information on the web about how it works. It is also well-documented.

The licensing model is difficult to understand and is something that should be improved.

When you are implementing a project, it's quite difficult to comment on what it is that you are doing. For a simple project it is fast, but to have a better overview then it gets complicated.

I would like to see more integration with other products.

We have been using Power Automate for about two years.

The stability is good.

Power Automate is a scalable solution. We have between five and ten developers who are using it.

The technical support from Microsoft is good.

We primarily use UiPath for our automation.

The initial setup is straightforward and it took us about two hours to deploy.

There are many different ways to license it.

This is a good product and one that I recommend. For anybody who is considering it, my advice is to do a proof of concept at each phase.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for our customers, to automate fields, for example.

The solution integrates well with Microsoft Office and other Microsoft solutions.

The solution offers pretty good automation capabilities.

The code of the product is very good. 

The initial setup was quite simple. We didn't have any trouble with the process.

The solution has been very stable so far.

Technical support is available regionally and it's quite good.

I need to have more integration capabilities from this solution. It's limiting us right now. Other solutions on the market are better in this regard. They need to step up and improve this aspect in future releases. 

The stability is good. We haven't really had any issues with the performance. I don't recall dealing with bugs or glitches. I don't recall it crashing or freezing. 

We've dealt with technical support in the past. We don't have local support, however, we do have access to regional support. It's good. I'd say that we are happy with the level of support on offer. 

We have experience in Microsoft Power Automate, however, we work with other solutions around the RPA - such as Micro Focus.

Overall, we found the solution to be very straightforward. It wasn't difficult or complex. In our case, it was easy. A company should have too much trouble handling the implementation process. 

We are partners with Microsoft.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We're quite happy with the product right now.

We primarily use the solution for automation purposes. It can offer an alternative desktop option, and therefore it can automate a lot of stuff. It's part of the application. It also can connect us to a number of data sources and that helps us a lot. However, it's difficult to get into specifics due to client privacy.

It's a very stable product. We find it to be quite reliable.

The solution is very easy to use. There's a bit of familiarity with the product due to the interface they have. We use other Microsoft Office products, for example, and it has a similar look and feel that's recognizable if you are familiar with the Microsoft Suite. 

The look and feel and user interface make training new users a fairly easy process.

The solution offers a variety of very good features.

There is an exhaustive amount of templates that users have access to.

You do need to either get a bit of IT support or do a bit of coding in order to implement the solution successfully.

Something lacking is Microsoft Office plugin, however, it's my understanding that their Office plugin is out now or coming soon. We're just trying to understand the use case. 

If they can make it integrated into Microsoft's Office Suite, that would be great. It would be better than lining it up with the Office plugin application. I'm sure it exists in some form, however, maybe not for the mainstream things.

The solution is still maturing very quickly and it's going to take no time for this to be Enterprise RPA.

I've used the solution for the last year and a half or so. 

The solution is stable. There aren't really any bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's good.

The solution is very scalable. As a cloud product, it makes it very easy for users to expand if they need to. When a company needs to scale, they can do so, no problem.

We do plan to continue to use this solution, and we'll continue to use other Microsoft solutions as well.

We end up using a lot of community resources. Microsoft has a huge community, and it's really helpful in terms of finding answers and asking questions.

I've used the previous generation of this technology, such as Logic Apps and other products of that nature.

We didn't use any other products really. We had some in-house and also some VBA Macros, PowerShell scripts and others which we had created. However, this was the first proper solution we've invested in.

The initial setup is pretty straight forward. It's not overly complex. You do need a bit of IT support, however, you could put it in and save it and other people can use it and probably tweak it quite easily.

While there is a bit of coding needed, once you have everything set up, there are lots of templates that make the implementation of different processes very easy.

The deployment is quick. There's just a bit of needed configuration with the cloud. We didn't activate all of the features; we only activated what was required. I can't recall the exact amount of time it took to do this.

It is fast to implement, does not depend on the changes to existing systems to implement. It save hours that a team spend on performing the process manually. Mostly importantly it is easy to training business users since users are very much familiar microsoft and windows interface (UI).

The licensing set up depends on your organization. If it's an enterprise, it's based on their user department and how do you want the solution to be distributed.

Many companies already have Microsoft Office licenses, for example, and this is part of that. 

It's not too expensive as a license. At least, that's my understanding. 

In comparison, an RPA tool with Outreach costs $5,000. You can use it, however, it's expensive.

I'm using the latest version of the solution.

We are a consulting organization, and we do help clients.

We've helped large organizations. We don't have just one use case for this product. We have many.

You can't build an application with this solution. This is more for automating within a department or in an area, for example, a finance area, where they have all sources lined up and it takes almost three or four days for an accountant to go through the data to create templates and updating templates, etc. Those kinds of things. This solution makes the processes happen faster.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations.

I would rate the product at an eight out of ten. There's a bit more maturity that needs to happen, however, all of the elements are there to make for a great product.

Our primary use case is the automation of tasks.

The most valuable feature is the ability and ease of linking multiple connectors within the same flow. For example, you can have the same flow connections with Outlook, SharePoint, and DLLs.

It is a low-code environment, which means that it is more agile in terms of automation. You are able to start with one automation and then easily modify it for other uses.

The interface is user-friendly. It took me perhaps a month or two to understand what the dynamic is and how it works, and then how it can be linked to the sprint. I would say that it takes two or three weeks to learn the basics, but then it becomes easy to work with. The more you learn, the more you can evolve the flow, and you can implement additional scenarios.

I would like to have chatbot assistance available, where you can open it and receive help on the spot. For example, if you are struggling in the middle of implementing a flow, you can easily communicate with the chatbot, perhaps providing the error message, and it will search for a resolution. In my case, I posted my error message on Google and saw that other people had similar problems. I was able to check the community platforms and I found the solution in one of the posts.

The documentation can be improved because although they do have a manual of about 500 pages, it does not cover all of the possible scenarios. It would be good to have one that covers different scenarios or different commands, provides basic knowledge about the commands, and even basics about JSON. Also, the user manual and learning guides that they have can be made more user-friendly.

I have been using Microsoft Power Automate for about six months.

I have had some issues with stability where I received a surprising error message and still don't know why it happened. While it has been primarily stable, so far, we are not yet in production so I am not fully certain how it will perform. If the performance is good and there are no glitches or automation errors, then I will feel confident in the stability.

My impressions at this point, from what I have experienced, is that the stability is high.

With respect to scalability, because we haven't implemented the solution yet, I am not sure if it will scale or not. My feeling is that it will scale because it already has multiple connectors for what most organizations frequently use.

It is fully designed but until it is implemented and I see the results, I will not feel comfortable commenting on whether it will scale well. My feeling at this point is that it is of medium scalability.

At this point, as the solution architect, I am the only one who is using it. In the future, we will have other people in my team using it.

I have not posted to the community, so I don't know how reactive they are. From what I have seen, as I searched the forums, it seems that people are responsive. My feeling is that community support should not be an issue.

At the same time, I still think that they should have more friendly documentation and chatbot assistance.

I would rate the support a three out of five.

I would say that the initial setup is easy and user-friendly, but you should still have basic knowledge in advance to do it properly.

Power Automate is included with Office 365.

In terms of resources and in terms of cost, this solution is efficient.

I see Power Automate as a quick-win solution for many enhancements that can be used in any organization. Rather than a task that involves heavy coding on a third-party application, such as a CRM or with Salesforce, Power Automate can be leveraged for good results.  Overall, I would say that my experience using this product has been good.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is to create a prototype or a proof of concept, first. At the end of the day, management needs to buy into the solution. They should see, however, that it brings value to the business. It is a product that I recommend, although they do need to fix the small glitches that I experienced in the flow.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution is for IT service checks within our daily process automation. 

It monitors consoles and raises alerts when things need to be alerted. For example, when a business rule is broken then an alert is raised, or if we are looking at the backup management and server availability and there is a problem with the backup then we raise an alert.

The most valuable feature is the ability to integrate across multiple systems. For example between web portals, excel and email. 

The ability to write a process that covers all of those different areas of technology.

One of the challenges is dealing with OCR text recognition. They link out to Google, IBM, and Microsoft AI services for text recognition. This area needs to continue to improve because recognizing forms and what's on a form, and then when you try to translate that into information that you can use, is very difficult. I have not been able to make that work. I think that the technology is there, but it would require too much coding and it would be too much of an investment of time to make it work.

WinAutomation doesn't have the management abilities for remote management, but we are using Splashtop to access the device that is running the software.

In the next release, I would like to see form recognition added. AI form recognition for processing things like invoices and timesheets would be number one.

I have been working with WinAutomation for two months.

It's a stable solution.

We are not scaling it much beyond a single work station, but it does seem to be scalable.

We have two users in our company. There are plans to increase our usage.

I have only used technical support a few times but they have been good.

Previously, we were not working with other similar products.

The initial setup was straightforward and it only took a few minutes to deploy.

This solution is reasonably priced and offers a free trial period.

We looked at some other tools, but we chose WinAutomation because it was a low cost of entry and a free trial.

It takes slightly longer than you would expect to set something up that's resilient. Building resilience takes as long as building in the logic.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for operations related to HR activity.

WinAutomation is very easy to use. It's a code three platform that works very easily with documents to create custom automations.

It also allows users to share their automations with colleagues, so users can send and receive automations quite easily.

At this time, I can't say the solution is lacking any features.

The solution could use some more advanced AI tools. It's one of the solution's only weaknesses.

I've been using the solution for the past three years.

The stability of the solution is very good. We've been very happy with it in general.

It's very easy to scale the solution, and at a very low cost as well. Scaling isn't expensive at all. 

Currently, we have nine users on the solution. They are all heads of departments.

We've been in touch with technical support often. I'd rate their support as excellent. We've been very satisfied with them so far.

We didn't previously use a different solution.

The initial setup is very straightforward. The products are basically plug-and-play in design. It makes it very easy to implement everything.

In our case, for deployment, it took us a month from trial to scale.

We handled the implementation in-house. Our internal team was able to manage the deployment.

The solution is relatively inexpensive.

We did evaluate other major players like Automation Anywhere, among others.

We're partners with Softomotive.

We're currently using the 2019 version of the solution.

I would recommend the solution to those who want to start exploring RPA and the benefit of RPA without investing too much money. It's a helpful way to get to know the technology.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use it to monitor the net flow of all the emails. It is really helpful.

It is stable. 

It should be faster and more user-friendly. 

I have been using Power Automate for around three years. 

It is stable and scalable. We have around 300 users. It doesn't require any dedicated IT to help run the appliance. 

We don't need much of their support. We have opened a ticket and their support was handy. It's very easy for us to communicate with them via email. 

The initial setup was easy. It was very easy for people to pick up. The deployment took a few hours. 

I would recommend it.

I would rate Power Automate an eight out of ten.