Microsoft Power Automate Reviews

We have a few domain-specific use cases, primarily with BFSI customers and IT specialists, including some IT giants. We work with them to leverage Power Automate. They are primarily using it to automate the internal workflows that they perform on a day-to-day basis. They use Power Automate or an automated solution to simplify and streamline their processes.

Our primary focus is on new workflow development. We mainly handle the development of use cases, integration, and workflow development. While working on development, we also provide support for the use cases where the workflow is developed

Workloads could be optimized.

My team has been working with Microsoft Power Automate for one and a half years. We are using the latest version. 

Stability-wise, you should be fine if you configure Azure Monitor, Azure Log Monitor, and Azure Monitor should be timed. You'll get the right alerts, and at the right time, you can have a stable environment.

Overall, I would rate the stability of Microsoft Power Automate a nine out of ten. 

Scalability should not be a problem as it is supported by Microsoft, and its infrastructure is well-equipped for it. Additionally, Azure, the cloud, and BestFactors Incorporated are all available for scaling the solution anywhere.

My customers are mostly small and medium-sized businesses, with no large customers. The majority are within the range of 200 or fewer. I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. 

For me, the support is perfect. It depends on the kind of support you have, like what kind of partnership you have. If you have premium partners, the support is really good too. It depends on what support or what kind of deal you have with them.

Positive

It is comparatively easy to install. I would rate it eight out of ten. It will require some knowledge due to the kind of setup it has. Also, considering the security reasons of Microsoft, it predominantly requires the infrastructure set within its domain. It cannot go out of its domain. So understanding all the nuances of it is essential.

Other platforms are not cloud diagnostic; they are on-premise also. But as an organization, Microsoft is not reporting that they would want to have everything on-premise on the cloud. So, understanding all the nuances and recommending that you get the right kind of security approvals done will be important because certain customers are not comfortable with having the PAT agent configured in such a way that it gives the data to the cloud. Microsoft is on. They are not comfortable with it.

The deployment process takes around a week or more. Typically, we have a complete person who serves as the leading architect for the project, along with two engineers to handle end-to-end deployment.

The maintenancedepends on the size of the workloads and how many production spots you have. For small deployments with 10-15 bots, one engineer should suffice. For medium deployments with 50-100 bots, you would need two to three people. And for large deployments with thousands of bots, at least four to five people are necessary. It also depends on whether bots are running during business hours or off-hours, in which case a 24/7 maintenance team may be required.

Power Automate is a better and more cost-effective solution compared to Automation tools. The pricing model is cheap. I would say they have played it very smart. It is cheap, but the connectors go for a task. So, you'll have to pay extra for the connectors.

I would rate the pricing model a two out of ten, where ten is very expensive. Moreover, Microsoft Power Automate has a per-user model. They don't require yearly payments. The licensing is for all updates per-user. So it's decently licensed. But it is a good amount. 

Predominantly, we pass our automated service from RPA technology upfront. We also work with UiPath and ServiceNow Automation Hub.

My advice would be that if you want to automate processes within your organization, this would be a good tool. If your organization's infrastructure is built on Azure or Microsoft, then Power Automate would be the best choice for automation within the organization.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We use Microsoft's Power Automate in two major fields. Our first use case is reducing the time it takes a user to repeat a task, like, for example, rewriting some physical information in our system. We used Power Automate to extract information from physical documents and to digitalize them. We also use it to put these documents in the correct system as soon as we receive them. We are using a robot agent to do that now for our finance department, for example. 

Our other use case with Power Automate is system reconfiguration. Before, users had to manually reconfigure the software to configure our project. When we had a major update, for example, we have to change it manually with the data for the software. Now we have a process for automatically changing that data.

We choose Power Automate because it allows us to monitor our process and know where we can gain some time. We have a cockpit that shows us all the workflow for all automated tasks in place. We have a good overview of our processes now thanks to Power Automate. This is cool because previously we organized our processes on either paper or in a Word document. This was not really an accurate reflection of the tasks taking place. Now, we can have an interactive mapping of our processes.

There is room for improvement in the collaboration between the digital team and the business partners because Power Automate is not an easy tool to use. Our business partner does not have a clue about how to use Power Automate so it would be great to have an easy user interface that business partners can understand.

There are a few limitations to the tool. For example, you can't have 100,000 interactions in an hour. I would like to see that worked out. 

It would also be good if Microsoft contacted customers directly about building their own connectors. 

We have been testing the solution since last summer, I think. We have just two solutions in production.

For now, it has been a good solution for us in terms of stability, but we don't know yet whether we will have mass production and who will use a lot of interactions per hour.

We have not had any direct interactions with their tech support. We use their forum mostly. Microsoft has a good community.

We ran into issues during the setup because our system is not entirely on the cloud or on major solutions. So we had a lot of information in a system we made. The integration of our system into Power Automate was a bit tricky. We had to put a data lake in place before automating anything because we were not very structured in terms of data. Our major issue was cleaning up the data.

We choose 10 premium licenses for our digital team. We do not have a license for everyone in the organization. That's why it would be good to have a free view-only interface for stakeholders. They don't need a premium license because they will never use it to build anything but they needed insight into what is going on to relay the information forward to other stakeholders or clients. 

I am not managing the pricing, but I think it is pretty standard for solutions of that type. However, there is always room for improvement. 

I would not recommend Power Automate to all organizations because whether or not it will work out for them will depend on a number of factors. If the organization is all in one Microsoft environment or well-connected with the cloud, it can be really good. But, the organization will have quite some costs if in a Google or Amazon environment. 

If an organization uses Power Automate, it is best if they use Power Automate's other tools like Power BI and Power Apps. That's why I think the pricing could be lower as you should be able to get several solutions in a bundle. This should be an option during relicensing, for example. 

Someone using Power Automate should also have a basic understanding of databases, Power Apps, Power BI, and Azure. You have to know the full environment to get the most out of this tool. In other words, training is mandatory.

I use both the on-premise version and web versions because they both have different tools. I use them both for different use cases and different scenarios.

I use Microsoft Power Automate to make reports and web scraping. I automate the reports with the desktop version because it works well. I use Microsoft Windows, to do some commands in the CMD, also known as the line assistant. When it comes to the web version, I mostly do reminders, scraping, extracting data from emails, and creating ticket systems. I take that data and put it in a list or create a table in Excel to extract information and automate that part. 

Microsoft Power Automate has helped our organization by making processes faster. I do some consulting on the side about Microsoft Power Automate. We realize we don't need as many people to work on something because you can automate it or at least semi-automate the tasks.

The most valuable feature of Microsoft Power Automate in the desktop version is web scraping because you can do a lot with it. I work in retail and you can study prices changes, which can give you a lot of information. The solution is no code which is a large advantage.

In the web version, the most valuable features are creating tickets, taking email information, and creating a ticket with it, similar to an IT ticket.

Microsoft Power Automate is a tool that is easy to learn. There is some basic logic that you will have to understand but overall it is not complicated.

I think the language Microsoft Power Automate uses when you do expressions could be better. What they use is not a popular programming language. It would be better for Microsoft to find a more popular programming language, such as Python. It would take away the whole no-code aspect of the solution but you don't need to write that many lines of code to improve something in a process. Instead of no-code, they could be a low-code environment.

I have been using Microsoft Power Automate for approximately seven months.

The stability of Microsoft Power Automate is good, I have not had a problem with the performance.

Microsoft Power Automate is scalable.

We have approximately 10 people using this solution in my organization. The solution is moderately being used. The more you use it, the more ideas come to you of what you can automate or what can you create. In the future, it's going to be used more.

I have not contacted the support from Microsoft.

The implementation of Microsoft Power Automate was straightforward. It took only hours to do the full implementation.

I did the implementation of Microsoft Power Automate in my company. Additionally, I do the maintenance and patching of the solution when needed.

The cost to use Microsoft Power Automate is approximately $15 per user per month, for the basic plan. However, the solution comes free with the Microsoft 365 Suite.

You have to pay extra for the scheduling of the automation tasks.

Microsoft Power Automate is a newer solution to the market. UiPath is a lot more popular and has more features than Microsoft Power Automate. There's a lot of potential in that Microsoft Power Automate because it connects well with other Microsoft programs inside the Suite which makes it even more powerful. UiPath connects with other applications, but the fact that if you use Microsoft in your organization, it's more seamless. It works better. 

I learned Microsoft Power Automate faster because I know how to use Microsoft Excel, and that teaches you how to think more logically when it comes to computers. If you have an Excel or programming background, it's going to be easier because the logic creates the flows. If you won't want your learning curve to be that steep, I would recommend learning Microsoft Excel and then going Microsoft Power Automate. You will have more ideas of what you can do with the tool.

I rate Microsoft Power Automate a nine out of ten because you have to pay to receive the schedule functionality of the automation, which is important.

In our organization, the solution is popular where there is a need for attended automation or user. That "human in the loop," as we call it. There it is more popular than the other tools.

The most valuable feature we have found with the solution is the AI Builder. And they have a big range of connectors that we are finding useful.

One area of improvement needed for the solution is regarding the cloud source versus desktop flows. The desktop flows are not as absent, and there are other limits in features when it comes to comparison between the two solutions that Power Automate provides. So perhaps the desktop could also start including features like Connectors and Builder because these are the more frequently used. But both of the tools have their own utility. 

It's evolving well. I have seen Power Automate eight months ago and have seen it now. So there is definitely a big step ahead. It's improved and it's rather helpful.

There is one feature I'd like to see added in the next release. Their OCR capabilities are not as evolved as the other tools. They do allow some AI Builder methods to achieve that. But in the desktop tool, the OCR functionality is not very useful. Everything has to be done on our text-based outcome. I'm sure they're already working on it.

Power Automate is relatively new. I've been working with the solution for eight to nine months.

The solutions that we have built are going well. They are used, and we've not heard of any breakages there. I would say they are stable.

The scalability of the solution is something we are still working on. Currently, we have a use case where we are trying to make it more scalable and there are means of doing it. Sharing up the flows and all of those things do add to the scalability. It's relatively new compared to UiPath, but I don't think they'll take very long to come up to speed.

When it comes to technical support, I'd like to draw a comparison between UiPath that's more popularly used. UiPath has a very good forum and we get most answers on the forum itself. However, the technical support itself is not that strong. 

Whereas in Power Automate, it is just the other way around. The forum is bad; we don't get anything there. But technical support, they're pretty responsive. And any queries you write to them, they usually do come back quite promptly. I'm happy with the technical support.

The initial setup of the solution is pretty straightforward.

Due to the pricing model, the solution is more convenient than any other tool. That is one plus that Power Automate has over the others.

It's very easy to use. Like we say, it's a "no-code solution." So even though all solutions do claim that, there is a little level of skill that is required when it comes to learning the other tools. But Power Automate is relatively the easiest to pick up.

UI Automation is something that they have made very easy, but editing both selectors is a challenge in Power Automate. There is not that much of a need to edit the selectors. But in case there is, then it is a challenge to edit them.

This solution is capable of doing pretty much everything that the other tools are capable of, and they have extremely competitive pricing. It is definitely an advantage. Their approval systems and interactions with the other tool. We have even tried some inter-vendor solutions, integrating UiPath along with Power Automate, for example. Those things work pretty well with Power Automate. It's convenient, not just for the end-user, for the business user, and it is also convenient for the developer. It's very simple and approachable to use as a solution.

I would rate the overall solution a seven out of ten.

To me, what's most useful in WinAutomation by Softomotive is that it's quite intuitive, especially because most of the capabilities of the older WinAutomation remain. You also don't need to do or know hard coding, and this is another useful feature of the solution.

I also like that WinAutomation by Softomotive integrates very well with Microsoft products, especially Microsoft Office, and this is great news because most companies use Microsoft Office. Having a very good integration with the Microsoft Office suite covers a lot of bases, and is one of the advantages of WinAutomation by Softomotive.

What needs improvement in WinAutomation by Softomotive is its stability. Stability is quite important to me. Another area for improvement in the solution is robot scheduling because it's not 100% accurate, in particular, it's 90% accurate. The monitoring of the robot could also be improved because it's not very straightforward, and you have to look in a few places or at least two places which means that monitoring is not a one-glance process.

I've been using WinAutomation by Softomotive for one and a half years.

WinAutomation by Softomotive is not a very stable product. It used to be a desktop application and was installed locally. It's a desktop application, but it's a cloud application at the same time, so the main problem is the integration with cloud services, the updates, and the refresh rate, plus its compatibility with other Microsoft applications. This means that WinAutomation by Softomotive requires frequent updates, and this is not bad. It's okay, but the point is that it's not very stable in the short run. The WinAutomation by Softomotive team usually addresses this issue, so if my company has a problem today, for example, within a few days, that issue will be solved, but in the short run, the solution is not very stable.

WinAutomation by Softomotive is a scalable product.

I didn't use the technical support for WinAutomation by Softomotive much. At the very beginning, I used it because of the licensing requirement when I transferred my account from WinAutomation by Softomotive to Power Automate. Currently, the documentation is pretty good, so I didn't use the technical support even through chat, phone, or email correspondence, so I'm unable to evaluate support for the solution.

In terms of the installation of WinAutomation by Softomotive, it wasn't as straightforward, specifically for the license administration because you have to be enrolled on the portal. I'm referring to the new version of WinAutomation which is now Power Automate, but the original WinAutomation by Softomotive only took ten minutes to install. The Power Automate version, on the other hand, wasn't impossible to install, but it wasn't straightforward.

I could say that my organization has ROI from WinAutomation by Softomotive.

My company switched to a monthly payment for the WinAutomation by Softomotive license. I don't have the exact figure, but it roughly amounts to 500 Euros a year which isn't bad.

I use WinAutomation by Softomotive, but the solution was bought by Microsoft, so it's now a part of Power Automate.

In my company, about twenty people use WinAutomation by Softomotive daily. I belong to a small company.

My advice to people looking into implementing WinAutomation by Softomotive is that it's a good solution, and I would recommend it for small-scale operations, for example, to automate back office operations. I would not recommend it for large-scale or for critical operations because it returns quite a lot of errors, not only automation errors, but also errors when liaising with other applications, so in some cases, those applications may not run properly, resulting in errors. From my point of view, I will not recommend WinAutomation by Softomotive for critical operations, unless it's stabilized in the future, and at the moment, the "transformation" of WinAutomation into Power Automate is still ongoing.

My rating for WinAutomation by Softomotive is nine out of ten.

We use the solution to automate our daily workflows. We generate customer invoicing and payroll with its help. We can automate the pre-defined steps for repetitive tasks using it. In other words, it works like a digital employee for us. We need to design the tasks and schedule them. Based on the preset time, the solution directly triggers and performs those tasks.

The solution's valuable feature is its compatibility with all Microsoft products like SharePoint, Azure, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams. We can incorporate all necessary Microsoft products in Power Automate Desktop. It helps us streamline the workflows of various applications. 

They should provide the connectors in Power Automate Desktop like Power Automate Cloud. Microsoft is already working on it. They released a SharePoint connector in Power Automate Desktop as a preview. So like that, we have hundreds of connectors in Power Automate Cloud required to be incorporated into Power Automate Desktop. For example, we need an exchange server to connect to an email account in Power Automate Desktop. It isn't easy to create a connection. It is simple with Outlook, but it is challenging with IMAP or POP-related settings. While using Power Automate Cloud, we log in to create the connection. But, while using Power Automate Desktop, we have to provide the server details instead of just logging in.

They should include a custom plugin feature so that we can add our custom connections. 

We have been using the solution since August 2020.

It could have been more stable initially, say in 2020. Since its new release in 2023, the stability has improved. Moreover, adding multiple actions takes it into not responding mode very frequently. In this case, communicating with the cloud environment consumes a lot of time. They need to work on these areas to improve stability. I rate the solution's stability as an eight.

It is a scalable product.

I have contacted the Microsoft community for a few issues. They respond within an hour. There are a lot of Microsoft users and everyone contributes to the community.

We switched to Microsoft Power Automate as it's very economical. I worked with Intellibot; they charged us $1,000 per annum. In comparison, the charges for Power Automate are $190 per month. Microsoft Power Automate has its benefits. As it is cloud-based automation, there is no need for any physical machine. Within the cloud environment, automation could be performed, reducing the expenses of additional resources like a machine. Also, if a big company acquires other products, they change the licensing model. It has already happened a couple of times with ProcessRobot and Intellibot. Since Microsoft is a big brand, it won't sell its products to other vendors. Due to our experiences, we decided to go with the bigger brand in the market. So we chose Microsoft.

The setup process is easy. You just have to log in, get the desktop.exe file, double click, and install.

The licensing model of the solution includes cross-selling. That means Microsoft provides Power Automate as an add-on product with other products. Also, it offers other add-on products with Power Automate. In this way, we can increase the credits with the provided options.

I advise others to go for Microsoft Power Automate. It's the best tool to my knowledge in the RPA industry. I rate it as a nine.

It is easy to migrate from other tools to Power Automate. We had more than 30+ in-house automations, and estimated a year for migration. Instead, it just took three months. We finished every automation in a short span. It helped us quicken the process of picking up new automation projects.

We are using Microsoft Power Automate for RPA.

We assessed the functionality of Microsoft Power Automate in streamlining repetitive processes that required human effort. Specifically, we discovered that the process of completing online loan applications for our customers was a prime candidate for automation. With Microsoft Power Automate, we were able to automate this process, enabling a single individual to log in to up to twenty loan applications. However, if we needed to scale up to two hundred applications per day, we would have required ten individuals to manage this process manually. With this solution, we were able to achieve this with only two people, as the software facilitated logging into the application master and extracting data directly into an Excel file, which could then be easily uploaded and processed within minutes. It has improved our organization's efficiency.

The most valuable feature of Microsoft Power Automate is the many functionalities, and ease of use. We had summer interns from college in their second year of engineering and they were able to start the building process quickly within a day.

More OCR and AI capabilities are needed to improve the solution. Other solutions have better features, such as Blue Prism and UiPath.

In a future release, they should add the running of multiple clients on a single machine. This is a critical feature. If not it requires multiple machines to run operations.

I have been using Microsoft Power Automate for approximately a year and a half.

I rate the stability of Microsoft Power Automate an eight out of ten.

We are not a large organization. We have approximately 10 clients using the solution.

The people who use the solution are back-end processing engineers.

We are considering increasing usage in terms of processes rather than personnel. Specifically, we are exploring automation for certain quick and simple processes, such as transferring data between Excel spreadsheets and performing calculations.

The solution has been scalable in our usage.

I rate the scalability of Microsoft Power Automate an eight out of ten.

We have standard support and it has been decent.

I rate the support of Microsoft Power Automate an eight out of ten.

Positive

It took us about fifteen days of training for our people to have the solution up and running. It was simple.

I rate the initial setup of Microsoft Power Automate a nine out of ten.

Initially, we relied on a third party for the proof of concept and comparisons. However, we eventually transitioned to completing the implementation in-house.

Our process or not complex and we used three people for the implementation.

Initially, we had a Microsoft account for Office 365. Later, we discovered that our license included access to Power Automate at no additional cost. There was a small fee for additional features, but it was negligible compared to the benefits. There are not any additional fees required to use the solution.

If we had purchased a UIPath or Blue Prism, it would have cost us a minimum of $10,000.

I rate the price of Microsoft Power Automate an eight out of ten.

We evaluated Blue Prism but we choose Microsoft Power Automate because it best suited our needs.

It is important to follow the typical software implementation methodology for Microsoft Power Automate. If .NET resources are available, you don't need to look outside. They can learn the software quickly and deliver it.

I rate Microsoft Power Automate an eight out of ten.

We have been very happy with the solution it is not costing us a lot and we can do the implementation in-house.

I have different use cases for Microsoft Power Automate. I was automating one of the refund processes in my previous company. This involved getting data from an Excel spreadsheet and iterating all its entries. For each entry, the solution checked a particular website to verify values and released payments to the client if everything was okay. This eliminated the need for me to perform the same task repeatedly.

Microsoft Power Automate allowed us to save about eight hours daily, which gave people time to focus on more complicated tasks. Instead of manually triggering payments through the website, everything was done through robotic process automation (RPA), saving us a lot of time.

In our use case, we used a lot of website scraping, so I think that's probably the feature I like the most. The solution provided the possibility to check the website's content and navigate through it, which was very useful for me at the time.

There is room for improvement in web scraping. Specifically, automatic selectors that allow me to select parts of a website could be more adaptable. Currently, if you select one element, it only takes some parameters that might change in the future. This can cause issues because the bot may stop running without fine manual tuning, especially if the website also has active tags loaded.

In the next release, it could be useful to integrate data tables directly into the spreadsheet without having to go through a loop. Integrated databases could be a good addition.

I have been using Microsoft Power Automate for one year.  

Scalability was not really a use case here for us because we only ran it on a local PC.

In case of problems, I would go to the forum directly to check for any other solutions.

I switched to Microsoft Power Automate because it's free. In many cases, it's installed on the PC, I think, on the Windows server, and you can have the screen installed on your PC or download it for free while authorized. UiPath usually costs quite a lot. I think it's the most expensive one.

For the initial setup, I would rate it somewhere in the middle, so around seven out of ten. It's not too difficult, and with some tutorials and testing, it can be achieved quite easily.

The whole deployment process took around three weeks, end-to-end. It starts with gathering the requirements. I asked the ops team to give me their exact steps and techniques. Then, based on that, we build the documentation for the step-by-step process. We mirror this process and try to replicate those steps from the RPA. Then we move on to the UET cases and go through them. If everything goes well, we will provide a sign-off and release it into production.

I would rate it as a low price. While a paid version with a subscription allows you to run it on the cloud, I think the free version is quite good, even compared to the paid version.

I was using UiPath and Automate Anywhere (AA). 

It's important to experiment with the tool and not give up. Always remember that any problem you have has likely been solved before and can be found on the internet.

Overall, I would give it an eight. It's not difficult to develop with this tool and doesn't require a lot of knowledge to get started. However, the selectors on web scraping aren't perfect, so that's where it loses some points. But this may change in the future, and I might change my rating accordingly.