Microsoft Power Automate Reviews

We've just started with the solution. 

We are exploring Power Automate and trying to get rid of some of the mundane tasks and we're seeking ways to increase the productivity. We're trying to do the automation on it. 

It's not my day-to-day work; I'm into infrastructure. I'm basically heading the APAC team here in the APAC region. I got a request from a couple of users to get rid of the setup of mundane tasks. 

The solution is booming at the moment. They're adding lots of features all of the time. 

The initial setup is very simple.

There's a great community around the product that is very helpful and active.

The solution is free to use if you have a Microsoft E3 license. 

Power Automate has a lot to do. What I've seen, for example, is that UiPath seems to be very efficient and you don't need to have any sort of training. With Power Automate, training is needed. You need to know how to work with pretty advanced queries. They need to add more training materials to their offering. 

It's not as user-friendly as a solution such as UiPath, which is really easy to use. 

Creating unattended bots is quite expensive. 

Having the connectors with multiple platforms would be great. They have connectors for SAP, yet they don't have a connector for the Oracle ERP, for example, or Oracle HCM. They should come up with multiple connectors where it would ease integrating with any other tool, rather than having to create a custom connector and trying to integrate with a third-party tool. UiPath offers multiple connectors and it is very useful. It makes our life very simple. On the fly, we should be able to integrate and talk to the other applications directly without struggling.

We've been working with the solution for just six months. It's only been half of a year so far. 

The community that surrounds the product is very active and quite helpful. 

The initial setup is very easy. It was very simple. In order to do automation, it is very easy to configure everything. It's also easy to maintain. The only part that is kind of complex, for example, is where you have to get into the website to get the data and try to feed the data into an Excel sheet. That happens if you're trying to automate some complex yet mundane task. That's where it helps to have someone on board that knows what they are doing and understands the solution quite well.

Since we are on E3, we get Power Automate as a free service from Microsoft, for everybody in the organization.

I'm from India and anything that I look at, in terms of pricing, be it UiPath or Power Automate the pricing appears to be on the higher side. That said, we're on the E3 Microsoft license and the price for Power Automate comes along with that, as a part of the subscription. It basically covers the basic functionality of Power Automate. In that sense, it doesn't hurt us too much. However, if I have to go set up an unattended bot, it is very expensive. That's something that for sure that I would like to highlight with Power Automate. If you'd like to go for an unattended bot it's quite expensive.

I have looked at other solutions. I was exploring and trying to compare which is the right tool for our environment. I was trying to compare where exactly Microsoft intersects with other services such as UiPath or Automation Anywhere.

We'll likely stay with Power Automate. Power Automate fits our requirements in terms of what we are looking for. If anything is required in terms of the desktop automation that would require us to buy a separate license we may move to something else, however, at this point, we do not really foresee anything that we couldn't do with this product.

I would urge users to stay on top of Microsoft by leveraging the community. They're very cooperative and trying to support us when we ask questions in the community, there'll be somebody who will always jump in and try to help us out. There are multiple forums, apart from the Microsoft community as well. I see multiple websites or blogs where you could find the solution for a question you have. There is a lot of documentation out there.

For working a bit with the solution and comparing it to options such as Automation Anywhere and UiPath, I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten so far. 

We use Microsoft Power Automate when we need to automate manual processes in our automation, or when we need to send a document for approval, or when we need to integrate some beams channels and messages.

It's quite simple to use. You can automate almost everything in your organization by simply dragging and dropping and selecting a few options, whether it's an Excel spreadsheet or other on-premise data.

Power Automate is integrating artificial intelligence into the product, allowing us to automate future aspects, such as in pharma companies, medical agencies, and even banks, which are now using these products to automate their manual processes. And because robotic process automation is already built into Power Automate, these features make this product fantastic and accessible to everyone.

These products are intended low-code, no-code solutions. As a result, even a strategic developer can create and automate your day-to-day tasks at their workplace, whether it's management work or a developer is dealing with day-to-day issues with APIs.

In terms of IT, everything can be automated, but other things can also be automated. We can automate the reporting process, as we can with the help of an AI builder. Using Power Automate and Power Apps, we can generate sales reports on the fly.

In terms of issues, I haven't had any until now because automation requires you to complete a task in less time. These products have some limitations, such as the need to build some custom controls in PCF or use the JSON format. There are some limitations, but it's a mature Microsoft product, and we can do almost everything.

Third-party systems can also be added. We can create a beautiful dashboard if another software provides open APIs. Even when discussing complete Power platforms, four components must be mentioned: Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, and Power BI. When we use all four, we can create a complete solution, whether it's a visualization dashboard, automated chatbots, or the rest, which we can achieve using Power Apps. Power Apps is also divided into three types of apps: canvas apps, model-driven apps, and data-driven apps. Another option is to use open-source, which refers to open projects known as portals. So we can actually do the same thing. When someone is creating a website, we can do the same thing here in the portal. So the things we can do with Power Apps are the same as the things we can do with the Power platform.

I have been working with Microsoft Power Automate for almost two years.

There are some limitations with the calls and other things, but it is a stable product.

Typically, we raise technical support through the Azure portal. If we have a basic plan in place, we can submit a request to Microsoft. 

Microsoft also provides Twitter support. If you have any questions or encounter any technical difficulties while deploying your Power App or configuring your Power Apps or Power Automate environment, you can raise a ticket on the portal and Microsoft will respond directly to you.

I also work with Power Apps.

The initial setup is a very simple procedure. We can deploy in any organization depending on their needs,  we can look into licenses to see what kind of license will meet their requirements. 

As it is in the cloud, it's very simple to deploy. It's ready-to-use software as a service, and we can use various connectors. In addition, if something is outside the scope of Power Automate, we can create a custom connector. How it is deployed is entirely up to the organization. If for example, they have three environments: development, testing, and production, we can easily switch, and we can use Azure DevOps to create CI/CD pipelines, and we can deploy that solution in any environment in the organization.

It is not a costly solution. You can have two types of licenses, one is user-based, and the other is app-based in the Power Platform. 

I work as a senior consultant for Microsoft technology as a developer, mains power developer, but I would love to explore other options.

It's a genuine Microsoft product, which is the main reason I would recommend it to someone.

I would rate Microsoft Power Automate an eight 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.

The solution is bundled together with many Microsoft products.

The solution is stable.

The solution offers a lot of documentation and tutorials for users to learn about various aspects and features.

The pricing is very reasonable.

The solution is not actually satisfying the complex programs that we want to execute. We're looking for alternatives right now.

Currently, Power Automate has, if I'm not wrong, about 500 actions per workflow, and my team is not satisfied as they want something very complex that automates a process end to end. That would need a lot of iteration and loops being implemented. The 500 steps in a workflow don't seem to serve our end goals.

The solution doesn't integrate very well with non-Microsoft products.

We've been using the solution for about nine months or so.

With the processes that we've been able to implement, it has been stable. There are no bugs or glitches and it does not crash or freeze on us. 

I am not sure about the scalability aspect of it as the kind of processes we've been executing has been very simple and straightforward, to be honest. We haven't tested the solution's limits.

So far, we have not had an experience where we had to get in touch with the Microsoft team to resolve any issue. There is documentation that is available online and tutorials provided by Microsoft, and the community has been pretty helpful for our IT team to design these solutions. We've been able to use those resources in order to mostly figure everything out ourselves. Therefore, I can't speak to their level of helpfulness.

We are using Power Automate, as it has come with the Microsoft Office 365 bundle. We aren't satisfied with it and therefore are looking for alternatives. This is our first experience with an RPA, and I don't like the app.

I didn't directly deal with the initial implementation. I'm on the management side. I get in touch with the IT team who work with Power Automate directly.

The pricing is absolutely reasonable as you're getting a lot more than just this solution. You're not just paying for Power Automate when you're paying for it. You're paying for the bundle itself. It was basically an add-on for whatever other services we're buying. Therefore, it was more or less free for us.

We are currently looking to explore other RPA options.

We have, for example, lightly explored UiPath as an option. Currently, there are a lot of processes that are being run on SAP and other infrastructure like Salesforce. Power Automate doesn't seem to be integrating well with them. We've been talking to other organizations or other partners that are using UiPath, and they've said they were able to implement somewhat similar tasks and were able to integrate easier. If the UiPath integrations are beyond the scope of Microsoft, it would be a better option.

We are a customer and an end-user of the product.

I have very little experience working with Power Automate. I'm the management person who gets in touch with the IT team who works with Power Automate directly.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using.

If your organization is running on Microsoft, and purely on Microsoft architecture, Power Automate is the way to go. If you're a very big company that wants to have complex tasks executed, however, it's not the best option. We're at a stage where we're trying to reevaluate where we want to go in ahead with the RPA journey. Power Automate doesn't look like the right option, at least for us right now.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

This is one of the solutions we sell to our customers. I'm an automater and we are customers of Microsoft. 

The connectors are a very good feature in this solution because they allow you to connect to multiple applications within the Microsoft environment. The solution is readily integrated. 

I'd like to see an improvement in the execution of workflows, which is currently an area of concern. It takes a lot of time and when you integrate these workflows, you have to be very careful because even a tiny error can break the workflow. Microsoft needs to make it more resilient.

An additional feature should be interoperability. It's the idea that you should be able to leverage other Microsoft technologies, let's say .NET, C#, VB macros, so that they can be integrated. It will make the solution more powerful, and they could provide a facility where we could run scripts written in other languages through Power Automate seamlessly. That would make this a very powerful product. 

I've been using this solution for 18 months. 

It's not stable yet, because it's still in development. There are a lot of things happening right now. If they bring in a new feature, an old feature can change and that's why we're not able to deploy it fully on all our client premises.

It's scalable because almost everything which is available within the Microsoft environment can be connected. But when you go outside the Microsoft environment, with respect to legacy systems and with third-party applications, the scalability is a somewhat limited right now. You can't connect very easily to Oracle or SAP or even third-party standalone custom applications. We don't have plans to increase usage for the time being. 

We haven't contacted technical support, mainly because we've been in a Microsoft related environment for the last 30 years. Most things that we solve ourselves, rather than talking to Microsoft.

We have not yet fully switched to Microsoft Power Automate. We still consider it an option for clients who are purely in a Microsoft environment. It's definitely an option, but we also have seven other RPA tools we use including UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, Kryon, Kofax. We also have an option for customers who don't want to go for any RPA tools that enables them to get custom automation.

The initial setup is complex. You need to know what you are doing, because it connects to so many things on your system which could be different for different systems. It took us about half a day to understand what we needed to do, and then after that it took just an hour. We did it ourselves. 

The solution is affordable and supportable, but the licensing is complex because you're paying for multiple services. You pay a license for Automate and a license for Azure Cloud. There could be a situation where you're managing more licenses than the bots.

We have evaluated 22 options in this area. 

Choosing a solution really depends on what the customer needs. If they're looking for something that's easy to maintain, we might go for UiPath or Automation Anywhere. And if we don't have the budget we tell them to look at Microsoft Power Automate. If you don't have a budget for that, then you look at a custom automation which doesn't need any RPA tool. It all depends on the customer's requirements and constraints.

This solution has the potential to go further, but for now I would rate it a five out of 10. 

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.