Microsoft Power Automate Reviews

We have been using Power Automate specifically for the COVID situation. The use case is mainly to automatically fire an e-mail every Monday morning requesting the employees of our firm to provide a response regarding their well-being. After the data is captured by using an MS form, the subsequent workflows get triggered through Power Automate. If somebody has mentioned that they have a fever or shortness of breath, we send this person's entry to our health and safety officer and our plan manager. All this is automated.

We also have another use case related to procurement where an automated flow was required for invoice processing for an external vendor.

We have been able to automate the form filling, form dispatch, and data collection activities, specifically for the COVID situation, across all offices within our firm. It is a global process covering all zones such as Europe, India, and Australia. We have also been able to define workflows for particular use cases, such as when there is a high volume of cases in a specific zone, such as India. We have created workflows so that our emergency team is directly able to connect with the R3 team that directly connects with the employee to provide the required support.

We have also gone a bit far with respect to the access part. The Power Automate flow also connects with the physical gates of our offices. Last year, we were able to control our physical gates with the data generated by the Power Automated workflow. We were prohibiting or allowing the entry of the people based on their responses that they had put in the Monday morning form. It was quite a complex use case, but we were able to roll it out globally, and it has helped a lot with the COVID situation.

The best part is the automated workflow, which is quite good and easy. It is just drag-and-drop. We are able to create workflows quite quickly. 

We are able to directly integrate the data that it generates with Power BI dashboards. Its integration is quite good with other Microsoft tools, such as Power BI. The visualization of the data has become helpful for us.

Microsoft shouldn't charge extra for the database license if you want to store the data in the database during the trial. We wanted to have a historical trend of the data, and we started with the trial version of the tool. The database license is not included with the trial version, and you have to purchase it separately. Because we had a budget constraint, we had to pull all the information manually from the system, massage it, and push it to the dashboard. About two months ago, we have upgraded to the full-fledged version in which the database is integrated. The database license should be there in the trial version, but they have totally decoupled it. They should have provided a bundle, at least for the trial version, so that once a person or a firm gets a sense of it, they can start building. It might be because they wanted to sell additional licenses or premium licenses, and that's why they have added it in the premium version.

It should have more cognitive features. Automation Anywhere and UiPath are different because they have cognitive functionality plus intelligent automation. The cognitive functionality is currently not there in Microsoft Power Automate. It is just for workflow automation and basic bot-level tasks. It should have more cognitive features, which probably will be launched in a couple of years.

I have been using this solution for the past one and a half years.

It is quite a stable product.

It is scalable. There is no doubt about Microsoft products in terms of scalability. Because of its scalability, we are able to have use cases that require a higher load.

From the build perspective, only our team builds it. We have around 10 to 12 developers who create and support Power Automate solutions. In terms of its usage, we are currently using it only for two use cases. We also have other tools, but we are using Power Automate for the use cases with less budget. Its license cost is comparatively less as compared to Automation Anywhere.

We have annual support, and there is also a community. My team connected with the community forums, and most of the things got resolved there. They connected with the support once for an issue, which got resolved. Their support is good.

We are also using Automation Anywhere, but we needed a tool that is cheaper than Automation Anywhere. Power Automate fits there well.

Its deployment was quite easy. We already have Microsoft suite across our company. Our complete ecosystem is Microsoft-based, so it was not a challenge. It took one or two days to get things in place. For complete documentation and implementation, it hardly took two weeks.

As per our current agreement, Microsoft is supposed to provide support. So, we had an external consultant who helped us out.

Its licensing cost is comparatively less as compared to Automation Anywhere. We have bought a two-year license agreement.

I would recommend this solution to others. It is one of the powerful tools. The best part is that it fits very well with the Microsoft ecosystem. It is not at the same level as Automation Anywhere and UiPath, but being a Microsoft product, I see a bright future for this. In one and a half years, it will be one of the key players in the RPA industry.

I would rate Microsoft Power Automate an eight out of ten.

We have various use cases because it is used at an enterprise scale. It is mainly used for document workflow management. It is used for validating and publishing documents. It is also used for validating the SharePoint page publishing, financial approvals, and investments approvals. It is a SaaS solution, so we have its latest version.

Its integration with the Office 365 ecosystem is most valuable. We use a lot of ready-to-use templates.

Its licensing model should be improved. The pricing should be more visible and transparent. When you consume services, there are too many criteria to figure out how much it is going to cost you to use the product to its full extent.

It should also support visual process editing, which is a standard feature for BPMN 2.0 compliance. They should improve the visual designer.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is globally stable.

We haven't scaled it up. We have between 1,000 to 2,000 users. On paper, it is easy to scale, but it is under the condition of license purchase. It scales within the limits of what has been imposed by the licensing model.

I have been more in touch with their pre-sales people than technical support. We are a large enterprise, so we have direct access to their premium support team with SLAs. Their support is very responsive and efficient.

It is simple. It is a ready-to-use product, and there is no setup. It also doesn't require maintenance from our side.

It costs us nothing because we use it on the built-in cost that is a part of our existing license for 365. To use it more extensively, there are different pricing models.

Its licensing is complex. It is complex to evaluate the cost in advance. As a result, people don't use it because they don't know what overall cost they are going to incur. There are too many criteria to figure out how much it is going to cost you to use the product to its full extent. Its licensing model should be improved, and the pricing should be more visible and transparent. 

I would recommend this solution to others. I would rate Microsoft Power Automate a seven out of ten.

It's a pretty big learning curve with Microsoft Power Automate and I'm trying to do a couple of other things. But I really have made some progress. I've actually started creating some bots. I've run into some snags. I haven't found my way out of the snags as yet. That's kind of why I'm not quite ready to publish because I'm not an expert yet, but I am actively working on it.

Microsoft Power Automate is on-premises because I'm using the Power Automate Desktop. So it's a desktop piece that I'm actually using and that's definitely on-premise. What I'm actually doing is interacting with actual systems. I run a clubby cloud system for moving data back and forth.

There are some very long processes that are happening now, where we need to move data from one system to another and do some analysis, and all of that. We're trying to automate some of that process to link the systems together. So some of it is actually reading the webpage, taking information off of the webpage, and doing things with it.

Power Automate is very user-friendly, it is easy to use. I find it very easy to use, easy to follow what's going on, to navigate around and get things done. I really like it. 

One of the features I like is the elements. Let me describe it. With Power Automate Desktop you're interacting with other pieces of software. That's kind of the whole point. You're grabbing information from other software so that you can then pull it together and move it back and forth between systems and do other things with it. Power Automate Desktop allowed me to quickly visually identify parts of a screen and record it. So I can see that I know I'm going to have to click this button here, this field there, and this tab here, and I can literally go and quickly just record all of them and identify them and have them in a list that I can see and say - there's my list of things.

Now when I'm actually pulling the logic together, it's really, really simple to just grab it from my list of elements and just fix things together. So I'm able to move faster than I can with Help and with the other solution. I really, really like that about it. I like its integration with other apps

Well, not integration. Because the whole point of Power Automate desktop is to grab information from other apps. So it's not a side feature, that's what it's designed to do specifically. So, that makes it easier to visually capture information from other applications, and then reuse those fields from other applications. I think it's the reuse that's really useful. Because I can see that I've done it. Whereas with the other one, did they do it or not?  But I really like that it is easy to capture visual elements of other applications and reuse them. 

The other good thing was the trial period. There's a much more realistic trial period of 90 days. So it encourages you to dig in on your own, and try and figure it out, because if something doesn't go right, you don't have to figure it out in 30 days, like all the others. So it's a 90 day trial, which makes sense to me because if it works, trust me, you'll never give it up. You going to use it, going to be hooked anyway, so 90 days make sense.

The problem with Power Automate is what happened when I had it set up to read web pages and Excel workbooks. But that was my first test, and I was working on it for around three days and then took a break of about two days. When I went back to it, all of the Excel, and all the Excel functions, just disappeared. Completely vanished.

I had installed it on my laptop. I had the spreadsheet there and all the features, because you have to do things like tell it to open the spreadsheet, tell it to read the cells, that kind of thing. And then you tell it to go to this webpage, and when you get to the webpage, log in, put in a username and password and then click on a button. So you have to put all of these steps and sort of link them together. And then when I came back, the flow was there, but it said all the steps that had to do with Excel were invalid. Anything that has to do with the web, it just said invalid. The whole tree, all instructions are still there, but the components that talk to Excel and the web were just gone. Just totally vanished.

When I looked up the help, it said that sometimes that happens when you're not connected to the internet. So it was kind of straight forward but complex as well.

It was straight forward, and then it just crashed, essentially. It just went. And I couldn't figure out a way to get the modules back. What on earth? So I switched to HelpSystems Automate, which I had also installed on my machine about a year ago. But now that I'd started working with Power Automate, that gave me the confidence to launch into the other one. So I launched into that one and that's where my HelpSystems Automate review would start. But if I would just stop by Microsoft Power Automate Desktop, that's where I'm stuck. I literally have not gone back to it. I actually find its easier to use. I prefer to use it, but it's just not working. It just stopped working. I don't know how to get this part back.

That's why I told you  I don't want to give a full review as yet because I don't know if it's something I did. I don't think so. But it just stopped. I'm still trying to give it a little grace, trying to figure out, trying to make it work.

What was difficult though, the weirdest thing, was just simple things like manipulating strings.

In terms of what features should be included, what would really help would be more help navigating webpages. What would help would be the help itself - if there would be lots of official walk-throughs. If it would say, for these scenarios, this is how you should do it, with the screen screenshots and the step-by-step thing. With other products I've used, even as a programmer back in the day, nothing ramps up learning faster than walk-throughs. It's not really the product itself, but more walk-throughs to help people ramp up their learning much faster.

That would be really great. Especially around web automation and services automation. Hooking into the EPI's of other solutions would be great. Right now we're just relying on the community of YouTube videos. People just set them up and do YouTube videos, and that's how they're hoping it will get solved.

It's not the type of setup, but it's the training on using the product that I would like to see more of. Better training on using the product itself, walk-throughs in particular, as a training method.

So I tell people that with Power Automate, you you can record the interview, that we're doing here, and fill out the forms automatically. All you have to do is sit down and engage the client with the right questions, and the system would listen to the interview and fill out the screen for you. So you thought, that would be really cool. Now you've downloaded it, and you're trying to figure out how on earth you do it. A walk-through is where you would go and this thing would literally say, "Capture audio and video." They give you a scenario and then they would have a little video that you can watch that shows you how to actually set it up. And then, in addition to that, you'd have a detailed scenario. This is what you want to do. Then it would have all the steps that you would need to actually do it end-to-end. If you follow the steps at the end of the walkthrough, you would actually have a working solution by just following the steps. By doing that, you're learning the product. You're learning how to use it. You learn so many things by using walkthroughs. And it's just training. It's not the actual product itself, it's training that goes along with the product.

This is Microsoft technical support. I'll try them. I haven't called Microsoft technical support in years. It's usually not a very good experience, but I will try. I will reach out to them and see what happens. When you go to support they tend to lead you to communities where other users are having issues. It's sort of, "see what you can find in the community." I will get back to it because I have to desperately get this thing to work. No matter which tool I use, I have to get it to work.

The price is why I even considered it, because HelpSystems Automate was winning all of these awards and was supposedly the easier tool to use. That's what it says. But Power Automate's pricing model had a more gentle incline. That's why I went to the Microsoft Power Automate Desktop in the first place, because the pricing seemed to be more favorable. It the end, once you're using it for the whole organization, you end up paying the same thing for both products anyways. But to get started, Power Automate Desktop seemed better priced. But then it stopped working and I don't know how to get it back working yet.

I'm using the HelpSystems Automate now, and I'm stuck on another step. I mean, it's hard and that's good. If it's hard, it means you'll get paid. So the bit being hard is not the issue. I just have no idea how to get Power Automate to work again. So when I do, I guess I'll let you know.

The licensing was on a monthly basis. I liked it because it gave me a more reasonable per user cost. So I can set up one user like me, and then quickly set up all the workflows that I need, and it allows me to evaluate better and longer. I can onboard two or three other logins at a very reasonable price. Ultimately everybody wants to just dominate the entire organization anyway, and so the price is going to get ridiculous at some point. But by the time it gets there, the organization would be benefiting so much from it they don't mind. Whereas with the other solution, you have to bite the bullet a little sooner.

I think you have to have an office license. I'm not sure actually. Maybe you can just use it by itself, but I'm not sure.

Right now, on a scale of one to 10, I would give Microsoft Power Automate a six since I can't actually use it. I really can't go past six. Maybe once I actually start using it, I'll rank it much higher. I think it has great potential if I could just get it back working.

I like that Power Automate gives us a connector to be able to connect different data sources or different software. 

It is very easy to connect, authenticate, and automate our daily routine tasks.

There are many things that need to improve, but not with the cloud side, it's desktop automation.

When you are doing desktop automation, they do not have a clear structure to create the code. This means that we have a poor chance of creating the project.

When creating sub-flows, there are no separate parameters. Instead, they are all combined together on the main page.

I would like to see improvements made to the Power Automate Desktop.

I have been exploring this product for one month.

Previously, I worked with Blue Prism and UiPath.

In my opinion, Blue Prism is far better than Power Automate, and UiPath is better than the desktop version.

Power Automate has the power to connect with different cloud sources, which is something that Blue Prism and UiPath do not have.

You can also create reusable code with Blue Prism and UiPath.

We are using the cloud version. There is nothing to install on our machine.

If you need to automate more on the cloud side, I would recommend Power Automate. If it's a third-party application they are trying to automate, I would try Blue Prism or UiPath.

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

Repetitive interactions between legacy systems and Excel managed by human resource. By collecting small tasks, there would be tons of time/effort we can replace with RPA. However, my challenge was major RPA solutions are not so much cheap to be applied to these small tasks. I believe Power Automate would be sufficient and cheap enough as Microsoft announced it will be free for Win 10 users (with basic functionalities).

It is still a persona trial phase so not much change has been brought. However, I have convinced Power Automate Desktop can be enough for many use cases where much investments are difficult.

Interaction with Microsoft Excel is good and will be more better in the future.

More detailed explanatory manuals are desired. As new features are introduced every month, I would like to know what is new and what is changed recently.

I have been using this solution for a couple of months. 

I'm not sure whether the desktop version is stable. It is relatively new. It was launched in May. I haven't really tried it. But the trial version I'm using has been stable so far. 

I haven't tried to scale it, so I'm not quite sure. 

So far, the tech support has provided me with good enough support and knowledge. 

Power Automate has two versions. The initial setup of the trial version is really easy. All you have to do is just activate the environment and you can start working on it. However, for desktop version, you need to install the software. It should be as easy to download and install as the Office 365 environment. 

How long it takes to deploy will depend on how confident you are with your development. The development itself is not easy. 

I live in Japan and there are not very many consultants available for the latest Power Automate yet as Microsoft is investing quite a lot and new versions are released every month.

Should be high, as unattended RPA capabilities are available at almost free as I can utilize it under o365 license. No extra costs to start small and you can pay extra if you need premium services.

I would recommend Power Automate. Those will small use cases can use a free license. 

We evaluated Blue Prism and Pega. However, Pega was a bit difficult to use for citizen developers. It requires some support from consultants or engineers, so it's a bit of an investment. They're small and if we introduced consultants or engineers, then it wouldn't pay off. So for that use-cases, yeah, users lost interest. 

Power Automate is a quite powerful tool. It helps you automate your daily processes. Being an RPA tool, it allows you to define certain logic and execute certain tasks at a scheduled time or for a certain event. I use it in conjunction with our SharePoint site to let our stakeholders know that something has been done or updated, and it kicks off another flow. We use it quite regularly.

Its usability is very valuable because it has a quite simple flow. It is very user-friendly. It provides you templates. I started learning with the help of Teams templates, and then I started providing them. It is always good to start with a template so that you understand how it works.

Its branches are quite user-friendly. You can put expressions in it. It allows you to link and test the flow so that you can check whether everything is running properly. From a business standpoint, Power Automate is quite good for a non-tech person. It is not like Java, HTML, or C++, which are very developer-driven. Power Automate is a more business-oriented kind of tool.

They can build more templates and more connectivity with other platforms. They can provide a more user-friendly way to connect with other platforms. They have their own in-built plugins for certain third-party vendors, but there are still a lot of third-party vendors that are not there.

I have been using this solution for over a year.

It is a stable product.

It is definitely scalable. If you want to integrate Power Automate with third-party software and other platforms, a technical person is needed. If you just want to connect Power Automate with Microsoft's suite of services, you can easily do it. They also have their own in-built plugins for certain third-party vendors. More and more plugins will come in the future because more and more people want to connect to Power Automate. I can already see Trello and Jira creating the plugins. There are still a lot of third-party vendors that are not there on it, but we can basically go ahead and create our own if needed.

Power Automate is a connectivity tool, so it has the ability to connect to other platforms. If they're able to do that, other platforms start making more money because I can get a flow that directly connects to another vendor and helps me achieve what I want to do, rather than having a tech person give me estimates and getting that done, which takes a longer time.

In terms of the number of users, we are a big organization with around 15,000 people globally. I don't know how many people use it, but the awareness is coming slowly within the organization and more and more people are becoming aware. I will continue using this solution.

I haven't actually reached out to technical support, which speaks for the usability of it. It is quite user-friendly, so I didn't really have to reach out to technical support.

I did attend a one-day workshop for Power Apps, which was great. For Power Automate, we actually have regular IT sessions. Our IT team has set up regular training sessions for learning different services from Microsoft, and one of them was Power Automate. That's where we got the awareness of Power Automate. That was a year and a half ago, and that was when we basically said, "Oh, wow, this is great!" At that time, it was called Flow. Now, it is called Automate.

We have it on our system. I don't really know if we need a separate license.

I would highly recommend Power Automate to anyone who is quite keen on RPAs and wants to automate certain processes from a business standpoint.

Microsoft is doing really well in this space. There are very few RPA tools, and Microsoft has been successful in penetrating the market. There are very few of them who are on every single PC. Any business, bank, or enterprise that has Microsoft on their PCs and has subscribed to this at an enterprise level are given Power Automate. The market penetration of Power Automate is really good. As more and more users start using it, they will obviously come up with issues. I definitely found a few challenges, but nothing with which Google Search couldn't help. More and more people are using Power Automate, and I can easily find answers on the web. It is already great, and it is going to go quite well if Microsoft goes ahead and starts building more of these tools.

I would rate Power Automate a nine out of ten. It is a great product.

We use Microsoft Power Automate for various personal initiatives of people to automate their own work.

It is used in a laboratory environment to connect the laboratory systems and to automate the connections between them.

The most valuable features are that it is low-code and simple.

For simple use cases, it is easy to use but as soon as it becomes complex then it doesn't fulfill the requirements.

It doesn't have any OCR capabilities. It doesn't really work with our ERP system, where we can log into the ERP system and have a robot updating it directly.

Microsoft is early on in this game and not really very far yet. They just need to mature their solutions.

In the next release, I would like to see a centrally-governed system, where you can access fully automated processes. This would include the ability to connect to other systems and log into them.

I would like to see it as a centrally managed solution.

I have been using Microsoft Power Automate for six months.

We are using a local partner of Microsoft in the Netherlands, and it's going quite well.

At the moment, we're using both Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Apps. We also use Kofax.

If you are using it as a user, I'm not aware of how complex it is for setting up central governance on it. But with proper RPA, you very much need the central-governance to ensure that things are conforming to standards. 

As soon as it starts being involved in business-critical use, then governance is very important.

I haven't seen that the central governing of it to be easy.

We use a local partner to help with the implementation and it's going quite well.

I am not aware of the pricing, but the problem is something we run into often. As soon as you want to use a data service, all of a sudden the license cost goes up. 

It's more fragmented licensing, where every little thing that you add, you get an extra license cost.

Microsoft is gradually becoming better, but for RPA, it's not fully there yet.

If you are looking for a low-code, simple to deal with email and extract a spreadsheet, then Microsoft is a good option. However, if you have a complex RPA use case where optical character recognition or PDF ingestion is needed then Kofax is a better choice.

I'm responsible for the center of excellence running Kofax as an RPA solution, and not for the Microsoft Power Apps.

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

Internally, we're doing a lot of workflow automation. This includes creating documents inside of SharePoint, updating SharePoint lists, taking templates in Microsoft Word, and then pulling data from SharePoint to populate different fields in the Word doc using the approval workflows.

When somebody is done reviewing a document, they click a button, and then it goes to the next person in the workflow. It sends me emails, sends notifications, posting from an email, stripping out all of the extra content in the text message, manipulating it, and then posting it to Microsoft teams, channels.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the native integrations with other Microsoft products. These include SharePoint, Office 365, and Microsoft Teams. 

The integrations that are built into Power Automate for those different Microsoft functions are good.

This solution has many areas that have room for improvement.

There are many features that are lacking compared to other Automation tools.

There is an inability to group different variables. When you have to establish all of your variables, you can't group them all.

The notifications when there are failures need improvement, as well as being able to start a process midstream.

The licensing is convoluted in understanding what license is needed.

There's just not enough error handling natively, so you have to build in a lot of workarounds for error handling. 

When compared to other workflow automation tools out there, it's just not as mature.

I have been using Power Automate for one year.

We are using the latest version, it's a cloud solution.

For the most part, it is pretty stable. We made one change that created a licensing error just out of the blue that stopped all of the processes that were in progress.

It created a problem, where we had to restart all of them and do a lot of manual cleanups, and backtrack to the ones that were canceled.

If there's a licensing issue, there should be some notification versus saying, "your licenses are out of compliance," and shutting down that process. When we checked the licenses, there was no issue.

I don't know if it was a bug or what that was, but that happened one time. Luckily it was when we started the rollout, and we didn't have as many processes in flight.

If we had hundreds of different processes in flight and that canceled my flow, that would not be acceptable for a production-type solution.

It's not scalable.

For some of the processes that we're building right now, we are asked to add a button for this additional piece, and it adds so much more complexity with the way that I have to build it out. It doesn't allow me to break up a process into multiple processes, and then call sub-processes, which would make it a lot easier to scale. When I break up these different processes, I have to redefine every variable. 

I can't take information from one process and then pass those variables to the next process.

Your workflow then becomes this very long, single process, that can't be started from the middle. It has to be long and convoluted, and it doesn't make it simple to scale and have sub-processes to make it more complex.

Currently, we are limiting the number of additional features and functionality. 

We don't want to add to it because it adds complexity and doesn't give us the ability to call a sub-process.

The couple of times that we have called, they haven't been able to solve anything.

In many cases, we try to figure it out ourselves or rebuild the workflow, if we can't reproduce the issue. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

We built out the workflow, completed the testing, the user testing, and completed a production rollout. 

I would say part of the challenges was with the production rollout. The tool is not as easy to work with because it's a hundred percent cloud-based.

A lot of the error handling and some of the things you would normally have aren't built-in, and so we ended up finding a lot of bugs and issues and things after the fact.

For example, it was set up where we needed to send an email, and if you put the two email addresses, but you don't put a semicolon between it, then it was just killing the process, saying, "that it couldn't send the email," so it just failed. The entire process failed.

It didn't send a notification and we had to find out two days later.

Those are the types of things where it just needs to have better handling for those types of situations to be able to say, "this is an error that happened," or let me kick off that same process from that point, and then restart the process from there; whereas, right now I have to restart the entire process.

All the steps that happened before, need to be able to go manually and clean up. It eliminates the point of automation.

The price depends on the features that we are using.

The licensing cost for us at this time is between $8 and $20 per user, per month.

It's a monthly cost for every user that touches one of the flows or is kicking off a workflow.

Licensing can get expensive.

There are premium connectors, where if you want to connect to external data sources, there is an additional cost for that.

I think one of the big issues was for an Azure SQL database or for SQL databases that used to be part of the standard connectors, and then they converted those to premium connectors, which increases the cost and limits the functionality for what you would be paying for it.

Use it for basic workflows, but I wouldn't recommend it for anything that is mission-critical. I don't think that it is ready for mission-critical type processing. 

It's a good product. They just have a lot of functionality they need to add.

People have posted on their feature request board, and on their community board.

The vast population that is using it asks for the same features. They are either very slow to implement those features or they are not interested.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We started using it just three months ago. These three months also include doing the proof of concept. We use it for IT operations where users can request for a software push by using a Microsoft Office 365 form. Using Forward Automate, I initiate the process. I have another department that is using it for requests for the PC team or for a contractor's visit to the main plant here in Panama.

It is basically free for me because it comes with my Office 365 subscription. The main feature is that there is abundant learning material on platforms like YouTube. You can find information about whatever you want to be done in Spanish or English without a problem. 

It is very easy to learn. Users can start using it on their own without any former training, which is something I like about this solution. 

It would be good to have some kind of on-premises solution for BPMN users, but I don't think Microsoft will ever go back to the on-premises solution. They all train their clients to use their online services.

It is easy, but it doesn't follow the industry-wide standards. I can only use the processes that Microsoft gives us. I can't map a business process by using other standards or notations, such as Business Process Management (BPM). I have to use whatever Microsoft gives us. I would like to have support for some standards because if we decide to use another BPM tomorrow, we will have to remap everything in notation to transfer from this solution. This is the only block or obstacle that I see in using this solution. It is closed in its infrastructure.

I have been using Microsoft Power Automate for three months.

I can't evaluate their technical support because I haven't had any issues. We have an enterprise license and subscription from Microsoft, which gives us 24/7 support in case we have any problem with the solution.

The most complex thing was setting up Microsoft Exchange Online. Our email solution was Google G Suite Email. Switching over to Microsoft was very difficult, and it took at least one week. We are a small company. We did everything in one day, but we had issues for at least one week after the migration because we transferred all mailboxes from Google to Microsoft. 

It is free with Office 365 subscription.

We have just started to use this solution. The next step is to have a dashboard to polish the KPIs from the data stored through this application.

I would suggest using this solution if you don't have any budget restrictions for automating processes. If you are a subscriber of Microsoft and you use Microsoft Office 365, I will advise using it right away. If you have a budget and you want a solution that designs specifically for business profits, I will suggest implementing some other solution such as the one from Pega systems.

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

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

The initial setup is pretty easy.

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

The solution lacks maturity. That will come with time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm using the latest version of the solution.

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

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

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