Blue Prism Cloud vs Microsoft Power Automate comparison

SS&C Blue Prism and Microsoft are both solutions in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category. SS&C Blue Prism is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.5, while Microsoft is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.2. SS&C Blue Prism holds a 1.4% mindshare in RPA, compared to Microsoft’s 21.1% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of SS&C Blue Prism users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 4, 2024

Blue Prism Cloud and Microsoft Power Automate compete in the automation software category. Microsoft Power Automate seems to have the upper hand due to its seamless integration within the Microsoft ecosystem and a cost-effective licensing model.

Features: Blue Prism Cloud is valued for its stability, robust backend office automation, and support for security controls, appealing to high-security sectors like banking. Its Object Studio tool allows users without programming expertise to automate tasks. Microsoft Power Automate excels in its integration capabilities with Microsoft applications like Excel and Outlook, providing a low-code environment that makes automation accessible to non-programmers. It also offers a wide range of connectors and templates.

Room for Improvement: Blue Prism Cloud needs to enhance its user interface for more intuitive use, improve AI capabilities, offer clearer licensing terms, and provide better integration and training resources. Microsoft Power Automate should focus on streamlining complex tasks, improving integration with non-Microsoft systems, and enhancing its documentation and training offerings. Additionally, its pricing model needs clarity, especially concerning the cost related to handling large datasets and using premium connectors.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Blue Prism Cloud supports various deployment models, including on-premises and private cloud strategies. Microsoft Power Automate, primarily a cloud-based solution, provides simplified setup within the Microsoft ecosystem. In customer support, Blue Prism Cloud generally receives positive feedback but has slower response times, while Microsoft Power Automate offers responsive support with significant community-driven resources.

Pricing and ROI: Blue Prism Cloud is viewed as expensive due to its high initial licensing costs, but it promises substantial ROI through effective automation. Its pricing structure is deemed complex. Microsoft Power Automate offers a cost-effective licensing approach, especially for users of the Microsoft Suite, making it a valuable choice for simple automation tasks. However, premium connectors could lead to increased expenses based on usage levels.

To learn more, read our detailed Blue Prism Cloud vs. Microsoft Power Automate Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Blue Prism Cloud vs. Microsoft Power Automate

March 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Automate

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category, the mindshare of Automate is 1.5%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Blue Prism Cloud is 1.4%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Power Automate is 21.1%, down from 21.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Featured Reviews

Anabel Marco

Account Director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Automates processes efficiently with cost-effective scaling and robust customer support

Web scraping is quite good since it offers a lot of possibilities. Another important feature for me is its compatibility with MBI, the Power that is ISEQUADO Centers. I appreciate the ability to scale and increase the number of bots or studios without additional expense. Automate's non-reliance on additional orchestrators makes it quite cost-effective.

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Keith Mcdowell

Chief Executive Officer at Keith F Kube and Associates

It helps us save on staff costs

I rate Blue Prism Cloud eight out of 10 for ease of setup. It's a cloud-based solution, so it isn't hard to set up. The deployment time is hard to quantify because I work for the government, and we need to go through all these internal reviews, but the technical part takes three to four weeks. The biggest challenge is security because we need to integrate it with Active Directory and set up VPN tunnels, security profiles, etc. We deployed Blue Prism in-house and used three people to set it up. One solution engineer is enough to maintain it.

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Nilesh Pundkar

IVR Developer at Orange

Good for email routing and management features but additional costs for plug-ins

Power Automate has fewer features and more limitations in general. It's not as mature a product as some of the others, like UiPath or Automate Anywhere. One of the main issues I've found is that Power Automate struggles with accessing Excel or other Office documents on servers. Even though it's a Microsoft product, we often have to log in through remote systems, and syncing can be problematic due to the way we use servers. At the very least, they should provide access to Office 365 directly, without requiring additional logins on servers. Most people utilizing Power Automate are already working within the Office 365 environment. Any proof of concepts (POCs) using Power Automate would naturally be built on top of Office 365.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"This product is quite easy to install, learn, and use, with our new employees being able to start using it in projects for clients after only two weeks of internal training."

"The most valuable feature is the drag-and-drop interface, which is very Windows-like."

"It gives us a central place to schedule tasks and run them distributed."

"The best feature of Automate is its ease of use, which is a major selling point."

"Compared to other vendors, it's the scheduling tool because a lot of vendors want to charge you extra for their enterprise-level license to have a scheduling tool built in to give you the ability to set up regular schedules to run and do certain data checks."

"The product effectively handles all the tasks we require."

"Overall, the whole product is really nice and provides significant benefits."

"I find it very user-friendly. Our IT department and other departments can seamlessly collaborate without requiring extensive training. As a business department, we particularly value this aspect, as our team doesn't consist of many IT users. However, we couldn't solely rely on a drag-and-drop approach to implement and utilize the solution within our departments."

More Automate pros

"The most valuable feature of a non-programmer is diagrams. Someone from an IT background can find it easier to start automation."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to write custom code."

"What I like best about Blue Prism Cloud is that it's secure, robust, and has 24 x 7 support available. I also find the solution quick and intelligent. Even a non-coder can easily use it."

"With Blue Prism, I like the feature that you build, I don't know the exact name now, but blocks or standards can be reduced later. You configure, for example, the CRM system, and you create a standardized manner of inputting data into the CRM system that you can reuse later. I'm not sure what that's called, but I enjoy it whether it's a feature or not."

"The reusability of the solution is excellent. It's a superior feature - far superior to any other tool on the market."

"Blue Prism Cloud is a stable solution."

"Blue Prism offers the whole package for LPR developers. It's a useful tool to automate anything. As an LPR developer, I think the most important feature is that it lets you get anything into blocks of code that you can use anywhere."

"The tool saves us from repetitive and mundane tasks. We don’t have to write, record or copy data from Excel. The product helps us save time. We save money as well since people doing this task are on various other automation tasks. The chance for repetitive entries is also reduced because the tool helps us make one-time entries."

More Blue Prism Cloud pros

"It is a low-code platform. It is easy to use and good for automating small tasks such as expense approvals, timesheet approvals, etc."

"WinAutomation is very handy to use, and it has the power to interact with multiple systems, such as SAP, Oracle, or .NET systems."

"The solution integrates more easily and with more tools than Automation Anywhere."

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

"Power Automate has allowed us to simplify the business process and improve operational efficiency."

"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."

"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."

"It makes work easier."

More Microsoft Power Automate pros

Cons

"There is room for improvement regarding cloud functionality; there are a few missing features, and the logging could be better, especially air logging. We can go into logging events and create our own task, but it would be nice if this were more detailed."

"I find that most important features are strong, however, there is a lack of good development for artificial intelligence, such as machine learning."

"The technical support could be better. We suffer from language barriers, as we are in Argentina."

"They do not encrypt passwords, so this is an issue with HIPAA compliance."

"The workflow for variables could be better. The input and output of task-level variables could be made a little clearer in terms of passing those around from one task to another upon success, etc. Things like that could be a little easier potentially."

"The interface could be more user-friendly and easier to navigate."

"We really need a free development environment for customers. Building and testing automation on production isn't ideal."

"There is a lack of good development for artificial intelligence, such as machine learning."

More Automate cons

"I would like to see a web-based control room, rather than the one that is in-built with the desktop version."

"The solution is unable to read some UI components in legacy systems."

"It takes a while to get up and running."

"The pricing was a bit high, from what I understand. That might have played a role in the decision to migrate to another solution."

"Pricing for Blue Prism Cloud is a pain as it's a little higher."

"Blue Prism should adopt a low-code approach. Most RPA vendors only provide what they call a "form builder." A low-code designer would enable us to build a custom UI."

"The issue is that it is not dynamic or intelligent."

"I personally would like the solution to be supporting more languages."

More Blue Prism Cloud cons

"Their connector to Oracle or premium data sets that aren't Microsoft would often fail for me. The information given back about why it failed wasn't always robust to understand how to fix it and why it happened."

"The BPM component needs improvement."

"One of the challenges is dealing with OCR text recognition."

"The thing which needs the most improvement is really the documentation. It should have better details of the processes."

"Execution of workflows could be improved."

"When you are doing desktop automation, they do not have a clear structure to create the code."

"The speed of the application could be improved."

"They've already improved it, but I guess a testing suite would be nice to be able to test your automations in real time."

More Microsoft Power Automate cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It has gone up in price. The price of Fortra's Automate has increased since we first started using it. It does a lot but also costs a lot. It was a lot more affordable before Fortra owned the software."

"I believe the price falls within a reasonable range, which significantly influenced our decision regarding the product. This aspect is crucial for any technological solution, especially in our country where enterprises might be hesitant to invest heavily in something untested or uncertain about its practicality and potential returns."

"It comes with a package that costs approximately $20,000 USD per year."

"While solutions like UiPath and Blue Prism cost around $11,000-$12,000 for each license, this product costs around $7,000 and you can keep it forever."

"Compared to other products, the pricing model for this solution is much more convenient, flexible, and adaptable to the Portuguese reality."

"I like the way this solution is priced because you can buy a license, or you can buy the software outright."

"The pricing is quite reasonable. We can run the process with one bot. The limitation is at the server level because they have some resources, and sometimes that is enough. It isn't too expensive, so you can get a good return off of one, and you can also have a pack of five bots that is quite competitive."

"From a distributor's side, one of the biggest selling points is its price point. Without going into any numbers, compared to UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism, we're significantly cheaper. The main difference is that other competitors usually charge you per process. However, in Automate's case, it's priced per bot. So, a bot can run multiple processes at the same time, but you are only priced for a single bot."

More Automate pricing and cost advice

"This solution comes at a medium to high price point. They need to work on their pricing to enable smaller enterprises to get the benefit of using the product."

"The pricing is fine."

"When compared with UiPath, I believe it will be difficult for Blue Prism to maintain its market share."

"Annual licensing costs were somewhere between $5,000 - $10,000 for the development tool. For the control tower, I think fees were about $50,000 annually."

"Though I don't have many details, I think Blue Prism Cloud is an expensive product compared to the other tools in the market since you need to pay for resources like machines."

"There are many RPA solutions available from different vendors and the pricing for Blue Prism is competitive."

"The price is very competitive when you are comparing to other providers."

"The pricing for Blue Prism Cloud is two out of ten because it's higher than every other technology. My company is on a three-year Blue Prism Cloud license."

More Blue Prism Cloud pricing and cost advice

"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with ten being expensive because there are charges for additional plug-ins."

"It depends and varies a lot according to the licensing terms. There is no cost to maintain if we have less than 10 forms. Microsoft only charges if there are more than 10 forms. So, most of the companies can survive without paying anything extra. It is included in the Office 365 licensing."

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

"The licensing model is flexible in that you can pay per automation or per user. My client receives a discount because of the large number of users and pays approximately $15 for each one."

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

"Licensing is on an annual basis."

"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."

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

More Microsoft Power Automate pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

17%

Educational Organization

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about HelpSystems AutoMate?

We use it for specific cases, mainly secure file transfers, which are vital for us. And it works for us.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for HelpSystems AutoMate?

I am a consultant and I am making a lot of processes in human resources, payroll, certifications, trainings, web scra...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortra Automate?

The pricing is quite good compared to its competitors. Competitors are often more expensive than Automate. I would ra...

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What do you like most about Blue Prism Cloud?

It's easy to use, the interface, the the the the queries is which we use. It's user friendly.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Blue Prism Cloud?

If we utilize Blue Prism's full capabilities, then it is cost-effective. Otherwise, the pricing can seem high. It req...

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What needs improvement with Blue Prism Cloud?

Decipher, one of their solutions, is a waste of time. Other than that, there's nothing specific I can think of.

See all answers

RPA that Bots can run without centralized control?

Yes, Attended Bots which can run without centralized control Module. RPA Tools like Automation Anywhere, uiPath ,Pow...

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How do I choose between UiPath and Microsoft Power Automate?

Microsoft‌ ‌Power‌ ‌Automate‌ ‌is‌ ‌intuitive‌ ‌and‌ ‌easy‌ ‌to‌ ‌integrate‌ ‌and‌ ‌use.‌ ‌I‌ ‌like‌ ‌that‌ ‌there‌ ‌...

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How is Automation Anywhere compared to Microsoft Power Automate?

‌Neither‌ ‌solution‌ ‌requires‌ ‌any‌ ‌coding‌ ‌experience,‌ ‌and‌ ‌both‌ ‌are‌ ‌easy‌ ‌to‌ ‌use‌ ‌and‌ ‌have‌ ‌great...

See all answers

Comparisons

UiPath vs Automate

Compared 38% of the time

Automation Anywhere vs Automate

Compared 8% of the time

Blue Prism vs Automate

Compared 6% of the time

VisualCron vs Automate

Compared 6% of the time

More Automate Competitors

UiPath vs Blue Prism Cloud

Compared 19% of the time

SAP Intelligent RPA vs Blue Prism Cloud

Compared 16% of the time

Blue Prism vs Blue Prism Cloud

Compared 15% of the time

Robocorp vs Blue Prism Cloud

Compared 13% of the time

ServiceNow Automation Engine vs Blue Prism Cloud

Compared 8% of the time

More Blue Prism Cloud Competitors

UiPath vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 27% of the time

Blue Prism vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 16% of the time

Automation Anywhere vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 16% of the time

IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 8% of the time

ABBYY Vantage vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 2% of the time

More Microsoft Power Automate Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Automate

April 2025

Download Automate product report

Buyer's Guide

Blue Prism Cloud

April 2025

Download Blue Prism Cloud product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power Automate

March 2025

Download Microsoft Power Automate product report

Also Known As

HelpSystems Automate, Automate

Blue Prism Thoughtonomy Virtual Workforce, Blue Prism Virtual Workforce, Thoughtonomy Virtual Workforce

Power Automate, Microsoft Flow, MS Power Automate, WinAutomation by Softomotive, ProcessRobot by Softomotive, Minit

Overview

Automate offers a user-friendly solution with a drag-and-drop interface for efficient task automation and integration with major platforms like SAP and Azure, making it ideal for quick deployment with minimal coding and training.

Automate provides powerful features for businesses seeking efficient automation, offering compatibility with databases, email integration, and cloud platforms. Its simple interface supports both beginners and experienced users, simplifying tasks like invoice processing, HR automation, and data transformation. Cost-effective pricing and flexible licensing enhance its appeal while integration capabilities and scheduling tools ensure smooth workflow automation.

What are Automate's Key Features?

Drag-and-Drop Interface: Simplifies automation with intuitive design.
Integration Capabilities: Connects with platforms like SAP and Azure for seamless data flow.
Database and FTP Triggers: Enhances automation potential through direct data interaction.
Efficient Scheduling: Automates tasks with precise timing and control.
Web Scraping: Automates data extraction for quick analysis and reporting.

What Benefits and ROI Should Users Expect?

Rapid Deployment: Minimizes coding efforts for quick implementation.
Cost-Effectiveness: Offers flexible pricing models to suit budget constraints.
Operational Efficiency: Reduces manual workloads and enhances productivity.
Comprehensive Integration: Facilitates improved data management across systems.
Scalability: Adapts to growing business needs with ease.

In industries such as healthcare, banking, and logistics, Automate is used for tasks like invoice payment automation, data transformation, and task automation. This leads to streamlined processes and reduced manual workload, illustrating its value in enhancing operational efficiency through diversified workflows.

Fortra

The Thoughtonomy Virtual Workforce is a highly flexible intelligent automation platform. It uses software to replicate the way people work in existing applications and systems, the processes they follow, and the decisions they make, to deliver automation without disruption.

SS&C Blue Prism

Microsoft Power Automate is a powerful tool that streamlines and automates tasks within an organization.

It is used for workflow automation, data integration, and creating automated notifications and approvals.

Power Automate connects different applications and services, such as SharePoint, Excel, and Outlook, to automate data transfer and synchronization.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Aldergrove Financial Group, Preferred Health Professionals, Mindbeam Technologies, First Credit Union in British Columbia, Vestcom International, Prime Liberty Benefits, University of Tampa, CNLBancshares, World Precision Instruments, BJ's Restaurants, Globe Pequot Press, Accudata Technologies, Norton Healthcare, Pacific Toxicology Laboratories

Cabot Credit Management, Hovis, Utilita

1. Coca-Cola 2. General Electric 3. Siemens 4. Accenture 5. Deloitte 6. Johnson & Johnson 7. Ford 8. Nestle 9. Procter & Gamble 10. IBM 11. Amazon 12. Google 13. Microsoft 14. Adobe 15. Cisco 16. Oracle 17. SAP 18. Intel 19. HP 20. Dell 21. Verizon 22. AT&T 23. T-Mobile 24. Walmart 25. Target 26. Home Depot 27. McDonald's 28. Starbucks 29. Nike 30. Apple 31. Facebook 32. Twitter

Buyer's Guide

Blue Prism Cloud vs. Microsoft Power Automate

March 2025

Free Report: Blue Prism Cloud vs. Microsoft Power Automate

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