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IBM Datacap vs Microsoft Power Automate comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Fortra's Automate
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (5th)
IBM Datacap
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (6th)
Microsoft Power Automate
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
126
Ranking in other categories
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

Anabel Marco - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
DeekshithShetty - PeerSpot reviewer
High-accuracy document processing with easy integration and good image enhancement
The OCR extractions are very good, almost 100% accurate now. The integration with other tools is very easy, with inbuilt actions to configure and directly export to multiple depositories. It is also good at image enhancement, including the removal of lines, which is helpful in processing and automation and ensures very little user intervention, thus saving time.
Nilesh Pundkar - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The best feature of Automate is its ease of use, which is a major selling point."
"The licensing of the product is very good. You only need to license it once and then you have it forever."
"I find the ease of use from a programming perspective very valuable."
"We have found the pricing to be very reasonable."
"The most valuable feature is the drag-and-drop interface, which is very Windows-like."
"It's very easy to use. That's a big selling point for it. It has got a drag-and-drop interface, so you can quickly deploy bots."
"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."
"I would rate the technical support as a nine out of ten because it is quite fast and courteous."
"The big thing these days is really the Insight Edition component and being able to build annotators to extract from literally unstructured content: paragraphs and information where there's no start anchor point to define where that data is located. There could be a number of entities in that which you have to draw information from. Being able to extract from them is really the differentiator today between that product and many of the other products..."
"The OCR extractions are very good, almost 100% accurate now."
"The solution offers many features that are beneficial for customers."
"It reduces human error and saves time."
"One of the valuable features of Datacap is the user experience. One thing that IBM did a few years ago was they standardized all of their ECM products on Content Navigator, including Datacap. If you're an IBM ECM customer you have FileNet, you have Datacap, you have StoredIQ and you have a consistent user experience, user interface."
"The OCR extractions are very good, almost 100% accurate now."
"I can have all scanners accessible from my end."
"Both Datacap Studio and Datacap Navigator are great features."
"The program requires no code making it very easy to implement various functions."
"Its complete integration with Microsoft tools and the inclusion of the CRM are the most valuable features. It is embedded directly in the Office package, so clients have direct access to it. It has a lot more functionality than other standalone solutions, such as UiPath or Blue Prism."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the cost and ease of use, it's very simple."
"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."
"We have a good overview of our processes now thanks to Power Automate."
"It works best to build cloud flows."
"This product is the best in terms of price and capabilities."
"The initial setup is very simple."
 

Cons

"The documentation for errors needs improvement as many of the error messages we receive are very vague."
"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 would prefer not having to log in to update a ticket; being able to respond via email would be beneficial."
"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."
"It's possible that they could use a stronger community for seeking guidance and help."
"Fortra's Automate is not as reliable as I would like it to be."
"It would be an improvement if Automate had better stability tools, whether by recommending a certain amount of memory because it can be a memory hog at times."
"They do not encrypt passwords, so this is an issue with HIPAA compliance."
"Its weaknesses are primarily tied to the lack of available resources and expertise in the market to effectively support and provide solutions and services to each customer for seamless implementation."
"We have page requirements where some values must be copied on each page. For example, say I need to scan a bunch of documents, and the name will be a field on every page. We don't have a default functionality in Datacap to copy the field value on the first page to all the pages. That feature would make the documents easy to prepare."
"When a client's requirement is not available in Datacap, out-of-the-box actions should be simpler to implement and not very complex."
"Datacap has performance issues when processing large volumes of documents. We're doing 18,000 pages daily. Scanning takes almost 20-30 minutes, but it normally takes one or two minutes. We informed IBM and opened a ticket for that. They forwarded the issue to developers but didn't give a specific timeline for it to be resolved. Version 8.1 is already at the end of support."
"Third-party integration could be improved; it's very slow."
"I give the scalability of the solution a six out of ten."
"When I scan a document in Datacap that has a watermark or the document is a little distorted, the image output is poor. It either becomes completely black, or there is so much distortion that we cannot read the numbers or the addresses mentioned in the POD. When we scan a document, we expect the output to be at least 95 percent accurate."
"Datacap's technology seems a little behind the industry. It's still using the old .NET framework. They should move to .NET Core and start integrating some machine learning. You can do some integration yourself, but you expect a solution to include the latest machine-learning approaches if you're paying reasonable money for it."
"There are frequent version updates and that impacts different algorithms so we have to adjust our code."
"It's not as user-friendly as a solution such as UiPath, which is really easy to use."
"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."
"There are two versions of the automation suite. You've got your cloud functionality, and you have got your on-premises functionality for legacy systems. There are a lot of functionalities between the two systems that don't cross-correlate with each other. A lot of the functionality in the cloud system is not there on the production side in the on-prem system. If they could implement some of the similar functionalities and streamline them for integration, it would be a lot easier. There should be seamless integration between the two systems."
"More scripting capabilities could be included in Microsoft Power Automate."
"In an upcoming release, the exception handling mechanism could improve. The issue that we are facing is whenever there is a failure in any of the middle execution and if you wanted to navigate it to the end of the last line of execution, we do not have this feature available. If we had this feature it would make it even more stable."
"There is a limitation in setting up loops, where it does not support multiple conditions."
"The debugging tools require improvement as well as the monitoring which goes along with it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."
"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."
"Once you buy the software, you just pay for the support for backend help."
"It comes with a package that costs approximately $20,000 USD per year."
"I like the way this solution is priced because you can buy a license, or you can buy the software outright."
"I'm only involved in running the product and maintaining the systems, so I can't speak to the cost."
"Compared to other products, the pricing model for this solution is much more convenient, flexible, and adaptable to the Portuguese reality."
"This solution offers seamless integration with other enterprise products, which is my area of responsibility, focusing on government sector projects. Larger enterprise projects don't pose problems. It might be suitable for small businesses as well."
"It varies, and it depends on the client's requirements and negotiations. Nowadays, Datacap is also included in the IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation."
"If you want IBM Datacap on cloud, which is a service run by IBM, the price can be quite expensive, but if you want to just purchase the licenses and own those yourself, then the price is very competitive."
"In Egypt, we have exchange rates that change year to year, and currently, we're facing an increase in the exchange rate between our Egyptian pound and the dollar. Since we have been using IBM DataCap two years ago we had a good price, it was not expensive. However, I cannot say now if it is expensive or not because of the exchange rate. Additionally, I don't have the data of other competitors and I don't know the prices."
"Pricing needs to stay competitive."
"This solution offers seamless integration with other enterprise products, which is my area of responsibility, focusing on government sector projects. Larger enterprise projects don't pose problems. It might be suitable for small businesses as well."
"You save a lot of time and money, but the benefit is you have people who are able to run the systems, check to see if there are any errors at all, and there are a lot less errors than a human system."
"IBM could offer more competitive pricing. This would allow them to attain more users. Some of our clients are considering moving to a different solution called Encapture which is similar but offers more competitive pricing."
"Microsoft Power Automate is expensive. The full license is quite expensive."
"There is zero licensing cost. It comes with our Microsoft Office subscription."
"Microsoft is providing an automatic license with a cost of $20 million per month, which is reasonable."
"It's more fragmented licensing, where every little thing that you add, you get an extra license cost."
"There should be increased transparency about which features attend the pricing."
"You can have two types of licenses, one is user-based, and the other is app-based in the Power Platform."
"Microsoft Power Automate is part of our Office 365 package, there are no additional licensing costs."
"There are many different ways to license it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
5%
 

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.
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...
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...
What do you like most about IBM Datacap?
The installation of the solution is very simple.
What needs improvement with IBM Datacap?
When a client's requirement is not available in Datacap, out-of-the-box actions should be simpler to implement and no...
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...
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 ‌...
How is Automation Anywhere compared to Microsoft Power Automate?
‌Neither‌ ‌solution‌ ‌requires‌ ‌any‌ ‌coding‌ ‌experience,‌ ‌and‌ ‌both‌ ‌are‌ ‌easy‌ ‌to‌ ‌use‌ ‌and‌ ‌have‌ ‌great...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

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
Turkcell, PowerSouth Energy Cooperative, Central Nacional Unimed, Conqord Oil
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
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Datacap vs. Microsoft Power Automate and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.