IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vs Microsoft Power Automate comparison

IBM and Microsoft are both solutions in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category. IBM is ranked #9 with an average rating of 7.8, while Microsoft is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.2. IBM holds a 1.9% mindshare in RPA, compared to Microsoft’s 20.7% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of IBM 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

IBM Robotic Process Automation and Microsoft Power Automate are prominent contenders in process automation. Microsoft Power Automate has the upper hand due to its integration with Office 365, making it cost-effective for existing Microsoft users.

Features: IBM Robotic Process Automation provides a comprehensive suite of features, including drag-and-drop functionality and integration with IBM Watson, offering a customizable experience. Microsoft Power Automate is noted for its low-code environment, seamless integration with the Microsoft ecosystem, and a supportive community, enabling quick adoption.

Room for Improvement: IBM Robotic Process Automation needs to enhance its machine learning capabilities, improve integration with third-party systems, and provide more user-centric templates. Microsoft Power Automate should focus on improving integration with non-Microsoft systems, enhance AI capabilities, and provide clearer error handling descriptions.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Robotic Process Automation supports diverse deployment options, including private, on-premises, and hybrid cloud environments. It is backed by highly-rated technical support. Microsoft Power Automate mainly operates in public cloud environments with varying technical support experiences.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Robotic Process Automation is perceived as premium, with the potential for ROI within six to eight months. Its flexible licensing model is appreciated. Microsoft Power Automate is cost-effective for Office 365 users, with opportunities for ROI within six months to a year, despite potential additional costs for premium connectors.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vs. Microsoft Power Automate Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vs. Microsoft Power Automate

January 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

Fortra's Automate

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category, the mindshare of Fortra's Automate is 1.3%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is 1.9%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Power Automate is 20.7%, down from 21.6% 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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Karinne Carnevalli De Almeida

Consultant at Universidade Federal Fluminense

User-friendly interface and good stability

I would recommend using IBM RPA. I would advise you to learn about your main processes to automate inside your company. So you can apply it in big and small processes depending on the investment for your company. That is an advantage or not. Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. It has some difficulty in the tool, but it's a very stable and useful tool for automating processes.

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We have tried other RPA solutions like UiPath or Automation Anywhere. They are fantastic products but complex, and it's hard to understand everything. It would be best if you had a skilled developer or several. Automate is easy to implement, administer, and use. It's appropriate for us because our cases are simple and easy to automate. We don't need complicated tools with many features; We prefer to get a significant ROI quickly."

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

"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."

"This tool has machine learning and voice recognition and computer vision, which are both quite useful aspects. These aren't available in other tools. It's a good addition to this tool and it gives the solution an edge on the market."

"The most valuable features of Fortra's Automate include its FTP functionality and file manipulation capabilities."

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

"We are still in the process of rolling it to production and tweaking it (our AD groups are a mess), but the improvements are priceless. Having users ID's created the same way every time without human error is the best part. We don't need to worry about why groups were not added, user rights not set to folders or missing a private folder being created, typos or just even knowing when things are done and logged."

"Web scraping is quite good since it offers a lot of possibilities."

More Fortra's Automate pros

"If you have a business process, and once you have automated that process, you have a readily available workflow in place."

"I like the integration with Watson and the possibility to have an intelligent reading of all the customers' documents."

"The good stuff about IBM is the fact that it's very easy to use, there are very nice and smart AI tools within the licensing that you don't have to pay any access. Moreover, it's more precise and more secure."

"The solution’s performance is good."

"IBM RPA helped us resolve a lot of difficult cases we could not resolve using other solutions."

"Integrating the tool with SAP, EBS, or other ERPs is easy."

"We can connect with different database types, and they have included a different package for a terminal connection to, for example, AS400. When it comes to UI development, it's not using the drivers or anything. It's not a selector-based development like UiPath."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

More IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) pros

"The most valuable feature is the ability to integrate across multiple systems."

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

"The solution is pretty customizable. Even big automation tasks are done rather simply."

"This product is the best in terms of price and capabilities."

"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."

"Overall, it is a great service at the given price. It is very modern, and it integrates in a great way with pretty much anything. It is also fast."

"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."

"Third-party integrations with third-party applications are quite easy."

More Microsoft Power Automate pros

Cons

"I would like to see some better web automation, a wizard like the one in the product WinAutomation would be very nice."

"The documentation for errors needs improvement as many of the error messages we receive are very vague."

"I would prefer not having to log in to update a ticket; being able to respond via email would be beneficial."

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

"The documentation is not that great."

"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 like the updates to be easier to deploy. Integration with Amazon S3 is somewhat lacking."

"The OCR for Hebrew text needs to be improved."

More Fortra's Automate cons

"Stability could be better."

"Extensibility is the key, especially in terms of the Recorders feature that we have. That should be browser independent. Enhance it because some people have Chrome, some have Internet Explorer, etc. Also, integration with PDFs: Not just the ability to read information from PDFs but the ability to write information from PDFs, make it secure, sign it, etc. Finally, if they can allow a token exchange inside the tool itself, that would help."

"I would like to improve the efficiency of this solution and the Surface Level Agreement."

"IBM Robotic Process Automation should be more stable."

"We can use its inbuilt activities, and it's a complete package, but just like ElectroNeek, a limitation is that we have to depend on its inbuilt activities. We can't include our own activities or we can't introduce other activities."

"Needs better integration with artificial intelligence or with machine-learning."

"The time it takes for approvals, and risk analysis could be faster."

"There are certain limitations in the solution for screen reading."

More IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) cons

"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 would like to have chatbot assistance available, where you can open it and receive help on the spot."

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

"It should work better for Angular websites, as it has a lot of problems."

"The solution could have more integration with different platforms."

"We expect Microsoft Power Automate to work like any other RPA software, but at present, it is fairly lax, especially in the RPA space. We have a very limited set of use cases today for Microsoft Power Automate. Microsoft should make it a full-featured RPA product like other solutions that we use, such as Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath. This is predominantly the area that they need to improve on. Microsoft Power Automate is quite complex to use as well, especially if you want to do advanced workflows or advanced automation. The regular simple workflows are quite easy and straightforward, but the moment you want to do something complex, it is almost impossible for one of our employees to work on it."

"Microsoft Power Automate could improve by offering recurring execution on the desktop."

"The technical support has room for improvement."

More Microsoft Power Automate cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"I'm only involved in running the product and maintaining the systems, so I can't speak to the cost."

"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."

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

"The cost is a bit high for a small business like ours, but we manage with Fortra's Automate."

"Once you buy the software, you just pay for the support for backend help."

"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."

"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."

More Fortra's Automate pricing and cost advice

"IBM licensing is annual and based on Virtual Processor Cores (VPC). This provides flexibility as part of the containerization environment."

"The product is reasonably priced compared to other tools."

"The license is paid annually."

"The product has a yearly licensing fee."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"IBM RPA is cheaper than other tools."

"There is a free trial for one month, so you can use it to run your payloads or proof of concept. After that, you can pay for the license on a monthly or annual basis."

"The pricing is reasonable for this solution."

More IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) pricing and cost advice

"They have the community edition that people can use for free, and they also have the enterprise edition. My company uses the enterprise edition, and I don't know how much they pay."

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

"It comes with the Microsoft suite. I'd rate it an eight out of ten in terms of pricing."

"I am not aware of the recent pricing model, but during the time that I was using this solution is was reasonable."

"The free version is quite good."

"The licensing price should be more cost-effective."

"At the moment, from our experience with the two, Power Automate is a lot more expensive solution than Automation Anywhere, but it is also a far more reliable solution. With the price increases and with the current pandemic situation going on worldwide, a lot of the prices have fluctuated, but the packages and the all-encompassing features you get with the Microsoft package far outweigh the benefits from the Automation Anywhere side. Each package on the Automation Anywhere side is cheaper, but we need to continuously purchase subsequent packages to continue with our automation to the extent that we require. So, the Power Automate solution is a bit more pricey, but it does offer us a far better range of capabilities."

"Due to the pricing model, the solution is more convenient than any other tools."

More Microsoft Power Automate pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

14%

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Educational Organization

Government

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

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?

We used the platform primarily for task automation, including transmitting EDR files. Additionally, we've utilized it...

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

The starter pack was all we needed and was reasonable. Others were either more expensive or didn't do all that I want...

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What do you like most about IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

Integrating the tool with SAP, EBS, or other ERPs is easy.

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What needs improvement with IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

The product must be promoted more. There are no promotions.

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What is your primary use case for IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

We're working with different clients from the manufacturing environment. We have implemented end-to-end solutions. We...

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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...

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Comparisons

UiPath vs Fortra's Automate

Compared 37% of the time

Automation Anywhere vs Fortra's Automate

Compared 8% of the time

Blue Prism vs Fortra's Automate

Compared 5% of the time

More Fortra's Automate Competitors

Automation Anywhere vs IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Compared 18% of the time

UiPath vs IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Compared 18% of the time

Blue Prism vs IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Compared 8% of the time

Nintex RPA vs IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Compared 3% of the time

More IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Competitors

UiPath vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 31% of the time

Blue Prism vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 18% of the time

Automation Anywhere vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 17% of the time

Pega Robotic Process Automation vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 4% of the time

ServiceNow Automation Engine vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 2% of the time

More Microsoft Power Automate Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fortra's Automate

February 2025

Download Fortra's Automate product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

February 2025

IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) report

Download IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power Automate

February 2025

Download Microsoft Power Automate product report

Also Known As

HelpSystems Automate, Automate

IBM RPA

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

Overview

Fortra's Automate is predominantly used in HR and operational departments for automating reports, file manipulation, and data processing. Key uses include automating repetitive tasks, integrating PDFs and emails, running scripts, processing large data sets, transforming file formats, synchronizing databases, managing job schedules, and transferring files.

Users commend Fortra's Automate for its ease of implementation and user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, which requires minimal technical skills for efficient bot deployment. The software is appreciated for its effective scheduling tools, reliable integration capabilities, and a wide range of functions such as file interaction, secure file transfers, and extensive automation without the need for coding. Businesses achieve significant time savings and simplified processes, bolstered by continuous updates and robust customer support.

What are the key features?

Scheduling Tools: Enables precise control and timing for automation tasks
Integration Capabilities: Seamlessly connects with various systems and software
File Interaction: Comprehensive functions for file manipulation and transfer
Secure Transfers: Ensures data safety during file transfers
User-Friendly: Minimal technical skills needed for deployment and use

What benefits should you look for in reviews?

Ease of Implementation: Fast and simple setup process
Time Savings: Reduces time spent on repetitive tasks
Process Simplification: Streamlines complex workflows
Customer Support: Access to continuous support and updates

In various industries such as healthcare, transportation, and payroll, Fortra's Automate automates workflows like invoice generation, data retrieval, data uploading, and insurance eligibility checks, enhancing efficiency and accuracy for HR and operational tasks.

Fortra

IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology that encompasses the use of smart robots in any process requiring efficiency, consistency and speed, with no risk of mistakes. In a nutshell, RPA simulates a human user working.

Today, it is possible to automate processes through the use of digital robots, or bots, which execute pre-programed, repetitive tasks in a safe and mistake free manner. There are literally thousands of opportunities for Robotic Process Automation to make an impact on your organization today, including: automatic invoice emission, system integration, information reconciliation, report generation, intelligent email management to lead generation, and many others.

IBM

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

The Hanover Insurance Group

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

IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vs. Microsoft Power Automate

January 2025

Free Report: IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vs. Microsoft Power Automate

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