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Microsoft Power Automate vs NICE Robotic Automation comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 4, 2024

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
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Power Automate
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
2nd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
126
Ranking in other categories
Process Mining (2nd)
NICE Robotic Automation
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
24th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 Microsoft Power Automate is 20.7%, down from 21.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NICE Robotic Automation is 0.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
 

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.
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.
Harish G V - PeerSpot reviewer
Quicker compared to other bots but not very user-friendly
There is a need for NICE to be more user-friendly. It should be designed in such a way that any developer can easily develop bots. For instance, Power Automate provides a good example of a user-friendly design that NICE can learn from. Moreover, in terms of documentation, there is very little available for NICE, making it challenging to implement the bots. So, documentation should be improved as well. There are a lot of additional features that could be included in NICE. As the NICE Robotic Automation claims, it is a low-code solution, but that is not entirely true. They need to concentrate on the prerequisites and building blocks. There should be more options available internally that are easy to use and well-developed.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The pricing is excellent. I would give them perfect marks in that regard."
"Fortra's Automate has effectively replaced the workload of an entire employee, saving us significant time and money."
"The product effectively handles all the tasks we require."
"The most valuable features for my client are timing and scheduling."
"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."
"The solution is continuously adding more integrations to help with workflows and bot and task creation."
"The most valuable features of Fortra's Automate include its FTP functionality and file manipulation capabilities."
"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."
"The RPA robotic process automation is a good feature. We can make a flow within a flow. We just made a UI flow. The flow is to run every day so far it's been quite helpful."
"The solution is relatively easy to use and cost-effective."
"We use Power Automate for applicant tracking and automated around 80 percent of the process."
"Power Automate is not complex and is very easy-to-use in deploying most development projects."
"The interface is user-friendly."
"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."
"The initial setup was easy. It was very easy for people to pick up. The deployment took a few hours."
"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."
"Through interfaces called Callout (created with HTML code) it is possible to create a strong interactivity with the user. These interfaces can be extremely dynamic in relation to the behavior of a local or remote robotic flow."
"The deployment of NICE Robotic Automation is easy."
"Provides good automation features."
"It is easy to deploy. To do the automation in NICE, you really need to use your programming expertise. There are no inbuilt features in it, and you have to create all the required features, which can be very interesting for a programmer."
"NICE is one of the only vendors that does attended and unattended out-of-the-box. Using the unattended processes we've been able to build a "feature library." We break each process down into workable chunks that we can save into a big library. The next time we come to automate a task, we already have chunks of that automation built."
"What we've done with the RTI client is that we've brought it into a bit more of a 21st-century feel. Our agents have the ability to move around when they want, click into stuff. They use it according to how their conversations go with the customer."
"It is a kind of desktop automation. Its licensing model is a little bit different. It tends to be individual automation specific to a role. It excels at that."
 

Cons

"The vendor is currently working on a solution that allows us to automatically create a process that is based on a document that we receive via email."
"It's possible that they could use a stronger community for seeking guidance and help."
"The technical support could be better. We suffer from language barriers, as we are in Argentina."
"The intelligent automation feature could be improved. It's interesting because it's simple, but the automation quality isn't always good. It's easy to use, but sometimes you need to make a slight improvement to the automation, and that's not so easy."
"They do not encrypt passwords, so this is an issue with HIPAA compliance."
"I would like to see some better web automation, a wizard like the one in the product WinAutomation would be very nice."
"While this solution is continually improving, as it is now, the user interface could use improvement when I compare it to a product like UiPath."
"I would prefer not having to log in to update a ticket; being able to respond via email would be beneficial."
"It doesn't have any OCR capabilities."
"Looping can be a bit tricky."
"During their merger, some key functions were eliminated which no longer allows it to run independently from the cloud as a standalone for other companies. For example, options to schedule and trigger have been removed. It would be nice to have these capabilities back. The flow and the connectivity between databases and so on is a bit complex as well."
"I would like to have chatbot assistance available, where you can open it and receive help on the spot."
"There is a limitation in setting up loops, where it does not support multiple conditions."
"The tasks that can be automated are limited to Microsoft applications only."
"The solution lacks maturity."
"This solution should be more resilient, with robots more capable of recovering after an error."
"We haven't found it to be as powerful as some of the other platforms. From a true RPA perspective, it is pretty far behind some of the other solutions. It has emerged as a more desktop automation kind of tool, but it lacks a lot of enterprise features. It is not really a true RPA because of its licensing, which is kind of user-initiated. It would be nice it can be deployed at a more enterprise licensing model versus a user-based model. It didn't have autonomous automation so far, and they have just released this feature. They have kind of hodgepodged a bunch of products together to get there, but it is not as seamless as other solutions."
"[During the upgrade] any issues, where it couldn't remotely connect to upgrade, I needed the floor plan so I could go to that PC and have a look at it. Often it was either that the PC was switched off or had a bug or some other application needed to be reset."
"The solution is not as intuitive as it could be and integrating took a lot of time."
"There are a few areas for improvement in the installation phase"
"Its connectivity with other applications should be improved. In the version that I was using, it would just stop interacting with the other application. Its graphical interface should also be improved. It should have a user-friendly interface. Sometimes, people find it very difficult to understand. One of the obstacles that I faced while programming was that if I needed any kind of help, there wasn't much content on the internet. It can be very difficult to find a solution for a particular issue."
"The one thing I'd like to see, and NICE is already heavily investing in it, is improvement in the user interface itself. They call it the Designer and it's what the developers use. It is a bit clunky; that is the polite way to put it. I'd like to see it be a bit more user-friendly, a bit more intuitive, and to move to something a bit more web-based..."
"There is a need for NICE robotics to be more user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"The cost is a bit high for a small business like ours, but we manage with Fortra's Automate."
"From a distributor's perspective, one of the biggest selling points of Automate is its price point."
"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'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."
"Once you buy the software, you just pay for the support for backend help."
"Power Automate is a much less expensive product than the competition."
"This solution is bundled with our Office 365, so there is no additional licensing fee."
"Good price-quality relationship. Its features for its price were the best fit for our company."
"The license cost could be better."
"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."
"We are just using the free products at the moment. We are using the ones that come with the license that we have got."
"We use Office 365 and this solution is free for me to use with the package we have. We have plans to increase the usage of Microsoft Power Automate."
"We have it on our system. I don't really know if we need a separate license."
"As per my understanding, UiPath has a much lesser cost than NICE, but I am not sure."
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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
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
5%
Computer Software Company
24%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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...
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...
What do you like most about NICE Robotic Automation?
Through interfaces called Callout (created with HTML code) it is possible to create a strong interactivity with the u...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NICE Robotic Automation?
In the configuration phase, you need to have a certain degree of knowledge of Windows and Linux environments. That sa...
What needs improvement with NICE Robotic Automation?
There is nothing so relevant to complain about except a few more options in the debug monitor (which is already very ...
 

Also Known As

HelpSystems Automate, Automate
Power Automate, Microsoft Flow, MS Power Automate, WinAutomation by Softomotive, ProcessRobot by Softomotive, Minit
No data available
 

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
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
HelpLine, Telefonica Spain, Banca Popolare Di Sondrio
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Power Automate vs. NICE Robotic Automation and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.