Microsoft Power Automate vs VisualCron comparison

Microsoft and NetCart AB are both solutions in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category. Microsoft is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.2, while NetCart AB is ranked #21 with an average rating of 8.3. Microsoft holds a 21.2% mindshare in RPA, compared to NetCart AB’s 0.7% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of NetCart AB users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Power Automate

Read 125 Microsoft Power Automate reviews

28,015 Views
16,879 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

VisualCron

Read 11 VisualCron reviews

823 Views
459 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power Automate

VisualCron

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 4, 2024

VisualCron and Microsoft Power Automate both compete in the automation and integration category, with notable strengths in various areas. Based on the comparison, VisualCron seems to have the upper hand in flexibility and customization, while Microsoft Power Automate shines in integration within the Microsoft ecosystem and ease of use due to its low-code environment.

Features: VisualCron's strengths include flexibility in handling nightly sync tasks, the ability to use job variables for customized templates, and process-specific logging. It offers intuitive scheduling for complex workflows and an alerting feature for error notifications. Microsoft Power Automate features seamless integration with Microsoft tools, out-of-the-box connectors, and minimal coding requirements. It provides an easy-to-use interface, a vast array of templates, and significant AI and third-party application integration.

Room for Improvement: VisualCron could improve its error handling and audit logs while enhancing user account management, community support, and UI. It also needs to bolster its documentation and security features. Microsoft Power Automate, on the other hand, needs to advance its AI capabilities, improve error handling and Excel integration, and simplify its licensing. Users also desire better documentation and more training resources.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VisualCron supports on-premises and hybrid cloud environments, offering deployment flexibility. Its customer support is generally quick and competent, although some users experience slow responses. Microsoft Power Automate provides versatile deployment options across public, private, and hybrid clouds, benefiting from a strong Microsoft support infrastructure. However, it could improve community interaction and the availability of support.

Pricing and ROI: VisualCron is praised for its fair and competitive pricing, supporting multiple instances that boost processing capabilities, with a high ROI due to reduced manual tasks. Microsoft Power Automate is cost-effective, particularly with its integration into Microsoft Office 365. Though licensing can be complex, its pay-for-use model and bundled free features enhance affordability. Its high ROI is attributed to its efficient integration capabilities within Microsoft tools.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Power Automate vs. VisualCron Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power Automate vs. VisualCron

December 2024

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Helped 824,168 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Power Automate

Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

2nd

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

125

Ranking in other categories

Process Mining (2nd)

VisualCron

Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

21st

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Managed File Transfer (MFT) (15th), Workload Automation (18th)

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Power Automate is 21.2%, down from 21.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VisualCron is 0.7%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Featured Reviews

Gowtham J

Associate - Analytics at Ernst & Young

Provides valuable integration with other Microsoft tools

The initial setup process involves three trigger points. One is a manual trigger, where users interact with a button or interface element to start the flow. The second is the recurrence trigger, which allows users to schedule automated maintenance at a specific time. Third is a data-driven trigger, where the flow is initiated based on an event in a database, such as creating a new line item in SharePoint database. Once triggered, the flow continues to execute, performing the configured actions and providing the results.

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Sourav-Dutta

Technical Lead - Database Administrator at SMART ENERGY SYSTEMS LLC

It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process

We use VisualCron for all our automation needs, like connecting to FileZilla, calling APIs, generating PGP keys, creating encryption files with the PGP key login to Azure, etc. It can automatically log in to SQL Server and execute SQL script jobs in bulk. We had 2,000-3,000 users at my previous…

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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

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Power Automate in the desktop version is web scraping because you can do a lot with it. I work in retail and you can study prices changes, which can give you a lot of information. The solution is no code which is a large advantage."

"There is an exhaustive amount of templates that users have access to."

"I like the scalability option and the simplicity, the way we can really use the interface to easily scale up."

"The initial setup is pretty easy."

"It is a stable solution."

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

"It is a great solution for simple automation activities or simple automation of simple tasks. It is also integrated with Office 365. Integration is an absolute breeze with any RPA software."

"I use the product for automation."

More Microsoft Power Automate pros

"We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works."

"The ability to clone jobs to shorten the time it takes to implement a process has been invaluable, but its flexibility also gives us the ability to create a job that can handle a multifaceted process with a complex workflow."

"What I like about VisualCron is that like its name, it's a very visual tool. In my previous company, there were a lot of scripts for all kinds of services, and through VisualCron, you get to group all flows and get a nice visual overview. VisualCron also has an alerting feature, so you receive alerts from it. VisualCron makes everything clearer and easier to maintain. Every other solution that I was looking for almost always needed a programmer, but with VisualCron, you can do what you need to do without programming skills, so this is another valuable feature of the tool."

"VisualCron is a very powerful program to automate different steps in your business processes. We use it to automate replacing files and inform departments about the replacement."

"The most valuable feature of VisualCron is its ability to schedule interactive jobs so that you can have interdependencies within the job and interdependencies of a job on another job, and so on."

"It has improved our organization with more automation within the business departments and less administration and development in the IT department. Usually, as the IT department, we are the bottleneck for many requirements within the business. With this tool, the business departments are able to perform many task themselves."

"What I found most beneficial from VisualCron is that you can directly connect it with different databases, user accounts, and credentials. You can run queries from one machine to another using the credentials, unlike PowerShell, that's run by the machine itself. With VisualCron, you can directly ask other machines and run requests through user credentials. Suppose you have an AWS or Azure environment. In that case, you can maintain the connection between on-premises and cloud-based machines, which is the type of setup in the organization I'm working for. You can directly call some of the services via VisualCron on your local on-premises machine, and I found that an excellent feature of the tool."

"I love VisualCron because we previously spent a lot of time writing Power switches to connect to SQL Server. VisualCron makes it easier to execute services or connect to FileZilla by only adding the credentials to the master credentials stored in the solution."

More VisualCron pros

Cons

"The product should improve its RPA capabilities."

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

"I've had some issues with the stability."

"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."

"Some automation features on some programs did not work smoothly."

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

"What needs improvement in WinAutomation by Softomotive is its stability. Stability is quite important to me. Another area for improvement in the solution is robot scheduling because it's not 100% accurate, in particular, it's 90% accurate. The monitoring of the robot could also be improved because it's not very straightforward, and you have to look in a few places or at least two places which means that monitoring is not a one-glance process."

"The debugging tools require improvement as well as the monitoring which goes along with it."

More Microsoft Power Automate cons

"The documentation is a bit weak."

"I want to improve the UI in VisualCron, as it's not as user-friendly, particularly when setting up the task scheduler. If you're familiar with the tool, then no problem, but if not, you'll have a problem typing text because sometimes, the cursor points to other places, so there's an issue with text box alignment in VisualCron. That was painful for me when I was just a VisualCron novice, but when you become used to it, there won't be a problem."

"The error timeout and info could be better. When making web request calls, it will time out sometimes and we won't get any useful info out of the error response."

"An area for improvement in VisualCron is its cluttered interface. It isn't always easy to find all functionalities, so what VisualCron needs is a user interface expert who can improve the interface. There's a learning curve in terms of finding what you need from the interface of VisualCron. The technical support for VisualCron also needs improvement in terms of response time. Currently, there's no live support or hotline you can call to get quick answers, so this is what I'd like to see in the next version of VisualCron. A less cluttered and more streamlined interface, where you don't need to hunt for some of the features, is also what I'd like to see in the next VisualCron update."

"VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve."

"VisualCron is software, and you will experience performance degradation when you scale up. VisualCron takes too much memory or CPU power. We have to increase the hardware resources of a specific server or system."

"VisualCron seems to operate like an efficient machine when it comes to improvements and enhancements and new features. I always appreciate the quick response I get when bringing up an issue or coming up with suggestions. I've mentioned before that it would be great to see a move away from SQLCE and XML configuration files."

"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."

More VisualCron cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"It is free for us. It is embedded directly in the Office package."

"The price of the solution is reasonable. I rate the pricing a five out of ten."

"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."

"The solution is $150 per month for the unattended add-on, and the normal Power Automate comes with an E3 license."

"Initially, we had a Microsoft account for Office 365. Later, we discovered that our license included access to Power Automate at no additional cost. There was a small fee for additional features, but it was negligible compared to the benefits. There are not any additional fees required to use the solution."

"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."

"It has a cost-effective pricing model compared to competitors."

More Microsoft Power Automate pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."

"ROI is one month."

"We are fine with a rather cheap setup. Licensing with VisualCron is fair. You have a simple one-year licence in different sizes. There isn't a licensing jungle with hundreds of options and opt-ins."

"ROI is 95 percent."

"VisualCron is correctly priced because it wasn't very cheap, and it wasn't overly expensive, so the price for it was set correctly. When my previous company bought VisualCron, it was €800 per server per year. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing for VisualCron a five because it was just right. The tool was affordable, and it has one of the most competitive pricing in the market."

"The price is a bit high."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

27%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Healthcare Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

RPA that Bots can run without centralized control?

Yes, Attended Bots which can run without centralized control Module. RPA Tools like Automation Anywhere, uiPath ,Power Automation they do support this.

See all answers

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 ‌is‌ ‌no‌ ‌coding‌ ‌experience‌ ‌necessary,‌ ‌and‌ ‌appreciate‌ ‌the‌ ‌automated‌...

See all answers

How is Automation Anywhere compared to Microsoft Power Automate?

‌Neither‌ ‌solution‌ ‌requires‌ ‌any‌ ‌coding‌ ‌experience,‌ ‌and‌ ‌both‌ ‌are‌ ‌easy‌ ‌to‌ ‌use‌ ‌and‌ ‌have‌ ‌great‌ ‌drag-and‌ ‌drop‌ ‌functionality.‌ ‌The‌ ‌training‌ ‌and‌ ‌resources‌ ‌for‌ ‌A...

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What do you like most about VisualCron?

The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VisualCron?

The price is a bit high. However, it is okay.

See all answers

What needs improvement with VisualCron?

The documentation is a bit weak. The tool must provide a better set of documentation.

See all answers

Comparisons

UiPath vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 34% of the time

Blue Prism vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 20% of the time

Automation Anywhere vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 18% of the time

Fortra's Automate vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 3% of the time

IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vs Microsoft Power Automate

Compared 2% of the time

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Control-M vs VisualCron

Compared 19% of the time

Stonebranch vs VisualCron

Compared 7% of the time

OpCon vs VisualCron

Compared 7% of the time

MOVEit vs VisualCron

Compared 6% of the time

ActiveBatch by Redwood vs VisualCron

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power Automate

December 2024

Download Microsoft Power Automate product report

Buyer's Guide

VisualCron

November 2024

Download VisualCron product report

Also Known As

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

No data available

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Microsoft

NetCart AB

Overview

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.

VisualCron automates tasks like file encryption, scheduling SQL jobs, system integration, data workflow management, and application triggering, making it ideal for handling nightly syncs, FTP server file replacements, job scheduling, and invoice processing.

VisualCron provides an efficient automation solution with features like error and status reporting, API connections, PGP key generation, encryption file creation, and bulk SQL script execution. It simplifies task automation through its mail and event triggers, job variables, conditional execution, and logging with error alerts. Users benefit from its integration capabilities, scheduling flexibility, visual interface, and support for databases and credential management without extensive coding.

What are the most important features?

Simplicity: Easy-to-use interface for seamless automation.
Mail and Event Triggers: Automate tasks based on specific events.
Job Variables: Customize tasks using various input variables.
Conditional Execution: Execute tasks based on predefined conditions.
Error Alerts: Logging and error reporting to ensure task reliability.
Integration Capabilities: Easily connect and integrate with systems and APIs.
Scheduling Flexibility: Create complex schedules with ease.
Visual Interface: User-friendly GUI for efficient management.
Database Support: Manage and automate database tasks efficiently.
Credential Management: Securely handle credentials for various tasks.
PowerShell Commands: Execute PowerShell commands directly.

What are the benefits or ROI users should look for in the reviews?

Efficiency: Streamline and automate repetitive tasks to save time.
Cost Savings: Reduce manual labor and associated costs.
Reliability: Ensure consistency and accuracy in task execution.
Integration: Enhance workflows by integrating with different systems.
Flexibility: Adjust quickly to changes and handle complex scheduling needs.
Support: Benefit from extensive post-sales support and configuration options.
Innovation: Foster innovation by eliminating the need for coding.

Industries like finance, healthcare, and logistics implement VisualCron to automate data workflows, secure file transfers, and schedule critical tasks. It is used to streamline invoice processing, manage large-scale data operations, and ensure compliance through encryption and error reporting. VisualCron enhances operational efficiency, scalability, and security in various sectors, making it essential for businesses requiring robust automation capabilities.

Sample Customers

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

7 Eleven, ABB Sécheron SA, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Amazon Europe Core, Apple, Assa Abloy, Aston Martin, Banco Santander, BMW (Australia)

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power Automate vs. VisualCron

December 2024

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