Microsoft Power Automate Reviews

Our primary use case for Microsoft Power Automate is in the direction of citizen developers, mainly small automations built by business people themselves. We also use it for automations in finance departments with Power Apps.

Hyperautomation strategies are built around UiPath and Microsoft Power Platform, improving service delivery. It is easy to learn for business users, facilitating quick setup of automations.

Microsoft Power Automate is a no-code platform which is very easy to learn, allowing businesses to build their own small automations. Templated flows enhance automation capabilities, and document understanding is also highly valuable. The integration with AI in process automation is anticipated.

The licensing model could be improved to make it easier to understand and follow, as it is difficult to determine if the embedded license provides all functionalities or if additional licenses are needed.

I have been working with Microsoft Power Automate since 2020, about four years.

Once you know how to build automations and bypass limitations, they are stable and work correctly.

Microsoft Power Automate is best suited for citizen developers. Managing it at the enterprise level with more complex business processes can be more challenging.

I am satisfied with Microsoft's customer support as we are a partner and receive fast responses.

Positive

The setup requires time for configuration and may require an administrator. It is time-consuming.

Our customers have seen return on investment with Microsoft Power Automate. However, it's important to consider licensing limitations to avoid high costs.

Costs depend on the automation complexity. Licensing can be based on per user or per flow, with the potential for high costs if not carefully managed. The cost for licensing can increase due to licensing fees.

When evaluating, it depends on needs. UiPath is more mature for enterprise-level automation but more expensive, while Microsoft Power Automate is a good start for small automations and for those already using Microsoft products.

I recommend trying Microsoft Power Automate. It is a low-code platform and is easy to learn, allowing quick start to automation.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Our clients utilize Power Automate for data collection and management in various ways. One primary use is integrating Customer Engagement (CE) with finance, operations, or other business systems. Additionally, we employ Power Automate to facilitate additional processes, such as automating workflows.

Firstly, enhancing Power Automate to work synchronously instead of asynchronously would eliminate the need for additional coding, saving time in project implementation. Secondly, addressing the limitations on the number of processes in Power Automate tracking would enhance its usability and flexibility for various scenarios. Incorporating a more intuitive user interface or experience would be beneficial for overall solution implementation. While PowerApps can provide this to some extent, it faces limitations, particularly with large datasets. Overcoming these challenges through enhancements or optimization would be valuable for implementing enterprise-class solutions effectively.

We have been using Microsoft Power Automate for 2 years.

I rate the platform's stability an eight out of ten.

Certain limitations apply to product scalability in enterprise environments or critical systems. We work with medium-sized businesses.

The deployment time depends on specific project requirements. Complicated configurations take three to four months to complete, while certain simple projects can be completed within two weeks.

I rate the process an eight out of ten.

When we purchase the Microsoft Dynamics license, the Power Automate license is often free, albeit with some limitations, such as a certain number of transactions per user. Given the substantial allocation provided, this arrangement typically suffices for most users. However, if premium features are desired or the project demands exceed the allocated resources, additional charges may apply accordingly.

I rate the pricing a six out of ten.

One of the automations we've implemented with Power Automate that significantly saves time involves discount application on quotations. When a discount is applied at the quotation level, we utilize it to automatically apply line-level discounts to the respective lines, distributing them equally.

The feature most useful for integrating different applications is its ability to create flows. Specifically, we use flows to integrate with finance and operations.

The cloud-based nature of Power Automate has greatly benefited our workflows. It operates exclusively on the cloud, eliminating the need for on-premises deployment. It enables low-code development, eliminating the need to create plugins. It saves a significant amount of time, reduces efforts, and enhances reliability in our automation processes.

I rate it an eight out of ten.

I've primarily used some automations, however, it was just for practice. I automated a few activities here and there. I have not used it extensively. For example, I can use it to read some emails or share files, or pull information from Sharepoint, et cetera. It can help me create new records for auditing purposes. It can pull data to show we are in compliance. 

The most valuable features include its ease of use for automation creation. It's very easy to use. We can go online and watch videos and figure out how to use it. 

It can help us improve many processes and workflows. It helps with efficiencies. 

The functionalities are very similar to other types of languages. It's not hard to learn, which means we'll be able to make more workflows in the future. 

It is stable.

It can scale well.

The solution comes bundled with Microsoft 365. 

I haven't come across any downsides to the solution.

We'd like to see even more free courses to help people learn to automate smarter. 

For countries in our region, it's not very well known. Microsoft has to do a better job of advertising it and how it can help businesses so that it becomes more well-known and widely used. 

So far, the solution has been stable. The workflows have been good. There are no bugs or glitches. 

The scalability has been fine so far. I haven't come across anything that would make me think it wouldn't be. 

We plan to use it more to make more workflows in the future. 

I've never used technical support in the past. 

In our company, we have people looking for new opportunities and tools to help the sales force in automation matters. 

The pricing is not clear to me. I don't deal with that. We have Office 365 and the solution is included in that bundle. 

It's a good product. If a company needs to automate something, it's a very useful tool.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We could use it more. It's still new to me. 

I'm using Microsoft Power Automate to automate some of my processes. Before using this solution it took me sometimes one day to complete tasks and now I can perform them much faster.

The most valuable features of Microsoft Power Automate are the ease of use and the templates that are provided. I no longer need to make the document from scratch. I can search for what template I want and then it only requires me to modify it a bit for my needs. Additionally, it's helped improve my productivity and efficiency, and at the same time, it's quicker.

Microsoft Power Automate could improve by adding more features to the free version it would be good because there are many features that you have to pay for. There are some functions that IT personnel, like myself, have a difficult time using and could be made more user-friendly.

In a feature release, it would be a benefit if Microsoft Power Automate could integrate with Google. I'm dealing with a lot of external systems, and it would be great if the site was able to connect with Google, because some of the flow requirements use Google. It is very difficult to do it.

I have used Microsoft Power Automate within the last 12 months.

Microsoft Power Automate is stable.

There were several people using this solution in my previous company, and in my current company, I am the only one working with Microsoft Power Automate.

The support from Microsoft Power Automate is good.  If I do not know how to use it they have the Microsoft community. I can ask questions on that platforms and straight away they provide me the answer.

I have not used other solutions previously.

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.

Microsoft should market Power Automate more to companies' operation personnel, it would be better because then the operations personnel would know there is a solution to make their life and tasks easier.

I rate Microsoft Power Automate a ten out of ten.

We've just started with the solution. 

We are exploring Power Automate and trying to get rid of some of the mundane tasks and we're seeking ways to increase the productivity. We're trying to do the automation on it. 

It's not my day-to-day work; I'm into infrastructure. I'm basically heading the APAC team here in the APAC region. I got a request from a couple of users to get rid of the setup of mundane tasks. 

The solution is booming at the moment. They're adding lots of features all of the time. 

The initial setup is very simple.

There's a great community around the product that is very helpful and active.

The solution is free to use if you have a Microsoft E3 license. 

Power Automate has a lot to do. What I've seen, for example, is that UiPath seems to be very efficient and you don't need to have any sort of training. With Power Automate, training is needed. You need to know how to work with pretty advanced queries. They need to add more training materials to their offering. 

It's not as user-friendly as a solution such as UiPath, which is really easy to use. 

Creating unattended bots is quite expensive. 

Having the connectors with multiple platforms would be great. They have connectors for SAP, yet they don't have a connector for the Oracle ERP, for example, or Oracle HCM. They should come up with multiple connectors where it would ease integrating with any other tool, rather than having to create a custom connector and trying to integrate with a third-party tool. UiPath offers multiple connectors and it is very useful. It makes our life very simple. On the fly, we should be able to integrate and talk to the other applications directly without struggling.

We've been working with the solution for just six months. It's only been half of a year so far. 

The community that surrounds the product is very active and quite helpful. 

The initial setup is very easy. It was very simple. In order to do automation, it is very easy to configure everything. It's also easy to maintain. The only part that is kind of complex, for example, is where you have to get into the website to get the data and try to feed the data into an Excel sheet. That happens if you're trying to automate some complex yet mundane task. That's where it helps to have someone on board that knows what they are doing and understands the solution quite well.

Since we are on E3, we get Power Automate as a free service from Microsoft, for everybody in the organization.

I'm from India and anything that I look at, in terms of pricing, be it UiPath or Power Automate the pricing appears to be on the higher side. That said, we're on the E3 Microsoft license and the price for Power Automate comes along with that, as a part of the subscription. It basically covers the basic functionality of Power Automate. In that sense, it doesn't hurt us too much. However, if I have to go set up an unattended bot, it is very expensive. That's something that for sure that I would like to highlight with Power Automate. If you'd like to go for an unattended bot it's quite expensive.

I have looked at other solutions. I was exploring and trying to compare which is the right tool for our environment. I was trying to compare where exactly Microsoft intersects with other services such as UiPath or Automation Anywhere.

We'll likely stay with Power Automate. Power Automate fits our requirements in terms of what we are looking for. If anything is required in terms of the desktop automation that would require us to buy a separate license we may move to something else, however, at this point, we do not really foresee anything that we couldn't do with this product.

I would urge users to stay on top of Microsoft by leveraging the community. They're very cooperative and trying to support us when we ask questions in the community, there'll be somebody who will always jump in and try to help us out. There are multiple forums, apart from the Microsoft community as well. I see multiple websites or blogs where you could find the solution for a question you have. There is a lot of documentation out there.

For working a bit with the solution and comparing it to options such as Automation Anywhere and UiPath, I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten so far. 

Power Automate is a quite powerful tool. It helps you automate your daily processes. Being an RPA tool, it allows you to define certain logic and execute certain tasks at a scheduled time or for a certain event. I use it in conjunction with our SharePoint site to let our stakeholders know that something has been done or updated, and it kicks off another flow. We use it quite regularly.

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.

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 have been using this solution for over a year.

It is a stable product.

It is definitely scalable. If you want to integrate Power Automate with third-party software and other platforms, a technical person is needed. If you just want to connect Power Automate with Microsoft's suite of services, you can easily do it. They also have their own in-built plugins for certain third-party vendors. More and more plugins will come in the future because more and more people want to connect to Power Automate. I can already see Trello and Jira creating the plugins. There are still a lot of third-party vendors that are not there on it, but we can basically go ahead and create our own if needed.

Power Automate is a connectivity tool, so it has the ability to connect to other platforms. If they're able to do that, other platforms start making more money because I can get a flow that directly connects to another vendor and helps me achieve what I want to do, rather than having a tech person give me estimates and getting that done, which takes a longer time.

In terms of the number of users, we are a big organization with around 15,000 people globally. I don't know how many people use it, but the awareness is coming slowly within the organization and more and more people are becoming aware. I will continue using this solution.

I haven't actually reached out to technical support, which speaks for the usability of it. It is quite user-friendly, so I didn't really have to reach out to technical support.

I did attend a one-day workshop for Power Apps, which was great. For Power Automate, we actually have regular IT sessions. Our IT team has set up regular training sessions for learning different services from Microsoft, and one of them was Power Automate. That's where we got the awareness of Power Automate. That was a year and a half ago, and that was when we basically said, "Oh, wow, this is great!" At that time, it was called Flow. Now, it is called Automate.

We have it on our system. I don't really know if we need a separate license.

I would highly recommend Power Automate to anyone who is quite keen on RPAs and wants to automate certain processes from a business standpoint.

Microsoft is doing really well in this space. There are very few RPA tools, and Microsoft has been successful in penetrating the market. There are very few of them who are on every single PC. Any business, bank, or enterprise that has Microsoft on their PCs and has subscribed to this at an enterprise level are given Power Automate. The market penetration of Power Automate is really good. As more and more users start using it, they will obviously come up with issues. I definitely found a few challenges, but nothing with which Google Search couldn't help. More and more people are using Power Automate, and I can easily find answers on the web. It is already great, and it is going to go quite well if Microsoft goes ahead and starts building more of these tools.

I would rate Power Automate a nine out of ten. It is a great product.

We have clients in a number of different industries. We were evaluating Power Automate for a hospital in Kansas City. We were looking at a couple of different use cases with regards to their vendor onboarding and some of the back-office processes. 

The initial setup is pretty easy.

The entire product is pretty easy to pick up and learn. We've got some developers and some software engineers that have picked it up. We have RPA specialists that are are deep specialists in UiPath, and they picked up Power Automate relatively quickly. We have guys that are trained in multiple platforms such as Automation Anywhere or Blue Prism and they got it right away.

The solution lacks maturity. That will come with time.

The complementary suite of capabilities with regards to task capture and being able to self-document a process needs improvement. The whole document handling aspect, OCR recognition and capabilities, need to incorporate some more of an AI type of approach with document extraction and document handling. 

Being able to handle various types of forms and complex documents is important. Obviously, we handle a lot of documents like invoices that could have multiple formats and multiple pages of content, and very complex material contracts. That area is where it shows that UiPath has come a long way and Microsoft has a ways to go. 

If I look at the suite of tools that UiPath has, it's very robust and extensive. There are complimentary tools that help determine the applicability of a process. Being able to have tools that help assess things like a business case, savings, applicability, etc., relatively quickly, which we see with UiPath, for example, is integral to a good product. 

I've been using the solution for less than a year.

A criticism of Microsoft is that they typically bundle everything together, like with the Office 365 or Dynamics 365 or whatever the package of all the different options are. You get it whether you want it or not. The problem with that is, the content that you're giving away in the bundle is either not fully baked, or fully thought out or all that valuable. Some might be buggy or not do exactly what they are supposed to.

Clients are frustrated that they're getting stuff that they don't want. They'll ask us "why am I getting all these other packages as part of my bundle, that don't make sense?". I would rather see a really innovative and leading tool, rather than a whole bunch of tools that do lots of things. 

We haven't really reached out to technical support. We haven't really gone into production. Most of the issues, anything that we've had to do technically, we've figured out.

The initial setup is very straightforward. Our team picked it up really quickly. The question is if it's really solving the trickier problems on not. The more complex problems, is where the value is going to be. Process automation is becoming a commodity. Therefore, the differentiation is in really being able to handle the more complex problems, especially at an enterprise level.

We're able to handle implementations ourselves. We're a reseller and gold partner with Microsoft.

I'm unsure as to what the licensing costs are. It's not something that I generally deal with.

We're a vendor, therefore, we tend to use various solutions according to our client's needs. We've evaluated UiPath against Power Automate, for example.

We have evaluated Power Automate and we're trying to get some competency there. I don't believe it's to the same level as where you have the maturity as UiPath.

We've also looked at Blue Prism and found their capabilities quite mature.

I'm using the latest version of the solution.

We would typically evaluate the solution as an on-Cloud deployment. However, we would use either cloud or on-premises deployment models, depending on the situation. It's not implemented in our organization. We're a vendor or a partner. We provide services to implement it.

I'd advise other organizations that if you are looking for industrial strength, I don't think this solution is quite it. However, if you're poking around and are going to use it lightly, it might be a way to venture into process automation. It would allow you to try it out without a big commitment. If there are companies that are serious about it, it's probably not the right option. It's not ready yet. Microsoft is maybe trying other ways to build out the capabilities, through acquisition avenues. Therefore, I'm not sure if that's the platform to get. There will be too many growing pains.

Overall, I'd rate the solution five out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for testing. For example, we made a website solution and we're open to trying new things because it's not on production yet. We use your flows in order to make some data automation. We fill our flows with some data and test to see if it's all correct.

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.

There's good Microsoft documentation that makes setup easy.

I am now a member of the digital transformation team, so we are making various products. We are just making the new projects, and developing them in the store. However, everything is new to us. We have are not working with this tool for more than six months. Therefore, it's hard to really know how well it works or what is lacking.

The solution needs more features so that it can better compete with competitors that have been on the market longer and are more mature.

Tech support could be more hands-on. Right now, they simply direct users to documentation instead of directly dealing with issues.

We've only just started using the solution. We have been using it for six months so far. It's been less than a year.

The stability of the solution is quite good. We're not in production, so we can't verify it 100% as we're just testing its capabilities. It's a rather new tool as well, so I don't know how much it's been tried and tested overall. However, overall, from what I've witnessed, it's been good.

The solution is quite new, both for us and on the market. I can't speak to the scalability as we haven't tried to scale it, and I don't know if many companies have really tried.

Although we have about 1,500 employees, we're still testing the solution, so not everyone has access to the product. Maybe five or six of us are actually on it and trying it out. We're all programmers.

As a developer, I can open a ticket with Microsoft, even though our DBA did teach us a lot about the solution. There's a lot of documentation and support online, so there's rarely a reason to have to actually open a ticket. So far, we've been satisfied with the arrangement, although, for the most part, their assistance is simply directing users to specific documentation.

Currently, we're just testing this solution, however, our organization is also using UiPath.

The initial setup isn't too complex. It's rather straightforward. You can just follow the documentation provided. Microsoft makes it very easy.

The solution is offered as part of a larger Microsoft license. It came as a solution in a bigger package. I'm not sure what the exact cost of it it, as it's not my area of expertise.

We have the Microsoft Dynamics Customer Enterprise license, and that covers for Automate and VI. Right now, we are doing some tests.

We're just working with four workflows. We're just really starting and haven't begun any big projects yet. We have 15 ongoing small projects.

I'm not sure of the exact version we are using.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. We're still testing it in production. We need more time with it to really get a sense of what it can do.