Microsoft Power Automate Reviews

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. 

We use Microsoft's Power Automate in two major fields. Our first use case is reducing the time it takes a user to repeat a task, like, for example, rewriting some physical information in our system. We used Power Automate to extract information from physical documents and to digitalize them. We also use it to put these documents in the correct system as soon as we receive them. We are using a robot agent to do that now for our finance department, for example. 

Our other use case with Power Automate is system reconfiguration. Before, users had to manually reconfigure the software to configure our project. When we had a major update, for example, we have to change it manually with the data for the software. Now we have a process for automatically changing that data.

We choose Power Automate because it allows us to monitor our process and know where we can gain some time. We have a cockpit that shows us all the workflow for all automated tasks in place. We have a good overview of our processes now thanks to Power Automate. This is cool because previously we organized our processes on either paper or in a Word document. This was not really an accurate reflection of the tasks taking place. Now, we can have an interactive mapping of our processes.

There is room for improvement in the collaboration between the digital team and the business partners because Power Automate is not an easy tool to use. Our business partner does not have a clue about how to use Power Automate so it would be great to have an easy user interface that business partners can understand.

There are a few limitations to the tool. For example, you can't have 100,000 interactions in an hour. I would like to see that worked out. 

It would also be good if Microsoft contacted customers directly about building their own connectors. 

We have been testing the solution since last summer, I think. We have just two solutions in production.

For now, it has been a good solution for us in terms of stability, but we don't know yet whether we will have mass production and who will use a lot of interactions per hour.

We have not had any direct interactions with their tech support. We use their forum mostly. Microsoft has a good community.

We ran into issues during the setup because our system is not entirely on the cloud or on major solutions. So we had a lot of information in a system we made. The integration of our system into Power Automate was a bit tricky. We had to put a data lake in place before automating anything because we were not very structured in terms of data. Our major issue was cleaning up the data.

We choose 10 premium licenses for our digital team. We do not have a license for everyone in the organization. That's why it would be good to have a free view-only interface for stakeholders. They don't need a premium license because they will never use it to build anything but they needed insight into what is going on to relay the information forward to other stakeholders or clients. 

I am not managing the pricing, but I think it is pretty standard for solutions of that type. However, there is always room for improvement. 

I would not recommend Power Automate to all organizations because whether or not it will work out for them will depend on a number of factors. If the organization is all in one Microsoft environment or well-connected with the cloud, it can be really good. But, the organization will have quite some costs if in a Google or Amazon environment. 

If an organization uses Power Automate, it is best if they use Power Automate's other tools like Power BI and Power Apps. That's why I think the pricing could be lower as you should be able to get several solutions in a bundle. This should be an option during relicensing, for example. 

Someone using Power Automate should also have a basic understanding of databases, Power Apps, Power BI, and Azure. You have to know the full environment to get the most out of this tool. In other words, training is mandatory.

The most common use is for digitizing Excel forms or Excel spreadsheets. We use Power Automate to digitalize all Excel-based processes on a SharePoint page and link the libraries with the transactional data from the client.

It is cloud-based. It can be deployed on a public, private, or hybrid cloud. It depends on the client. It is linked with the Microsoft license that a client has. If the license is hybrid, then Automate is hybrid as well.

By digitizing Excel spreadsheets, we reduced the errors in information transactions. We also reduced the time for the internal processes and improved operational efficiency.

The cloud solution on Azure makes it easy for us to take care of the security, which is a big deal for us. We can use the same permissions that we already have in place in Azure Active Directory and just duplicate them for the forms in Power Automate and the SharePoint page, so managing security is very easy for us.

Workflow management is what clients select the most. It is very intuitive and pretty much drag-and-drop, so we can create escalation, decision flows, and if-else conditions pretty much by dragging and dropping boxes. Even someone who is not technical can develop a workflow for the business.

It is very easy to use. It doesn't need a technical resource to create and maintain forms. The UX/UI is very similar throughout the Microsoft platform, including SharePoint and Office 365. 

It integrates with all sorts of databases, such as SQL Server and Oracle Database, which is a plus. 

While working with non-structured data (like logs and user tracking information that usually fits the criteria of big data), all the data sources must pass by a data quality process via any ETL tool before linking and publishing any information to the automation workflows and forms. This process is important to standardize all the content and format types for the columns and fields in the tables that will be used to show data in the front end.

 The ability to read non-structured data and provide insights into how to sanitize and organize data automatically is something that I'd like to be covered in the next releases.

I have been using this solution for two and a half years.

We never had any downtime, so it is pretty good.

It is very scalable. We are working with hundreds of forms at the same time, and some of our clients have thousands of people working simultaneously on the same form, so it is very scalable.

Most of its users are function-based. They are process leads in their companies. We currently have more than 1,000 users.

It is being used a lot. It is currently our most important tool for team efficiency. We plan to increase its usage in the near future. We have lots of other internal applications and processes in the pipeline, especially for functional areas, which can be moved from paper and Excel to a SharePoint form by using Power Automate.

The response time depends on your license level. If you are a gold partner, the response time is in a couple of hours, which is pretty decent. If you are an individual user or a company that doesn't have any L1, L2, or L3 licenses, the response time is up to 48 hours. So, it all depends on your license level with Microsoft, but whatever they say in the contract, they do respect that, which is good.

We were already users of other Microsoft solutions such as SharePoint and Teams, so when Power Automate became decent for the market users, we just adopted it naturally. Our experience with their technical support was good. They were able to answer our questions and solve our issues within the response time in our contract.

I used Blue Prism a couple of years ago, and now I'm using Power Automate. Blue Prism is bigger and way more expensive, and they charge by the number of users. Microsoft was cheaper, and they charge by the number of forms. So, it was way cheaper for us to move to Power Automate from Blue Prism.

It was pretty straightforward. Microsoft had two solutions: Microsoft Flow and Power Apps. Microsoft combined these two solutions and called it Microsoft Power Automate. It is pretty seamless because if you're already using Microsoft licenses, everything integrates with Office 365, SharePoint, and Teams. So, it is very seamless.

It took some days to create the front end of all the forms. Creating a whole page takes a couple of hours for a SharePoint administrator or developer or even a functional person, and we have hundreds of those. It took a few weeks to create the entire front end, but the connections were done in minutes. They were very simple.

It was done in-house. In terms of maintenance, once the forms are created, we have just one full-time employee taking care of the maintenance of those 100 forms, and that's enough because it is pretty much adding or deleting fields. It is pretty simple to maintain.

I don't know the exact number. 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.

I would advise others to first look at the process and then the technology. The biggest issue is that people think that whatever they have in the current system can be digitized and automated, but it is better to first do the roadmap, understand the process from A to B, and then design the flow on paper. After the flow on paper seems okay, then go to the tool and create the form.

I would rate Microsoft Power Automate a nine out of 10. Big data support is something that I'd like to be covered a lot. The other piece that my business needs is already taken care of by the solution. Big data support is the only piece that is missing currently.

More scripting capabilities could be included in Microsoft Power Automate.

The product could be more stable. I rate the stability as seven out of ten.

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

There needs to be direct contact for the technical support team. The users need to submit a maintenance request and then wait for a callback or update from the support team.

Neutral

The initial setup process was relatively simple, with additional modules that could be imported during the setup.

Only some individuals typically handle maintenance, as Microsoft automatically manages most updates. Additional maintenance tasks are required only when necessary, such as for critical updates or multi-case scenarios.

The platform is averagely priced. I rate the pricing a five out of ten.

I have used Microsoft Power Automate to develop mobile apps and other applications. Additionally, we have implemented workflows and automated solutions for various processes.

It helps with the feedback mechanism, where we need to determine the relevant team and obtain their email addresses.

Microsoft could enhance the learning experience by offering more video resources.

I rate it a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for dashboard reporting, RPA, and account management.

The product has helped us with support generation. We supported a client who required 42 hours of manual work every month. The solution enabled us to automate the process and save time.

The solution is integrated with Microsoft. It can be integrated with different platforms. The product is very reliable and very easy to use. Anyone can learn to use it.

The product should improve its RPA capabilities.

The product should add AI capabilities.

I have been using this solution for four to five years.

I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

The initial setup is easy. I rate the ease of setup a nine out of ten.

The time taken for deployment depends on the project. A small project would take a week to deploy. RPA, on the other hand, takes two months.

I use the latest version of the solution. We use the solution daily. People using the solution should maximize their usability to get a good return on investment. Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

We use Power Automate for applicant tracking. We automated around 80 percent of the process. 

Power Automate's out-of-the-box integration is nice. 

Microsoft could offer more AI education and training.

I have used Power Automate for a few years.

I rate Power Automate seven out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Power Automate seven out of 10 for scalability.

I rate Power Automate eight out of 10 for ease of setup. We did it in-house.

I rate Microsoft Power Automate four out of 10 for affordability. It's a little more expensive than average.

I rate Microsoft Power Automate six out of 10 overall. It has a lot of integration capabilities out of the box, but it isn't always accurate. 

We are using Microsoft Power Automate for automating approval.

The most valuable features of Microsoft Power Automate are user-friendliness and low coding functionality.

When you try to create a flow or work on the flow in Microsoft Power Automate you cannot undo changes. There are no options to edit or, undo an action. This feature would be useful. The editing option within the flow can be enhanced.

In a future release, they could extend the flow run limits. When the flow is running it will be terminated.

I have been using Microsoft Power Automate for approximately three years.

Microsoft Power Automate is reliable.

I rate the stability of Microsoft Power Automate a nine out of ten.

We have five developers and IT managers that are using the solution.

The solution is scalable.

I rate the scalability of Microsoft Power Automate a nine out of ten.

We opened a few tickets with support from Microsoft Power Automate. The support is responsive.

I have not used a solution similar to Microsoft Power Automate.

We did the implementation of the solution in-house.

The solution is managed by the global tenant. We have three people who manage it.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Microsoft Power Automate a nine out of ten.

The primary use case for this solution includes automating process work with optical character recognition. Companies can also automate document processing with Microsoft Power Automate.

From my personal experience of using Microsoft Power Automate, I think that the automatic document processing feature is helpful for many organizations in streamlining administrative processes. It is a very good feature. It has helped many enterprises to process documents without spending much time on them.

I would recommend removing the AI Builder feature from the automatic document processing functionality. The tool can serve even better with free automatic document processing features, it shouldn’t only be available in the trial version.

I have been using this solution for a couple of months now.

I have found Microsoft Power Automate to be a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution but I also think that the scalability of this solution depends on the type of organizations that are using it. For instance, public enterprises like government organizations can make very good use of this solution. I plan to propose the tool to my organization. It’s still in the loading phase and I have not got any feedback on it.

I have not felt the need to contact the customer service and support team since most of my doubts were resolved through the tutorials and tech instructions available on the website, which are very helpful.

I have previously used Power BI. I came across Power Automate while looking for other Power platforms. I saw the different features that Power Automate offers and so I chose it.

It was easy to set up. Once you have access to the portal, navigate to the automatic document processing feature where you can see many examples. There are a total of just two or three steps that you need to follow for completing the entire setup process.

The setup took a couple of months. It requires much concentration like when you are training your model to analyze the documents. For example, when you are setting up the automatic process document, the tool will ask you to try with five documents. Also, we will have to look into the different fields from which we are going to extract the information from the documents.

Once the document upload is done and the training is finished, you will need to locate the locations where other documents are located. It’s recommended to use either the OneDrive or Sharepoint locations. Power Automate will locate the schema of the document, connect with it and the document upload will be done. When the upload is done, the AI Builder will apply the OCR. After the completion of the OCR, the information will be extracted and put on other documents like Excel. 

I am not sure about the setup cost, pricing or licensing since I use the trial version.

I would rate this tool a nine out of ten. 

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 are using it for automating legacy systems as well as email verifications. I haven't touched on the APIs yet, but the use case is for user accessibility to and from data sources.

The solution is still in the development phase. It is not in the production run at the moment. Therefore, at the moment, there is not a significant visible improvement.

In terms of deployment, it is a mix of hybrid cloud and on-premises. Microsoft is the cloud provider. It is a single environment deployed over multiple branches in each province of the country. Currently, the version that we are using is the latest Microsoft release.

Its ease of use is most valuable. A lot of the bulk functionality is done either through standalone or custom connectors and standard API processes. 

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.

I have been using this solution for three months.

It is highly stable with good performance.

It is extremely scalable. It integrates with a lot of existing systems, both Microsoft-related and non-Microsoft-related, and it is extremely extensible. The additional support validation and software integrations that are available are limitless.

Our experience of the technical support on the solution has been minimal because there have not been a lot of technical issues with the implementation. The turnaround time for any type of technical query is usually a day to two days, but before that time period is up, they either have a solution or a guaranteed workaround.

We previously used Automation Anywhere. We switched because of the ease of use. The functionality of Automation Anywhere is for a very specialized use case scenario. They focus on a lot of areas, but Power Automate has a lot of simpler solutions and easier approaches. For example, we have a solution in place that has three or four RPA scripts for a single process. With the Power Automate solution, we have a single script running for maybe five sub-processes. It is a lot more streamlined and consistent.

At the moment, it is still in development and is a matter of integration. It does require a bit more technical know-how, but it is mainly done from the environment perspective and from an administrative point of view. 

From a development point of view, the crossover is pretty much the same for going, for instance, from Blue Prism to UiPath, or UiPath to Automation Anywhere. There's a transition period level of difficulty. So, from a development point of view, it's fairly the same, but from a technical point of view, Microsoft does require a bit more technical know-how to get the environment set up.

With some of the integration conversions we've done from one platform to the other, from a development standpoint, it has taken us close to a month in the development environments, and this is interrupted. If we had an uninterrupted conversion, I would estimate a maximum of a week. We just need to get it converted and implemented.

We've been doing everything in-house with direct help from a Microsoft representative. We have a single person to take care of it. It doesn't require a massive deployment team.

So far, based on the development calculators that we've been running, it's running far smoother and far more efficiently and faster. So, the estimated return on investment over the past three months that we've been calculating has been looking far higher than the Automation Anywhere solution.

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.

There are different development plans that you can use. Additional licenses might be required for additional features, such as your Azure Logic or your Dataverse capacity. There is a limited capacity package that you can purchase, and then you have to have an additional license for added capacity.

I would advise paying critical attention to the environment that you're setting up. User access roles, either through Active Directory or through the database control method, should be the key focus. After that, you need to assign roles and licenses as necessary. From there on, you need to integrate the system. 

The Microsoft documentation portal for both cloud and on-premises is going to be the easiest to follow. All the solutions are there. For technical assistance from the Microsoft side, contact details are available on the documentation portal for any type of query.

I would rate it a solid eight out of ten. For me to give it a ten, there should be seamless integration between both the cloud and the on-premises solutions. There should be the exact same or similar functionality between the two to make the entire automation process a bit more streamlined.