Microsoft Power Automate Reviews

The primary use we have for this product is a solution we created for a client to download daily data from a big company's website. It is a website tool for helping the company monitor the channel for managing their associate or partner responsibilities. They needed to visit the website every day — or as often as possible — so they could get information from the parent company, or collect orders or complaints from there.  

The most valuable thing about the product is that it is simple. When you go into the UI — and probably because Softomotive has about a 20-year long history in the IT industry — there are small details in the features that simplify how you work with it. It has all the big features like competing products but the detail is the kind of thing that makes users feel more comfortable using the product than if the details were not there. So those kinds of ease-of-use details are good things for Softomotive. The design is a GUI interface which is really for non-programmers. There is only the graphic user interface so it is simple to use.  

I think the primary thing that needs improvement in this product is the stability. It looks like it is easy-to-use and that is very nice, but it is more important to have a stable product and not just one that is easy-to-use. If I am working to create a simple process, odd errors occur quite often and in the middle of creating the process.  

The additional features I might like to see in the next release would be adding in some capabilities that other products already have. For example, some RPA process management framework. UiPath has something like that, RE Framework (Robotic Enterprise Framework), which is something in Softomotive we have to develop by ourselves. They have some premade processes in WinAutomation, but in running a process they should have some kind of error handling. For example, if there are tasks that should be run like 100 times and maybe it will freeze up at the 50th cycle, then the process should start again from 50, not from number one.  

If they can come up with some kind of framework and error handling, that will enhance the stability of the running processes made out of their solution. Right now I cannot resolve these main issues on my own and they should be added to the product.  

I started testing it out three months ago and have been using it for about two months.  

The stability of the product is not always good even when working on simple projects. This is not a bad product — I still use it — but the stability is something that they need to improve.  

Scalability is just buying more licenses. I worked for RPA consulting company and a development company and then I worked as an RPA developer. Then I was dispatched to a company to develop a process for that company. That company at the time purchased ProcessRobot, and then recently WinAutomation — I think five copies. They tested it and they are now trying to expand usage.  

I have been in touch with the technical support for WinAutomation by Softomotive a lot, really. The support is good and they provide the information or answers I need.  

I have used other products in the past. For example, by comparison, UiPath might be a little bit more stable but it is also a little bit more complicated in the UI/UX (User Interface/User Experience) than Softomotive. UiPath has not got some of the fancy features — just the basic ones. You just collect your UI elements or web elements and use the basic features. But say you maybe run a process 1000 times in both tools. UiPath seems to me in our testing to have fewer errors than Softomotive. But the complexity of the project or the stability would make me choose one product over the other.  

The setup in WinAutomation is kind of straightforward. I did not experience any trouble in the installation. ProcessRobot is a bit different and then UiPath is a little bit more complicated in the installation, but I think it is manageable as well.  

To actually get the product to work from the point of installation to where I could start running some processes took maybe a month the first time. But this included learning the product. Development with a little experience using the tool usually takes 15 days or about two weeks.  

We did the deployment of this by ourselves.  

Because I am in this industry, I am gathering information about different tools all the time. I use mainly WinAutomation and ProcessRobot and maybe UiPath for only a month. It is sometimes just to collect information and other times to consider other products.  

I think the advice I can give someone considering this solution has to do with making a smart choice. If someone wants to do some RPA project without already knowing a product, then he or she needs to take quite a long time to learn about RPA. You can look at the subject to learn about it and then learn a little bit about programming. There is not just one place to find this kind of tutorial and educational material. A single vendor will only provide what you need to use their product. Each vendor has different educational materials from different perspectives and different methods of teaching.  

If they want us to use Softomotive as a solution, they may have to do less work in learning about RPA because it is easy to use. But they should probably also visit the UiPath website or maybe AutomationAnywhere to compare the products and features. In many ways, the products are the same with the ultimate goal being that of creating a working RPA process.  

But I think there is a difference in the availability of information and user communities. UiPath has a little bit more structured education system and their community is larger. Because Softomotive is not as widely used it is more difficult to ask other users questions. You may have to direct your questions to the software team. But with UiPath, they can ask questions through a web portal like forum.uipath.com. It is less stressful to ask a question and get an answer from other users.  

ProcessRobot users also have a smaller community but they cannot ask questions from support unless they have the license for the product. WinAutomation is different. It is kind of a semi-commercial product but it is not totally free like open-source. There is also a little restriction on which questions you can ask of support before you invest in the product. They are very responsive and also helpful and their company helps people directly. You go through a sort of process. Maybe Softmotive might not always find an answer or give you a particular solution. Then you can also be a little creative and look for how something is solved using other RPA tools like consulting UiPath Academy. This might give you some hints about what you are trying to accomplish.  

Sometimes I have found that I kind of I reached a dead end. I had no answer as to where to go. I was just confused and then I could not find any answer from the Softmotive website and there was nowhere to ask the question that I had. Other vendors also have wonderful features and then I tested those to see what they could do. It is kind of a long process to develop a stable process and you have to continue to learn.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a seven. Of course to rate this software higher, they would need to work on the stability issues, enhance the available resources for users, and fill in some of the features that are missing which other products already have. 

* Added on 2020-07-17 : Now that Softomotive is acquired and WinAutomation have become a part of PowerAutomate and the price has gone down almost to half of its original price, the future is quite promising for this product.

We primarily use the product for credit card operation customer complaints.

The solution is great for some of our backend processes, for example, accounting and financial processes, and also for IT batch processes. 

The solution is very easy to set up.

The initial setup isn't too difficult. 

I heard from my team that it's quite immature. If you compare it against Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, it seems there is less experience in the product. The desktop version of the on-premise solution seems as if it's not as mature as Automation Anywhere.

We need a more powerful desktop option.

We started using the product this year. We've used it for about four months at this point. We're using it for three processes. 

We haven't used the solution for too long. We are at the beginning of automation. We are not ready to escalate just yet. However, we do plan to increase usage in the future. 

We've contacted local support in the past. At the time, it was just a simple question, as we have developed a simple process. We've just had small questions and issues.

Currently, we are also using Automation Anywhere. 

The product is easy to set up. Actually, we're a very large Microsoft customer. All of our solutions are mostly Microsoft. All of the security fields are already solved by Power Automate, which makes it easy to implement and to set up. It's not a problem at all.

Each process took us about two months to set up. Since we define them, it's quite easy. The operational processes are very easy to maintain and to operate. There are no issues with that. It's a simple three-step process, it's not a complex task.

We are looking for automation and are looking at options such as UiPath and Blue Prism.

We are looking for some solution for logistics.

We are a customer and an end-user. 

We are using the solution on our desktops, however, I don't know which exact version we are using. 

I'd advise other users that it is very simple to implement Power Automate, however, new users have to be careful with how they expand it and develop complex processes. That said, we don't have experience with processes more complex than a one or three-step process.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

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

It is very easy to connect, authenticate, and automate our daily routine tasks.

There are many things that need to improve, but not with the cloud side, it's desktop automation.

When you are doing desktop automation, they do not have a clear structure to create the code. This means that we have a poor chance of creating the project.

When creating sub-flows, there are no separate parameters. Instead, they are all combined together on the main page.

I would like to see improvements made to the Power Automate Desktop.

I have been exploring this product for one month.

Previously, I worked with Blue Prism and UiPath.

In my opinion, Blue Prism is far better than Power Automate, and UiPath is better than the desktop version.

Power Automate has the power to connect with different cloud sources, which is something that Blue Prism and UiPath do not have.

You can also create reusable code with Blue Prism and UiPath.

We are using the cloud version. There is nothing to install on our machine.

If you need to automate more on the cloud side, I would recommend Power Automate. If it's a third-party application they are trying to automate, I would try Blue Prism or UiPath.

I would rate Microsoft Power Automate a six out of ten.

Our primary use for this product is for the automation of manual tasks that may require some small integrations between systems. An example would be something like automatically sending an email from an action that is performed on our online system. Another might be writing data to our CRM database based on the input from an online form.  

The thing that this product has provided is a solution for quickly developing prototypes. We can create some new solutions really fast, test it to understand exactly which data is needed and then deploy the solution moving forward quickly through the process. That has been important for us. It is not necessarily that we all use Power Automate as a production-ready solution. It is more that we can use it to make prototypes that we can test with.  

I think the most valuable thing about this product for me is that it is really quick and easy to use. You do not need to have a lot of development skills to be able to create solutions. There is very little code involved, which is great, and it is very logical. It has also got great reporting. You can see the success and failure of each item that has been run through it. There are a lot of out-of-the-box connectors as well that make things easier.  

To improve the product, I think it would be great to see even more connectors available out-of-the-box and more maturity in that direction. I would also like to see some readiness for creating test and production environments so that you can differentiate which environment is you are working in.  

As far as additional features I am not sure what could really improve the product. It could maybe do with some more insights like triggered alerts.  

We have been using this product for about a year.  

So far we find that the stability of the product is really good. There is also good reporting if it is down for any reason. We have not really experienced stability problems or had any complaints about that.  

The scalability is really good. We have been able to use it for lots of different kinds of things. We do think that Power Automate is more for prototyping than for production-ready applications. You should probably upgrade to using Power Apps if you need something production-ready. You can build something quickly as a prototype in Power Automate and then upgrade to Power App to create a more refined application. Using those together means that what you develop is more production-ready. But in general, I think it is really scalable. There are lots of different use cases and lots of different solutions you can build and make available.  

There are not a lot of people currently using the product in the company — maybe like 10 or 12. We really want more and more people to use it, but it is not our job to roll it out to everybody. We just found it and thought it was interesting. We share it with people when they want to know how to try and automate something. But it is not something we had planned to really roll out company-wide as a solution initially.  

We will eventually roll it out to more people as we grow with it and discover more uses.  

We did not really use a different solution before Microsoft Power Automate. We were using Flow originally, which is what the same product was called before it became Power Automate. The name change was just within the last two months.  

The initial setup is really straightforward. It is immediately available out-of-the-box when you have Microsoft Cloud. You just click on the button and it is there ready to use.  

Our deployment took maybe a week or so. Most of that was just to play around and get familiar with it and become ready to start doing actual projects. Because you are building your own little mini-applications inside of it and the framework is available already, it is just a matter of learning how to work with the tool. You need to learn how to use it to build what you want to build.  

There were only two people involved in the deployment process. It did not require a lot of effort. It was just a couple of minutes to be ready to start using it and a week to get to the point where we could be productive.  

The framework for the product is maintained by Microsoft. Any applications that we build inside of it is all we need to maintain ourselves. So we do not have to maintain the framework at all.  

Power Automate is really cost-effective. You pay for use and if you want a premium connector then you just pay for a premium connector. But a lot of things are available for free. If you want to use an adapter that is not available for free, then you have to pay the provider for it. I do not know how much that costs.  

My advice to people who are considering implementing Microsoft Power Automate is that I think it is a really great tool that allows you to get started quickly on prototyping and integrating solutions that will simplify some redundant tasks. The best idea would be to just get started with it and experience what it can do.  

The biggest lesson we have learned from using Microsoft Power Automate is that there is just so much that is possible to automate. Thinking about the potential scope of what the tool can do, we now look at a problem and think that maybe we can use Power Automate to resolve the issue.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Microsoft Power Automate as a nine-out-of-ten at this point. To become a ten they would just need some more maturity with the test and production environments and making things more production-ready. Also, some additional guided help would valuable for new users to orient them and get started building their own applications. But other than that, it is perfect.  

I am a solution provider and I implement RPA products and automate processes for my clients.

With this product, you create your workflows on the cloud. We've used this product for integrating with Microsoft solutions. For example, one of them is a document approval solution, where documents are sent to SharePoint and then pushed to different users within Active Directory for approval. This is done according to rules set by the client.

There is also a COVID application that was built around Power Automate and the Power Platform, where users within the organization can raise a request for a test and this would be pushed to managers for approval.

We are also looking at financial processes around bank reconciliations and interbank transfers.

The most valuable feature is that it easily integrates with other Microsoft products, so it has multiple connectors. You can create solutions that connect to Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, and OneDrive.

There are templates available for you to create your own flow, and it is easy to start creating a flow and automating a solution.

There are some bugs or intermittent behavior in the Excel activities that require using workarounds. For example, there is an Excel activity called Collect that fails once in a while. When you want to choose or select a particular cell, once in a while, it fails to do so. It doesn't happen all of the time and I don't know if it's a bug, but it's something that they can look into.

I have been working with Microsoft Power Automate for approximately one year.

This is a very stable product.

The scalability is amazing. This is a cloud-based resource, and there is no limitation in terms of scale or size. You can easily increase the scope of processes being handled.

The COVID use case is available for all of the employees, which is approximately 2,500. The documentation approval use case is used by managers and people making requests, which is approximately 2,000 people. The use case involving financial reconciliation is only for a small team that consists of about five people.

The technical support is good. They are available and you can just call them. We have Microsoft Office online support, as well. This means that you can call them, or instead go to the forum and search for activities and resources. They have a lot of resources available online.

There are good tooltips available within the product itself. You can look at something and the tooltip will explain how it works and what you should do.

Overall, the support resources are good and I would rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

I also work with UiPath and WorkFusion.

The initial setup is straightforward. Power Automate is a cloud-based tool, although I downloaded the Studio to my local machine.

The deployment takes one day. You just switch environments from UAT to production. You can easily export your solution and import it into the production environment.

We were working with another company to implement the solution but we completed the implementation and deployment ourselves.

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.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees unless other resources are being used. For example, Office resources are available on Azure, but that is a different product. It is related to Azure, rather than Power Automate.

Our client chose this solution. They already had Microsoft enterprise licenses, and they felt it was better to use a Microsoft product for their automation solution.

Overall, this is a good solution and I like it. It's very scalable and easy to do so. Also, there are many connectors and they are quite useful. This is a product that I recommend.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Power Automate is to be cautious about how they distribute their flows, just to manage the licensing cost. Because it is cloud-based, it is an easy-to-use tool for both small and enterprise-wide solutions. There are no complications when integrating with Active Directory or the cloud platform, and this is good, in particular, because everybody is moving to the cloud. This product makes it easy to integrate things that people are already working with, such as Teams and Outlook.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

This is one of the solutions we sell to our customers. I'm an automater and we are customers of Microsoft. 

The connectors are a very good feature in this solution because they allow you to connect to multiple applications within the Microsoft environment. The solution is readily integrated. 

I'd like to see an improvement in the execution of workflows, which is currently an area of concern. It takes a lot of time and when you integrate these workflows, you have to be very careful because even a tiny error can break the workflow. Microsoft needs to make it more resilient.

An additional feature should be interoperability. It's the idea that you should be able to leverage other Microsoft technologies, let's say .NET, C#, VB macros, so that they can be integrated. It will make the solution more powerful, and they could provide a facility where we could run scripts written in other languages through Power Automate seamlessly. That would make this a very powerful product. 

I've been using this solution for 18 months. 

It's not stable yet, because it's still in development. There are a lot of things happening right now. If they bring in a new feature, an old feature can change and that's why we're not able to deploy it fully on all our client premises.

It's scalable because almost everything which is available within the Microsoft environment can be connected. But when you go outside the Microsoft environment, with respect to legacy systems and with third-party applications, the scalability is a somewhat limited right now. You can't connect very easily to Oracle or SAP or even third-party standalone custom applications. We don't have plans to increase usage for the time being. 

We haven't contacted technical support, mainly because we've been in a Microsoft related environment for the last 30 years. Most things that we solve ourselves, rather than talking to Microsoft.

We have not yet fully switched to Microsoft Power Automate. We still consider it an option for clients who are purely in a Microsoft environment. It's definitely an option, but we also have seven other RPA tools we use including UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, Kryon, Kofax. We also have an option for customers who don't want to go for any RPA tools that enables them to get custom automation.

The initial setup is complex. You need to know what you are doing, because it connects to so many things on your system which could be different for different systems. It took us about half a day to understand what we needed to do, and then after that it took just an hour. We did it ourselves. 

The solution is affordable and supportable, but the licensing is complex because you're paying for multiple services. You pay a license for Automate and a license for Azure Cloud. There could be a situation where you're managing more licenses than the bots.

We have evaluated 22 options in this area. 

Choosing a solution really depends on what the customer needs. If they're looking for something that's easy to maintain, we might go for UiPath or Automation Anywhere. And if we don't have the budget we tell them to look at Microsoft Power Automate. If you don't have a budget for that, then you look at a custom automation which doesn't need any RPA tool. It all depends on the customer's requirements and constraints.

This solution has the potential to go further, but for now I would rate it a five out of 10. 

Internally, we're doing a lot of workflow automation. This includes creating documents inside of SharePoint, updating SharePoint lists, taking templates in Microsoft Word, and then pulling data from SharePoint to populate different fields in the Word doc using the approval workflows.

When somebody is done reviewing a document, they click a button, and then it goes to the next person in the workflow. It sends me emails, sends notifications, posting from an email, stripping out all of the extra content in the text message, manipulating it, and then posting it to Microsoft teams, channels.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the native integrations with other Microsoft products. These include SharePoint, Office 365, and Microsoft Teams. 

The integrations that are built into Power Automate for those different Microsoft functions are good.

This solution has many areas that have room for improvement.

There are many features that are lacking compared to other Automation tools.

There is an inability to group different variables. When you have to establish all of your variables, you can't group them all.

The notifications when there are failures need improvement, as well as being able to start a process midstream.

The licensing is convoluted in understanding what license is needed.

There's just not enough error handling natively, so you have to build in a lot of workarounds for error handling. 

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

I have been using Power Automate for one year.

We are using the latest version, it's a cloud solution.

For the most part, it is pretty stable. We made one change that created a licensing error just out of the blue that stopped all of the processes that were in progress.

It created a problem, where we had to restart all of them and do a lot of manual cleanups, and backtrack to the ones that were canceled.

If there's a licensing issue, there should be some notification versus saying, "your licenses are out of compliance," and shutting down that process. When we checked the licenses, there was no issue.

I don't know if it was a bug or what that was, but that happened one time. Luckily it was when we started the rollout, and we didn't have as many processes in flight.

If we had hundreds of different processes in flight and that canceled my flow, that would not be acceptable for a production-type solution.

It's not scalable.

For some of the processes that we're building right now, we are asked to add a button for this additional piece, and it adds so much more complexity with the way that I have to build it out. It doesn't allow me to break up a process into multiple processes, and then call sub-processes, which would make it a lot easier to scale. When I break up these different processes, I have to redefine every variable. 

I can't take information from one process and then pass those variables to the next process.

Your workflow then becomes this very long, single process, that can't be started from the middle. It has to be long and convoluted, and it doesn't make it simple to scale and have sub-processes to make it more complex.

Currently, we are limiting the number of additional features and functionality. 

We don't want to add to it because it adds complexity and doesn't give us the ability to call a sub-process.

The couple of times that we have called, they haven't been able to solve anything.

In many cases, we try to figure it out ourselves or rebuild the workflow, if we can't reproduce the issue. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

We built out the workflow, completed the testing, the user testing, and completed a production rollout. 

I would say part of the challenges was with the production rollout. The tool is not as easy to work with because it's a hundred percent cloud-based.

A lot of the error handling and some of the things you would normally have aren't built-in, and so we ended up finding a lot of bugs and issues and things after the fact.

For example, it was set up where we needed to send an email, and if you put the two email addresses, but you don't put a semicolon between it, then it was just killing the process, saying, "that it couldn't send the email," so it just failed. The entire process failed.

It didn't send a notification and we had to find out two days later.

Those are the types of things where it just needs to have better handling for those types of situations to be able to say, "this is an error that happened," or let me kick off that same process from that point, and then restart the process from there; whereas, right now I have to restart the entire process.

All the steps that happened before, need to be able to go manually and clean up. It eliminates the point of automation.

The price depends on the features that we are using.

The licensing cost for us at this time is between $8 and $20 per user, per month.

It's a monthly cost for every user that touches one of the flows or is kicking off a workflow.

Licensing can get expensive.

There are premium connectors, where if you want to connect to external data sources, there is an additional cost for that.

I think one of the big issues was for an Azure SQL database or for SQL databases that used to be part of the standard connectors, and then they converted those to premium connectors, which increases the cost and limits the functionality for what you would be paying for it.

Use it for basic workflows, but I wouldn't recommend it for anything that is mission-critical. I don't think that it is ready for mission-critical type processing. 

It's a good product. They just have a lot of functionality they need to add.

People have posted on their feature request board, and on their community board.

The vast population that is using it asks for the same features. They are either very slow to implement those features or they are not interested.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We use the solution for integrating Microsoft Team and SharePoint. Also, we use it to manage document libraries and automation processes.

The solution's most valuable feature is cloud flows.

They should improve the solution's features for data and process mining. It is easy to run small automated tasks but difficult to build large complex flows. Also, it is challenging to scale it horizontally across multiple branches.

We have been using the solution for a year.

I rate the solution's stability as a seven. Its error-handling feature needs improvement.

We have three developers and ten end users of the solution. It is a scalable solution, and I rate its scalability as a six. But it could be better for large and complex cloud flows.

We often take help from online forums to fix errors instead of the solution's support documents.

Neutral

We use our in-house software as well.

The solution's initial setup process is straightforward and takes a day to complete. I rate the process as a nine.

We evaluated UiPath. It has better functionality and scalability. But, Power Automate is more accessible as our systems are integrated with Microsoft ecosystem.

I advise others to take some YouTube courses on how to build solutions for desktop and cloud flows.

I rate Microsoft Power Automate seven out of ten.