Microsoft Power Automate Reviews

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.

The solution can be primarily used small process automation of day-to-day activities, such as routing of emails, Excel sheet manipulation, and more.

The solution is very scalable.

The solution is easy to use. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

Technical support has been great so far. 

If a company already uses a lof to Microsoft applications, this solution is great. 

The solution should offer similar features that users can easily access if they use Automation Anywhere or UiPath.

It would be great if it was able to integrate more with various other platforms. It would make development easier. 

I've been dealing with the solution for two years at this point. 

The product can scale well. If a company needs to expand its use, it can do so.

Technical support has been great. They are helpful and responsive and I have no complaints. 

I'm also aware of solutions such as Automation Anywhere and UiPath. They, at this point, are much more feature-rich.

As a cloud-based solution that is very easy to implement. It's not overly complex or difficult. It doesn't take too much time to deploy.

You only need two or three people to deploy and implement the product in an organization. You don't need a big team. 

The solution offers a yearly subscription package. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. Currently, we have ten customers that are using the solution. 

I would recommend the solution to other companies and users, however, only if they have a Microsoft suite of products that are in use and they already have a license based on that usage.

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.

The solution seems to have a good drag and drop functionality. 

It's very well automated.

The solution is pretty customizable. Even big automation tasks are done rather simply. If you want to do more, we've found that anybody can do it. Even a business user that has no knowledge of IT can jump on and figure it out.

Two or three years ago, in all IT products, there were a lot of standards that were missing. Now, using the cloud and using some EA tools, there is a huge scope of possibilities. It's much better.

The biggest problem right now is the fact that, when you use only the trial version, you don't have the whole power or capacity of what you can do with the Power Automate. 

The price of the license isn't that cheap. We want to see what it can do, fully, before purchasing. 

If you get a license, you can only have one developer or one user on it.

If you want to be more precise and the jobs to be more complete, it's somewhat complicated and there are some complex tasks that can't be done so easily by a business user. You'll need to get someone that's more highly skilled.

You need to pay for the ability to customize the solution. That's not an option on the free trial. You also have to be able to read some code in order to customize it. You need to be slightly skilled. You can only customize it on your own, only for you, and not for the other users.

When it comes to using UiPath or Blue Prism, there are more tools you can use. For example, Java or tools. It's easy to interact with them with UiPath and not so much on Power Automate. While Microsoft has a way of integrating well with itself and its own internal tools, it could do more to include external options and add them to the mix.

I've been using the solution for one to two months. It's pretty new for us.

It's largely stable. When Microsoft updates, it tends to update everything at once. Your Excel, Work, Power Automate, etc., everything updates automatically. That makes everything align so that nothing is out-of-date and affecting the stability of everything else at any time. In general, stability seems to be absolutely fine.

If it's on the cloud, it's generally easy to scale. The volume of data is viable. However, we haven't really attempted to scale anything. I haven't put everything onto Power Automate at this time.

I haven't really reached out to technical support yet. I don't have experience with them, so I can't gauge if they are better than other options.

From my experience, for example, UiPath technical support was not that good. I've used Automation Everywhere and I didn't find them to be very good either. Each time we have a problem with Automation Anywhere, they wouldn't give any explanation. They would always blame the issue on a problem with Microsoft and never with their own problems. Therefore, historically, we haven't had a good run with support at other companies. I'm not sure if this will be the case with Microsoft.

We've looked at and worked with UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere. We're doing comparison POCs with UiPath and Power Automate now. We're not likely to just choose one solution; we may end up using two. We'd like to have options to choose a few depending on the needs.

The initial implementation is not that difficult. It's on the cloud, so there's nothing to install. It's not exactly user friendly, however. UiPath is much more user friendly if you compare it to Power Automate.

In any case, you just connect it with your Microsoft login. If you want to automate a task, it's easy as everything is connected due to the Mircosoft account. It's easy to set up and concentrate your automation tasks.

Since we are on the trial version, we haven't bought it yet, or paid for anything.

If you are a small company, you can have a Power Automate license for as low as $30/month if you want to run one bot per month. It's pretty inexpensive.

With solutions like Blue Prism or UiPath, you need to think in one or five-year terms and many small companies can't just throw down $10,000 upfront.

We're a Microsoft customer. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

We're using the trial version of the cloud deployment model. We haven't paid for it yet as they have to do a benchmark within or the solution for some POCs on UiPath and on Power Automate to see the differences. 

In a lot of companies, they use Microsoft products. It's easy to demonstrate how it's important to have a Power Automate type of solution on hand.

Overall, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. Power Automate definitely offers the best automation scenarios due to the fact that it's a Microsoft product for Microsoft products. I tried automating something, for example, in SharePoint, using both UiPath and Power Automate, and Power Automate was the clear winner. It was just so easy and seamless.

It's also great from the perspective of a small company as there aren't high costs up front.

We primarily use the solution for back-office activities and processing.

The ease of use is the solution's most valuable aspect. It's easy to configure and write code on it.

The solution is simple, it's not complicated.

The pricing of the solution is competitive, which is good for the Romanian market.

The solution could offer more specific training. There should be more examples of what the functions can do and more instructions and explanations to the process.

I've been using the solution for about one year.

The solution is relatively stable. I'd rate it seven out of ten.

The solution could be scalable, but it depends on the design process. Currently, I'm the only one using the solution in our company. I use it every day.

Technical support has been okay. They are quite prompt, but I was hoping they would provide more in-depth explanations concerning the process.

We didn't previously use a different solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. Deployment only takes a few minutes.

We handled the implementation ourselves.

We did a bit of market research before ultimately choosing this solution. Most of the information we found was in the public domain. We found that costs were transparent when looking at this solution.

The solution is web-based. We're partners with WinAutomation.

I'd advise others to be patient and learn how to program it properly. The results will come, but there will be a learning curve.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use the solution as a business process automation tool. It allows one to automate an application in his organization. 

The solution is not only meant for SharePoint, but for everything.  It has millions of connectors. The best feature of the tool is that it is generic, so it allows one to do as he wishes. He can obtain data from Twitter and put it on his SQL Server. He can obtain data from WordPress and connect it with IBM. 

The solution could have more integration with different platforms. 

The licensing price is too high. 

Microsoft Power Automate has only been released recently, so I have been using it for the past three or four years. 

The solution is certainly stable. 

The solution is definitely scalable. 

Technical support is very nice. It's fast. 

As the solution is cloud-based, it does not require installation. 

The solution does not require deployment, but a team is needed for development and this will vary with the scope of the project. Every site would require around eight to ten people. 

The licensing price should be more cost-effective. 

As we are talking about a Microsoft product, the licensing can be purchased on a monthly or yearly basis. 

The solution is both cloud-based and on-premises. 

We are consultants of Power Automate. We do not use the solution ourselves. 

So far, we have handled 14 or 15 projects and are working on one at present. 

I would recommend the solution to others. 

I rate Microsoft Power Automate as an eight out of ten. 

I am the head of RPA solutions at my company where we implement this product for our customers. These are insurance companies that have legacy systems and prefer to keep their RPA off the cloud.

The product allows us to alleviate customer pain points by automating their data entry processes and enhancing archiving capabilities. We are able to minimize the delays of various claims and policies while improving data entry accuracy. We also offer them the ability to archive various communications to a variety of archiving portals such as SharePoint.

The program requires no code, making it very easy to implement various functions.

During their merger, some key functions were eliminated which no longer allows it to run independently from the cloud as a standalone for other companies. For example, options to schedule and trigger have been removed. It would be nice to have these capabilities back.

The flow and the connectivity between databases and so on is a bit complex as well.

We were using Softomotive for approximately three years until they were purchased by Microsoft where it was then merged under the umbrella of Microsoft Power Automate and we have been using this since - it has been about a year and a half since the merger. 

Overall, I would say that it is quite stable, but with the merger, we are not ready to move to the latest version until we can completely replace all of the old functions. I would say the product is 90% stable.

We require five team members to maintain the product and assist our clients.

The product is quite scalable. When considering extending more processes, features, machines, etc. it is a much cheaper and easier option.

We are still communicating with the Softomotive support team that we have been using prior to the merge and they are perfect. Microsoft is supportive as well.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward and easy, especially in comparison with other RPA's such as UiPath or Automation Anywhere.

We are able to see high returns thanks to having few machines with minimal implementation costs. We are able to present our clients with their ROI upon completion of each project and they see ROI's as soon as their first month.

This is the cheapest option among competitors. 

You can choose to have the RPA with attendance at $40/month with add-on's totaling about $190. There are standalone options that require someone to run the process and there are fully automated options that are integrated within the cloud.

We were trying some open source solution, but it was not really reliable so we did not continue with it.

The actions and functions are much easier than other competitors.

I would rate this product an eight out of ten.

In our organization, the solution is popular where there is a need for attended automation or user. That "human in the loop," as we call it. There it is more popular than the other tools.

The most valuable feature we have found with the solution is the AI Builder. And they have a big range of connectors that we are finding useful.

One area of improvement needed for the solution is regarding the cloud source versus desktop flows. The desktop flows are not as absent, and there are other limits in features when it comes to comparison between the two solutions that Power Automate provides. So perhaps the desktop could also start including features like Connectors and Builder because these are the more frequently used. But both of the tools have their own utility. 

It's evolving well. I have seen Power Automate eight months ago and have seen it now. So there is definitely a big step ahead. It's improved and it's rather helpful.

There is one feature I'd like to see added in the next release. Their OCR capabilities are not as evolved as the other tools. They do allow some AI Builder methods to achieve that. But in the desktop tool, the OCR functionality is not very useful. Everything has to be done on our text-based outcome. I'm sure they're already working on it.

Power Automate is relatively new. I've been working with the solution for eight to nine months.

The solutions that we have built are going well. They are used, and we've not heard of any breakages there. I would say they are stable.

The scalability of the solution is something we are still working on. Currently, we have a use case where we are trying to make it more scalable and there are means of doing it. Sharing up the flows and all of those things do add to the scalability. It's relatively new compared to UiPath, but I don't think they'll take very long to come up to speed.

When it comes to technical support, I'd like to draw a comparison between UiPath that's more popularly used. UiPath has a very good forum and we get most answers on the forum itself. However, the technical support itself is not that strong. 

Whereas in Power Automate, it is just the other way around. The forum is bad; we don't get anything there. But technical support, they're pretty responsive. And any queries you write to them, they usually do come back quite promptly. I'm happy with the technical support.

The initial setup of the solution is pretty straightforward.

Due to the pricing model, the solution is more convenient than any other tool. That is one plus that Power Automate has over the others.

It's very easy to use. Like we say, it's a "no-code solution." So even though all solutions do claim that, there is a little level of skill that is required when it comes to learning the other tools. But Power Automate is relatively the easiest to pick up.

UI Automation is something that they have made very easy, but editing both selectors is a challenge in Power Automate. There is not that much of a need to edit the selectors. But in case there is, then it is a challenge to edit them.

This solution is capable of doing pretty much everything that the other tools are capable of, and they have extremely competitive pricing. It is definitely an advantage. Their approval systems and interactions with the other tool. We have even tried some inter-vendor solutions, integrating UiPath along with Power Automate, for example. Those things work pretty well with Power Automate. It's convenient, not just for the end-user, for the business user, and it is also convenient for the developer. It's very simple and approachable to use as a solution.

I would rate the overall solution a seven out of ten.