Microsoft Power Automate Reviews

I use the product for automation. 

Microsoft Power Automate's basic activities are not strong. 

I have been working with the solution for a year. 

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

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

Microsoft Power Automate responds quickly. 

The tool's deployment is easy. 

The product is for small and mid-sized companies. I rate it a nine 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.

We implemented this solution for our clients and the primary aim was to create a chatbot that would provide service answers to customers. If the chatbot wasn't able to help, the query moved to a ticketing tool like ServiceNow, which creates the ticket and assigns it to the appropriate team. For logging purposes, the ticket is logged with ServiceNow and it provides the solution to the end-user through the chatbot. I'm a senior manager and we are Microsoft gold partners. 

This product improves the way an organization functions by creating monitoring solutions. One of the things we can do now is to enable the system to inform the service people before end-users log a ticket because the system can be monitored in advance. Those tickets will be created by the system itself so that the service provider can take action before being contacted by the end-users. It improves the quality of the service. 

The value is that the whole platform seamlessly integrates well and that there are enough connectors to the majority of the systems for the SAP connection, or ServiceNow connection, or an email connection, or SharePoint connection. There are a number of connectors already built-in. It doesn't require writing any extra code, it's a low code solution platform so it's easy and faster to create solutions.

Things need to be improved with respect to RPA kinds of solutions and it requires a level of stabilization that is currently lacking. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

The solution is stable. I haven't found many issues because when we design and implement we have a lot of experience behind us so we plan ahead and know what we're doing. 

This solution is scalable. 

The technical support is there with Microsoft depending on what kind of a subscription and relationship you have with them. Support ranges from standard to premium. Things are not always solved in a single instance and they'll sometimes tell you that what's been implemented is not supported. 

It is a very easy and straightforward deployment process. If you are going to implement a very complex solution, something that's automated with a DevOps process, and many teams are involved, then it may require some extra people. It depends on the complexity of what you plan to build, the number of systems, etc. We have our own internal team that carries out the implementation. 

There are multiple layers of licensing; there is a subscription license and if you want to use any premium connectors, then you need to have a separate license. RPA solutions also require a separate license and if you want to use any AI features, there's a separate license for that too, it depends on your requirements. 

Before implementing this solution, be aware that there may be limitations within the system or within the platform that might not be suitable for your needs.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

It's a pretty big learning curve with Microsoft Power Automate and I'm trying to do a couple of other things. But I really have made some progress. I've actually started creating some bots. I've run into some snags. I haven't found my way out of the snags as yet. That's kind of why I'm not quite ready to publish because I'm not an expert yet, but I am actively working on it.

Microsoft Power Automate is on-premises because I'm using the Power Automate Desktop. So it's a desktop piece that I'm actually using and that's definitely on-premise. What I'm actually doing is interacting with actual systems. I run a clubby cloud system for moving data back and forth.

There are some very long processes that are happening now, where we need to move data from one system to another and do some analysis, and all of that. We're trying to automate some of that process to link the systems together. So some of it is actually reading the webpage, taking information off of the webpage, and doing things with it.

Power Automate is very user-friendly, it is easy to use. I find it very easy to use, easy to follow what's going on, to navigate around and get things done. I really like it. 

One of the features I like is the elements. Let me describe it. With Power Automate Desktop you're interacting with other pieces of software. That's kind of the whole point. You're grabbing information from other software so that you can then pull it together and move it back and forth between systems and do other things with it. Power Automate Desktop allowed me to quickly visually identify parts of a screen and record it. So I can see that I know I'm going to have to click this button here, this field there, and this tab here, and I can literally go and quickly just record all of them and identify them and have them in a list that I can see and say - there's my list of things.

Now when I'm actually pulling the logic together, it's really, really simple to just grab it from my list of elements and just fix things together. So I'm able to move faster than I can with Help and with the other solution. I really, really like that about it. I like its integration with other apps

Well, not integration. Because the whole point of Power Automate desktop is to grab information from other apps. So it's not a side feature, that's what it's designed to do specifically. So, that makes it easier to visually capture information from other applications, and then reuse those fields from other applications. I think it's the reuse that's really useful. Because I can see that I've done it. Whereas with the other one, did they do it or not?  But I really like that it is easy to capture visual elements of other applications and reuse them. 

The other good thing was the trial period. There's a much more realistic trial period of 90 days. So it encourages you to dig in on your own, and try and figure it out, because if something doesn't go right, you don't have to figure it out in 30 days, like all the others. So it's a 90 day trial, which makes sense to me because if it works, trust me, you'll never give it up. You going to use it, going to be hooked anyway, so 90 days make sense.

The problem with Power Automate is what happened when I had it set up to read web pages and Excel workbooks. But that was my first test, and I was working on it for around three days and then took a break of about two days. When I went back to it, all of the Excel, and all the Excel functions, just disappeared. Completely vanished.

I had installed it on my laptop. I had the spreadsheet there and all the features, because you have to do things like tell it to open the spreadsheet, tell it to read the cells, that kind of thing. And then you tell it to go to this webpage, and when you get to the webpage, log in, put in a username and password and then click on a button. So you have to put all of these steps and sort of link them together. And then when I came back, the flow was there, but it said all the steps that had to do with Excel were invalid. Anything that has to do with the web, it just said invalid. The whole tree, all instructions are still there, but the components that talk to Excel and the web were just gone. Just totally vanished.

When I looked up the help, it said that sometimes that happens when you're not connected to the internet. So it was kind of straight forward but complex as well.

It was straight forward, and then it just crashed, essentially. It just went. And I couldn't figure out a way to get the modules back. What on earth? So I switched to HelpSystems Automate, which I had also installed on my machine about a year ago. But now that I'd started working with Power Automate, that gave me the confidence to launch into the other one. So I launched into that one and that's where my HelpSystems Automate review would start. But if I would just stop by Microsoft Power Automate Desktop, that's where I'm stuck. I literally have not gone back to it. I actually find its easier to use. I prefer to use it, but it's just not working. It just stopped working. I don't know how to get this part back.

That's why I told you  I don't want to give a full review as yet because I don't know if it's something I did. I don't think so. But it just stopped. I'm still trying to give it a little grace, trying to figure out, trying to make it work.

What was difficult though, the weirdest thing, was just simple things like manipulating strings.

In terms of what features should be included, what would really help would be more help navigating webpages. What would help would be the help itself - if there would be lots of official walk-throughs. If it would say, for these scenarios, this is how you should do it, with the screen screenshots and the step-by-step thing. With other products I've used, even as a programmer back in the day, nothing ramps up learning faster than walk-throughs. It's not really the product itself, but more walk-throughs to help people ramp up their learning much faster.

That would be really great. Especially around web automation and services automation. Hooking into the EPI's of other solutions would be great. Right now we're just relying on the community of YouTube videos. People just set them up and do YouTube videos, and that's how they're hoping it will get solved.

It's not the type of setup, but it's the training on using the product that I would like to see more of. Better training on using the product itself, walk-throughs in particular, as a training method.

So I tell people that with Power Automate, you you can record the interview, that we're doing here, and fill out the forms automatically. All you have to do is sit down and engage the client with the right questions, and the system would listen to the interview and fill out the screen for you. So you thought, that would be really cool. Now you've downloaded it, and you're trying to figure out how on earth you do it. A walk-through is where you would go and this thing would literally say, "Capture audio and video." They give you a scenario and then they would have a little video that you can watch that shows you how to actually set it up. And then, in addition to that, you'd have a detailed scenario. This is what you want to do. Then it would have all the steps that you would need to actually do it end-to-end. If you follow the steps at the end of the walkthrough, you would actually have a working solution by just following the steps. By doing that, you're learning the product. You're learning how to use it. You learn so many things by using walkthroughs. And it's just training. It's not the actual product itself, it's training that goes along with the product.

This is Microsoft technical support. I'll try them. I haven't called Microsoft technical support in years. It's usually not a very good experience, but I will try. I will reach out to them and see what happens. When you go to support they tend to lead you to communities where other users are having issues. It's sort of, "see what you can find in the community." I will get back to it because I have to desperately get this thing to work. No matter which tool I use, I have to get it to work.

The price is why I even considered it, because HelpSystems Automate was winning all of these awards and was supposedly the easier tool to use. That's what it says. But Power Automate's pricing model had a more gentle incline. That's why I went to the Microsoft Power Automate Desktop in the first place, because the pricing seemed to be more favorable. It the end, once you're using it for the whole organization, you end up paying the same thing for both products anyways. But to get started, Power Automate Desktop seemed better priced. But then it stopped working and I don't know how to get it back working yet.

I'm using the HelpSystems Automate now, and I'm stuck on another step. I mean, it's hard and that's good. If it's hard, it means you'll get paid. So the bit being hard is not the issue. I just have no idea how to get Power Automate to work again. So when I do, I guess I'll let you know.

The licensing was on a monthly basis. I liked it because it gave me a more reasonable per user cost. So I can set up one user like me, and then quickly set up all the workflows that I need, and it allows me to evaluate better and longer. I can onboard two or three other logins at a very reasonable price. Ultimately everybody wants to just dominate the entire organization anyway, and so the price is going to get ridiculous at some point. But by the time it gets there, the organization would be benefiting so much from it they don't mind. Whereas with the other solution, you have to bite the bullet a little sooner.

I think you have to have an office license. I'm not sure actually. Maybe you can just use it by itself, but I'm not sure.

Right now, on a scale of one to 10, I would give Microsoft Power Automate a six since I can't actually use it. I really can't go past six. Maybe once I actually start using it, I'll rank it much higher. I think it has great potential if I could just get it back working.

We use SharePoint to collect information from tests, exams, and similar things that we do in our office. When people complete the tests, we use Microsoft Power Automate to collect the results and email them to appropriate people. We are currently using the latest version of Microsoft Power Automate. 

Its integration with SharePoint and Outlook is the most valuable. 

I found it very easy to use. I could do everything that I wanted very quickly, and I didn't have any complications at all. I never had a problem in using Microsoft Power Automate.

If someone was just about to start using it, it would be better if it was a bit more user-friendly in terms of understanding function references. I come from a bit of development background. To me, it all makes quite a lot of sense, but someone using it for the first time would probably battle understanding how the functions work. This might be something they could improve on.

It would be really useful if it could publish data to Power BI. We like to use Power BI for our reporting, but we can't directly integrate the data across. If there was a way to automate the collection of the data and push it straight into the Power BI platform, it would be quite useful.

I have been using Microsoft Power Automate for about three months.

It seems to be very stable. It has been running now for about three months, and it regularly gets used, probably about 30 times per day. I haven't had a single missed event. I have received all the emails, and everything works great. Today, funnily enough, I have started building a new solution for something similar. So, I went back and actually checked the records for the last three weeks, and everything was perfect. I haven't had any issues with it at all. 

I am sure that it is going to be perfectly fine for what we need. We are looking at about 30 people using it in one day over the last three months, which is not a very high volume. We are not going to do more than probably a maximum of 50 users a day. 

I did not have any need to contact them.

Previous to this, I used Microsoft Flow, and before that, I used the SharePoint workflow. We switched from Microsoft Flow because Microsoft actually changed their product and went from one to the next. It used to be Microsoft Flow, and then they revamped it and re-introduced it with a new name. I just carried on basically using the same platform. It is better than what they used to have. That's for sure, but I'm still effectively using the same product. They had advertised through emails and other mediums that they have switched to a new product, and it has been rebranded. I thought I'm going to try it, and I just found it very friendly and easy to use. So, I just stuck with it.

It is integrated completely with our Office 365, so I didn't have to set up anything. Everything just works automatically. The security works from the first time. When I logged in, it straight away identified me. I could immediately get a list of all the people to whom I needed to send the stuff. It connected straight away to the SharePoint. I didn't have any problems at all.

The original product was set up by the consultant firm that looks after our IT. We don't do it on our own. They set up everything and configure it. All I had to do was just log in and make sure everything works the way I wanted it to do.

I don't deal with the financial side. I know that we pay for a per-user license. It is probably less than $20 a user, but I am not sure about the exact figures.

To use this solution, you need to maybe brush up a little bit on how to use the function references that are available in Microsoft Power Automate. The code that you use for the functions is a little bit different from what you would use if you were using Excel or anything like that. So, you just need to brush up on how the functions work. Once you understand them, it is pretty simple.

I would rate Microsoft Power Automate a ten out of ten. Everything has been perfectly fine. I am a happy user.

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. 

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.