Microsoft Power Automate Reviews

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.

The solution is bundled together with many Microsoft products.

The solution is stable.

The solution offers a lot of documentation and tutorials for users to learn about various aspects and features.

The pricing is very reasonable.

The solution is not actually satisfying the complex programs that we want to execute. We're looking for alternatives right now.

Currently, Power Automate has, if I'm not wrong, about 500 actions per workflow, and my team is not satisfied as they want something very complex that automates a process end to end. That would need a lot of iteration and loops being implemented. The 500 steps in a workflow don't seem to serve our end goals.

The solution doesn't integrate very well with non-Microsoft products.

We've been using the solution for about nine months or so.

With the processes that we've been able to implement, it has been stable. There are no bugs or glitches and it does not crash or freeze on us. 

I am not sure about the scalability aspect of it as the kind of processes we've been executing has been very simple and straightforward, to be honest. We haven't tested the solution's limits.

So far, we have not had an experience where we had to get in touch with the Microsoft team to resolve any issue. There is documentation that is available online and tutorials provided by Microsoft, and the community has been pretty helpful for our IT team to design these solutions. We've been able to use those resources in order to mostly figure everything out ourselves. Therefore, I can't speak to their level of helpfulness.

We are using Power Automate, as it has come with the Microsoft Office 365 bundle. We aren't satisfied with it and therefore are looking for alternatives. This is our first experience with an RPA, and I don't like the app.

I didn't directly deal with the initial implementation. I'm on the management side. I get in touch with the IT team who work with Power Automate directly.

The pricing is absolutely reasonable as you're getting a lot more than just this solution. You're not just paying for Power Automate when you're paying for it. You're paying for the bundle itself. It was basically an add-on for whatever other services we're buying. Therefore, it was more or less free for us.

We are currently looking to explore other RPA options.

We have, for example, lightly explored UiPath as an option. Currently, there are a lot of processes that are being run on SAP and other infrastructure like Salesforce. Power Automate doesn't seem to be integrating well with them. We've been talking to other organizations or other partners that are using UiPath, and they've said they were able to implement somewhat similar tasks and were able to integrate easier. If the UiPath integrations are beyond the scope of Microsoft, it would be a better option.

We are a customer and an end-user of the product.

I have very little experience working with Power Automate. I'm the management person who gets in touch with the IT team who works with Power Automate directly.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using.

If your organization is running on Microsoft, and purely on Microsoft architecture, Power Automate is the way to go. If you're a very big company that wants to have complex tasks executed, however, it's not the best option. We're at a stage where we're trying to reevaluate where we want to go in ahead with the RPA journey. Power Automate doesn't look like the right option, at least for us right now.

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

We use Microsoft Power Automate for various personal initiatives of people to automate their own work.

It is used in a laboratory environment to connect the laboratory systems and to automate the connections between them.

The most valuable features are that it is low-code and simple.

For simple use cases, it is easy to use but as soon as it becomes complex then it doesn't fulfill the requirements.

It doesn't have any OCR capabilities. It doesn't really work with our ERP system, where we can log into the ERP system and have a robot updating it directly.

Microsoft is early on in this game and not really very far yet. They just need to mature their solutions.

In the next release, I would like to see a centrally-governed system, where you can access fully automated processes. This would include the ability to connect to other systems and log into them.

I would like to see it as a centrally managed solution.

I have been using Microsoft Power Automate for six months.

We are using a local partner of Microsoft in the Netherlands, and it's going quite well.

At the moment, we're using both Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Apps. We also use Kofax.

If you are using it as a user, I'm not aware of how complex it is for setting up central governance on it. But with proper RPA, you very much need the central-governance to ensure that things are conforming to standards. 

As soon as it starts being involved in business-critical use, then governance is very important.

I haven't seen that the central governing of it to be easy.

We use a local partner to help with the implementation and it's going quite well.

I am not aware of the pricing, but the problem is something we run into often. As soon as you want to use a data service, all of a sudden the license cost goes up. 

It's more fragmented licensing, where every little thing that you add, you get an extra license cost.

Microsoft is gradually becoming better, but for RPA, it's not fully there yet.

If you are looking for a low-code, simple to deal with email and extract a spreadsheet, then Microsoft is a good option. However, if you have a complex RPA use case where optical character recognition or PDF ingestion is needed then Kofax is a better choice.

I'm responsible for the center of excellence running Kofax as an RPA solution, and not for the Microsoft Power Apps.

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

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.

We are resellers and sometimes we implement solutions.

It's a component of Microsoft 365.

We use this solution to match some documents or spreadsheets, to match data from one spreadsheet with another, and to download and load invoices.

We also use it for an approval flow.

The most valuable features of this solution are the automation interface and the RPA automation.

The BPM component needs improvement.

Microsoft doesn't have certification training for Microsoft Power Automate, like other solutions such as UiPath, Kofax, and Automation Anywhere. All of these products have certification training available.

Power Automate is part of a suite called Power Platform.

Power Automate can integrate into a business intelligence component like Power BI, a flow component like Flow, and a bot component like Virtual Agents. 

Power Automate can make that cross to these components for better results of all the data that the client wants to see, and wants to automate.

I have been working with this solution for almost two years.

It's very stable, it doesn't have any crashes. 

The only issue is when we don't have an internet connection, it crashed because it's a cloud solution and not on-premises.

It has many connectors to other vendors or other components or other programs that make the solution scalable.

It is very easy to deploy with other vendors like Power Automate versus SAP. You can connect SAP with Power Automate very easily and extract information from the SAP environment.

It's a scalable solution.

Our clients are medium-sized companies. We have anywhere from 16 to 100 users.

Microsoft has the team to analyze every incident. In my experience, they have teams that can process incidents for my clients.

I am satisfied with technical support.

The initial setup was easy and it took a week or two weeks to deploy.

We have a team of two or three people to deploy and maintain this solution.

Our clients also evaluated UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

UiPath and Automation Anywhere are leaders in Gartner Magic Quadrant. Microsoft is the challenger. 

Our clients are aware of these evaluations.

I would recommend this solution to others, but first, they should evaluate it. Do a PoC of the tool and evaluate the business purpose. Review the results before making the purchase.

In the beginning, Power Automate was called Flow, and it was very basic to easy to manage. During the last year, there have been many improvements from Microsoft that have taken it to the next level and can compete with UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

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

We are using Power Automate to send notifications when working with items in SharePoint. It is used to send notifications when a document is moved or needs to be approved. When a document needs to be approved in SharePoint, we send a notification to the user who needs to approve that document. I also use Power Automate to create a work item in another system, such as Azure DevOps.

I like Power Automate because it is very easy to use for users who don't have IT knowledge.

They can improve the description of errors and provide more details. Sometimes, when I receive an error, I can't understand what is wrong.

It would be useful to have a desktop version to modify or edit workflows. Its scalability can also be better.

I have been using this solution for five months.

It is stable.

It is scalable, but its scalability can be better. We have 10 to 20 users of this solution.

We have a contract with Microsoft for premium support. We have support all the time, and they are good.

Its initial setup is easy. The deployment duration depends on the complexity of the deployment. It can take a week or a month.

To know about the best practices for this solution and how to make it more secure, I would advise others to read the information on the web.

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

I really like the built-in integrations with other applications like Teams. The product is also straightforward and easy to use.

Sometimes it can be difficult to share flows for multiple users to edit. So, it is a potential area of improvement.

For additional features, it would be helpful to have a more collaborative building of flows.

I have been using this solution for four years.

It is a stable solution.

I never needed customer support for this product. It is easy to use.

The initial setup is easy.

Overall, Microsoft Power Automate is an eight 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.