Microsoft Power Automate
About Microsoft Power Automate
Microsoft Power Automate pricing
Microsoft Power Automate does not have a free version but does offer a free trial. Microsoft Power Automate paid version starts at US$15.00/month.
Alternatives to Microsoft Power Automate
Microsoft Power Automate Reviews for UK Users
Feature rating
- Industry: Environmental Services
- Company size: 10,000+ Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Efficient Workflow Automation in the O365 Ecosystem with Power Automate.
My experience with Power Automate has been largely positive. It’s a versatile and powerful tool for automating a wide range of tasks within the O365 ecosystem, allowing teams to save time and reduce errors in repetitive processes. While there is a learning curve for more advanced features, the platform’s ability to streamline workflows and enhance productivity makes it a valuable asset for organizations leveraging Microsoft’s ecosystem.
Pros
What I liked most about Microsoft Power Automate is how seamlessly it integrates with the entire Office 365 ecosystem, making it easy to automate repetitive tasks and workflows across Microsoft applications, from Outlook to SharePoint. The platform offers a vast library of pre-built templates and connectors that simplify automating even complex processes without heavy coding. Additionally, its intuitive, drag-and-drop interface enables users with minimal technical experience to create effective automations quickly, which improves productivity and reduces manual work.
Cons
One drawback of Power Automate is that more advanced workflows may require knowledge of expressions or PowerShell, which can be a barrier for non-technical users. Additionally, complex flows can sometimes experience latency or encounter errors, especially when triggered by high volumes of data or frequent actions. Managing and troubleshooting these errors can take time, as logs and error messages aren’t always straightforward.
- Industry: Government Administration
- Company size: 10,000+ Employees
- Used Daily for 1+ year
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Review Source
Automated thousands of hours of manual work using power automate
Overall pretty good. Quick learning curve if you have even the most basic background in programming. You can implement powerful automated tools that could cut down a lot of manual processing for your organization. I was able to build a solution to replace/replicate a CRM tool (that costed us 6 figures to maintain) using power automate to piece together various other MS office applications together (eg. sharepoint, outlook, etc..). Examples of things i've used this to automate was workflow management (automated emails to get approvals for documents), report creation (pre-populate word/powerpoint presentations and templates with data collected from various sources), intake and customer management workflow (building forms to collect and store information to a database, then tracking those intakes and automatically requesting approvals through a workflow), reporting, etc.. There's also capabilities to use pre-built AI functions for things like image recognition (eg. scanning a invoice to automatically populate it to a database instead of having someone read over it) which can automate a lot of manual work for your org
Pros
Power automate has a pretty easy to use graphical user interface to click and drag functions together to build an automated workflow. Can be scaled and implemented quite quickly within your organization. Also connects to a lot of existing microsoft products/ecosystem so it could automate a lot of desktop procedures for any organization that uses microsoft (which is a majority of large scale orgs). I like the pre-built automated templates you can use, and the access to third party templates (some cost additional money) that automate various desktop procedures for you. Also has advanced AI/ML analytics/functional capabilities.
Cons
Customer support is okay/pretty trash - it involves searching/posting in their forums and hoping someone has the same issues as you for answers. Essentially I had to figure out how to use most of the functionality myself because of the lack of guides/training available for this compared to other tools. Also get a lot of random unexplained glitches with flows i've already built but haven't touched but break for unknown reasons (I'm guessing its because the vendor is pushing updates which could break existing functionality). I can build the exact same flow twice but if i don't build it in a specific order, your flow just wont work. I also don't like how it logs me out of connections within my flows, which then requires me to regularly log back in to re-establish these connections so my flows can continue to work (although this might be a organizational security issue).
Q&A and testing of the code for errors is also pretty basic and needs to be robustly improved. If i want to run through my flow to identify errors, there's limited functionality to allow me to do so effectively. For example, if i build a loop with various stored procedures in it, building it in a certain way will not allow you to open the loop to see which stored procedure isn't working. You would need to build the flow in a certain way (that sometimes isn't the most practical) so it would allow you to properly troubleshoot it.
- Company size: 501–1,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Was a great product but they got greedy and make you pay for everything that you automate
Prior to the whole "you MUST buy tokens to be able to use the software that you already spent a lot of money on", they had a really good product that did things not found in other types of automation programs. You can compile your scripts/processes to run on other machines ... except now you have to pay for every little thing that you automate OR spend a lot of money to "register" a computer that you want to run unlimited exe's on. Of course, this is after you have already paid a premium price for the software. They don't advertise the costs up front because they want you to buy the software ... once you log into your account you finally get to see the costs for various tokens and functionality. We didn't appreciate the sneaky approach they decided would be a good business model. As horrible as the whole upgrade experience is/was, it is our hope that they drop this business model and get back to what made them great to begin with. They have great software but they have lost our business until they stop crippling it. We are in the process of moving on to a different product.
Pros
It does things that other software packages do not do (like search for an image on a screen that isn't identifiable via other means).
Cons
Steep learning curve. Recent versions now make you pay for everything that you create - making the software absolutely useless in an enterprise environment where you have to pay for the executable that you generate ... except if you discover an error and need to recompile and recreate your executable to fix something (which happens most of the time), you have to PAY AGAIN. I spent years learning and using Winautomation and it was awesome to be able to create solutions on the fly where there weren't any viable alternatives, but their greed has destroyed the flexible nature of what this software did best. The support people know their stuff, but moving the support forum to Linked-In groups has been a miserable switch....searching is problematic ... anything negative at all (even if it is constructive feedback) is deleted by the moderators.... it is like they are doing everything humanly possible to make the software and the company fail. I find this sad because I really like the software and the latest functionality that the newer versions bring. We were tricked into upgrading to Version 7 during a sales WebEx (no mention of the additional costs at all except a brief 1 sec mention of tokens that was not explained). Even though we have paid for the professional version upgrade, we went back to our old version (version 6) as soon as we realized how crippled the latest versions are unless you are willing to hand over large amounts of cash for a small fraction of the functionality the older versions had..
- Industry: Law Practice
- Company size: 51–200 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Used for internal ticket system
Pros
Able to use power automate to create a help ticket system email based on user input criteria.
Cons
There is a slight learning curve, but once you get the hang of it its pretty easy.
- Industry: Banking
- Company size: 10,000+ Employees
- Used Daily for 1-5 months
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Review Source
Powerful Automation Software
Overall, I am quite happy and I no longer lose business hours sending reminders, having unnecessary meetings about workflows or even approving simple tasks. Other than the occasional email about a failed workflow, everything works just as intended. I do believe that Microsoft could improve this feature but until then, it will work just fine and does satisfy my business and departmental needs.
Pros
Late last year, my department had a challenge with getting approvals done on time or work flows being submitted to team members,. Notifications and reminders were sent out manually which affected productivity. After some research I came across workflows which later turned to power automate and the following features really stood out to me in a positive way.
1. We did not break the budget - Initially, we opted for a power automate license which cost around $12 and was mostly utilized by my department. Later on, the main company adopted MS O365 and included PA license as part of the main license and allowing better integration with th e rest of the MS office features. This was a pleasant surprise.
2.Ease of use - I am not very computer/software conversant but it took me less than one business week to figure out how to use Flow/PA. Some of my colleagues were proficient after one or two YouTube
videos.
3. Easy to debug - when PA crashes, it's very easy to pinpoint what the main problem/cause of the crash is. This saves time and i do not have to log a ticket with IT to have it resolved.
4. I have noted that the templates available on PA are the only things I need to get my work done. I use PA to connect employees and the CRM systems and I was able to connect these by simply following a template.
Cons
Further to my point about how easy it is to resolve crashes on PA, the biggest con of this software is inadvertently how much it crashes when you have a large number of tasks to multiple people or to external individuals.
The second con I found is that it is hard, actually impossible to connect the cloud services available on PA to other non Microsoft cloud services. This is a big disadvantage because as a company, we work with external vendors who use other cloud based systems. This problem is pushing companies to buy extra licenses /software purchases or make alternative plans with vendors. This is sometimes frustrating.