Terraform from HashiCorp is a cloud infrastructure automation tool that enables users to create, change, and improve production infrastructure, and it allows infrastructure to be expressed as code. It codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. It is available Open Source, and via Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.
$0
Microsoft Power Automate
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Power Automate is an advanced automation platform offering a range of features, including AI-powered automation, robotic process automation (RPA), business process automation (BPA), digital process automation (DPA), and process/task mining. The platform aims to empower organizations to securely automate their operations at scale by leveraging low-code and AI technologies.
$15
per month per user
Pricing
HashiCorp Terraform
Microsoft Power Automate
Editions & Modules
Open Source
$0
Team & Governance
$20/user
per user/per month
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Power Automate Premium
$15
per month per user
Power Automate Process
$150
per month per bot
Hosted RPA add-on
$215
per month per bot
Process Mining add-on
$5,000
per month per tenant
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HashiCorp Terraform
Microsoft Power Automate
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
HashiCorp Terraform
Microsoft Power Automate
Features
HashiCorp Terraform
Microsoft Power Automate
Configuration Management
Comparison of Configuration Management features of Product A and Product B
Anything that needs to be repeated en masse. Terraform is great at taking a template and have it be repeated across your estate. You can dynamically change the assets they're generating depending on certain variables. Which means though templated assets will all be similar, they're allowed to have unique properties about them. For example flattening JSON into tabular data and ensuring the flattening code is unique to the file's schema.
Very useful RPA tools for automating processes with minimal coding and drag-and-drop functionality, with a wide variety of triggers, including scheduled time-based triggers and activity-based triggers, such as modifying a file/list in SharePoint to run a Power Automate flow. Very easy-to-use UI with native integration with every Microsoft product, and a very low automation failure rate for deployed workflows.
The language itself is a bit unusual and this makes it hard for new users to get onboarded into the codebase. While it's improving with later releases, basic concepts like "map an array of options into a set of configurations" or "apply this logic if a variable is specified" are possible but unnecessarily cumbersome.
The 'Terraform Plan' operation could be substantially more sophisticated. There are many situations where a Terraform file could never work but successfully passes the 'plan' phase only to fail during the 'apply' phase.
Environment migrations could be smoother. Renaming/refactoring files is a challenge because of the need to use 'Terraform mv' commands, etc.
The tool is very useful when used with its various native connectors, taking great advantage of the integration between the components and systems of the Office365 universe. However, its cost is still high, and automation using more advanced components containing AI resources becomes unfeasible for some companies. Due to the financial crisis that many companies are currently experiencing, investment in automation systems or tools is taking a back seat.
I love Terraform and I think it has done some great things for people that are working to automate their provisioning processes and also for those that are in the process of moving to the cloud or managing cloud resources. There are some quirks to HCL that take a little bit of getting used to and give picking up Terraform a little bit of a learning curve, thus the rating
Power Automate features a clean and intuitive user interface that allows users to create, manage, and monitor workflows easily. The UI is designed to be accessible to both technical and non-technical users, with drag-and-drop functionality for building workflows. Power Automate supports integration with a wide range of Microsoft and third-party applications. This flexibility in integration allows users to automate workflows across various systems, enhancing overall productivity and efficiency.
Terraform's performance is quite amazing when it comes to deployment of resources in AWS. Of course, the deployment times depend on various parameters like the number of resources to deploy and different regions to deploy. Terraform cannot control that. The only minor drawback probably shows up when a terraform job is terminated mid way. Then in many cases, time-consuming manual cleanup is required.
I have yet to have an opportunity to reach out directly to HashiCorp for support on Terraform. However, I have spent a great deal of time considering their documentation as I use the tool. This opinion is based solely on that. I find the Terraform documentation to have great breadth but lacking in depth in many areas. I appreciate that all of the tool's resources have an entry in the docs but often the examples are lacking. Often, the examples provided are very basic and prompt additional exploration. Also, the links in the documentation often link back to the same page where one might expect to be linked to a different source with additional information.
both Community support and Microsoft official support typically respond to (and resolve) reported issues in a VERY expedient manner, usually going above and beyond for education and bugfixing. I have been thoroughly impressed with the level of support I had been provided in the past.
after reviewing the main features of Power Automate, the Microsoft trainer focused on some of our real life use cases implementation, from simple to more advanced.
although it was productive, it is more difficult to stay focused and in a 7 hours a day online training (including screen share issues and the fact that the trainer just can't precisely show the exact location of your mistake)
Overall, our experience implementing Microsoft Power Automate has been positive, with a relatively low barrier to entry and a fast time-to-value—especially because it integrates natively with Microsoft 365, which we were already using extensively. With Respect to migration, I had a very good experience where existing workflows were reviewed and simplified. Unnecessary steps were removed. Business rules were reimplemented using Power Automate logic. We migrated Approval workflows, email-based notifications, SharePoint-centric processes, and simple integrations.
Terraform is the solid leader in the space. It allows you to do more then just provisioning within a pre-existing servers. It is more extensible and has more providers available than it competitors. It is also open source and more adopted by the community then some of the other solutions that are available in the market place.
Microsoft Power Automate is worlds ahead of Zapier in so many ways. The looping, DOM access, and flow controls are much better. I feel that accessing different data within previous connectors used in a flow is much easier in Microsoft Power Automate as well. The custom connector creation process is a lot more pleasant in Microsoft Power Automate. The DateTime data type is handles MUCH better in Microsoft Power Automate, which is reason enough to use it.
Microsoft's professional services provide hands-on support throughout the implementation lifecycle of Power Automate.This includes initial setup, configuration, integration with existing systems, testing, and deployment. They ensure that workflows are correctly designed, optimized for performance, and aligned with security best practices.
we are able to deploy our infrastructure in a couple of ours in an automated and repeatable way, before this could take weeks if the work was done manually and was a lot of error prone.
having the state file, you can see a diff of what things have changed manually out side of Terraform which is a huge plus
if state file gets corrupted, it is very hard to debug or restore it without an impact or spending hours ..
writing big scale code can be very challenging and hard to be efficient so it's usable by the whole team
You can automate a lot of process very easy like automatic mails for status updates and such. This will save a lot of time and is more accurate, faster and up-to-date than a user can be.
Task approval is centralized and automatic reminders save us a lot of time.
The ROI is good if you have a lot of use cases and things to automate
