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
Smartsheet
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Smartsheet is an online project management and collaboration tool. It includes automated alerts, instantaneous updating and sharing across team members, resource management, nested tasks organized in a hierarchy, a Gantt chart view, exportable and automated reports, and integration with email.
Power Automate beats UiPath basically from a costing perspective. I prefer Power Automate over UiPath because of its different costing segments that make it way cheaper than UiPath.
Smartsheet provides a number of functions when it comes to dealing with and showcasing tabular …
Power Automate can do many things that most platforms can't do as a 'citizen-developer' with no access to coding tools and deployment. It allows you to develop and deploy low/no-cost automation flows quickly. The blocks in Powert Automate do the API work for you, where you only …
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.
Smartsheet shines for collaboration. When you have multiple people involved with planning events Smartsheet makes it easy to share and collaborate. For instance, multiple people can be in Smartsheet working at the same time. Also setting permissions for exactly those who need to know is quite easy with Smartsheet. For data analytics and general spreadsheet purposes Excel is better but for project management and event planning Smartsheet is superior
Its hard to overstate the value of familiarity. Being able to use a tool that has some familiarity takes away the time needed to train and orient employees on a new tool and allows an organization to hit the ground running.
Smartsheet covers most of the basics of a project management tool, the usual tasks, milestones and project viewing options.
For data viewing, you get multiple data viewing options including a calendar view (good for marketing teams and those who work around scheduling), Kanban, Gaant etc
Smartsheet set up is similar to Excel, yet when you upload an Excel file, things like conditional formatting are lost. Smartsheet has its own conditional formatting, and you have to reinstate the rules. It would be great if those would apply automatically once a file is uploaded
Some Smartsheet management and access rules can take some tweaking to work properly. This may be a case of offering more info to admins so they can apply these better and with more efficiency
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.
It definitely meets our needs as far as organizing and archiving our tasks and files. As we train more staff to view it, I see opportunities for more improvement, which I am sure this program can handle. I look forward to seeing continued improvement from Smartsheet on their capabilities and functionality.
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.
Smartsheet is very easy to learn. However, while I have been able to pick it easily, Microsoft Excel and Project super users that I have trained on Smartsheet get bogged down in the differences and can find it frustrating. Explaining the differences ahead of time and why Smartsheet is being chosen instead of a different software seems to counteract those reactions
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.
I give this rating because it fills a niche in the market. MS Project scares many away from proper task management but there are limited tools our there, especially cloud-based that are mobile-friendly. Smartsheet fills this market gap, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. IT is not fair to compare it to MS Project, but fairer to see what gaps it fills.
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.
It's absolutely paramount to take a few minutes to actually play with the software. It's nearly impossible to do anything wrong or make a mistake which cannot be fixed easily. Under the help menu is Live Training option. After you familiarize yourself with the commands, watch the live training for some in depth understanding of how to make the software fit your needs perfectly.
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.
Jira and Redmine are much more robust and technologically advanced project management solutions. I enjoy using either when managing a very large project. However, I prefer to use Smartsheet for my smaller to medium sized projects. As for Google Drive - I would say that Google sheets and Smartsheet are almost identical in my opinion when it comes to functionality. Personally I prefer to manage smaller projects via Google Drive, but it is a personal preference!
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.
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
