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Microsoft Power Automate

Microsoft Power Automate
Formerly Microsoft Flow

Overview

What is Microsoft Power Automate?

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…

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Recent Reviews
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Power Automate Premium

$15

Cloud
per month per user

Power Automate Process

$150

Cloud
per month per bot

Hosted RPA add-on

$215

Cloud
per month per bot

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://powerautomate.microsoft.com/pri…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $15 per month per user
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Product Demos

Power Automate Guided Tour

powerautomate.microsoft.com
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Product Details

What is Microsoft Power Automate?

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.

Capabilities

  • (DPA) digital process automation through cloud flows to connect apps, data, and services.

  • Automates repetitive tasks using UI-based automation with (RPA) robotic process automation through desktop flows.

  • Ensures consistency with business process flows—the (BPA) business process automation capability in Power Automate.

  • Process advisor: Power Automate also includes process and task mining capabilities to analyze and optimize workflows.

  • AI Builder: Power Automate uses AI to automate tasks that are repetitive or time-consuming. For example, its AI can automatically extract data from documents, generate reports, or answer customer questions.

  • The "describe it to design it" feature allows users to create flows by simply describing them in natural language, making it faster and easier for users to create flows, to produce flows that are more likely to be used.

  • The Power Automate platform offers a wide range of connectors, so users can more easily integrate existing applications and systems.

Microsoft is now adding two new features to Power Automate:

  • Copilot, an AI-powered assistant that suggests actions, connectors, parameters, and supports flow debugging.

  • "Create text with GPT," an AI-powered action used to generate text for various purposes, including content creation, feedback gathering, and document information extraction.

  • Power Automate Process Mining (launched August 2023) - Optimizes operations and uncovers opportunities for automation.

Microsoft Power Automate Features

  • Supported: (DPA) Digital Process Automation - Cloud Flows
  • Supported: (RPA) Robotic Process Automation - Desktop Flows
  • Supported: (BPA) Business Process Automation - Business Process Flows
  • Supported: AI Builder
  • Supported: Process Mining - Process Advisor
  • Supported: Task Mining - Process Advisor

Microsoft Power Automate Screenshots

Screenshot of Microsoft Power Automate (Interface Screenshot) - Work Queues, Initial pageScreenshot of Microsoft Power Automate (Interface Screenshot) - Signed-in web portal home pageScreenshot of Microsoft Power Automate (Interface Screenshot) - Signed-in web portal create pageScreenshot of Microsoft Power Automate (Interface Screenshot) - Desktop designerScreenshot of Microsoft Power Automate (Interface Screenshot) - Hosted RPAScreenshot of Microsoft Power Automate (Interface Screenshot) - Display of DLP violations (on Run)Screenshot of Microsoft Power Automate (Interface Screenshot) - Cloud flow designerScreenshot of Microsoft Power Automate (Interface Screenshot) - AI Builder homepage

Microsoft Power Automate Videos

Microsoft Power Automate is a cloud-first, comprehensive automation platform powered by low-code and AI with GPT, designed to accelerate development without comprising visibility and control, modernize business processes, and integrate operations at scale. Key features: advanc...
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Al Builder's new Azure OpenAl service model enables businesses to integrate intelligent text generation capabilities into their Power Automate and Power Apps solutions. With pre-built templates, users can incorporate relevant prompts into their workflow.

Microsoft Power Automate Integrations

Microsoft Power Automate Competitors

Microsoft Power Automate Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android, Windows Phone
Supported CountriesAsia, Australia, Canada, Europe, France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, South America, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States
Supported LanguagesEnglish, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, Spanish, Estonian, Basque, Finnish, French, Galician, Hindi, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Lithuanian, Latvian, Malay, Norwegian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian (Cyrillic script, Serbia), Serbian (Latin script, Serbia), Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional)

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Microsoft Power Automate starts at $15.

UiPath Automation Platform, SS&C Blue Prism Intelligent Automation, and Automation Anywhere are common alternatives for Microsoft Power Automate.

Reviewers rate Usability highest, with a score of 9.

The most common users of Microsoft Power Automate are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(223)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-4 of 4)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
October 16, 2023

Work reduction with process automation with Microsoft Flow.

SS
Sandro Silva
IT Consultant
dormakaba (Computer Software, 51-200 employees)
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Microsoft Flow to automate internal processes such as material purchase approval flow, document file upload, customer data collection, technical teams communication when new documents are published in the file repository, and recently the integration between our chatbot to support technical and commercial teams, implementing in the bot the sending of emails with attachments and password validation by 2FA. All these automation have been integrated with Office365 products: SharePoint, Microsoft Forms, Outlook 365, Office 365 Users, and Microsoft Teams. Activity flows utilize various integration components such as HTTP webhook, Egnyte, Office 365 user, and groups search. As a result, we reduced the time spent on internal processes, with email exchanges and billing between teams, improved the dissemination of important documents, and expanded the resources and services available to our internal users.
Pros and Cons
  • Easy to configure and implement the flows.
  • Large catalog of addons and integration components.
  • Ease of working collaboratively.
  • Allows creation of custom flow components.
  • Easy to share and distribute the flows.
  • Depending on your license type, access to different integration components
  • Documentation about some components, functions, and usage syntax needs to be improved.
  • A tool for creating custom connectors.
  • Poor visualization of complex flows with multiple steps and unfolding
Likelihood to Recommend
For those who use Microsoft and Office 365 products, it is a great orchestrator and Automator of routines, running autonomously to integrate SaaS products, databases, and collaborative tools such as Teams and Sharepoint. Depending on the need, a Premium subscription is necessary, as it enables a series of native or third-party connectors and integration services. Integrations with third-party systems and services require you to have a subscription or license to these services. Microsoft Flow will be much better used in situations involving several teams, or manual processes with many steps, standalone use can automate many routines that should be done using a workstation, even if server components, such as Sharepoint, are required. Possible to create a flow integrating the components of these two environments. However, the workstation flow editor is not for beginners, it is a more complex tool that requires prior knowledge of the functioning of corporate systems and infrastructure and programming logic.
Most Important Features
  • Native integration with office365 services.
  • Active Directory-integrated security and permissioning.
  • Automation of communication tasks, treatment and dissemination of information.
Return on Investment
  • Real-time alerts when new documentation material becomes available.
  • Tracking and visibility of steps in a purchasing process.
  • Insufficient documentation for lay users or beginners regarding formulas and connector configuration.
  • Has an engaged community with multiple forums covering all aspects and features of Flow.
Implementation Rating
8
Implementing routines in Power Automate requires prior study and preparation, with many tests and validations at each stage. A free subscription helps in this phase of the project, as you can make sure that all integrations and automations will work when put into production. . The option to export the flow from one environment and import it into a new one is also a facilitator when putting the flow into production, or if you have offline team members or even outsourced people who create the integration routines. Once the automation routine is implemented in production, its maintenance occurs without problems, allowing the validation of calls to flows that resulted in an error, as well as the data used that resulted in the error. It is common not to require interventions after the final phase of implementation, routines run efficiently and fluidly, even with high workloads.
Generative AI
I have not yet used the existing AI resources in PowerPlatform, so far only the flow performance analysis has been interesting as it points out the average start-to-end execution times of each flow, and at which stage there were bottlenecks or longer processing times.The idea of using the Virtual Agent with some internal process flows is being studied and evaluated.
Alternatives Considered
The tools competing with Microsoft flow have interesting features, but they fail when you need to use resources located internally in the company, such as databases and network file repositories, in your flow, in addition, the security, permissions, and authentication part is not integrated to the Active Directory used for user authentication on the network, it is even possible to implement this authentication integration, but this requires a level of access to the server environment and network services that ordinary users will not have. If you only want to use cloud services in your flow, some free tools can be useful, including the free license of the Microsoft flow itself.
Other Software Used
Products Replaced
No
Key Differentiators
  • Cloud Solutions
  • Integration with Other Systems
  • Ease of Use
The ease of integration with other Microsoft products was decisive in deciding which tool to use to automate some processes. Another important point was security, which is integrated with the policies defined in Azure. The possibility of using on-premise gateways was a differentiator, as we were able to integrate legacy systems and databases into our cloud environment.
Evaluation Lessons Learned
The main premises would still be the same: integration with Microsoft systems, integrated security (this includes single authentication), and the possibility of integrating legacy systems on-premise; on the other hand, cost can become a tiebreaker, when we compare the cost of PowerAutomate alone, competitor products become more attractive, such as Zappier and ServiceNow, but when we analyze the cost integrated into an Office365 subscription, Power Automate becomes the best choice.
October 13, 2023

Power Automate Really Reviewed

Verified User
Analyst in Quality Assurance
Education Management Company, 5001-10,000 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I currently use this to send out automated emails for quality assurance record entry and other types of automated emails. I primarily use this for end-users to view quality assurance results. The problem that this problem helps with is emailing out in masses automatically instead of me having to do it. I also have a workflow built that emails out with attachments to help keep communication as up-to-date as possible.
Pros and Cons
  • Send automated emails
  • Notifies colleagues / managers when records have been entered.
  • Sometimes I have to really research how to do something in power automate. It's great, but it would be better if it could be even more user friendly
  • Is there something other than forums to learn how to do certain things in power automate?
Likelihood to Recommend
It's well suited for sending out automated emails or receipts of records entered. This has been extremely useful for our quality assurance initiative for keeping track of each QA and allowing each colleague an emailed / time-stamped receipt of their findings for review. It also has worked well for communication purposes, to send out emails to various teams with attachments and for them to go back and search through SharePoint instead of rummaging through their email trying to find something.
Most Important Features
  • Sending emails
Return on Investment
  • It has simplified a lot of our processes by creating an automated email process.
  • It has allowed for better communication across all teams.
Other Software Used
Users and Roles
4
N/A
Support Headcount Required
1
Currently just me that I am aware of. We have a few people that have 'messed around' with it, but we do not have a designated person to reach out to for questions on it that I am aware of.
Business Processes Supported
  • email notification
  • trigger events
  • information sharing
Innovative Uses
  • pull data automatically
  • send confirmations
  • send authorizations per approvals
Future Planned Uses
  • confirmation of completed projects to requestors
  • Integration with other PM platforms - such as ASANA
  • Request notifications
Likelihood to Renew
I do not have the authority to make that decision for my company.
Products Replaced
No
Key Differentiators
  • Ease of Use
  • Other
I was not involved in the purchasing of MS Power Automate, so I couldn't say what were the most important factors. I'm sure cost and ease of use are two big ones to consider.
Evaluation Lessons Learned
I was not involved in the selection process to purchase this product.
October 10, 2023

Great product, just needs to sand off some rough edges

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Outsourcing/Offshoring Company, 10,001+ employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Microsoft Power Automate extensively throughout the business. My usage of it is to streamline, schedule, and automate the evaluation, training, and onboarding of qualified individuals who meet the skillset required for the job. It addresses the primary business problem of being able to track/manage thousands of candidates in a way that works for a temp/outsourcing firm. It does everything from staged onboarding to scheduled mailings of bespoke examinations, to preparing emails to our customers for items such as employee terminations. My scope handles over 90,000 unique records.
Pros and Cons
  • "When an item is changed in a SharePoint list, do ____" - very easy to trigger massive flows of data based upon a one-field change on a SharePoint list.
  • Being able to manually trigger from a Microsoft PowerApp button press to perform actions.
  • Scheduled tasks - once a day, get every record in (LIST) with (Filters) and do (Stuff) to them.
  • The Power Automate tool can often take upwards of 10 minutes to start a "When an item is changed" flow, which is very frustrating when the action is time-sensitive.
  • The Power Automate builder's search is hot garbage - it only searches the names of the already-fetched Flows. so if you are looking for a flow with the word "Resignation" in it, you have to sit there and click "Load More", and wait ~30 seconds per click for it to fetch more data.
  • The documentation is Poor at best, and even the Forums can be rather incorrect.
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft Power Automate is Perfect for basic automation depending upon actions taken in a SharePoint list, or even to simplify your life. anything from "Once a week, back up any new documents in this folder to this other SharePoint", "on Monday morning, send trainees their login information", to "When someone books an event in my Outlook calendar, automatically schedule a 15m buffer meeting afterward to prevent meetings from overlapping". It's less appropriate for time-sensitive tasks that MUST be done immediately.
Most Important Features
  • SharePoint Integration.
  • Dataverse integration.
  • PowerApps integration.
Return on Investment
  • The project I am on would not have proceeded without PowerAutomate or a bespoke software solution.
Implementation Rating
10
implementing power automate was a bit tricky in learning the complexities, but the barebones is no harder than using Legos - grab a block, do a few settings, and wire them together. becoming a wizard took a few months and some research, but was really fast overall in getting up to speed.
Generative AI
we have not implemented the conversational AI tools within my scope of work. There are plans to investigate the AI functionality in the future however to move items closer to MS Teams and chat-based processing
Alternatives Considered
within my scope of work here, we did not evaluate competitive software. Primarily we looked at homegrown solutions that were massive shell scripts and nested code blocks... the power automate tool integrates MUCH better with the azure environment,
Other Software Used
Users and Roles
5000
every business function has at least one engagement with power automate
Support Headcount Required
50
our technical, HR, and IT Teams have this skillset.
Business Processes Supported
  • automation
  • data processing
  • bulk notifications
  • candidate management
  • onboarding
Innovative Uses
  • automating the user onboarding cycle
  • outlier detection based on large data models
Future Planned Uses
  • further streamlining processes
  • replacing low-effort job roles
Likelihood to Renew
10
my employer is absolutely fearful of ever changing anything, ever.
Products Replaced
Not Sure
Key Differentiators
  • Cloud Solutions
  • Scalability
  • Integration with Other Systems
the ability to integrate it easily within our existing microsoft investment was key in this regard towards selection
Evaluation Lessons Learned
I would not, our process worked well.
Implementation Details / Implementation Partner
  • Implemented in-house
Change Management Lessons
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled
our Change Advisory Board is very very strict in their requirements and what hoops we had to jump through
Implementation Issues
  • unexpected authentication issues
  • fetching data from sharepoint lists was ungodly complicated
Support Rating
9
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.
Premium Support
my employer purchased premium support, as that is our SOP for vendors and cloud services. no decision was made in this regard, that is simply our Standard Operating Procedure.
Bug Resolution
Yes
my issue definitely was solved in a very satisfactory manner, and it was really honestly quite quick to get the results back. I am very happy with the speed and quality of the overall responses i received.
Exceptional Examples of Microsoft Power Automate Support
when i thought i had discovered a bug in the power auto mate tool around its handling of JSONpath extracted variables as substrings, the support team was really very fast in pointing me at two potential solutions, and then they were able to get me on the right track towards a successful implementation and solution to my issue.
Usability
9
its a chaotic beast to tame, but once you do, its a WorkHorse!
Easy Tasks
  • basic design
  • wysiwyg flow between code blocks
  • low-code implementation
Difficult Tasks
  • advanced use cases
  • integrating with Live datasets
  • fetching more than 2,000 records to process from a Sharepoint List
October 10, 2023

Affordable and easy way to set up automations in a Microsoft environment.

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Building Materials Company, 201-500 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We needed a solution for our payables department to receive invoices from email attachments, going into a one drive folder. Microsoft Power Automate gave me the tools needed to design a product that achieves our end goal in simplifying payables document management. We linked it from our Exchange Online mailbox to our Microsoft OneDrive account.
Pros and Cons
  • Allows you to create automation and scripts that speed up productivity in the workplace.
  • Shows an overview of the workflow and job history.
  • Has lots of plug-ins with other Microsoft and third party vendors' product's.
  • Would like to see deeper integration with Exchange online, specifically the plugin realizing that an email is being sent via an alias address, not the primary SMTP address. We had to do a workaround that involved creating multiple single-member distribution groups to get power to automate to differentiate different email addresses going to the same mailbox.
  • The interface is slow to load at times.
Likelihood to Recommend
The integrations for Microsoft products seem robust and reliable. It's well suited for workflows staying inside 365 products, but not as much when it comes to third-party integrations. Microsoft Power Automate also is not suited for IoT due to a lack of integration with those services.
Most Important Features
  • Microsoft Exchange Online integration.
  • Microsoft OneDrive integration.
  • File handling ability.
Return on Investment
  • We've seen productivity increase 20% for our payables department, they no longer have to download email attachments and put them into folders.
Implementation Rating
10
There are some quirks to how email aliases are processed in power automate. But once those were figured out, it worked flawlessly, and we haven't had any major issues with the implementation of our Power Automate routine.

My knowledge of creating automations is limited to GUI macro software like Jitbit macro recorder, and scripting in PHP and Powershell. The GUI is much easier to use for a beginner than writing a script
Generative AI
We have not used any AI tools in our power automate jobs.
Alternatives Considered
We were previously using on-prem Sharepoint and Exchange 2016. After migrating to 365 we realized it was hard to replicate this functionality without using power automate. We didn't look elsewhere because the license was included with our 365 subscriptions.
Other Software Used
Users and Roles
5
Only I directly use power automate. But the results of power automate's scripts are used by 5 people in our org. Mainly accounting and finance.
Support Headcount Required
Just myself
Business Processes Supported
  • Email organization
  • Attachment filing
  • Invoice organization
Innovative Uses
  • Email attachment filing and organization into Sharepoint
Future Planned Uses
  • Creating workflows for people in our manufacturing production shop
Likelihood to Renew
10
It's included free with our Microsoft license, we've had no problems with it, and it serves us well.
Products Replaced
Yes
Power Automate replaced on-prem sharepoint email workflows with an on-prem Exchange server. We used to send invoices to email addresses created by sharepoint, and it would file them into folders on our old server. We moved to the cloud a few years ago, and it wasn't economical to keep old sharepoint running.
Key Differentiators
  • Cloud Solutions
  • Integration with Other Systems
It works with Office 365 and Sharepoint Online. It replaces what we've previously implemented on premise.
Evaluation Lessons Learned
Power Automate was simply a product that "fell into my lap" and fit the bill. We didn't specifically search out competitors.
Implementation Details / Implementation Partner
  • Implemented in-house
Implementation Phases
No
Change Management Lessons
Change management was minimal
I had to show the team how to use sharepoint online, its URLs vs our old system. But other than that, it was transparent to our users.
Implementation Issues
  • It took a while to get our flow implemented because I wanted to use a single mailbox with multiple aliases. Initially Power Automate couldn't tell between what alias I was sending an attachment to. I had to tweak and test the script to have it figure that out.
Support Rating
6
Our support for 365 comes from our value added reseller, so my rating is based on that. Not Microsoft directly.
Premium Support
We did not purchase premium support. We are not aware of that as an option.
Bug Resolution
No
Exceptional Examples of Microsoft Power Automate Support
I can not. I have not contacted Microsoft directly for support.
Usability
10
Power Automate has an intuitive interface that is easy for novices to use. It doesn't require programming knowledge, however having that experience will help troubleshoot potential issues if they do arise. There are advanced features that allow the use of "code-like" steps that will help power users get more advanced automations set up quickly.
Easy Tasks
  • The use of logic is presented in an orderly way which is easy to understand
  • The integrations with microsoft and third party apps is well organized being grouped by product
  • The advanced features like JSON and HTML parsing allows more advanced controls in flows, without having to write code.
Difficult Tasks
  • There are sometimes too many options when trying to perform an action. For example Microsoft Outlook, there are v2, v3, v4 without a clear indication on why you would want to use each.
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