Microsoft Power Automate is a powerful automation tool that helps you take care of what’s essential by automating the rest. It’s designed to streamline repetitive tasks and business processes, boosting efficiency and reducing costs. With Power Automate, users can create and run automated workflows that connect their favorite apps and services to synchronize files, get notifications, collect data, and more.
Key Features
- Hundreds of pre-built connectors and thousands of templates
- AI assistance for task automation
- Power Automate Process Mining to record and visualize end-to-end processes
- AI Builder and GPT to embed powerful language models into your workflows
- Power Automate apps for automation across desktop, web, and mobile
- Seamless integration with Microsoft services and many other third-party apps
Use Cases
- Streamlining supply chain functions
- Automating various applications and services such as delaying emails based on time zones
- Creating useful apps and workflows with minimal effort
- Managing multiple data flows to reduce duplication of work and effort
- Automating report generation and ETL processes
- Synchronizing files between different applications
Pricing
Microsoft Power Automate offers a free trial for users to try out their service. After the trial period, you will need to choose one of their paid subscription plans to continue using the service. Here are the details of some of the plans:
- Power Automate Premium: This plan is best for businesses that want predictable licensing with per-user plans. It costs $15 per user/month and enables licensed users to automate modern applications via API-based digital process automation (cloud flows) and legacy applications via UI-based robotic process automation (desktop flows) in attended mode. It includes unlimited cloud flows (DPA) and desktop flows (RPA) in attended mode, 50 MB Power Automate Process Mining data storage, 5,000 AI Builder credits, and Dataverse entitlements of 250 MB database and 2 GB file.
- Power Automate Process: This plan is best for businesses that want predictable licensing with per-bot plans. It costs $150 per bot/month and licenses a single “automation” bot that can be used for unattended desktop automation (RPA), or a digital process automation (DPA) flow that can be accessed by unlimited users in the organization. It includes cloud flows (DPA), desktop flows (RPA) in unattended mode, 5,000 AI Builder credits, and Dataverse entitlements of 50 MB database and 200 MB file.
- Pay-as-you-go: Power Automate also introduces pay-as-you-go pricing for customers to pay only for the number of flow runs they execute. The Power Automate cloud flow run and desktop flow run (attended mode) will be priced at $0.60 per flow run, enabling organizations to run automation at scale without per-user licenses, and only pay for the number of cloud flow runs or attended flow runs.
You can check out their pricing page for more information about each plan to make the best decision for your business.
User Experience
Power Automate has an intuitive user interface, with tools designed for simplicity and efficiency. With the drag-and-drop feature, users can build automated processes quickly and securely. The availability of Power Automate on desktop, mobile, and web also enhances user experience.
Customer Support
Users can raise a support ticket or reach out via email if they encounter any issues or need assistance. Besides, Microsoft maintains a rich knowledge base packed with tutorials, guides, and helpful articles to assist users in navigating and maximizing the utility of Power Automate.
Community and Learning Resources
Microsoft has a wealth of resources available to learn Power Automate, including a roadmap, webinars, and self-paced learning. They also have an active community in their forums where users can discuss and learn more about business processes and workflow automation topics.
Security and Reliability
Microsoft provides strong security for Power Automate, with data encryption both in transit and at rest. In terms of reliability, the tool is part of the Microsoft 365 suite, which has robust uptime and is supported by Microsoft’s large infrastructure.
Integration
Power Automate can connect workflows to hundreds of data sources using a library of connectors and Microsoft Dataverse, which helps bring your data together for a single source of truth. Power Automate integrates well with Microsoft’s suite of products such as Office 365, SharePoint, and Dynamics 365. It also connects with many third-party apps like Salesforce, Twitter, MailChimp, and more.
Alternatives
Alternatives: Tools such as Zapier, n8n.io, and IFTTT serve as alternatives to Microsoft Power Automate. Each of these tools offers similar but distinct features and capabilities.
