Microsoft Power Automate vs VisualCron comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Power Automate
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
2nd
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
123
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VisualCron
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
13th
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Managed File Transfer (MFT) (10th), Workload Automation (13th)
 

Market share comparison

As of June 2024, in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category, the market share of Microsoft Power Automate is 24.8% and it increased by 19.0% compared to the previous year. The market share of VisualCron is 0.4% and it increased by 5.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Unique Categories:
No other categories found
Managed File Transfer (MFT)
1.2%
Workload Automation
0.9%
 

Featured Reviews

Nilesh Gosavi - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 28, 2023
Straightforward setup, stable, and scalable
Microsoft Power Automate is used to automate tasks and schedule workflows Microsoft Power Automate has helped us automate tasks that have reduced human error and increased efficiency. Microsoft Power Automate offers over 200 connectors that enhance the user experience. Microsoft Power Automate…
MT
May 10, 2024
Integrates easily into the existing systems and reduces operational costs
We use the solution mainly for reporting purposes The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%. A lot of manual processes have been automated. The product runs smoothly within Windows. It is easy to integrate VisualCron into our existing systems. The documentation is a bit weak. The tool…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Microsoft Power Automate is an easy-to-understand solution."
"The technical support is good."
"I like that Power Automate gives us a connector to be able to connect different data sources or different software."
"It's not hard to learn, which means we'll be able to make more workflows in the future."
"I have found the scheduling and email notifications features to very good compared to other RPA tools I have used."
"The most valuable feature is that it is very easy to use."
"The email routing, consolidation of the reports, and management features are strong."
"The development time for ProcessRobot is very good compared to other solutions."
"'ve only had a few cases where I've had to request support in the past 12 years of use, but the support response time and resolution were was extremely quick."
"The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%."
"I love VisualCron because we previously spent a lot of time writing Power switches to connect to SQL Server. VisualCron makes it easier to execute services or connect to FileZilla by only adding the credentials to the master credentials stored in the solution."
"VisualCron is a very powerful program to automate different steps in your business processes. We use it to automate replacing files and inform departments about the replacement."
"The ability to clone jobs to shorten the time it takes to implement a process has been invaluable, but its flexibility also gives us the ability to create a job that can handle a multifaceted process with a complex workflow."
"It has improved our organization with more automation within the business departments and less administration and development in the IT department. Usually, as the IT department, we are the bottleneck for many requirements within the business. With this tool, the business departments are able to perform many task themselves."
"What I found most beneficial from VisualCron is that you can directly connect it with different databases, user accounts, and credentials. You can run queries from one machine to another using the credentials, unlike PowerShell, that's run by the machine itself. With VisualCron, you can directly ask other machines and run requests through user credentials. Suppose you have an AWS or Azure environment. In that case, you can maintain the connection between on-premises and cloud-based machines, which is the type of setup in the organization I'm working for. You can directly call some of the services via VisualCron on your local on-premises machine, and I found that an excellent feature of the tool."
"The most valuable feature of VisualCron is its ability to schedule interactive jobs so that you can have interdependencies within the job and interdependencies of a job on another job, and so on."
 

Cons

"When you try to create a flow or work on the flow in Microsoft Power Automate you cannot undo changes. There are no options to edit or, undo an action. This feature would be useful. The editing option within the flow can be enhanced."
"One of the challenges is dealing with OCR text recognition."
"When you are doing desktop automation, they do not have a clear structure to create the code."
"WinAutomation is scalable to a certain extent. I would rate it seven for the scalability, which could be better. Softomotive is better scalable than WinAutomation in this regard."
"AI-enabled voice recognition features could be included in the product."
"The BPM component needs improvement."
"Sometimes, Microsoft changes the game rules, and the free tools are no longer free, which makes it too hard to explain to customers. It is a SaaS service, so the cost is calculated based on the execution hours. However, we don't know the background of this cost because we cannot touch the infrastructure. They can be more open to developers or customers about this. The infrastructure part must be open for the customers."
"I've had issues with reordering columns. When I tried to do it, it seemed to take a long time, and then, later, it gave me some kind of error."
"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."
"The documentation is a bit weak."
"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."
"VisualCron seems to operate like an efficient machine when it comes to improvements and enhancements and new features. I always appreciate the quick response I get when bringing up an issue or coming up with suggestions. I've mentioned before that it would be great to see a move away from SQLCE and XML configuration files."
"The only problem I face when I use the tool is that it doesn't contain much documentation or it doesn't have many video tutorials on its features."
"The error timeout and info could be better. When making web request calls, it will time out sometimes and we won't get any useful info out of the error response."
"VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve."
"VisualCron is software, and you will experience performance degradation when you scale up. VisualCron takes too much memory or CPU power. We have to increase the hardware resources of a specific server or system."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution is bundled with our Office 365, so there is no additional licensing fee."
"The licensing model is flexible in that you can pay per automation or per user. My client receives a discount because of the large number of users and pays approximately $15 for each one."
"There are many different ways to license it."
"It costs us nothing because we use it on the built-in cost that is a part of our existing license for 365. To use it more extensively, there are different pricing models. Its licensing is complex. It is complex to evaluate the cost in advance. As a result, people don't use it because they don't know what overall cost they are going to incur. There are too many criteria to figure out how much it is going to cost you to use the product to its full extent. Its licensing model should be improved, and the pricing should be more visible and transparent."
"It is free for us. It is embedded directly in the Office package."
"It is free with Office 365 subscription."
"You can have two types of licenses, one is user-based, and the other is app-based in the Power Platform."
"There is zero licensing cost. It comes with our Microsoft Office subscription."
"ROI is 95 percent."
"VisualCron is correctly priced because it wasn't very cheap, and it wasn't overly expensive, so the price for it was set correctly. When my previous company bought VisualCron, it was €800 per server per year. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing for VisualCron a five because it was just right. The tool was affordable, and it has one of the most competitive pricing in the market."
"ROI is one month."
"We are fine with a rather cheap setup. Licensing with VisualCron is fair. You have a simple one-year licence in different sizes. There isn't a licensing jungle with hundreds of options and opt-ins."
"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
"The price is a bit high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
15%
Healthcare Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

RPA that Bots can run without centralized control?
Yes, Attended Bots which can run without centralized control Module. RPA Tools like Automation Anywhere, uiPath ,Power Automation they do support this.
How do I choose between UiPath and Microsoft Power Automate?
Microsoft‌ ‌Power‌ ‌Automate‌ ‌is‌ ‌intuitive‌ ‌and‌ ‌easy‌ ‌to‌ ‌integrate‌ ‌and‌ ‌use.‌ ‌I‌ ‌like‌ ‌that‌ ‌there‌ ‌is‌ ‌no‌ ‌coding‌ ‌experience‌ ‌necessary,‌ ‌and‌ ‌appreciate‌ ‌the‌ ‌automated‌...
How is Automation Anywhere compared to Microsoft Power Automate?
‌Neither‌ ‌solution‌ ‌requires‌ ‌any‌ ‌coding‌ ‌experience,‌ ‌and‌ ‌both‌ ‌are‌ ‌easy‌ ‌to‌ ‌use‌ ‌and‌ ‌have‌ ‌great‌ ‌drag-and‌ ‌drop‌ ‌functionality.‌ ‌The‌ ‌training‌ ‌and‌ ‌resources‌ ‌for‌ ‌A...
What do you like most about VisualCron?
The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%.
What needs improvement with VisualCron?
The documentation is a bit weak. The tool must provide a better set of documentation.
 

Also Known As

Power Automate, Microsoft Flow, MS Power Automate, WinAutomation by Softomotive, ProcessRobot by Softomotive
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. Coca-Cola 2. General Electric 3. Siemens 4. Accenture 5. Deloitte 6. Johnson & Johnson 7. Ford 8. Nestle 9. Procter & Gamble 10. IBM 11. Amazon 12. Google 13. Microsoft 14. Adobe 15. Cisco 16. Oracle 17. SAP 18. Intel 19. HP 20. Dell 21. Verizon 22. AT&T 23. T-Mobile 24. Walmart 25. Target 26. Home Depot 27. McDonald's 28. Starbucks 29. Nike 30. Apple 31. Facebook 32. Twitter
7 Eleven, ABB Sécheron SA, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Amazon Europe Core, Apple, Assa Abloy, Aston Martin, Banco Santander, BMW (Australia)
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Power Automate vs. VisualCron and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
787,061 professionals have used our research since 2012.