Fortra's Automate (formerly HelpSystems Automate) is a robotic process automation platform for desktop applications. According to the vendor, it offers the ability to automate almost any business process, and no technical expertise is required—IT and business users alike can understand the drag-and-drop interface.
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Microsoft Power Automate
Score 8.2 out of 10
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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.
Anything where automation would be helpful, I'd recommend. If you're doing a task over and over again, Automate can likely work and do it for you. It helps to keep things running exactly the same so that when failures occur, they can easily be traced to their source.
We replaced all the classic SharePoint and Nintex-based workflows with Power Automate. This saved extra licensing costs and getaways from managing legacy workflows. Power Automate Designer is very user-friendly and requires no additional learning curve. We also use it to replace RPA solutions created with other platforms using the Power Automate Desktop application.
Power Automate is a great product that has a vast array of options on how to use it. Your imagination is the only hurdle with using Power Automate as there is no limit to what can be done with the system. It has brought a lot of value to our business through the use of custom systems, connectors, and streamlining processes.
For most tasks WinAutomation is great and easy to use. You just set up tasks on a step by step basis and you can even tell the program what to do when there is an error (such as continue with job). Sometimes with complicated web extraction jobs it would be good to be able to easily extract data from the web page source.
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)
I had to migrate from Robocorp to Power Automate. The automation was using API and sharepoint. So it was better to use Power Automate instead of Robocorp so we did the migration. in some areas the migration was easy but creating flows and making it smaller codes was difficult. Debugging the code was tough so we took lots of time.
It has similar usage cases and functions. However, many tools are stuck behind paywalls and always try to upsell you to the next version. It's very upsetting. Even if it's cheaper, whenever I try to replicate the functionality, I get that annoying message, "not available in this version." As an IT professional who needs approval for every purchase, I can't keep asking for upgrades to existing tools.
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 need to connect the key data points and actions taken.
Positive: Reliability on FTP jobs - really important on bank files.
Negative - annual support a little pricey - but not unusual for this level of software.
Positive: Does not require a dedicated administrator, especially after the jobs are created and tested. I perform other job duties and this rarely interferes with them.
Positive - Since it is easy to learn and use it makes it easy to have a back up administrator