IBM Business Automation Workflow vs. Microsoft Power Automate

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Business Automation Workflow
Score 9.7 out of 10
N/A
IBM Business Automation Workflow is a solution that helps users automate digital workflows to increase productivity, efficiency and insights — on premises or on cloud.N/A
Microsoft Power Automate
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
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
Pricing
IBM Business Automation WorkflowMicrosoft Power Automate
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Power Automate Premium
$15
per month per user
Power Automate Process
$150
per month per bot
Hosted RPA add-on
$215
per month per bot
Process Mining add-on
$5,000
per month per tenant
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Business Automation WorkflowMicrosoft Power Automate
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM Business Automation WorkflowMicrosoft Power Automate
Features
IBM Business Automation WorkflowMicrosoft Power Automate
Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
IBM Business Automation Workflow
10.0
Ratings
20% above category average
Microsoft Power Automate
-
Ratings
Dashboards10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Standard reports10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Custom reports10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Process Engine
Comparison of Process Engine features of Product A and Product B
IBM Business Automation Workflow
10.0
Ratings
18% above category average
Microsoft Power Automate
-
Ratings
Process designer10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Process simulation10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Business rules engine10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
SOA support10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Process player10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Support for modeling languages10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Form builder10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Model execution10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Collaboration
Comparison of Collaboration features of Product A and Product B
IBM Business Automation Workflow
10.0
Ratings
17% above category average
Microsoft Power Automate
-
Ratings
Social collaboration tools10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Content Management Capabilties
Comparison of Content Management Capabilties features of Product A and Product B
IBM Business Automation Workflow
10.0
Ratings
20% above category average
Microsoft Power Automate
-
Ratings
Content management10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
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IBM Business Automation WorkflowMicrosoft Power Automate
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CMW Platform
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Score 8.9 out of 10
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Score 8.9 out of 10
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Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM Business Automation WorkflowMicrosoft Power Automate
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(0 ratings)
7.8
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.0
(0 ratings)
9.3
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(0 ratings)
7.9
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
7.6
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM Business Automation WorkflowMicrosoft Power Automate
Likelihood to Recommend
It is best suited for streamlining business processes in our enterprise. It acts as middleware and allows to use of mobile development
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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.
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Pros
  • Case management - provides flexibility for dynamic processing.
  • Smarter process - streamlines repeatable activities and does work distributions.
  • Advanced integration - makes integration with other systems very easy.
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  • Sending confirmation email to clients and user once the flow is triggered.
  • Fetching or Dumping files from one location to another if the flow is triggered.
  • Schedule flow helps to send alerts and triggers the flow at a specific interval of time to carry out the required task.
  • Power Automate also be used to convert any file format to a specific file format and save it to the required location
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Cons
  • Installation is (typically) a bit painful out of the box and requires expert help.
  • Following installation, initial projects require outside consulting expertise to be successful. Projects without importing BPM expertise tend to have much higher failure rates. Though individually the technologies involved are widely available and not complicated, combined and collectively BPM solutions require a flexible, creative, technical talent to help deliver. It takes time to learn the judgment and craft required.
  • The out-of-the-box UI controls (widgets) are not terribly inspiring- on desktop or mobile. Use of third party toolkits (e.g. Brazos) is recommended. Silver lining: those third party toolkits are quite good.
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  • No activity disable feature in the workflow, this would have saved lot of time
  • Allow turn off feature to not trigger any pending runs in the queue or add new feature to just run pending runs when the workflow is turned off
  • Allow easy copy and paste activities from UI
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Likelihood to Renew
This particular decision will be made by other people. Overall IBM BPM is the best BPM engine that I have worked with. It is implemented at our company and IT and business are already somewhat familiar with it. Therefore if asked I will recommend renewal as long as the price is reasonable.
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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.
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Usability
Building complex UIs can be cumbersome. Calling complex SOA services that have a lot of objects, types, anyType attributes, recursive object references, etc can be cumbersome. The Process Designer IDE communicates with the server side Process Center a lot and as a result it is pretty slow. The IDE is also Eclipse based which doesn't make it faster.
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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.
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Support Rating
Issues can be raised through tickets and it works based on the priority of the issue. The Support Team response is also good and the solution is provided in a short span of time. In a case where the issue is serious, they try to find out the root cause and provide an alternative for it.
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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.
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In-Person Training
• Attended on premise sysadmin training for 4 days, 8 hours per day. Although further follow-up training was available, I never felt the need to go back. Training was very hands-on with real modeling (rather than just following a manual). Very effective.
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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.
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Online Training
No answers on this topic
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)
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Implementation Rating
• Very satisfied – not too difficult at all.
• We had a consultant available as part of our contract, but we didn’t really need to use (except for some advice on ActiveDirectory and single sign-on)
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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.
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Alternatives Considered
Pega Pega is a comprehensive suite which offers a unique theme of BPM development in the market. A no-coding approach based on rules with inheritance makes Pega a very powerful product. However Pega, falls short on integration centric capabilities and very rigid to customize. On the other hand IBM comes with array of products which suits needs of varying degree. Advanced integration is solved by BPEL Process Server which has support for state based patterns and mediation. Dynamic rules and event management can be solved with WODM, Cloud to on-premise connectivity with Cast Iron, Enterprise gateway and security usecases with DataPower, Social BPM with IBM BPM , WODM, mobify with Worklight. Pega has a little bit of eveything here and there. It solves the dynamic rule management, brings out the flavor of Social BPM and mobility with Antenna ( I guess) and predictive analytics as well in one single suite. There are certain usecases which needs to have a little bit of everything, however this little bits and pieces of functionality when its blows, Pega would have problems to scale. With IBM its a bit nightmare to maintain a variety of technologies, however you can wish to go for one without the other and go for something only when you truly need it. Pega vs IBM Its difficult to pick a winner. In nutshell when you want a full scale BPM with rich integration capabilities go for IBM BPM. On the other hand if you hava mature integration capability already, Pega can yield quick results for you as well. Pega's strength is its methodology. IBM BPM's strength is integration. Actually you can't go wrong with both in terms of implementation. My strong recommendation is to invest time to process analysis and pick a good vendor to support consulting and implementation.
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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.
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Scalability
It scales from small team interactions to business processes serving thousands of employees, as well as straight-through-processing needs that go well beyond. Of course, scale is always in the eye of the beholder, but IBM BPM does a good job of giving you all of the hooks, APIs, and data that you need to take on whatever scaling approaches you need to meet the load
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No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • Easier to implement and does not take much effort to work on it.
  • Versioning made easy. We can even degrade to the previous version in case of any issue, which is not easier to do in other BPM suites, thereby, saving a good amount of time.
  • Helped in achieving client requirements faster, which results in a higher return of investment.
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  • Automating emails for finance and payroll has not only saved hours of work for those departments but lowers the risk of human error.
  • Creating workflows and approvals for our goals and bonus system has saved everyone in the organization hours of manual work and MATH!
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ScreenShots

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)