Microsoft Power Automate vs. Salesforce Lightning Platform

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
Salesforce Lightning Platform
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
Salesforce Platform is designed for building and deploying scalable cloud applications with managed hardware provisioning and app stacks. It provides out-of-the-box tools and services to automate business processes, integrate with external apps, and provide responsive layouts and more.
$25
Per User Per Month
Pricing
Microsoft Power AutomateSalesforce Lightning Platform
Editions & Modules
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
Starter
$25.00
Per User Per Month
Plus
$100.00
Per User Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft Power AutomateSalesforce Lightning Platform
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Microsoft Power AutomateSalesforce Lightning Platform
Considered Both Products
Microsoft Power Automate
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
In our experience, Microsoft Power Automate fails with throttling and became unusable to meet our client deadlines. Nintex did not experience throttling issues for us.
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
Power Automate don't require additional license like Nintex. Also, plenty of connectors in Power Automate connect external systems and applications.
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
We preferred PowerAutomate due to its integration and security within the M365 suite which our business was already using.
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
Firstly, it came with organizational license, so it was available to everyone, for some of the automations that we're not able to do so when we took license for other tools it was more difficult and tedious to do hence, we had to shift back to Microsoft Power Automate. License …
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
Microsoft Power Automate is worlds ahead of Zapier in so many ways. The looping, DOM access, and flow controls are much better. I feel that accessing different data within previous connectors used in a flow is much easier in Microsoft Power Automate as well.

The custom …
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
The Microsoft Power Automate have the browser based access which doesn't require any tool installation separately. Whereas for the Uipath, many dependencies are needed for the flows. We need to purchase the separate License for the UiPath but in case of the Power Automate, it …
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
I have only used Microsoft Power Automate as our organization is using microsoft ecosystem and i can access its features easily. With new features it is sufficient enough for my use as if now. I would recommend it for those who are in microsoft ecosystem to use it is capable …
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
I have many years of experience with Nintex applications and it stands up very well against Microsoft Power Automate. I hope Microsoft Power Automate can become the better workflow application. With the Integrated AI builder and continuous updates I expect they can become the …
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
We migrated from Flow. They only other we have used is Sharepoint workflows and Power Automate is miles ahead of that.
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
easy to use, easy to adopt
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
earlier we have used UiPath Automation Platform .Later we have used Microsoft Power Automate for below reasons
1.Accessibility
2.Microsoft Integration
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
  1. Power Automate beats UiPath basically from a costing perspective. I prefer Power Automate over UiPath because of its different costing segments that make it way cheaper than UiPath.
  2. SmartSheet provides a number of functions when it comes to dealing with and showcasing tabular …
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
User Interface and Ease of Use, Integration Capabilities, Bot Development, Cognitive Services and AI Integration, Scalability, Pricing, Community and Support. The most thing that Power Automate stands out from others is the Pricing models as it is way more cheap than Automation …
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
UIPath allows for automation of saving email attachments but the time required to create this automation is a great deal longer than Microsoft Power Automate.
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
Microsoft Power Automate is a Low-Code,No-Code approach making it easy for a beginner to learn and understand. The integration with microsoft ecosystem is an advantage. The cost is less when compared to uipath. There are pre built templates available and the AI integration is …
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
Microsoft Power Automate is the platform we can say very user friendly You need not to know the coding and programme you just need to enter the flow you wanted and you are set . You no need lengthy program and eventually no time is required. Very productive tool we are using …
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
Power Automate is a no-code/low-code solution tailored for workflow automation, data integration, and AI integration, making it an excellent choice for Microsoft-centric organizations.
OutSystems, on the other hand, is a comprehensive application development platform, offering …
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
Power Automate is very well integrated with Microsoft office 365 suit, Teams channel and SharePoint online. The workflow UI is very user-friendly and the users from non-technical background can easily understand the tool and start automating any simple and complex workflows. …
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
Power Automate is much more powerful than IFTTT or Zapier, and the cost is included in our current license. IFTTT is sometimes too simple in their API capabilities, and Zapier charges per process which means the high frequency tasks that we most want to automate quickly get …
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
Both have their use cases. Nintex Automation Cloud allows external users to submit forms, which Microsoft PowerAutomate or PowerApps doesn't allow. (Power Pages is very costly)
Chose Microsoft Power Automate
The only other similar product I have used is Excel with advanced formular and macros, PA is by far more superior and easier for the laymen
Salesforce Lightning Platform
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
Salesforce Lightning Platform provides a more sales-focused CRM. It allows the sales force of an organization to be able to stay organized and can pull necessary reports to get a better understanding on how the business is performing regarding sales and customer activity. …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
I have only used Salesforce Lightning Platform for crm purposes
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
Salesforce stands out purely for its enterprise pedigree. No other competitor out there knows Enterprise business as well as Salesforce does. It is levels about the rest of the competition in terms of managing heavy processing requirements of a large enterprise. I did not have …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
Compared to Sage CRM, Salesforce Lightning Platform is leaps and bounds ahead. Sage CRM feels outdated and very slow compared to Salesforce Lightning Platform. There is a lot more ability to integrate Salesforce Lightning Platform with other APIs and systems. There is more of …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
I have been using Salesforce for two years now. Ans I have not used any other platform before similar on this. I find Salesforce very easy to use and this really makes your job much easier and faster. Its features are easy to understand and use and I am glad I have learned …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
We have always been a Salesforce shop, but have grown with the App Cloud platform as it's evolved. We eventually moved to lightning based on the streamlined interface and increased ease of use for our employees. So far we are happy with the results. Would definitely recommend …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
Salesforce, while more expensive, provides faster support, higher scalability options, and an increased opportunity to change any details whether it's about user permissions management, custom field or object creation, or an integration of another application. What really sets …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
Salesforce has more functionality as a CRM platform. The major disadvantage is the ability to integrate with Microsoft products. Ability to integrate with Microsoft is the best part about 356 given that it is a Microsoft product. Even though the price is more expensive, it …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
We were previously using an older version prior to it becoming Salesforce Lightning Platform so we were well adverse on the advantages of using a CRM, to begin with. It made sense to convert to Salesforce Lightning Platform after we were given a free trial of the platform. …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
It offers way more functionalities and the interface/design can be fully customized to best support your companies needs.
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
NA - I've only used [Salesforce Lightning Platform (formerly Salesforce App Cloud)] in my tenure as a CSM
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
I think Salesforce has the most powerful developer engine - I have yet to need a module that I couldn't create (maybe with help). I probably could have made the others work but Salesforce, in my opinion, made it the easiest. Salesforce is reliable and established as well so …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
I would love to switch back to Service Cloud as it was much, much more intuitive and fast. I would even take Salesforce Classic over Lightning. It at least wasn't this slow.
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
I used a program formerly known as "CP." I considered it somewhat outdated, and it does not have any of the modern features that the Salesforce Lightning Platform (formerly Salesforce App Cloud) has. I consider the Salesforce Lightning Platform (formerly Salesforce App Cloud) …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
I use both. SF is the constant through the organization and I receive leads into SF and pass on opportunities through SF.
SL is better for internal processes within business dev.
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
Salesforce is the premeire product. Period. The others are cheaper and less capable, they may fulfill your organisation's needs but you will always be looking at Salesforce with wishful eyes. If you are a company that needs to bootstrap then spend the time to evaluate your …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
Microsoft is pretty limited in functionality compared to Salesforce. Most folks coming into your organization are going to have some level of Salesforce experience but will most likely not have experience with Dynamics. Dynamics doesn't connect as well to other platforms.
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
I believe the only reason we didn't choose Monday.com is because we're just a bit bigger (company size- 75 people) than what Monday.com handles. We also are in San Francisco, and Salesforce pretty much owns this entire city. I was also not part of the selection process of the …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
There is a reason why the Salesforce Lightning Platform is the market leader for all things related to customer relationship management. While Close is somewhat user-friendly, it pales in comparison to all the features, bells, and whistles that the Salesforce Lightning Platform …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
We originally used spreadsheets when we first started. That worked fine until we started growing by over 100% year over year. We were able to upload all of our previous accounts in Salesforce Classic once it was called for. However, Salesforce Classic soon became redundant and …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
We needed a product that would allow for easy and dynamic reports for potential and new clients. Account Managers use other products as well to monitor the client's success and Salesforce allows for seamless integration to other platforms. This serves as a one-stop-shop for all …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
We currently use the two together, along with Hubspot sales. Salesforce is our primary CRM and where we track and manage account and contact information.
Salesforce is much more flexible and intuitive - everything is where you would expect it to be.
Hubspot reporting is …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
I think that the Lightning platform is not as clean and doesn't integrate that well. Whenever I was logged out, it was such a treck to have to log back in and I never actually knew if my activity was being saved or actually being tracked. Personally, Lightning is not my …
Chose Salesforce Lightning Platform
Close and Salesforce are two very different beasts. Close is much more user friendly but lacks the ability to serve complex infrastructures and hierarchies provided by Salesforce. Close is much simpler and faster--great for high volume but will not provide you with rich, …
Features
Microsoft Power AutomateSalesforce Lightning Platform
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Power Automate
-
Ratings
Salesforce Lightning Platform
7.5
Ratings
6% below category average
Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings5.90 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Platform management overhead00 Ratings7.20 Ratings
Workflow engine capability00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Platform access control00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Services-enabled integration00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Development environment creation00 Ratings7.30 Ratings
Development environment replication00 Ratings7.40 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings7.30 Ratings
Issue recovery00 Ratings6.30 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings7.90 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Microsoft Power AutomateSalesforce Lightning Platform
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
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All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Microsoft Power AutomateSalesforce Lightning Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
7.8
(0 ratings)
6.7
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.9
(0 ratings)
8.1
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.9
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.6
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
8.5
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Microsoft Power AutomateSalesforce Lightning Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Read full review
We use Salesforce Lightning Platform in everyday business as sales coordinators. By using this tool, we are able to send new requests to clients and communicate regarding pending proposals in real-time. This also tool holds many of our client accounts where we are able to monitor their sales and revenue.
Read full review
Pros
  • 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
Read full review
  • Reporting and Dashboards are thorough and can show a wealth of important data to inform and scale processes. It's helpful in a high volume sales cycle to be able to quickly identify weak points in performance and productivity so that adjustments can be made.
  • Highly customizable. We are able to customize just about everything which allows us to track very specific things and in theory create better efficiency.
  • Parent/Child account hierarchy exists which is helpful.
  • Contact records can be associated with multiple accounts and opportunities. This, in theory, should minimize duplicates and mismanagement of contacts.
  • Console helps a lot with data nesting. Having a fairly comprehensive look at an account without searching through various tabs and sections speeds up an otherwise cumbersome platform.
Read full review
Cons
  • 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
Read full review
  • Can be cumbersome: takes multiple clicks to get where you need to go
  • Lightning is slower than original Salesforce, and it is very noticeable
  • The UI change means sometimes I can't find what I need, so I have to switch back to the Classic version to find it
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
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.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Usability
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.
Read full review
UI can be quite complex, but the more that is required will bring more complexity. Can handle complexity and variety very well, but makes ground-level views harder when not knowing full extent of functionality. Finding new functionalities can be difficult to pinpoint on some pages
Read full review
Support Rating
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.
Read full review
Salesforce's support is top-notch. They have subject-matter experts that are accessible at all times to address needs as they come up. They let you know in advance when there are system updates and enhancements so that you are prepared for upcoming changes. I've never had an issue that wasn't addressed immediately when reaching out for support.
Read full review
In-Person Training
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.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Online Training
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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No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
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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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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.
Read full review
We were previously using an older version prior to it becoming Salesforce Lightning Platform so we were well adverse on the advantages of using a CRM, to begin with. It made sense to convert to Salesforce Lightning Platform after we were given a free trial of the platform. Certain reps were chosen to experiment with it and from there a decision was made to move forward. We've been customers ever since.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • 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!
Read full review
  • Better visibility of Accounts and Contacts interactions makes it easier to maintain during employee transitions.
  • Tracking of current jobs and relating them to past jobs is very useful.
  • More efficient use of Sales Reps time.
  • Sales Managers have good visibility into how their people are working.
Read full review
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)