Why Power Automate Desktop is not for professional RPA development
I am an RPA-developer from Denmark.
I have a non-technical background but have taught myself web development working with RPA-tools for the past two years.
In the past I've worked with KofaxRPA and UiPath but am now working with Microsoft Power Automate and RoboCorp.
When I first started my current position we were migrating from ProcessRobot by Softomotive to Power Automate Desktop by Microsoft. Microsoft acquired Softomotive and turned its product into a part of the Microsoft Power Platform. Overall I believe that the tools found in the Power Platform are great for enhancing the work of individuals. The RPA tools found here such as Power Automate, Power Automate Desktop and AI Builder work well for what they are intended to.
What we had to learn the hard way is that Power Automate Desktop is not meant to be, and does not work as a professional RPA tool.
What is missing from Power Automate Desktop?
Power Automate Desktop does not really have any version control. It does not have local variables. You do not have a lot of control over what is being logged in the Power Platform. It offers poor solutions for reusing code/bot snippets. Finally, it is laggy and takes forever to save when you get to more than 40-50 actions.
Version control is important when building professional bots, especially if you need to change or improve your bots (which you will be doing quite often unless all your bots are running off of APIs).
Having all local variables makes it cumbersome to navigate your bot and figure out, what data is used when and why.
The lack of control over log data turned out to be a major issue with my employer, which handles sensitive information and is quite sceptical towards the Cloud. Having all your data logged for 30 days in the Cloud, including screenshots of every screen where your bot failed, posed too big of a GDPR risk for us to take.
Finally, the speed with which you navigate your bot when it has grown into a giant beast of subprocesses within subprocesses what seriously a pain. Whenever I talked to other RPA developers working with Power Automate Desktop I got the same response: The lagging what unbearable (the Microsoft forums are also filled with people complaining about this).
Oh, and as a side note. Power automate Desktop does not have a Trashcan. If you delete a bot, it is gone forever, for everyone in your team. Believe me, I did that exact thing. Microsoft Customer Support confirmed it.
Where did we go instead?
What got us to choose Power Automate Desktop in the first place was:
- It was familiar to ProcessRobot
- It was cheap
When searching for another, cheap, alternative we started to look into various open-source RPA platforms and eventually settled on RoboCorp, which is completely open-source and builds on top of Robot Framework. It was originally developed by Nokia for acceptance testing.
Robot Framework is built on Python and follows a similar syntax with libraries tailored to Robotic Process Automate. The fact that it is open-source also means that our bots are not dependent on licensing of a specific software product making us immune to price hikes and platform agnostic.
The lesson
Beware of which RPA platform or product you choose. Bots take time to develop and they take almost as much time to migrate if you a dissatisfied with the platform. I would highly recommend RoboCorp and Robot Framework. If you are able to build your own orchestrator, which is definitely possible, you can run your entire RPA setup completely free of licenses.
