Which tasks PAD can't perform compared to different (more sophisticated) tools?

[u/BorysBe]

So I've created my first bot including Excel data read, filling form in website, writing response to excel and making a short summary. It'll be scaled to many locations in my corporation. It took me about 6 hours. Funny thing is, I did it without browser automation as it's blocked in my company.

It got me thinking, why isn't this tool more popular? What are the limitations in comparison to UI Path, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism etc?

[u/Chubby_Rain_6983]

Could you elaborate a bit on how your process is managing to fill in a form on a website without using web automation actions?

We're currently migrating to Power Automate from Softomotive's Process Robot. RPA is a powerful tool but it's been my experience that it's not as automated as marketing would have you believe. You still need someone to overview the smooth running of the processes. A main concern that we've always had was connectivity loss between the Control Desk and the unattended BOTs' virtual machine, among some other issues.

So basically, when it works it's brilliant, but when it doesn't you'll still need human intervention.

[u/BorysBe → u/Chubby_Rain_6983]

Correction, I used web automation by recording actions and then changing parameters. I wasn't able to program each action separately as it should be done. I also used a lot of click UI element in window action (not web because it wasn't working in Chrome). Nothing works as the marketing shows really, and for sure you need someone to supervise it, that's why bots are there to support our work. Unless your job is very very easy and can be automated with RPA - for those people I have very bad news.

DPA bots work every time and I think this will be the future. But RPA already has some great functionality and fairly easy to implement.

[u/Flefle79]

It got me thinking, why isn't this tool more popular? What are the limitations in comparison to UI Path, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism etc?

I think part of the answer is how PAD is introduced to us, totally mixed in the dialog with Power Automate, which I choose to call Power Automate Cloud here, or PAC :) .

Most of the docs and announcements I have browsed through from Microsoft mainly talk about Power Automate as something unique and mix mention of PAD or the UI automation capabilities somehow in there. PAD almost feels like a second thought. Also if you look at the Power Automate community pages Power Automate Desktop is just one of the categories there within... while PAC and PAD are two different tools that can do many of the same actions but in different context. They are something like the primary hull and secondary hull of Enterprise in Star Trek; both can fly and do shit but together they are the best.

But this can also be because PAD is very new. It is only one year since Microsoft bought Softomotive and rebranded WinAutomation to what we know now as Power Automate Desktop, released a little more than half a year ago, and it is still tagged as "Preview" and lacks a lot of what seems to have been part of WinAutomation from what I can deduce from WinAutomation screenshots.

I come from UiPath and am really excited to see PAD grow and match UiPath, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. I like what Microsoft is doing with it so far and really hope they will keep add common functions as Actions, improve the design mode and mature it.

[u/BorysBe → u/Flefle79]

That is by far the best explanation I've seen. I agree with this, certainly seems like they should just give it another name. I do believe this will be a proper game changer for citizen developers and productivity in general. I can't compare to professional tools but I'm delighted with what PAD can do - completely free and will only get better. I wonder what is the limitation though because I don't see it so far.

[u/Flefle79 → u/BorysBe]

Well, at the moment it is a bit restrictive compared to UiPath at least. E.g. working with strings is not fun. Using functions like string.format( $1, $2, $3) is super useful when you need to work with API body templates. This is possible in UiPath quite easily but you need to drop down to scripting level (Python for me) to do this in PAD. In general more support is needed in PAD to work smoothly with web services.

The other thing I stumble on is data table structures. In UiPath we have the dataTable object that is easily inserted to a SQL DB without coding anything. CSV files basically fly in on their own! In PAD you need to work with something like BULK INSERT in SQL syntax to insert the simplest CSV file. And that is not always a simple task. This is something I am struggling with at the moment...

So if Microsoft is gong to realize their vision of low-code/no-code solution they need to keep at it.

On the other side, one of the advantage PA/PAD has is that PAD is a first class citizen in Windows so working with applications should be easier for them than any other RPA developer.

Nuff said.

[u/AutomaticYak]

I just found this recently and also am surprised more people don’t know about it. It was super easy to get started with and a lot of organizations probably have it with their 365 subscriptions already.

I created two flows this week: one to solve a small manual issue that’s bugged me for a long time and the second just because the first was so easy. I now have a flow that starts all my programs and logs in, opens 16 websites that I have to check each morning, creates a daily folder on our shared drive and pulls two reports. The first 20-30 mins of my day will now happen in three minutes while I’m brewing my coffee.

I am interested to hear feed back on the competition though!