Product Review: Microsoft Power Automate (It's Trash)

New series on the blog: product reviews. My mentor Rich pointed out that honest reviews are a great way to pull new people to a blog, and, well, good artists copy, great artists steal. So here we go.

First up on the chopping block: Microsoft Power Automate. I'll spare you the suspense. It's trash. Let me show you why, category by category.

What it's supposed to be

Power Automate is Microsoft's tool for automating business workflows: connect your apps, move data between them, trigger actions automatically. Great idea on paper. The execution is where it all falls apart.

The logic is painfully brittle

The moment you go past the most basic "when this happens, do that," it gets ugly. Try to insert a dynamic variable or a function and the whole thing turns fragile.

Quick translation for the non-technical crowd. A "dynamic variable" is just a placeholder that fills in real information as the automation runs, think of a form letter that auto-inserts each customer's name. A "function" is a small instruction that transforms data, like "take this date and reformat it" or "add these two numbers together." These are the basic building blocks of any real automation.

Power Automate handles them like it resents you for asking. You can tell this thing was built back when people typed expressions out by hand. Now, I actually love doing that. But the average person trying to automate their business does not, and this tool somehow punishes both of us at once.

It crumbles on edge cases

It is genuinely awful at handling edge cases. If you're not technical: an edge case is a weird, uncommon situation your system only hits once in a while, the exception to the normal flow. (I wrote a whole article on those.) Good software expects the weird stuff and handles it gracefully. Power Automate face-plants on it, which meant I ended up building awkward, defensive workarounds and weird routing I should never have needed.

The OAuth carousel

To connect other apps, Power Automate leans on something called OAuth. In plain English, OAuth is the "Sign in with Google" or "Sign in with Microsoft" handshake that lets one app securely talk to another without you handing over your actual password. When it works, it's invisible.

Here, it does not stay working. The connections to other Microsoft apps, its own ecosystem, are so rigid they break every three to seven days and demand you reconnect. It happened so consistently I stopped calling it a bug and started calling it a feature. Either way, it's maddening.

It's stuck in no-man's-land

Here's the core problem. Power Automate lives in an awkward middle ground where it serves nobody well.

For a normal, non-technical business owner? It's too fiddly and technical to be approachable. I'd give it a 3 out of 10 on accessibility. But for a power user like me, someone who wants fine-grained control, real architecture, proper edge-case handling? It doesn't give me the depth I need either. On actual technical capability, it's more like a 2. Too complex for beginners, too shallow for pros. Impressive, in the worst possible way.

The AI features are a markup scheme

Its "AI" features are rough, and the business model behind them is worse. You buy AI credits from Microsoft to use them, and those credits are essentially a marked-up ChatGPT API you could get cheaper by going straight to the source. So you're paying a premium for a middleman, on top of tech that's already annoying to use. Hard pass.

File handling is a comedy of steps

This one got me. One automation I built simply needed to connect a SharePoint file to a Google Form. Simple. In a sane tool, that's a two-step job. Power Automate needed something like five. It's full of redundancy, and not the good kind, just needless extra steps that should have been consolidated into one. Death by a thousand clicks.

And I'm not alone

Since I'm just one guy, let me zoom out to the complaints you'll hear across the board. People consistently gripe about the licensing maze, half the useful connectors are "premium" and cost extra, so the real price is rarely the sticker price. They gripe about throttling and API limits that quietly cap how much your flows can actually do. The web designer is sluggish. Debugging is a pain, and when something fails, the error messages tell you almost nothing useful. This isn't just my bad luck. It's a pattern.

The one redeemable thing

To be fair, there is one. If you live entirely inside the Microsoft ecosystem and you're a big enterprise, being native to that environment carries some real convenience and IT-approval value. Assuming, of course, your OAuth connections decide to stay up that week.

The scorecard

• Accessibility for non-technical users: 3/10
• Technical control and depth: 2/10
• Edge-case handling: 2/10
• Integration reliability (OAuth): 2/10
• AI features and value: 2/10
• File handling: 2/10
• Overall: 2.5/10

The verdict

Power Automate is outdated, clunky, and stuck between two audiences it manages to fail simultaneously. My experience was bad enough that, as someone who genuinely enjoys wrestling with technical tools, I'm never touching it again. If you're deep in enterprise Microsoft land, maybe it earns its keep. For everyone else, there are far better ways to automate your business. And I'd know. I build them.

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