9 Best Power Automate Alternatives for Process Automation

Microsoft’s Power Automate helps you build processes and business automation with task and process mining across desktops, websites, and apps.

It excels at integrating with Microsoft applications. However, if you’re:

Not deeply invested in Microsoft products to run your business.
Need your workflows to be collaborative across teams.
Need to scale processes without busting your budget.
Need to make complex automations easy.

Then Power Automate is not the ideal solution for you.

This article breaks down popular Power Automate alternatives, like Relay.app, Automation Anywhere, IFTTT, and more.

Why Do You Need a Power Automate Alternative?

There are three major reasons why you might need a Power Automate alternative:

The platform’s free version has limited features and usage.
The software is clunky and has a steep learning curve.
A Microsoft app might not fit well with your existing stack.

Let’s discuss these drawbacks in detail. ⤵️

Reason 1. Power Automate’s Free Version is Limited

Power Automate comes with a free version that’s good for individuals and small teams.

Compared to other free workflow automation tools in the market, you might face limitations with Power Automate’s free plan, such as:

Fewer connectors and data sources.
Lower execution limits (for example, fewer runs per month, fewer concurrent runs).
Reduced storage and retention capabilities.

While the premium version of Power Automate addresses all the limitations of the free versions, it comes with risk.

Depending on your team size and requirements, the paid plan can be expensive and cause unexpected costs, especially for large-scale deployments.

Source

Reason 2. Steep Learning Curve & Clunkyness

It's easy to get overwhelmed with Power Automate.

Microsoft updates the product quite often—too often, in our opinion. This introduces constant friction for users.

💡 Remember that Microsoft isn’t known for creating best-in-class user experience.

The sheer number of connectors, triggers, actions, expressions, and advanced features can be daunting, especially for those lacking experience in automation or workflow design.

Reason 3. Microsoft Apps Don’t Play Well With Others

Microsoft has a reputation for bundling products, forcing customers to use its 365 apps, and not integrating well with third-party solutions.

Adding to this downside is the absence of community support for Power Automate. Whereas some products have raging fans, forums, or community templates, Power Automate lacks.

From a verified G2 user:

“If you need to do anything outside of the template scenario, expect challenges to customize to your liking. While it is advertised as low code, a lot of the issues that arise provide no explanation to why an error is happening. I spend more time in forums trying to fix issues but the software itself should be helping me find what is wrong, not Bob the carpenter.”

9 Best Power Automate Alternatives

Some of the best alternatives to Power Automate are:

Relay.app: Keep humans in the workflow automation loop.
Automation Anywhere: Cloud-native workflow automation platform.
Appian: Low-code process automation platform.
Cflow: Build multi-step workflows with several layers.
IFTTT: Automation software that lets you turn SaaS into interconnect systems.
Nintex: Simple yet powerful process automation software.
Bardeen: AI-powered extension that lets you automate workflows within web apps and websites.
Pipefy: Low-code business process automation software.
Flokzu: Robust business process management platform.

1. Relay.app

Relay.app is a faster way to create reliable, time-saving workflows. The tool is becoming a go-to choice because of features like human-in-the-loop, multiplayer, and 1-click automation AI.

It’s the best Power Automate alternative for teams with broader, more flexible automation needs.

The best part?

You don’t need any coding or workflow automation knowledge to use Relay.app. Just create an account and get 100 runs for free.

Here are the top 3 features that Power Automate customers appreciate in Relay.app 👇

Feature 1. Human In the Loop

Relay.app's ‘Human in the Loop’ feature lets you integrate human steps into automated workflows so you can benefit from:

✅ The efficiencies and time-saving benefits of an automated process.

✅ The personalization and precision that only human inputs can provide.

The most popular Human in the Loop applications are:

Approvals: In a sales workflow, managers need to approve newly created contracts. When approved, the workflow automatically sends the customer a Docusign and waits for completion.
Manual data inputs: In a customer onboarding workflow, the Account Executive (AE) for a closed deal is asked to provide a link to the deal’s summary notes, which will then be automatically shared with the Customer Success Manager (CSM).
Human decisions: When a new support email arrives in a shared inbox, a member of your support team is notified to classify it as either a complaint or a support request. Depending on the decision, an email will be sent to the customer, or a support ticket will be created in Zendesk.
Blocking manual tasks: In a sales workflow, after a deal is closed according to a CRM update, a task is assigned to the Sales Manager to create a contract draft. Once the contract is drafted by the manager, the workflow continues, and the document is shared with the other party's legal counsel for review.

Why is Human in the Loop Important?

There's a common misconception that involving humans in automated processes inevitably slows things down.

It is slower, perhaps, but the effectiveness goes up significantly.

Nothing can replace the added value of human contextual awareness and emotional intelligence. Not even today’s artificial intelligence.

If you rely solely on AI without a human layer, your workflows accelerate but often at the expense of customer satisfaction.

Here’s a real example to help you understand the concept better 👇

Suppose you send churn emails to customers who opt out of your paid product.

Without humans involved, everyone will receive the same churn email with basic personalization.

Response rate? Likely very low…

With the Relay app, you can fire notifications as soon as the workflow starts and request that someone from the customer support team add context to the email.

Result? More feedback. Higher retention. And a tailored customer experience!

Try it out for yourself below ⤵️

Feature 2. 1-Click AI Assistance

Unlike other workflow automation tools, Relay.app comes with purpose-built AI use cases that you can add to processes in one click.

For example, you can use AI Autofill to suggest paragraphs for emails and summarize content from a Notion page.

Or use AI Classify to guide your automation through conditional logic paths intuitively.

In the example below, we ask AI to summarize call transcripts before adding the summary to customer records in our CRM ⤵️

Feature 3. Collaborative Workflows

Most workflows are managed in silos. Relay.app promotes teamwork by letting you build playbooks alone or with your team.

💡 Looking to assign a support ticket to the right account owner in your CRM?

Relay.app can ingest data from your existing go-to-market tools and create dynamic role assignments in workflows.

Relay.app Integrations

Relay.app currently integrates with applications like Ashby, ClickSend, DocuSign, Drip, and many more (and constantly adding new ones).

Most importantly, apps are easy and seamless to deploy, with little to no oversight needed once published.

Pricing

With Relay.app’s free plan, you get 100 free runs and access to all features.

👀 Note: Unlike other automation tools on the market, Relay.app’s plans include unlimited usage.

Need to onboard your team and increase the number of runs? Choose from three paid plans:

Starter: $18 per month (for up to 2 users)
Team: Starting at $27 per month ($9 per seat)
Enterprise: Custom pricing

How Does Relay.app Compare to Power Automate?

Power Automate has a limited free version and is hard to master. Because of its dependency on the Microsoft 365 environment, it’s not an ideal choice for most organizations.

People switch to Relay.app for its ability to easily build complex workflows collaboratively, unlimited automations, VIP support, and predictable pricing.

Pros and Cons

✅ Gives you unlimited runs for all its plans.

✅ An easy-to-use tool for users with no workflow automation experience.

✅ Transparent pricing with all of Relay.app’s features included across tiers.

❌ Being a new tool, it has fewer integrations (we’re adding new integrations regularly).

2. Automation Anywhere

Automation Anywhere is a cloud-native automation platform. It uses AI, robotic process automation (RPA), and APIs to build workflows that mimic human actions across screens and systems.

Features

A visual automation canvas lets you drag and drop RPA bots, APIs, apps, and human-in-the-loop actions to build automated systems – no coding required.
Use AI-powered co-pilot across any web app, model, and system to create workflows using natural language commands.
It offers a complete automation toolkit to capture processes and sequences and build workflows across local and remote devices.
The built-in form builder helps create interactive forms that collect real-time data at every step of your workflow where oversight and engagement are needed.