Key findings
- Microsoft 365 integration is the most praised theme, positive in 20 of the 25 accounts that discuss it, and all 9 accounts that discuss time saved report saving it.
- Maintainability is the most raised concern, named in 22 of the 24 accounts that discuss it for unreadable flows, missing error handling, hard-coded values, or moves between environments.
- Licensing comes next, raised in 17 of 22 accounts. These range from organizations as small as an office hitting Premium on reminder flows and as large as a 1,000-user organization pricing Premium for one HTTP connector.
- Teams and leaders are less negative than individual builders. Score is -4 across 46 team and leader accounts and -21 across 42 builder accounts.
- Copilot divides builders, with 12 of the 23 accounts that discuss AI steps critical, 9 of them about Copilot in Power Automate. Several builders draft flows with Claude, GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, or Gemini instead.
GILD read the public accounts published between January 2025 and October 2026 and counted who leaves: 10 describe moving work off Power Automate and 6 describe staying. Team and leader accounts read less negative than individual builders.
Where the value shows up
Team accounts describe routine work removed inside Microsoft 365. On TrustRadius, an IT employee at a health and fitness company reports about 12 hours a week saved on onboarding, follow-ups, and report compiling. An IT analyst at an automotive company replaced paper weight-scale records with a flow that posts to SAP and saves about two hours of data entry a day. A Hexaware developer moved approvals and onboarding off email and spreadsheets.
Eight accounts describe staff without programming backgrounds building and running flows. One r/MicrosoftFlow poster started by automating their own work, and now builds SAP desktop flows for colleagues full time.
| Theme | Sources | Share of sources discussing the theme |
|---|---|---|
| Time saved (praised) | 9 of 9 | |
| Run reliability (raised) | 13 of 14 | |
| Maintainability (raised) | 22 of 24 | |
| Microsoft 365 integration (praised) | 20 of 25 | |
| Licensing & cost (raised) | 17 of 22 | |
| Ownership & governance (raised) | 8 of 14 | |
| Desktop automation (praised) | 5 of 10 | |
| Copilot & AI steps (praised) | 11 of 23 | |
| Low-code reach (praised) | 6 of 13 |
GILD review of 92 public accounts, January 11, 2025 to October 15, 2026; shares calculated by GILD.
Where flows break down
Builders most often complain that flows become hard to maintain. They describe flows nobody can read a week later and a designer that slows simple tasks. One RPA team reports unreliable pipelines between environments. A consultant with five and a half years of repairs lists missing error handling, hard-coded values, unchecked loop concurrency, and connections tied to one person.
Accounts also report reliability failures. A May 2026 outage interrupted work, and flows stopped when their creators were unable to sign in again. Power Platform advisor Jukka Niiranen traced broken connections in his tenant to expired OAuth refresh tokens, while Microsoft's alert email named a changed password or a tenant policy as the most common cause. In October 2025, a Microsoft connector change made 72 of 80 runs in one day fail for a company's CoE Starter Kit inventory flow. In September 2026, disabling Exchange Web Services (EWS) broke the Outlook connector's Send an email (V2) action for some tenants. Microsoft's EWS access page warns that blocking apps by user agent also blocks REST and Graph connections, and that app allow-list changes take up to 24 hours to apply. Microsoft changes how the EWS setting works in October 2026, so run mail-sending flows in a test tenant before Exchange admins change EWS settings.
Where licensing bites
A small organization that ran event reminder flows on Microsoft 365 in 2022 now hits Premium for reminders and Word templates. A builder who made a desktop flow in a couple of hours learned that running it unattended needs a second license, and expects approval to take months. An organization of 1,000 users found one premium HTTP connector meant Premium for everyone who triggers the flow.
Not every account objects. One builder calls the Premium price small next to what it buys. An IT manager at a mining company runs most processes on Office 365 rights with Premium for a few users.
Ownership and governance
Flows tied to people fail when those people leave or lose access. A Power BI report's flow ran for years after its author left, then stopped for most users. A team's Teams alerts stopped while their creator was on vacation. Builders fix this with shared ownership, solutions, and service accounts or service principals. A service principal used to avoid licenses can breach Microsoft's multiplexing rules.
Why some move and some stay
Ten accounts describe moving work to UiPath, PowerShell, VBA, a bought ticketing product, open-source RPA, or their own code, most often because flows were hard to keep consistent or to support. Six stayed or chose Power Automate, for its place in the Microsoft tenant and, in two TrustRadius reviews, over Nintex, Joget, and UiPath for Office work.
Desktop automation divides opinion. 5 of 10 accounts praise desktop flows, while developers who know UiPath describe weaker error handling, and one company plans to leave desktop flows after a two-year migration.
Methodology
GILD read 92 public English-language accounts published between January 11, 2025 and October 15, 2026, and opened each on October 12 or October 25, 2026. They are 52 Reddit posts and comments from r/MicrosoftFlow, r/PowerAutomate, r/sysadmin, and r/rpa, read through the Arctic Shift archive, and 20 Hacker News comments and posts. Then come 8 TrustRadius reviews and 2 G2 reviews, which GILD read from an Internet Archive capture of G2's review page. The last 6 are 1 Power Platform Community forum post, 1 dev.to post, 1 personal blog post, 1 newsletter post, 1 GitHub issue and 1 X post. GILD tagged each account with the themes it supports, so every count is a number of accounts. Reddit and Hacker News lean toward IT staff and developers. Product facts come from Microsoft's official pages, checked on the same dates.
Products in this piece
Sources
- Official documentation
- 6
- Public source
- 20
- Microsoft Learn: Types of Power Automate licenses
- Microsoft Learn: Limits of automated, scheduled, and instant flows
- Microsoft Learn: Support for service principal owned flows
- Microsoft Learn: Data policies
- Microsoft Learn: FAQ for Copilot in cloud flows
- TrustRadius review: about 12 hours a week saved at a health and fitness company (Jan 13, 2026)
- TrustRadius review: paper weight-scale records replaced with a flow into SAP (Feb 5, 2026)
- TrustRadius review: approvals and onboarding at Hexaware Technologies (Jan 17, 2026)
- Reddit r/MicrosoftFlow: a citizen developer who now builds SAP automations full time (Aug 13, 2026)
- Reddit r/MicrosoftFlow: why flows that pass testing fall apart in production (May 17, 2026)
- Reddit r/rpa: pipelines between environments that never worked right (Sep 19, 2025)
- Reddit r/sysadmin: Send an email (V2) breaking with EWS disabled (Sep 15, 2026)
- Reddit r/MicrosoftFlow: Did Microsoft move most of Power Automate behind a paywall? (Jan 11, 2026)
- Reddit r/MicrosoftFlow: a desktop flow built in hours, then a second license to run it unattended (May 12, 2025)
- Power Platform Community: the premium HTTP connector for 1,000 users (Nov 26, 2025)
- Reddit r/MicrosoftFlow: a flow whose author is long gone stops working for most users (Jun 30, 2025)
- Reddit r/MicrosoftFlow: Teams alert flows that stopped while their creator was on holiday (Feb 25, 2025)
- Reddit r/MicrosoftFlow: a service principal owner can count as multiplexing (Jul 1, 2025)
- Hacker News comment on a company moving away from Power Automate (Feb 5, 2026)
- Reddit r/MicrosoftFlow: a ticketing system built from flows (Feb 17, 2026)
- Reddit r/rpa: three years migrating UiPath bots to Power Automate for desktop (Sep 21, 2025)
- Reddit r/rpa: a company leaving Power Automate for desktop after two years (Oct 6, 2025)
- David Wyatt: Code Reviewing Copilot in Power Automate (Jul 28, 2025)
- Reddit r/MicrosoftFlow: Claude Code vs GitHub Copilot when working in Power Automate (Apr 7, 2026)
- Jukka Niiranen, Perspectives on Power Platform: disconnecting workflows (Mar 12, 2026)
- Microsoft Learn: Control access to EWS in Exchange (updated Oct 7, 2026)