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Power Automate VS Logic Apps. general information

Hello everyone! Let's talk about Power Automate and Logic Apps today. Often, people do not understand what is the difference between these services and which of the services should be chosen to solve their problems. Let's get it right.

Microsoft Power Automate


Microsoft Power Automate is a cloud service that provides users with the ability to create threads to automate time-consuming business tasks and processes. This service is intended for Citizen Developers - users who are not 100% developers, but who are involved in application development and process automation.

Microsoft Power Automate is part of the Microsoft Power Platform, which also includes services such as Power Apps, Power BI, and Power Virtual Agents. This platform makes it easy to get all the necessary information from related Office 365 services and combine it in applications, data streams, reports, as well as auxiliary helper services.

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Creating Power Automate threads is based on the concept of “trigger” => “action set”. The stream starts by a specific trigger, which can be, for example, creating an item in a SharePoint list, receiving a mail notification or HTTP request. After start, processing of the actions which are configured in this flow begins. As actions, connectors to various services can be used. Currently, Microsoft Power Automate supports over 200 different third-party services and services of such giants as Google, Dropbox, Slack, WordPress, as well as various social services: Blogger, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and many others. Of course, in addition to this, integration with Office 365 applications is available.To simplify the use of Microsoft Power Automate, Microsoft provides a large number of standard templates for various applications and events that we can use by simply filling out the set of necessary parameters. Also, users can create templates themselves in the designer and publish them for use by other users.

Distinctive features of Microsoft Power Automate are:

  1. The presence of a large number of connectors to various third-party services.
  2. Support for integration with Office 365 services.
  3. The ability to start streams according to a specific trigger - for example, an integration scenario, when upon receiving a letter to a Gmail mailbox it is necessary to initiate a series of actions in another service, for example, send a message to Teams and create an entry in the SharePoint list.
  4. The ability to debug threads, with detailed information about the state of the stream at each of its stages.

However, Microsoft Power Automate is a simplified version of Logic Apps. This means that when you create a Power Automate stream, a Logic Apps stream is created under the hood, which processes the configured logic. Simply put, Power Automate uses the Logic Apps engine to implement threads.

Microsoft Power Automate is currently available as part of an Office 365 subscription, or in a separate plan, purchased by user or by thread.

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It is worth noting that premium connectors are available only with the purchase of a separate plan. An Office 365 subscription does not offer premium connectors.

Logic apps


Logic Apps is a service that is part of the Azure Application Service. Azure Logic Apps is part of the Azure Integration Services platform, which includes the ability to access the Azure API. Like Power Automate, Logic Apps is a cloud-based service designed to automate business tasks and processes. However, while Microsoft Power Automate focuses on business process flows, Logic Apps focuses more on the business logic blocks that are part of an integrated integration solution. Such decisions will require more careful management and control. One of the main differences between Logic Apps is the ability to specify the frequency of checking the trigger. Power Automate does not have this setting.

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For example, using Logic Apps, you can automate scenarios such as:

  1. .
  2. Office 365 , .
  3. FTP Azure.
  4. .

Along with Microsoft Power Automate, Logic Apps allows you to create threads of various levels of complexity, without writing code, but the pricing here is slightly different. Logic Apps uses a pay-as-you-go approach. This means that you do not need to buy individual subscriptions and all connectors are available immediately. However, each execution of an action within the flow costs a certain amount of money.

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When developing Logic Apps flows, it should be borne in mind that the cost of running standard and Corporate connectors is different.

In the next article, we will see what other differences there are between Power Automate and Logic Apps services, as well as various interesting ways of interaction between these two services.

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