👧🏽 🚴 📞 Power Automate VS Logic Apps. Features Logic Apps 👉🏾 🤡 📈

Good day to all! In a previous article on Power Automate and Logic Apps, we looked at some of the possibilities of using Power Automate. In this article, I would like to dwell on some scenarios of using Logic Apps and a number of differences from Power Automate. As you and I found out earlier, Power Automate and Logic Apps are twin services that differ only in their location (Office 365, Azure), as well as in their approach to licensing and some internal features. Let's see today what features Logic Apps have in contrast to Power Automate. We will not waste time.

1. Trigger trigger frequency

In Power Automate, there is no way to configure the frequency of checking trigger conditions. You have to rely on the default value. Logic Apps has the ability to configure the interval and frequency of trigger checks, which significantly speeds up event processing. However, Power Automate often has much less settings for triggers than Logic Apps:

Power Automate trigger “When creating an item”:

Logic Apps trigger “When creating an item”:

In Logic Apps there are also time zone and start time settings for this trigger.

2. Switch between stream display modes

Logic Apps, unlike Power Automate, has the ability to switch between Design and Code View. This feature helps a lot in debugging threads, and also allows you to make more subtle changes to the logic of threads:

3. Debugging threads

Often, when setting up threads, we need to check the correctness of the execution of one or another logic that was embedded in them. And here we can not do without debugging. Logic Apps has an incredibly convenient mode of stream debugging, with which you can display the input and output data of each of the activity of the stream. Using this mode, at any time you can see at what stage what information flew into the activity and what turned out to be the output of the activity:

In Power Automate, this mode is present, but in a very truncated version.

4. Premium Connectors

As we already know, Power Automate has a separation of connectors by type, into regular and premium:

regular connectors are always available, premium connectors are available only when buying a separate plan for users or for flows. In Logic Apps, all connectors are available for use at once, but charging is carried out as the connectors are used. Running in a stream of conventional connectors is cheaper; premium is more expensive.

5. Start the stream by button

And here Logic Apps loses Power Automate in that the Logic Apps stream cannot be started, for example, by a button from the Power Apps application. Using Power Automate, as we found in a previous article , you can create threads and connect them to the Power Apps application for subsequent recall, for example, by clicking on a button in the application. In the case of Logic Apps, if you need to implement such a scenario, you have to come up with various outputs, for example, use the "Upon receipt of an HTTP request" trigger and send a request from the POST application to a pre-configured address:

6. Creating a stream using Visual Studio

Unlike Power Automate, Logic Apps can create threads directly through Visual Studio.
You can create and edit Logic Apps streams, for example, from Visual Studio Code, if the Azure Logic Apps extension is installed. After installing the extension, you will be able to connect to Azure. And after successful authorization, you will get access to the existing Logic Apps streams in this environment and you can proceed to edit the required stream:

Of course, I didn’t list all the differences between these two products, but I tried to note the features that caught my eye when developing threads using Power Automate and Logic Apps. In the following articles, we will look at you with interesting features and implementation cases using other products of the Power Platform line, and we will return to Logic Apps more than once. Have a nice day, everyone!