Power Automate vs RoboTask: Here’s what you should use to automate your PC

Working at a computer all day can have you pulling your hair out due to how repetitive and monotonous the work can get, which is why automation is such an important step towards improving efficiency and reducing said monotony. There are plenty of ways you can automate certain tasks on Windows 11, but two major programs that help with this are

and RoboTask, both of which have very similar purposes. But with that in mind, which one should you use? While it greatly depends on your specific needs, we’d say Power Automate may be the better option overall. Let’s take a look at why.

What is Power Automate? And RoboTask?

Automate almost anything

At their core, Microsoft’s Power Automate app and RoboTask are pretty much the same kind of tool. These are designed to automate processes on your Windows PC using a very low-code approach, with no coding necessary most of the time. You can choose from a long list of available actions and triggers, allowing you to automate tasks based on almost anything you want. These actions can include anything from copying files, clicking UI elements, pulling data from certain documents, and more.

Additionally, both tools let you record your own interactions with your PC, automating the process of creating a sequence of events by saving your interactions so you can easily repeat them automatically. This makes automation achievable for basically anyone, at least to some extent.

Power Automate is developed by Microsoft and included in Windows 11 out of the box. RoboTask is a third-party utility that’s been around for a long time.

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Pricing

Power Automate is (mostly) free; Robotask isn’t

The first big advantage Power Automate has over RoboTask is the price. As mentioned above, Windows 11 comes with the Power Automate app included by default, which means you get it free of charge when you get a Windows PC. Power Automate is a bigger platform than just the desktop app, and some features do require you to pay. But a lot of the features in Power Automate that you can run locally on your PC are free, which makes it easy for anyone to get started.

RoboTask is a paid app that only offers a 30-day trial, meaning anything you do with it will require you to pay up after a while. You can either buy a perpetual license or join the subscription model, depending on your preference. A personal perpetual license costs $150, while the subscription costs $60 for one year. For businesses, those prices go up.

Recording workflows

Power Automate works better

Another big advantage for Power Automate is that it just seems to be a more modern platform that works better with modern versions of Windows, specifically when it comes to recording workflows. Both apps can record your actions and replicate them to automate all kinds of tasks, but I’ve found that RoboTask is not ideal when it comes to recording actions in more modern Windows elements, like the Start menu, Selecting an item from the Start menu just doesn’t work, and in general, recording actions is just a bit more finicky.

In Power Automate, your basic desktop interactions are captured perfectly, so you can really automate almost anything you’d do manually. It’s also a bit easier to read, because RoboTask will create list items for every little interaction, even if it just means moving the mouse without actually clicking on something. It works most of the time, but it does make it a bit harder to read the list of recorded items when there’s so much extraneous stuff in there.

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Available actions

There’s a lot to both of these apps

Of course, there’s a lot more to automation than just recording a set of actions, and both apps have a lot of strengths here. RoboTask offers over 300 actions that the app can take automatically, from something as simple as copying files from one directory to another (or deleting them) to reading data in CSV or Excel files, monitoring screenshots, and much more. While a lot of these are also available in Power Automate, RoboTask does have some things you can’t do on Microsoft’s solution. For instance, you can create or delete registry keys from your machine, or do things like sync the contents of two folders so that they match.

Power Automate lacks those capabilities, but it also has a lot of its own exclusive features. In addition to Excel, it can act on Word and PowerPoint documents as well as PDFs, it can run optical character recognition on the screen content, interact with most major browsers through the Power Automate extension, and even plug into all kinds of cloud services, though these require certain types of licenses on their own. There is a lot Power Automate can do that RoboTask can’t.

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Running automations

Power Automate falters here

This is the big comeback story for RoboTask: triggers and how to run automations. RoboTask offers over 30 trigger options for your automated workflows, including keyboard shortcuts, time-based triggers, and all sorts of monitoring capabilities, such as network monitoring, screenshot monitoring, and more. You can make it so that your workflows run exactly when you need them to without having to think about it, which is the big appeal of automation.

Power Automate falls flat here for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the only way to automate running a Power Automate flow is by pressing a specific keyboard shortcut, which you can define. You can’t set any custom triggers based on time or anything else, which makes this whole concept a bit less useful to begin with.

What’s potentially even more frustrating, though, is the fact that Power Automate flows can’t run without an internet connection. Power Automate is a cloud service, and running automations means downloading them first, which means you need to be online. There doesn’t appear to be a way to download a flow so that it can be run without an internet connection. Sure, you’ll probably be online most of the time on Windows 11, but that’s still a frustrating limitation.

Power Automate is better, if you have internet

All things considered, I’d still say Power Automate is the better option of these two, but it’s not a clear victory in every regard. Being able to run easily offline and the ability to set different triggers to run a workflow make RoboTask much more versatile if you want a true sense of automation that doesn’t require any input from you.

But Power Automate still has the upper hand overall, with lots of integrations with specific apps and services and much more reliable step recording in modern UI elements in Windows. Plus, you can use Power Automate for free, which is an advantage that’s kind of hard to beat. Plus, it’s preinstalled on Windows, so you don’t really have to do much to get started.