Popular business automation tools, compared

Automation is practical for teams that want fewer manual steps and mistakes, and more time for work that matters. The difficulty is that every tool promises the same thing at first glance. The difference is where each one’s centre of gravity sits.

Microsoft Power Platform

The best choice if the company is already on Microsoft 365. It integrates deeply with SharePoint, Teams, Outlook and Dataverse, and the licence is often already paid for.

It pays off on internal processes: approvals, forms, internal apps, reporting. It is weaker when you need to connect many services outside the Microsoft world.

n8n

Open source, and it can be self-hosted, which is often the deciding factor when data must not leave the company or the EU.

It bills per workflow execution rather than per step, so complex flows stay cheap. It asks for a little more technical knowledge than Zapier, but far less than writing code from scratch.

Zapier

The fastest route to simple links between SaaS tools: a form filled in here, a row added there, a message posted to Slack.

Excellent for marketing and sales. It gets expensive as soon as flows grow complex or execution counts rise, because it bills per task.

UiPath

A genuine RPA platform. The key difference: the robot works through the user interface, exactly as a person would. That means it can automate systems with no API at all: legacy ERPs, terminal applications, desktop software.

It is a serious investment and needs licences and oversight, but for some processes it is the only option that exists.

How to choose

Rather than picking a tool and then looking for a problem, work backwards:

• If the process lives inside Microsoft 365 → Power Platform
• If you are joining several services and data must stay with you → n8n
• If the link is simple and speed matters → Zapier
• If the system has no API and cannot be changed → UiPath

In practice most companies end up using two tools, not one. That is fine. The problem only starts when the same process gets built twice in two different tools.

If you are not sure where your process fits, send it to us and we will tell you what we would use, and why.