Advantages of Azure Logic Apps over Power Automate

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Advantages of Azure Logic Apps over Power Automate

Logic Apps and Power Automate are low code/no code products developed by Microsoft.  While Power Automate allows users to automate Microsoft 365, Logic Apps allow users to automate not only Microsoft 365, but also Azure. In this article, we will discuss the advantages of Azure Logic Apps over Power Automate in detail.

Editing the generated JSON

Logic Apps and Power Automate generate JSON for created apps/workflows. In Power Automate, we can see the generated JSON by right clicking on an action and selecting ‘peek code’ unfortunately, you cannot edit the JSON. In Logic Apps, we can see the generated JSON in the logic by clicking on the ‘code view’ button. But unlike Power Automate, we can see and edit the generated code. The edited JSON will be automatically converted into actions in the workflow. This feature allows us to copy content from one action to another, and we can even copy actions from one workflow to another.  If you are a workflow developer, you will find this to be a very useful feature of Azure Logic Apps.

Assume that you have a created a workflow that creates and updates rows in a table with many columns. In Power Automate, we have to manually insert column values in both create and update actions, which is time consuming. In Azure Logic Apps, we can manually insert the values in create action and copy the JSON body of create action and paste it in update action, which is time saving.

Significantly low cost for premium connectors

Power Automate workflow is free if you do not need premium connectors, but you will run into the quota limits causing your functionality to require premium connectors. Based on our experience, a lot of functionalities require premium connectors; even an HTTP call requires a premium connector. Premium connectors are very costly in Power Automate, requiring a pay per user plan starting at $15/user or $500 per flow. Logic Apps do not have premium connectors, instead they have enterprise connectors. Logic Apps provides two types of pricing plans: standard and consumption. The standard plan allocates a fixed amount of CPU and memory for a group of flows and there is no extra cost for enterprise connectors. The consumption plan is a pay as you go plan and charges $0.000025 per action for every execution and charges $0.001 per enterprise connector action execution.  Both plans are very cheap compared to the premium connector cost in Power Automate cost.

Assume that you have to create a workflow that generates a Word document every month based on the data in a table. You would need a premium connector to generate Word documents in Power Automate which would cost a lot of money. It would cost pennies in Logic Apps on the other hand.

Manage both Azure and Office 365 platforms

Logic Apps has most of the actions available in the Power Automate. You can manage the Office 365 platform in addition the Azure platform with Logic Apps.  Logic Apps has a lot of actions to create, config, connect and delete many kinds of Azure resources. They can connect to function apps, delete blob storage, create a virtual machine and so on.  Power Automate also has a lot of actions to manage Azure, but almost all of them require a premium connector. As discussed earlier, premium connectors are very costly. The number of Azure actions in Power Automate on the other hand is limited compared to Logic Apps. Most of the Azure actions in the Logic Apps are not enterprise connectors, which means it will cost less to manage Azure with Logic Apps.

Easily extendable

Logic Apps can connect to Azure functions and get data from it. It is a very useful functionality and allows users to indirectly include custom code in the Logic Apps. For example, assume you want to create a logic app to encrypt file and store that file in Azure blob. Logic Apps do not have a file encrypt action; we can create an Azure function that encrypts and returns a file, and call that function from the Logic App. In this way we can add custom functionality to the logic apps without creating custom connectors.  Users can develop Azure functions in their preferred programming language.

We can include custom functionality in the Power Automate workflows by creating a custom connector or making an HTTP call. Making an HTTP call requires a premium connector and is very expensive. Even if we have a premium subscription, it requires a lot of configurations to secure the HTTP endpoint, which is not the case with Azure functions as we do not need to expose the Azure function to the internet. Creating a custom connector is the stealthy way to make a HTTP call without a premium connector but it will still take time to secure the HTTP endpoint.

Trigger from anywhere

Logic Apps has far more triggers than Power Automate. Logic Apps can be triggered with an HTTP call from the internet, which means any application with internet access can trigger a logic app. Power Automate did not have an HTP trigger. Logic Apps have far more actions and connectors than Power Automate.

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