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Am I betting on the wrong horse?

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Posted on by Mark_H

I work in Service Delivery at a global telecom, and I’ve been tasked to work with an automation engineer to map out our processes and identify automation opportunities.

We’re a Microsoft shop with full Power Platform licensing, so I proposed using Power Automate to trigger email reminders to our DWDM/dark fiber vendors when certain “new order” criteria are met in Salesforce.

However, our Director of Architecture & Engineering told the engineer: “Power Automate is fine for single-user use cases. For enterprise-scale, use n8n.”

If large enterprises are who I target for employment, am I wasting my time learning Power Platform? I’m not trying to be an engineer. I’m on the business side and enjoy thinking about how to streamline work, but I also don’t want to invest in a tool that enterprises quietly avoid at scale due to cost or limitations.

Would love to hear from others on this. Are large orgs moving away from Power Platform in favor of tools like n8n, or is this more of an engineering bias that overlooks Power Platform’s role in business-led automation?

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Mark_H 14 on at

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Am I betting on the wrong horse?

Thanks, @Michael E. Gernaey. I appreciate your response.

Since posting, I found out our IT Security hasn’t approved n8n for internal integration yet, so while A&E is actively promoting it, we can’t actually use it.

Power Automate it is! 🙃
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Michael E. Gernaey 44,960 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Am I betting on the wrong horse?

Hi @Mark_H

Most everything is bias based, you cannot get around it.

Everything has its blind spots. Power Automate provides both Robotic and Enterprise scale automation. n8n is also a very good tool with open source features that make it attractive to many. But if you are a full on Microsoft + Power Platform + Office 365 for instance, then bias would dictate to at least validate the needs against the features of both to decide and if its close, PA wins. That's my trying to be not biased as I dont mind mixing thing, but doing so just to do so I do.

You are going to find people who are mixing things together, including UiPath, or Blue etc etc, but what matters more, to me, is understanding the total landscape of need(s) not just "automation" but what does your ecosystem look like, your security needs, your back office, your data, your reporting and analytics, AI you name it, I look at the entire scope before I pitch one particular thing.

if you were ONLY talking, hey I need just cloud automation, then I would still have to say, great lets discuss a full scope Use Case comparison to validate the choice, I didnt say the best choice, because thats relative (cost, support, TCO, TTM) you name it.

Unfortunately, even though i have been doing this for decades, even as the lead for this across the global Partner, FTE, ISV for the product team itself and internal MSIT, I cannot say one way or the other except for what I said already.

Anything else would me being biased.

If these suggestions help resolve your issue, Please consider Marking the answer as such and also maybe a like.

Thank you!
Sincerely, Michael Gernaey

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