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  5. Airflow vs Microsoft Power Automate

Airflow vs Microsoft Power Automate

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Airflow
Airflow
Stacks1.7K
Followers2.8K
Votes128
Microsoft Power Automate
Microsoft Power Automate
Stacks164
Followers119
Votes0

Airflow vs Microsoft Power Automate: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Airflow and Microsoft Power Automate are both powerful workflow automation tools that enable businesses to automate and schedule tasks. However, there are some key differences between the two platforms that make them suitable for different use cases. In this article, we will discuss the major differences between Airflow and Microsoft Power Automate.

  1. Programming and Flexibility: Airflow is a developer-friendly platform that allows users to create complex workflows using code. It provides a Python-based interface for defining and managing workflows, making it highly customizable and flexible. On the other hand, Microsoft Power Automate focuses on a no-code/low-code approach, allowing users to build workflows through a visual interface with pre-built connectors and actions. This makes it easier for non-technical users to create simple automation tasks without the need for coding skills.

  2. Scalability and Performance: Airflow is designed to handle large-scale workflows with distributed execution across multiple worker nodes. It offers built-in support for task parallelism, which allows for scalable and efficient execution of tasks. Microsoft Power Automate, on the other hand, is more suited for smaller-scale workflows and is hosted on the Microsoft cloud platform. While it can handle a considerable amount of workload, it may not be as suitable for complex and high-performance scenarios.

  3. Integration and Ecosystem: Airflow provides a wide range of connectors and integrations with popular systems and services, allowing users to easily interact with various data sources and systems. It also has a large and active open-source community, which contributes to the development of additional plugins and extensions. On the other hand, Microsoft Power Automate has native integration with Microsoft products and services, such as Microsoft 365, SharePoint, and Dynamics 365. It also provides a marketplace where users can find additional connectors and templates created by Microsoft and third-party developers.

  4. Monitoring and Alerting: Airflow offers a comprehensive web-based user interface for monitoring and managing workflows. It provides built-in tools for tracking task progress, viewing logs, and managing dependencies. Users can also set up email and Slack notifications for task completion or failure. On the other hand, Microsoft Power Automate provides a more simplified monitoring and alerting system. Users can track the status of their flows through the Power Automate portal and receive notifications via email or mobile app when a flow fails or succeeds.

  5. Cost and Licensing: Airflow is an open-source project and is available for free. However, setting up and managing a scalable Airflow environment may require infrastructure resources and technical expertise. Microsoft Power Automate offers different pricing plans, including a free plan with limited features and usage, as well as premium plans with additional functionalities and enterprise support. The costs associated with using Microsoft Power Automate will depend on the specific plan and usage requirements of the organization.

  6. Deployment and Hosting: Airflow can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, giving users more flexibility in choosing their hosting environment. It can run on popular cloud platforms like AWS and Google Cloud, as well as on-premises infrastructure. Microsoft Power Automate is a cloud-based platform hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud, which means that users do not need to manage the underlying infrastructure. This can be advantageous for organizations looking for a hassle-free deployment and management experience.

In summary, Airflow and Microsoft Power Automate differ in terms of programming flexibility, scalability, integration ecosystem, monitoring capabilities, cost, and deployment options. Airflow is more suitable for developers and complex workflows, while Microsoft Power Automate caters to non-technical users and simpler automation tasks with its no-code/low-code approach.

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Advice on Airflow, Microsoft Power Automate

Anonymous
Anonymous

Jan 19, 2020

Needs advice

I am so confused. I need a tool that will allow me to go to about 10 different URLs to get a list of objects. Those object lists will be hundreds or thousands in length. I then need to get detailed data lists about each object. Those detailed data lists can have hundreds of elements that could be map/reduced somehow. My batch process dies sometimes halfway through which means hours of processing gone, i.e. time wasted. I need something like a directed graph that will keep results of successful data collection and allow me either pragmatically or manually to retry the failed ones some way (0 - forever) times. I want it to then process all the ones that have succeeded or been effectively ignored and load the data store with the aggregation of some couple thousand data-points. I know hitting this many endpoints is not a good practice but I can't put collectors on all the endpoints or anything like that. It is pretty much the only way to get the data.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Airflow
Airflow
Microsoft Power Automate
Microsoft Power Automate

Use Airflow to author workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks. The Airflow scheduler executes your tasks on an array of workers while following the specified dependencies. Rich command lines utilities makes performing complex surgeries on DAGs a snap. The rich user interface makes it easy to visualize pipelines running in production, monitor progress and troubleshoot issues when needed.

Microsoft Power Automate is a cloud-first, comprehensive automation platform, powered by low-code and AI. Modernize business processes, integrate operations at scale, and maintain visibility and control with enterprise-grade governance.

Dynamic: Airflow pipelines are configuration as code (Python), allowing for dynamic pipeline generation. This allows for writting code that instantiate pipelines dynamically.;Extensible: Easily define your own operators, executors and extend the library so that it fits the level of abstraction that suits your environment.;Elegant: Airflow pipelines are lean and explicit. Parameterizing your scripts is built in the core of Airflow using powerful Jinja templating engine.;Scalable: Airflow has a modular architecture and uses a message queue to talk to orchestrate an arbitrary number of workers. Airflow is ready to scale to infinity.
Robotic process automation; RPA; Digital process automation; DPA; Artificial intelligence; AI; GPT; Intelligent document process; IDP; Process mining; Task mining
Statistics
Stacks
1.7K
Stacks
164
Followers
2.8K
Followers
119
Votes
128
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 53
    Features
  • 14
    Task Dependency Management
  • 12
    Cluster of workers
  • 12
    Beautiful UI
  • 10
    Extensibility
Cons
  • 2
    Observability is not great when the DAGs exceed 250
  • 2
    Open source - provides minimum or no support
  • 2
    Running it on kubernetes cluster relatively complex
  • 1
    Logical separation of DAGs is not straight forward
No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft SharePoint
Microsoft SharePoint
Azure Active Directory
Azure Active Directory
Windows
Windows
Microsoft Power Fx
Microsoft Power Fx
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft PowerApps
Microsoft PowerApps
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365

What are some alternatives to Airflow, Microsoft Power Automate?

Zapier

Zapier

Zapier is for busy people who know their time is better spent selling, marketing, or coding. Instead of wasting valuable time coming up with complicated systems - you can use Zapier to automate the web services you and your team are already using on a daily basis.

IFTTT

IFTTT

It helps you connect all of your different apps and devices. You can enable your apps and devices to work together to do specific things they couldn't do otherwise.

n8n

n8n

It is a free node based Workflow Automation Tool. Easily automate tasks accross different services. Synchronise data between different apps/databases.

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions

It makes it easy to automate all your software workflows, now with world-class CI/CD. Build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. Make code reviews, branch management, and issue triaging work the way you want.

Ghost Inspector

Ghost Inspector

It lets you create and manage UI tests that check specific functionality in your website or application. We execute these automated browser tests continuously from the cloud and alert you if anything breaks.

Apache Beam

Apache Beam

It implements batch and streaming data processing jobs that run on any execution engine. It executes pipelines on multiple execution environments.

Zenaton

Zenaton

Developer framework to orchestrate multiple services and APIs into your software application using logic triggered by events and time. Build ETL processes, A/B testing, real-time alerts and personalized user experiences with custom logic.

Luigi

Luigi

It is a Python module that helps you build complex pipelines of batch jobs. It handles dependency resolution, workflow management, visualization etc. It also comes with Hadoop support built in.

Unito

Unito

Build and map powerful workflows across tools to save your team time. No coding required. Create rules to define what information flows between each of your tools, in minutes.

Integromat

Integromat

It is an easy to use, powerful tool with unique features for automating manual processes. Connect your favorite apps, services and devices with each other without having any programming skills.

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