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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Integration
  4. Continuous Integration
  5. GitHub Actions vs Microsoft Power Automate

GitHub Actions vs Microsoft Power Automate

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions
Stacks48.2K
Followers3.1K
Votes27
Microsoft Power Automate
Microsoft Power Automate
Stacks164
Followers119
Votes0

GitHub Actions vs Microsoft Power Automate: What are the differences?

Introduction

GitHub Actions and Microsoft Power Automate are both popular automation platforms that offer various features to streamline workflow processes. While they share similarities in providing automation capabilities, there are key differences between the two platforms that set them apart.

1. Integration with Platform Ecosystems: GitHub Actions is tightly integrated with GitHub's platform and allows users to automate workflows directly in their GitHub repositories. On the other hand, Microsoft Power Automate offers broader integration options, allowing users to automate workflows across a wide range of applications and services, including Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and third-party apps like Salesforce and Slack.

2. Target Audience and Focus: GitHub Actions primarily targets developers and focuses on automating software development workflows. It provides features like continuous integration and delivery, code linting, and testing automation. In contrast, Microsoft Power Automate aims to empower all types of users, including business users and non-technical professionals, to automate tasks across various platforms and services.

3. Workflow Triggers: GitHub Actions triggers are event-driven and are triggered based on actions happening within a GitHub repository, such as when code is pushed, a pull request is created, or a release is published. Microsoft Power Automate offers a broader range of triggers, including time-based triggers, email triggers, and triggers based on changes in data connectors or activities within apps.

4. Design and Customization: GitHub Actions provides a code-first approach, allowing users to define workflows using YAML files, which can be version controlled and managed alongside the codebase. Microsoft Power Automate, on the other hand, offers a visual, low-code/no-code interface, enabling users to create workflows through a graphical user interface. This makes it more accessible to users with limited coding expertise.

5. Pricing and Availability: GitHub Actions offers a generous free tier for public repositories, along with various pricing plans for private repositories with additional features and capabilities. Microsoft Power Automate also has a free edition, along with different pricing plans depending on the level of automation and usage. Additionally, Microsoft Power Automate is available as a standalone product and as part of the broader Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 subscriptions.

6. Supported Automation Scenarios: GitHub Actions primarily focuses on automating software development processes, such as building, testing, and deploying code. It offers extensive capabilities for CI/CD workflows and code reviews. On the other hand, Microsoft Power Automate caters to a wide range of automation scenarios, including workflow orchestration, approval processes, data synchronization, notification alerts, and business process automation across multiple applications and services.

In Summary, GitHub Actions is tightly integrated with GitHub's platform, focuses on software development workflows, provides event-driven triggers, requires coding expertise, and offers a free tier for public repositories. In contrast, Microsoft Power Automate offers broader integration options, targets various user types, supports a wider range of triggers, provides a visual interface, and caters to diverse automation scenarios.

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Advice on GitHub Actions, Microsoft Power Automate

Somnath
Somnath

Engineering Leader at Altimetrik Corp.

Jun 25, 2020

Needs adviceonCircleCICircleCIDrone.ioDrone.ioGitHub ActionsGitHub Actions

I am in the process of evaluating CircleCI, Drone.io, and GitHub Actions to cover my #CI/ #CD needs. I would appreciate your advice on comparative study w.r.t. attributes like language-Inclusive support, code-base integration, performance, cost, maintenance, support, ease of use, ability to deal with big projects, etc. based on actual industry experience.

Thanks in advance!

1.82M views1.82M
Comments

Detailed Comparison

GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions
Microsoft Power Automate
Microsoft Power Automate

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.

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.

Multiple workflow files support; Free and open source; Workflow run interface; Search for actions in GitHub Marketplace; Integrated with Github's Checks API; Logs and artifacts downloading support
Robotic process automation; RPA; Digital process automation; DPA; Artificial intelligence; AI; GPT; Intelligent document process; IDP; Process mining; Task mining
Statistics
Stacks
48.2K
Stacks
164
Followers
3.1K
Followers
119
Votes
27
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 8
    Integration with GitHub
  • 5
    Free
  • 3
    Easy to duplicate a workflow
  • 3
    Ready actions in Marketplace
  • 2
    Read actions in Marketplace
Cons
  • 5
    Lacking [skip ci]
  • 4
    Lacking allow failure
  • 3
    Lacking job specific badges
  • 2
    No ssh login to servers
  • 1
    No manual launch
No community feedback yet
Integrations
GitHub
GitHub
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 GitHub Actions, Microsoft Power Automate?

Jenkins

Jenkins

In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.

Travis CI

Travis CI

Free for open source projects, our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.com means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.

Codeship

Codeship

Codeship runs your automated tests and configured deployment when you push to your repository. It takes care of managing and scaling the infrastructure so that you are able to test and release more frequently and get faster feedback for building the product your users need.

CircleCI

CircleCI

Continuous integration and delivery platform helps software teams rapidly release code with confidence by automating the build, test, and deploy process. Offers a modern software development platform that lets teams ramp.

TeamCity

TeamCity

TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers, build engineers, and DevOps. It is trivial to setup and absolutely free for small teams and open source projects.

Drone.io

Drone.io

Drone is a hosted continuous integration service. It enables you to conveniently set up projects to automatically build, test, and deploy as you make changes to your code. Drone integrates seamlessly with Github, Bitbucket and Google Code as well as third party services such as Heroku, Dotcloud, Google AppEngine and more.

wercker

wercker

Wercker is a CI/CD developer automation platform designed for Microservices & Container Architecture.

GoCD

GoCD

GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks. GoCD offers business a first-class build and deployment engine for complete control and visibility.

Airflow

Airflow

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.

Shippable

Shippable

Shippable is a SaaS platform that lets you easily add Continuous Integration/Deployment to your Github and BitBucket repositories. It is lightweight, super simple to setup, and runs your builds and tests faster than any other service.

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