When you're not a programmer and you just want two separate apps to work together—say, when you post a picture on Instagram, you want it to automatically save to Dropbox, too—what do you do? The simplest answer is to turn to an automation service that will help you create the script without any scripting. These productivity apps make life simpler by creating connections that wouldn't otherwise exist between apps and products. IFTTT is probably the most well known, and Zapier is a close second. Microsoft is now in the game, too, with Microsoft Flow. The service is technically in Preview mode as of this writing, but it's open to anyone with a Microsoft work or school email address. After testing the service, I was left unimpressed. It lags behind its two main competitors because it only supports a few dozen apps, and it was buggy every time I used it, problems Microsoft should address before the service comes out of Preview. If you're intrigued by the idea of this new service, you should also check out IFTTT, Zapier, or both. They're not mutually exclusive, and they're PCMag Editors' Choices.

Price
One reason you might be drawn to Microsoft Flow is because it's entirely free. IFTTT is free for now, but the company has announced that it's working on a premium service that will require a fee, but the pricing has yet to be announced. Zapier already has a freemium business model. With a free account, Zapier performs up to 80 tasks per month, and you can have only five automations active at any given time. There are a few other limits, too, such as which apps you can connect. Paid accounts start at $20 per month.

Flow's Business Bent
This early version of Flow requires a Microsoft business or academic email address to get started. The site seems skewed more toward business use than home and personal use, but you can use it for either or both. For example, it works with tools you're likely to find in knowledge worker settings, like Github, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, and Azure Storage. But it also supports social channels, such as Facebook and Twitter, which you might use in both your business and personal life.

In my experience, Zapier is better suited for business use, in part because it works with so many productivity apps, although it also works with dozens of other apps that I'd categorize in the social and entertainment categories. If you only use Zapier for personal automations, you probably won't run into too many roadblocks using the free version.

IFTTT is slightly more geared toward personal and home use than business. It supports a number of smart home appliances, so you can create automations that, say, turn your lights on and off or text you when the thermostat in the house rises above a certain temperature. Microsoft Flow doesn't work with any smart home equipment at this time.

Going With the Flow
From the interface, you start by creating a flow, Microsoft's name for an automation rule. You can browse or search for templated flows that other users have already created, or you can build your own from scratch.

As you set up your first flow, the system prompts you to authenticate the services that it will use. For example, if your flow is to create a Wunderlist task every time a Github task is assigned to you, then you'll first need to authenticate Microsoft Flow to give it access to Wunderlist and Github.

I ran into a lot of trouble with authentications. They were sluggish—when they worked at all. Too often, I got error message after error message when I tried to authenticate services. Sometimes I got nothing more than crashing pages. A representative from Microsoft said updates were still being applied to the service and reminded me that Flow is still in Preview.

I gave it a rest and resumed the next day to check my list of authenticated services, or My Connections. That's where you see all the services you have connected and their state, such as connected or "can't sign in." Some services, like OneDrive and Twitter, were listed in duplicate. A few of them still showed error messages, telling me the password needed to be updated, even though I hadn't changed their passwords any time recently. The experience didn't instill confidence in me.

Exploring templates and setting up custom flows was a little smoother, but only if the services I wanted to use were already authenticated. Once you have a few flows created, you can view them, toggle them on and off, and check when they last ran (it opens in a new page) from a central page called My Flows.

While navigating the site, I noticed the pages were very slow to load, even when they didn't contain a lot of information.

Microsoft Flow doesn't do anything beyond the basics, but both IFTTT and Zapier do. IFTTT has a few special apps that let you trigger an automation with an action you take, rather than waiting for something to happen. For example, a standard automation is something like "If I post something on Twitter, then also post it on Facebook." But an automation that uses one of the special apps, like the DO Button, might be "If I press the button in the DO Button app, then text my location to my partner." Flow doesn't have a manual trigger option.

Zapier's special feature is that you can string together more than two apps in an automation. Let's say when you add a star to a Gmail email, you want Zapier to create a new task in Todoist based on that email, and create a new card in Trello, and send a message to Slack. With Zapier, you can create these multi-app automations with one command. Only paid users can make automations with three or more services, however. With Microsoft Flow, you can only connect two services at a time.

Another huge advantage of IFTTT and Zapier over Flow is that they support many more services. Because Microsoft Flow is relatively new, it only works with a few dozen tools.

Not Quite Ready for Prime Time

Microsoft Flow is coming into the automation game late, and it's just not up to speed with other services that offer the same thing. So far, it's sluggish, buggy, and doesn't add anything special. You might as well stick to IFTTT and Zapier for now. But it's still early for Flow. We'll reevaluate the service as it develops.