Azure Logic Apps: Power Automate's Overlooked Cooler Brother

I've been doing automation development for almost 6 years now. In the first half of those years, I stuck primarily to no/low code solutions. But in the second half my automation solutions have increasingly used more code. But for now, I think that most people likely see process automation as more of a low-code offering, rather than a coded one.

And this is especially true in the public sector. Quite often, the only two process automation tools available in the public sector are UiPath and Power Automate, for better or worse. And after extensive time with both of these tools, I think it's hard to deny that UiPath is the better of the two, and Power Automate is worse.

Specifically, I'm referring to Power Automate's cloud flows. Power Automate has seen improvements in recent years with the addition of AI Builder, work queues, and of course Power Automate Desktop. But in all these years (at least six since Microsoft Flow was renamed to Power Automate), the cloud flow experience still has the same janky issues that were there on day one. In 2025 alone, I have seen

Even right now as I'm writing this, I created a flow to see if I could edit it in the new designer view. But I am not being given the option to open the flow in the new designer, and there is no clear reason why. Issues like this are what make Power Automate the weakest link in the Power Platform ecosystem to this day.

But as it happens, there is an alternative to Power Automate that not only fixes all these issues, but is cheaper and has more features. This alternative is Azure Logic Apps.

When you create an Azure Logic App and edit it in the visual designer, it may look similar to Power Automate's connector/workflow framework. And that's because it is. Power Automate is actually built on top of Azure Logic Apps. As I see it, Power Automate cloud flows are essentially an extension of Azure Logic Apps that can use Power Automate specific features, and integrate with other Power Platform solutions.

But Azure Logic Apps offers unique benefits of its own. It integrates with Azure services much better than Power Automate. It supports custom JavaScript code. And most importantly, it solves one of Power Automate's larger issues: licensing.

Often there is a certain trigger or action that is either really helpful, or required to build a flow. Naturally, these particular triggers/actions are often locked in the premium tier, requiring a paid license to use it. If anyone needs to modify or run a flow that uses a premium trigger/action, they need a paid license as well.

I will give Power Automate props for being quite affordable compared to other API integration services out there. But I've been amazed at how many clients are hesitant to pay even $15 a month for Power Automate Premium, despite how many benefits it offers. More than once, I've had to build bloated workflows to do something in several actions that could have been done with one premium HTTP action. And sometimes I've had to report that one or more use cases are unfortunately not possible because we don't have a premium license.

This is where Logic Apps shines. There is no licensing in Logic Apps. Instead, it offers consumption and standard hosting plans. The standard plans are intended for very high complexity/volume workflows, but the consumption plan lines up with a typical Power Automate use case. The consumption plan charges for each time the logic app runs. Azure's site has a full cost breakdown (make sure to click on the consumption plan instead of the standard plan), but just as a simple example, if you had a logic app with 5 standard actions that ran once per day, this specific app would cost $0.02 per month.

And this logic app can be modified by anyone on the team, with full access to every trigger and action. Seems like a pretty good deal compared to paying $15 per month for a license that might use only 1-2 premium actions in 1-2 flows.

If your Power Automate use cases do not require integrating other parts of the Power Platform (apps, pages, etc), then migrating your Power Automate cloud flows to Azure Logic Apps is a no-brainer. If you have Azure-specific processes to automate, even better!

Whether you want to try Azure Logic Apps out for yourself, or you would rather stick to Power Automate, Logic Apps is an option that more people should know is out there. At least for me, if I knew Logic Apps existed 1-2 years ago, I could have developed much better automations.