Microsoft Power Automate vs Skyvern
Microsoft Power Automate and Skyvern are both workflow automation software. Microsoft Power Automate is a commercial product from Microsoft. Skyvern is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 23k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Microsoft Power Automate when
- A Microsoft 365 organisation wants approvals and automations around SharePoint, Outlook and Teams.
- Pick Skyvern when
- You need to automate tasks across many websites without APIs, such as portals, quotes or applications, and selector-based scripts keep breaking.
Side by side
Microsoft's workflow automation with cloud flows across connectors, desktop RPA and approvals inside Microsoft 365.
Automates browser workflows with LLMs and computer vision, filling forms and navigating sites from instructions rather than brittle selectors.
Premium connectors and RPA need extra licences, and error handling is clumsy.
AGPL license, LLM costs per run, and results are less predictable than scripted automation.
Production-ready
Usable
Cloud service and desktop app
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Not published
Python, TypeScript, Playwright and PostgreSQL
Closed source, sold by Microsoft
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
483 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
23k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 2 years ago, latest release v1.0.56.
Other comparisons
More workflow automation tools
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.