Power Automate

About Power Automate

Microsoft Power Automate is a workflow-automation service in the Microsoft Power Platform that builds automated processes across cloud applications, desktop applications, and Microsoft 365 services. It launched in 2016 as Microsoft Flow and was renamed Power Automate in November 2019. The product sits alongside Power Apps, Power BI, and Power Pages in Microsoft's low-code platform, sharing the Dataverse data layer and the connector framework with those products.

Power Automate splits into two distinct automation models. Cloud flows run on Microsoft's servers and automate API-connected services through triggers and actions, covering scheduled flows, automated event-triggered flows, and instant manually triggered flows. Desktop flows provide robotic process automation through Power Automate Desktop, a Windows application that records and replays user-interface interactions for systems that have no API. Power Automate Desktop is included at no cost for Windows 10 and Windows 11 users for attended manual runs; unattended desktop automation requires a paid plan.

The platform offers more than 1,000 connectors split into standard and premium tiers. Standard connectors such as SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, and Excel are included with most Microsoft 365 business subscriptions. Premium connectors such as Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, ServiceNow, and generic HTTP, along with custom connectors, require a paid Power Automate license. This split is the single most consequential pricing detail of the product: a flow that touches one premium connector moves the entire flow into paid territory.

As of May 2026 the paid lineup centres on Power Automate Premium at $15 per user per month, which grants one user unlimited cloud flows, premium and custom connectors, 250 MB of Dataverse capacity, process mining, and a monthly AI Builder credit allotment. For RPA at scale, the Power Automate Process plan is priced at $150 per bot per month and is licensed to a flow rather than a user; the Hosted Process plan at $215 per bot per month adds a Microsoft-hosted virtual machine so customers do not supply their own RPA infrastructure.

flowchart TD
  A[New automation] --> B{Target system has an API?}
  B -- No --> C[Desktop flow / RPA]
  C --> D{Attended or unattended?}
  D -- Attended --> E[Power Automate Desktop: free on Windows 10/11]
  D -- Unattended --> F[Process plan: $150/bot/month]
  B -- Yes --> G{Flow uses a premium connector?}
  G -- No --> H[Covered by Microsoft 365 standard connectors]
  G -- Yes --> I[Power Automate Premium: $15/user/month]

Power Automate competes with Zapier, Make, and Workato in the cloud-flow category and with UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism in the RPA category. Its principal advantage is native depth inside Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 estates. Microsoft has added Copilot features that generate flows from natural-language descriptions and AI Builder models for document processing and prediction. For organisations already licensed for Microsoft 365, Power Automate is frequently the default automation surface; for organisations outside that ecosystem, the premium-connector licensing model often makes a dedicated platform more economical.

Editor's Note: Across 12 ShadowGen Power Automate deployments in 2024-26, the most common budgeting error is assuming Microsoft 365 "includes" Power Automate. It includes standard connectors only. In 9 of those 12 engagements a single premium connector, most often Salesforce or an HTTP call to an internal API, pulled an entire department onto $15/user/month licensing inside the first month. The mitigation that works: inventory every connector a flow will touch before committing to a licence count, and consolidate premium-connector calls into a small number of service flows owned by a handful of licensed users. — Rafal Fila, ShadowGen