Power Platform Licensing: Power Automate

• Power Automate is a low-code workflow automation service that can be used to automate repetitive processes.
• The service is provided in several license types; choosing the wrong plan could result in significant extra expense for customers.
• Other offerings, such as Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, offer limited Power Automate rights that could leave customers responsible for later expenses.
• Pay-as-you-go plans can cost up to twice as much as standard plans and offer fewer capabilities.

Power Automate is a graphical workflow automation engine that runs in Azure and is based on the Azure Logic Apps service. The workflows created, called “flows,” can be desktop flows—which run locally and need some user interaction such as a button click to launch them, or cloud flows—which can be triggered automatically by some event, run through user interaction such as a button click, or can run on a set schedule.

As with Power Apps, Power Automate license requirements depend on technical requirements for capacity, connectors, Dataverse, and add-ons. (See the sidebar “Elements of Power Platform Services”.)