Power Automate supports both user and capacity licensing. With a Power Automate Premium user license, users gain the full set of capabilities for cloud and desktop automation including premium connectors, process and task mining, AI Builder, use of Managed Environments, and Microsoft Dataverse storage.
For additional capacity, running desktop flows unattended, or licensing flows on their own without use licenses, subscribe to Power Automate Process licenses or enable pay-as-you-go. To extend further, additional add-ons are available for hosted machines, RPA unattended bots expanding Dataverse storage, AI credits, and other resources.
Other licenses across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and the Power Platform include a limited set of Power Automate capabilities. Learn more about what's included in each license in Microsoft Power Platform Licensing Guide.
License type
License scope
Description
User license
User-centric: a user license is assigned to a user.
It entitles the user to access specific capabilities.
Capacity license
Automation-centric: a capacity license is allocated to a Power Automate automation (cloud flow, machine, hosted machine, hosted machine group).
It provides the automation entitlements (the same way a user license provides entitlements to a user).
In addition to Power Automate Premium or use rights from other licenses, users can be licensed with Power Automate trial license to try out premium capabilities. They can also use the Free license to create cloud flows with standard connectors.
We recommend the Power Automate Premium license for all users, as it gives them the full set of capabilities to create both API based and desktop automations.
This license allows users to create, run, and share unlimited cloud flows (within Power Platform requests (PPR) limits for API-based automation (with standard, premium, and custom connectors) and to automate their legacy applications simulating a human behavior such as keyboard or mouse keys and movement (with desktop flows through robotic process automation (RPA).
More precisely regarding the premium RPA entitlements, this license includes the ability for users to register their workstation, to create unlimited desktop flows, and to execute their desktop flows in attended mode on their registered machine through an attended bot borne by the license.
Additionally, this license also includes full access to process mining capabilities and the provisioning of AI Builder credits, which support AI consuming scenarios like form processing, object detection, text classification, and more.
Power Automate trial
License name
Power Automate trial
License type
User license (90 days trial)
Entitlements
This self-assisted trial license provides a user with the same capabilities as a Power Automate Premium license (except for AI builder credits and storage capacity).
The Power Automate trial license also includes the ability to run desktop flows in unattended mode.
Using basic Power Automate capabilities is included at no cost for work or school accounts in a Microsoft Entra tenant. The Power Automate Free license includes creating and running cloud flows (without sharing), as well as authoring and running desktop flows locally (attended). Connector usage is limited to standard connectors only.
In addition to user licenses, organizations can upgrade their automation scenarios with capacity licenses, which are allocated to Power Automate automations (cloud flows, machines, hosted machines, hosted machine groups) and provide these automations autonomous entitlements (regardless of the user license owned by persons interacting with those automations).
When assigned to a cloud flow, a Power Automate Process license entitles it to better performance, and allows use of premium and custom connectors regardless of the owning or triggering user's license. Flows must be in a solution for a Process license to be assigned.
Allocated to a machine, a Process license becomes an unattended bot that can run one desktop flow at a time. Up to one cloud flow will automatically inherit the Process plan from the the related machine or machine group that has Process capacity assigned. To run multiple unattended desktop flows in parallel, purchase Process licenses for the maximum number of runs that are needed to execute in parallel, and allocate Process capacity to the related machines.
To trigger attended or attended desktop flow runs from cloud flows that are operating under the Process license, the user whose connection is being used to run the desktop flow needs a Power Automate Premium license (or other user license with desktop flows entitlement).
Each Process license includes up to 250,000 Power Platform Requests per 24 hours. For requests above this, support for stacking capacity from multiple Process licenses is coming soon. To ensure you purchase sufficient capacity for the flow to operate, we recommended purchasing Process licenses up to the maximum requests per 24 hours you anticipate from the process.
Will benefit
Organizations looking to automate their business processes at scale using cloud flows or unattended desktop automations, or maintain a flow without each co-owner needing a user license.
The Hosted Process license enables RPA with zero infrastructure with no physical machine management on the user side. Each Hosted Process license can support one hosted bot, which enables the creation of one Microsoft hosted machine requires.
Those hosted machines can be created as individual hosted machines or as part of hosted machine groups, which provide 1) auto-scalability delivering high processing parallelization and reacting to demand spikes and 2) load balancing1 across multiple hosted machine groups, which optimizes the hosted bot utilization rate.
The Power Automate Hosted Process is also a superset of the Power Automate Process, which means it can provide the same entitlements as the Process license (allocated to a cloud flow or to a machine).2
Will benefit
Organizations looking to enable their RPA desktop automations quickly and at scale while freeing up the previously required management of physical resources and thus reducing costs.
1 Load balancing refers to the ability of multiple hosted machine groups to scale-up and down at different moments using a common hosted pool. The load balancing governance is managed through the max bots and committed bots scaling settings.
2 The Power Automate Hosted Process superset behavior (allowing it to be applied to machines and cloud flows) isn't yet available. In the meantime, any organization with Process overage that could be covered by its Hosted Process licenses should ignore the Process overage.
Can my organization only purchase and use capacity licenses within an environment?
Capacity licenses aren't meant to replace user licenses in an environment, as some essential capabilities are only available to licensed users, including creating and running automations running desktop flows attended or unattended. create automations. Capacity licenses can grant higher Power Platform requests (PPR) to such flows built using the premium user licenses.
Allocation of a Process license to a machine (required by the unattended mode) still prerequires the machine to have been registered by a Power Automate Premium user.
Multiple monitoring pages in the Power Automate portal (for example, workqueue page, machine list page, desktop flow list page, and more) are displayed only to Power Automate Premium users.
Compare Power Automate licenses
The following table details each license entitlement:
1 The Power Platform requests are subjected to higher limits during the transition period. Learn more in Request limits in Power Automate.
2 When multiple units of Process licenses are allocated to a cloud flow, their PPR limits are stacked.
3 As the Hosted Process license is a superset of the Process license, each hosted bot can also appear as an unattended bot, which allows to run in unattended mode on the hosted machine / hosted machine group.
4 Up to 100 GB per tenant.
License entitlements
Power Automate licenses include entitlements to use specific Power Automate capabilities. This section lists the supported entitlements.
Entitlements to usage of connector types in cloud flows
A connector represents the underlying service (such as OneDrive, SharePoint, Salesforce, etc.) with which a cloud flow can interact. It provides a way for a user to connect its cloud flow to a third-party account (such as a Salesforce account) and use a set of prebuilt actions and triggers.
Entitlement to
Entitlement description
Standard connectors
The standard connectors entitlement is needed to add a standard connector to a cloud flow and trigger it.
Premium connectors
The premium connectors entitlement is needed to add a premium connector to a cloud flow and trigger it.
Custom connectors
The custom connectors entitlement is needed to create a connector with its own triggers and actions when an app / a service does't have a prebuilt connector.
Entitlements to usage of Robotic process automation (RPA)
Robotic process automation (RPA) is needed to interact with applications, which are lacking a prebuilt connector and which don't have APIs that could be used to build a custom connector. With RPA, you automate applications by teaching Power Automate for Desktop to mimic the mouse movements and keyboard entries of a human user, as if a robot was using the computer.
Entitlement to
Entitlement description
Attended RPA
The attended RPA entitlement is needed to perform most of the RPA related operations: register a machine, access RPA management portal pages, add premium and custom actions to desktop flows, share desktop flows, create desktop flows in non-default environments and trigger desktop flows in attended mode through an attended bot (in default attended mode or in Picture-in-picture attended mode).
Attended run mode refers to a desktop flow execution with human supervision, it's materialized by attended bots: the Trial user license and the Premium user license bear one attended bot each.
When an attended run is triggered, the attended bot securely accesses the machine already is use by the user and executes the desktop flow actions on the target applications.
Picture-in-picture attended mode refers to attended desktop flows executions within a virtual window that replicates the user's desktop, so that they can continue working on their machine while the automation is running in parallel.
Unattended RPA
The unattended RPA entitlement is needed to trigger desktop flows in unattended mode through an unattended bot.
Unattended run mode refers to a desktop flow execution without human supervision, it's materialized by unattended bots: the Trial user license and the Process license bear one unattended bot each (to be allocated to a machine for the Process license).
When an unattended run is triggered, the unattended bot securely signs into the machine on user's behalf, executes the desktop flow actions on the target applications, and then signs out of the device.
Hosted RPA
The hosted RPA entitlement is needed to create and turn on a Microsoft hosted machine (individual hosted machine or part of a hosted machine group) thus enabling RPA with zero infrastructure with no physical machine management on the user side.
An active (= turned-on) hosted machine is materialized by an hosted bot: each Hosted Process license supports one hosted bot.
As the Hosted Process license is a superset of the Process license, the hosted entitlement implicitly includes the unattended entitlement, meaning that each hosted bot can also be seen as an unattended bot (= provides the unattended run mode capability on the hosted machines (individual or part of a group)).
The business process flows entitlement is needed to create a business process flow. Business process flows provide a guide for people to get work done they offer a streamlined user experience that leads people through the processes their organization defined.
On premises gateway
The on-premises data gateway entitlement is needed to create and use an on-premises data gateway. It acts as a bridge to provide quick and secure data transfer between on-premises data and several Microsoft cloud services. With gateways, organizations can keep databases and other data sources on-premises and securely use that on-premises data in cloud services.
Process mining
The process mining entitlement is needed to use the process mining and task mining capabilities of Power Automate.
Consumptive credits and storage entitlements
Entitlement to
Entitlement description
AI Builder credits
With AI builder, you add intelligence to your automations, predict outcomes, and help improve business performance. AI Builder capacity is expressed in the form of "service credits." Service credits serve as the single (common) currency across all the scenarios that AI Builder supports. Available service credits are deducted when AI Builder services are used. For instance, you could use these credits to extract data from a few documents with form processing or perform hundreds of basic text extractions. Different scenarios (for example, forms processing, prediction, etc.) consume service credits at different rates. Learn more about AI builder licensing.
Dataverse database and file storage
Data volume continues to grow exponentially as businesses advance their digital transformation journey and bring data together across their organizations. Modern business applications need to support new business scenarios, manage new data types, and help organizations with the increasing complexity of compliance mandates. To support the growing needs of today's organizations, data storage solutions need to evolve continuously and provide the right solution to support expanding business needs. Microsoft Dataverse capacity storage is optimized for relational data (database), attachments (file), and audit logs (log). Some Power Automate license provide a tenant-wide entitlement for each of these three storage types. You can buy more storage in 1-GB add-on increments. Learn more about Dataverse capacity storage.
Process mining data storage
The process mining capability in Power Automate is suited for discovery of inefficiencies in organization-wide processes. It enables you to gain a deep understanding of your processes using event log files that you can get from your system of recording (apps you use in your processes). The process mining capability displays maps of your processes with data and metrics to recognize performance issues.
How can I show my current entitlements?
In the Power Automate portal, select Settings > View my licenses:
Note
The user license(s) display in the section My licenses.
The capacity license(s) (and capacity add-ons) display in the section Environment capacities.
The user entitlement (in context of environment capacities) display in the Capabilities section with a green check mark.
Seeded licenses
Learn more about Power Automate capabilities included in Seeded licenses.
Legacy licenses
Learn more about Power Automate capabilities included in Legacy licenses.
