The Different Types of Power Automate Licenses
Understanding Power Automate licenses is a critical step in the planning phase for Power Automate. Now, just like other components of the Power Platform suite of applications, Power Automate offers flexible pricing. This means that you will have the option to choose from various Power Automate pricing plans and choose the one that suits you best. However, it is not uncommon to see businesses getting confused by different types of Power Automate licenses. Let us try to understand the different Power Automate licenses and see how experienced Power Platform consultants at Evolvous can help you choose the right plan
What Will You Learn in this Article
The Basics of Different Power Automate Licenses – The different types of licenses and the basic yet important facts you should know about.
Understanding Power Automate User License – We will be taking a bit of deeper look into Power Automate User License
Understanding Power Automate Capacity License – Following that, we will try to understand Power Automate capacity licenses
Comparing the Popular Licenses – We will be comparing the most popular licenses and check out the differences between them.
License Entitlements – We will be looking at the key capabilities of the platform you will be able to use with a license.
How Do Our Consultants Help You Make the Right Choice – Find out how Evolvous and our team of specialists can help you choose the right license for your business.
So, let us get started, shall we?
The Basics of Different Power Automate Licenses
Let us start with the basics. We will first try to understand the different kinds of licenses you have available.
There are two types of Power Automate licenses available – User license and Capacity License.
The following table gives you the difference between the two:
| Type of license | Description | Scope |
| User License | It entitles a single user, or a group of users to use the capabilities of Power Automate. | Covers only a single user |
| Capacity License | It provides the automation workflow with the entitlement to the capabilities – the same way as the user license provides the entitlements to the user. | Covers automation workflows like cloud flow, machine, hosted machine, hosted machine group. |
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Understanding Power Automate User License
Now, let us take a deeper look into Power Automate User License. This is the most common license-type that most businesses use.
There are three types of Power Automate Use Cases that are available
- Power Automate Premium
- Power Automate Trial
- Power Automate Free
Please note that the Power Automate Trial license is only valid for a period of 90 days. Post-trial, you will need to upgrade to Power Automate Premium license to keep using the platform.
Power Automate Free doesn’t really have a trial period but you will only have access to limited features.
So, in the long term, Power Automate Premium is the only viable option for businesses looking to use the platform. It gives them the full set of capabilities to create both API based and desktop automations.
The Features of the Power Automate User License
This license allows you 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).
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.
Understanding Power Automate Capacity License
In addition to user licenses, businesses can also upgrade their automation scenarios with capacity licenses. Capacity licenses are allocated to Power Automate automations like cloud flows, machines, hosted machines, hosted machine groups etc.
With the capacity license, you will be providing the particular automation with autonomous entitlements. This is independent of the user license owned by persons interacting with those automations. So, a user with a Power Automate premium license will still be able to use automation with a capacity license of their own.
Just like the user license, there are different kinds of capacity license available as well.
- Power Automate Process
- Power Automate Hosted Process
What is a Power Automate Process License?
A Power Automate Process license is a paid license that is allotted to a Cloud flow or a Standard machine.
When assigned to a cloud flow, a Power Automate Process license entitles it to the use of premium and custom connectors regardless of the license the user has. Please note that the Flows must be in a solution for a Process license to be assigned.
The license is often allocated to a machine. In such scenarios, it becomes an unattended bot that can run one desktop flow at a time.
If you want to run multiple unattended desktop flows in parallel, then it is recommended that you purchase Process licenses for the maximum number of runs that are needed to execute the flow in parallel and allocate Process capacity to the related machines.
Each Process license includes up to 250,000 Power Platform Requests per 24 hours.
What is a Power Automate Hosted Process License?
A Power Automate Hosted Process License can be also allocated to cloud flow or a machine. Apart from that, it can also be allocated to a hosted machine or a hosted machine group.
The Hosted Process license enables Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with zero infrastructure with no physical machine management on the user side. Each Hosted Process license can support one hosted bot.
This type of license is ideal for organizations who are looking to enable desktop automation rapidly and at scale. At the same time, it reduces costs by eliminating the need to manage physical resources.
Comparison Between Power Automate Premium vs Process vs Hosted Process Licenses
Let us now compare the three most popular Power Automate Licenses to see what you will get with each of them.
| Aspect | Premium license | Process license | Hosted Process license |
| Applicable for | User |
|
|
| Capacity Limits | |||
| Daily PPR limit | 40k per user | 250k per Process license2 | 250k per Hosted Process license3 |
| Process mining data storage | 50 MB per license4 | Not included | Not included |
| AI Builder credits | 5000 per month | 5000 per month | 5000 per month |
| Dataverse database storage | 250 MB per license | 50 MB per license | 50 MB per license |
| Dataverse file storage | 2 GB per license | 200 MB per license | 200 MB per license |
| Connectors | |||
| Standard connectors | Included | Included | Included |
| Premium connectors | Included | Included | Included |
| Custom connectors | Included | Included | Included |
| Desktop Automation | |||
| Attended RPA | One attended bot included | Not included | Not included |
| Unattended RPA | Not included | One unattended bot included | One unattended bot included3 |
| Hosted RPA | Not included | Not included | One hosted bot included |
| Other | |||
| Process mining | Included | Not included | Not included |
| Business process flows | Included | Included | Included |
| On-premises gateways | Included | Included | Included |
Now, let us look at the entitlements you will get from your Power Automate License
Power Automate License Entitlements
What is meant by the term license entitlements? It refers to the capabilities, features and systems you will get access to when you procure a Microsoft Power Automate license.
Here is an overview of the license entitlements for Power Automate:
Connectors: You will have access to a range of standard & premium connectors, as well as custom connectors.
Types of automation: Users will be able to create an attended, unattended or hosted RPA
Others: You will also get other entitlements like AI Builder Credits, Process Mining Storage as well as Dataverse storage. The sizes will vary depending on the license you have.
How Do Power Automate Consultants Help You Choose the Right License?
Evolvous is a Microsoft Gold Consultant, and we offer end-to-end solutions for businesses who are looking to adapt to the low-code capabilities of Microsoft Power Automate.
Our certified and experienced Power Automate consultants will assess several factors to guide you in choosing the right Power Automate licenses. Here are some of the ways in which we help:
-
Workload and Process Analysis
We will evaluate the potential automation workloads, complexity, and various other factors to determine the ideal license.
For example, if you need high-volume unattended automation, then Power Automate process licensing might be a better option instead of per-user plans.
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Microsoft Dataverse and Premium Connector Needs
In some cases, your automated workflows might need premium connectors like SQL Server, Salesforce etc. Similarly, you might need to store data on Microsoft Dataverse so that it can be consumed by the automated flow.
These factors will be considered by our team to decide on the right license. For example, if you need access to on-prem SQL, then it is better to get a Power Automate User plan, with access to premium connectors.
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Concurrency & Scaling Considerations
We will be engaging with you to determine whether multiple bots need to run simultaneously. If that is the case, then you will need to get bot concurrency licensing.
In case of high throughput processing, then we might recommend multiple unattended RPA add-ons rather than overloading a single bot.
These are only some of the technical aspects that we will be considering. There are a host of other factors that we will be taking into account before we make the recommendation that will help you to optimize costs.
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