How to license Power Automate?
To understand how to optimize your costs for Power Automate, you need to understand what the different licensing options are, how the costs look like, and what your current usage looks like. In this blog, we will deep-dive into these three areas.
Note: Due to the high complexity of the various license options, we will only cover Power Automate in this blog. Previous weeks we covered Power Apps and Microsoft Data verse.
Licensing overview
Access to all the features of Power Automate is licensed by subscriptions on a per-user, bot or flow basis. These subscription-based licenses come in five different options: Power Automate Premium, Power Automate Per User or Per Flow, Power Automate Process, Power Automate Process Mining, Power Automate Hosted RPA Add-on.
Microsoft recently changed its model from Power Automate Per User or Flow to Power Automate Premium or Power Automate Process licenses. This seems to be a more expensive option, as you are no longer able to license a limited number of flows per user. Nevertheless, along with this change, Microsoft halved its price for Power Automate.
| Power Automate Premium | Power Automate Per User or per flow | Power Automate Process |
| Per User | Per User or per flow | Per bot or flow |
| Unlimited Flows | Both license options are End-of-life, but still available through DealDesk | License a single automation |
| Power Automate Process Mining | Power Automate Hosted RPA Add-on |
| Per 100 GB of data stored | Per bot |
| Capacity based license. | Add-on on Power Automate Premium |
Build-In Power Automate use rights Dynamics 36, Microsoft 365 and Office 365 licenses
Microsoft 365, Office365 and specific Dynamics licenses include limited build-in rights for Power Automate usage. The use of Power Automate is restricted to the context and environment of the Dynamics, Microsoft 365 and Office 365 applications.
How to analyze your current usage?
Microsoft has created a separate admin center to manage your PowerPlatform environment. Here, you can allocate licenses to specific users and manage your usage and licenses.
To manage and monitor your active and inactive users, you can go to: Billing > Licenses > Environments. In the analytics section, you are able to go more in-depth and analyze the current usage across the different apps and determine the number of users.
How to Optimize your Power Automate licenses?
We now have a better understanding of the different licensing options and where to find the actual usage of your different apps. This gives us the possibility to optimize the costs.
In general, you’ve two options. Is an user or a bot using an automation? If it’s an user then we need to license it through the Power Automate Premium per User license. A unattended bot we license through an add-on on the Premium per suer license or per single automation with the process license.
Unattended means that a automation runs autonomously, i.e., independent of a user.
