Microsoft Power Automate: A new opportunity to power up your Automation? – Webinar Q&A Part 1

Q&A Blog: Microsoft Power Automate: A new opportunity to power up your Automation?

Our Co-Founder Jukka Virkkunen and Microsoft’s Solution Specialist Janne Hirva recently hosted a webinar discussing the new automation opportunities enabled by Microsoft Power Automate. We received a ton of great questions during the live session and were not able to cover them all in the webinar. In this article, you can find our answers to audience questions about pricing. Check out also our other Q&A articles covering technical questions, and uses cases/ business perspective.

You can also watch the webinar recording here.

Key takeaways from the webinar include:

• What is Microsoft Power Automate?
• How does Power Automate fit the ever-growing automation toolbox?
• How can your business tap into opportunities enabled by the technology?
• How can the Power Platform be utilized to improve personal productivity and boost innovation?
• Practical use cases

Q&A Part 1

Microsoft Power Automate: Questions about pricing

What is the pricing model for Power Automate? 

Janne:Using Power Automate (PA) for automating processes requires a Power Automate license. The attended scenarios are licensed per user and unattended per flow. Some Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365 packages include a limited trial version of Power Automate that works within the Office context.

More information on the licensing and packaging at https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

Jukka:Power Automate is also delivered as part of our latest Intelligent Automation platform service, Roboshore. We developed the service in cooperation with our clients to tackle automation efficiency issues: overcapacity of licenses, technology lock-in, challenges in managing the ever-growing automation toolbox and development quality, and barriers to scale up or down as needed.

Roboshore is a multi-technology platform, including the market’s leading automation technologies from Microsoft, UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere. We deliver RPA capacity from our cloud instantaneously as needed to ensure maximum utilization efficiency. The service also includes development quality acceptance procedure and process maintenance. Roboshore is priced per minute, based on consumption.

You can find out more here: https://digitalworkforce.com/roboshore/

What Microsoft Grade is Power Automate “free to switch on”?…. E3, E5, all?

Janne:The question seems to relate to the different Microsoft 365 packages; Microsoft 365 E3 and Microsoft 365 E5 and so on. Or Office E3 and E5 packages. There is no free version; only trials are free and for a limited time.

Which packages include Power Automate?

Janne:

Power Automate trials are included in M365 licenses (above):

• The limited version allows creating Power Automate flows for personal productivity. Flows done with this version can connect to Office products like Outlook, OneDrive, Word, Excel, Teams, and some 3rd party services.
• Allowed connectors (standard): https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/?filter=&category=standard
• Cannot connect to business systems, use HTTP connector, or create custom connectors (own connectors wrapping custom API)

Power Automate licenses:

• These are full-feature Power Automate licenses that are for creating automations, business processes, workflows, and orchestrations for the business.
• Allows all connectors (standard & premium) and custom connectors: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/
• These licenses can be obtained by purchasing them separately (Power Automate only), or they are included in Power Apps and Dynamics 365 licenses (can be created and used within app context).

More information on the licensing and packaging at https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

What kind of license policy does Microsoft Power Automate have if it is used for RPA-cases?

Janne:Using Power Automate for automating processes requires a Power Automate license. The attended scenarios are licensed per user and unattended per flow.

More information on the licensing and packaging at https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

Jukka:As mentioned above, PA can also be delivered as part of Roboshore multi-technology RPA platform service. Here, pricing is based on usage—price per minute for performing a process, running on any technology.

More here: https://digitalworkforce.com/roboshore/

Check out our other Q&A articles covering Microsoft Power Automate technical questions, and uses cases/ business perspective.