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Types of Power Automate licenses

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.

👁 Screenshot of Power Automate licenses.

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).

You can subscribe to Power Automate licenses on Power Automate pricing. If you're an administrator, you can also purchase licenses from the Microsoft 365 admin center.

User licenses

👁 Screenshot of user licenses.

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.

Power Automate Premium

License name	Power Automate Premium
License type	User license (paid)
Entitlements	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 action 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.

License name

Power Automate Premium

License type

User license (paid)

Entitlements

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 action 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.

Learn more in Power Automate trial license.

Power Automate Free

License name	Power Automate Free
License type	User license (free)
Entitlements	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.

Learn more in Power Automate Free license.

Capacity licenses

👁 Screenshot of capacity licenses.

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).

Power Automate Process

License name	Power Automate Process
License type	Capacity license (paid)
Allocated automation	- Cloud flow - Standard machine
Entitlements	When assigned to a cloud flow, a Power Automate Process license entitles it to higher action limits 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 unattended 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 actions per day (shown as Power Platform Requests in admin center reports). Up to 10 Process licenses can be stacked on a single cloud flow, with each additional license adding 250,000 actions to the flow's daily entitlement. To ensure you purchase sufficient capacity, estimate your daily usage — (actions per run) × (runs per day) — and purchase Process licenses to cover that volume. Use Power Platform request reports in the admin center to see each flow's actual daily action count and identify flows that need additional stacking.
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.

Learn more about the Power Automate Process license.

Power Automate Hosted Process

License name	Power Automate Hosted Process
License type	Capacity license (paid)
Allocated object	- Hosted machine - Hosted machine group - Cloud flow - Machine
Entitlements	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) autoscalability 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.

Learn more in Power Automate Hosted Process license.

Important

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 action limits 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 was 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:

	Premium license	Process license	Hosted Process license
Applied to	User	- Cloud flow - Machine	- Hosted machine - Hosted machine group - Cloud flow - Machine
Capacity Limits
Daily action limit¹	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

¹ The Power Platform requests are subjected to higher limits during the transition period. Learn more in Request limits in Power Automate.

² Up to 10 Process licenses can be stacked on a single cloud flow. Each additional Process license adds 250,000 actions per day.

³As 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.

⁴Up to 100 GB per tenant.

License entitlements

Power Automate licenses include entitlements to use specific Power Automate capabilities. This section lists the supported entitlements.

👁 Screenshot of license entitlements.

Entitlements to usage of connector types in cloud flows

A connector represents the underlying service (such as OneDrive, SharePoint, Salesforce, and more) with which a cloud flow can interact. It provides a way for a user to connect its cloud flow to a non-Microsoft 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 nondefault 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)).

Learn more about the premium RPA capabilities in Premium RPA features.

Entitlements to other Power Automate capabilities

Entitlement to	Entitlement description
Business process flows	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:

👁 Screenshot of how to view your licenses.

Note

The user licenses display in the section My licenses.
The capacity licenses (and capacity add-ons) display in the section Environment capacities.
The user entitlement (in context of environment capacities) displays 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.

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Additional resources

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URL: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/power-automate-licensing/types