Microsoft Power Automate
Builds automations across Microsoft 365 and over a thousand other apps, including desktop robots that click through old software with no API of its own.
What it costs
| Tier | Price | For | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free trial | Free | Testing cloud flows before committing to a paid seat. | Cloud flows with standard connectors, basic process and task mining, limited storage. |
| Premium | $15/user/month, paid annually | One person automating work across Microsoft 365 and connected apps. | Cloud flows, attended desktop flows (robots that need you present to run), process and task mining, a Dataverse database. |
| Process | $150/bot/month, paid annually | Automating a specific unattended process — a robot doing one job around the clock. | Cloud flows plus unattended desktop flows (robots running with nobody watching), 50 MB Dataverse database. |
| Hosted Process | $215/bot/month, paid annually | The same unattended automation, without needing your own virtual machine. | Everything in Process, plus a Microsoft-hosted virtual machine to run the robot on. |
Read from Microsoft Power Automate's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.
Where it breaks
A separate Process Mining add-on is priced at $5,000 per tenant per month, which is enterprise pricing far beyond a small business's needs and easy to mistake for a normal plan tier when scanning the pricing page quickly. 'Attended' versus 'unattended' bots is the single most important distinction on this page — attended needs a human logged in to trigger it, unattended runs genuinely alone, and the price difference between Premium and Process reflects exactly that.
Bundled into many Microsoft 365 subscriptions at a limited level; the tiers above are the standalone add-on pricing for real automation use. Desktop flows require a Windows machine or the hosted VM option.
First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.
Power Automate’s real value shows up in the gap between “automate a cloud process” and “automate a piece of old desktop software that was never built to be automated.” The cloud-flow side competes directly with Make and Zapier — trigger, action, connector, running on Microsoft’s servers. The desktop-robot side is a different capability entirely: a bot that clicks, types and reads a screen the way a human would, useful for the legacy accounting or industry-specific software that has no API and never will.
Attended versus unattended is the whole pricing story
Premium buys attended automation — a robot that runs while you’re logged in, essentially automating repetitive clicks during your own workday. Process and Hosted Process buy unattended automation — a robot that runs on its own schedule, with nobody watching, which is a genuinely different and more valuable capability, priced accordingly at ten times Premium’s cost.
Against Make and Zapier
Power Automate’s edge is depth inside Microsoft 365 — SharePoint, Teams, Dataverse — and the desktop-robot capability neither Make nor Zapier really offers. Its cost is real complexity: the licensing model, the attended/unattended distinction, and the bot-hosting decision are not simple for a non-technical owner to navigate alone. A business already living inside Microsoft’s ecosystem gets more value here than one that isn’t; a business on Google Workspace or a mixed stack is usually better served starting with Make or Zapier.
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