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Power Platform Community / Forums / Power Automate / AMA: Difference betwee...
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AMA: Difference between a flow and a bot from a licensing point of view.

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Posted on by zrnet 5

Hi,

What is the difference between a flow and a bot on licencing point of view.

Could you clarify this chart please? PA.png

 

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  • Verified answer
    Pstork1 Profile Picture
    Pstork1 69,024 Most Valuable Professional on at

    As I understand it a bot is a physical or virtual machine that runs a desktop flow in unattended mode. Its only meaningful when working with unattended desktop flows.  If you run multiple desktop flows on a single VM that involves one bot.  If you split them up and run them on multiple VMs to gain better performance that involves multiple bots.  So it isn't the number of flows, its the number of machines or VMs used in unattended mode.  In attended and cloud mode its all per user or per flow based.

  • Verified answer
    PriyaKodukula Profile Picture
    PriyaKodukula Microsoft Employee on at

    A bot is a virtual machine used to run unattended RPA automations. For example, i have a batch of invoices coming in every sunday night and i want the invoices to be uploaded into multiple legacy applications (that do not have any APIs or connectors). Because it is a legacy application, the RPA automation needs to run on a VM that has the legacy applications deployed on it.  

    I will create a flow(automation) that will be triggered on every sunday at 9pm and run the automation on the VM (bot) to complete the task. The owner of the flow needs a per user with attended RPA license to create the flow and also need a Unattended RPA bot addon for the bot/VM. 

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