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Power Platform Community / Forums / Power Automate / Comparison between fre...
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Comparison between free and paid license of Power Automate Desktop

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Posted on by 14

Hi Team,

 

Hope you are doing well. I have a few queries -

 

1. Could anyone give me a comparison between free and paid version of Power Automate Desktop?

2. What are the benefits of Paid version?

3. What would be the cost of Paid License?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thank  You !!

Vineet Semwal

I have the same question (0)
  • trice602 Profile Picture
    16,021 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

    Hi @VineetSemwal ,

     

    Here's the link to the latest and is the best resource I refer to.

     

    https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2085130 

     

     

     

  • Agnius Bartninkas Profile Picture
    Most Valuable Professional on at

    Power Automate Desktop does not have any triggering or scheduling functionalities at all. You can only manually start the flows, when you want to. So, it's only intended to be used for attended automation. If you want any kind of event-based triggers or schedules to run your flows automatically (either via a cloud flow or the Windows Task Scheduler), you need the Premium version of Power Automate.

     

    When you do get a Premium version, you also get cloud flows, which are extremely powerful and are usually enough to automate most processes that do not require a user interface. So, you don't even need to use desktop flows. But when you do, you can launch a desktop flow from the cloud.

     

    Also, with a Premium license, you also get access to all the Premium actions (marked with a diamond icon in the actions tree):

    Agnius_0-1705127863552.png

    (also Work queues that did not fit into the screen). These require a connection to the cloud portal and as such are Premium.

     

    Finally, you get some AI builder credits included in the license, so you can use AI to process several documents per month, if needed.

     

    As for the price, please refer to this page: https://powerautomate.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

    The Premium license is charged per user using it, and only applies to attended desktop flow runs (no automated login to a machine) and the Process license is charged per environment, and applies to unattended flow runs only.

     

    If you don't run a lot of flows, or if they're not very frequent, you might also want to look into the Pay as you Go licensing model, where you are charged only for actual flow runs. See here for more info: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/pay-as-you-go-meters?tabs=image#power-automate-meters-preview 

    -------------------------------------------------------------------------
    If I have answered your question, please mark it as the preferred solution. If you like my response, please give it a Thumbs Up.

    I also provide paid consultancy and development services using Power Automate. If you're interested, DM me and we can discuss it.

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