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Differences between free and Premium?

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Posted on by LogicSmith

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I am enthused with Power Automate, and hope to convince the boss to pay for the Premium version. However, I have not been able to find a definitive list of what you get with Premium. We would love to be able to do the following:

Save flows to specified directory / repo / backup
Run flows via a command line app
Run flows from Azure DevOps after a code deployment

Can someone confirm this, or point me to a list of what you get with Premium? Thanks in advance!

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Power Automate Desktop

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Pstork1 69,601 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Here's a link to documentation that talks about the differences between Power Automate Desktop licensed through Windows 10/11 and a Premium Organization account. Power Automate for desktop prerequisites & limitations - Power Automate | Microsoft Docs

For your questions -

PAD flows are saved to either OneDrive Personal or a Power Platform Environment Dataverse database. They aren't stored in folders/directories. Premium will let you store them in a specified environment.

Premium will let you schedule and run flows using a Power Automate Cloud flow. There really is no way to run them from a command line.

Using Cloud Flows you should be able to schedule a PAD flow as part of a DevOps pipeline.

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LogicSmith 225 on at

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Thanks - the link helped a lot. Was a bit surprised this information was not more prominently displayed. Sounds like PAD has some work to do before they can be thought of as a test automation system. Being able to save and manage your files is a major trait of ANY development environment, so I'm surprised they did it this way.

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Pstork1 69,601 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Think of it as more of a Macro recorder for your desktop. It wasn't designed to be a test automation system. It can be used for that to some extent but that wasn't the original intent.

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PAG 154 on at

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Well, those might be the official answers, but you could try these:

> Save flows to specified directory / repo / backup

Copy and paste your flows to notepad for backup purposes or to share flows to other users.

> Run flows via a command line app

It's possible to use "ping" to run flows from Command Line or Windows Task Scheduler, see solution: https://power.automate.gallery/run-flow-from-command-line-prompt-or-windows-task-scheduler

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LogicSmith 225 on at

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Thanks - that's a pretty cool solution. You could actually use an EXE of any name, provided it's on the path. Even just an old C program with an empty Main() would work. You just want a unique name that doesn't match anything else in the path.
That's what I like about tools like this (and most every other test automation system I've used) - if you can't find a way to do it, you can find a way by thinking outside of the box.

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Shann 26 on at

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I have done this, but it doesn't work for UI Elements, correct? I have quite a few modified UI Elements in my flows.

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shaunie_67 26 on at

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> Save flows to specified directory / repo / backup

Copy and paste your flows to notepad for backup purposes or to share flows to other users.

I use this option to save all my flows that i have created in case of PC/hard drive failure to my OneDrive plus i am able to keep a copy of the flow being the original creation and then any subsequent changes i make provides a record of the project should i need to use all or part of the flow in future projects etc.

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Shann 26 on at

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It seems this was improved by an update. I am now seeing the UI elements copy over too!

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