Microsoft Power Automate is a workflow and process automation service in the Microsoft Power Platform. It combines cloud flows for digital process automation with desktop flows for robotic process automation, so one product can connect web services and operate legacy desktop apps. Flows can be authored in natural language, started from prebuilt templates or built with more than 1,000 API connectors. Task and process mining uncover what to automate. Premium costs $15 per user per month paid yearly, and a 30-day free trial is offered.
Business analysts, citizen developers, IT administrators and enterprise automation teams are the main users. Individuals can start with Premium for cloud flows and attended desktop flows, while organizations running unattended work buy Process plans at $150 per bot per month, or Hosted Process at $215 per bot per month with a Microsoft-managed virtual machine on Azure. Admins get Managed Environments, data loss prevention and live monitoring for governance at scale.
Typical scenarios include routing approval requests across an organization, automating work in Excel, OneDrive or Teams, setting up an SAP procurement solution template for purchasing, and moving data between older systems that have no API by recording user-interface actions. AI processing handles documents and images, prediction and analysis, while built-in AI generation turns raw data into content. Attended automation runs alongside a person, and unattended bots work in the background on schedules or triggers. A Process Mining add-on at $5,000 per tenant per month helps teams discover and analyze inefficient processes before automating them.
