Power Automate Premium is a robust per-user licensing tier designed by Microsoft to provide individual creators, developers, and business professionals with a comprehensive suite of automation tools. Priced at $15 per user per month (billed annually), it serves as the bridge between simple personal productivity and sophisticated enterprise-grade process orchestration.

Unlike the basic capabilities included in standard Microsoft 365 subscriptions, the Premium license unlocks advanced features such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), artificial intelligence integration through AI Builder, and access to hundreds of third-party enterprise data sources.

Core Features of Power Automate Premium

The value of a Power Automate Premium license is distributed across five primary pillars of the Microsoft Power Platform. Understanding each of these components is essential for determining whether the investment aligns with your organizational or personal automation goals.

1. Unlimited Cloud Flows and Premium Connectors

At the heart of Power Automate are Cloud Flows—automations that run in the Microsoft cloud based on triggers. While the free or "seeded" versions allow for basic interactions with Microsoft services like Outlook, SharePoint, and Teams, the Premium license removes the most significant barrier: the "Standard" connector limit.

Accessing the Enterprise Ecosystem

With a Premium license, users gain access to over 1,000 connectors, including high-value enterprise systems. This includes:

  • Database Systems: Direct integration with SQL Server, Oracle, and MySQL.
  • CRM and ERP: Seamless data movement between Salesforce, SAP, and Dynamics 365.
  • External Services: Professional tools such as DocuSign, Adobe Acrobat Sign, and Jira.
  • HTTP Connectors: The ability to call any REST API, enabling you to build custom integrations with proprietary or niche web services that don't have a pre-built connector.

Custom Connectors

For developers building internal applications, the Premium license allows the creation and use of Custom Connectors. This is a critical feature for businesses that rely on bespoke software, as it allows those legacy or custom-built systems to participate in modern automated workflows.

2. Attended Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

The inclusion of Attended RPA—marketed as "Desktop Flows"—is perhaps the most compelling reason to upgrade to the Premium plan. While Cloud Flows handle API-based automation (Modern DPA), Desktop Flows handle UI-based automation for applications that lack APIs.

How Attended RPA Works

In an "Attended" scenario, the automation acts as a digital assistant on your workstation. It requires a user to be signed in and present to trigger the flow or handle occasional manual interventions.

  • Legacy Software Integration: If you use an old accounting software package that only runs on Windows and has no web interface, RPA can "read" the screen, click buttons, and type data just like a human.
  • Excel Power Usage: While the Excel Online connector is powerful, it has limitations with macros or complex formatting. Desktop flows can open the local Excel application and perform any task a human can.

Technical Capabilities

The license includes the full use of Power Automate for Desktop. This tool features a drag-and-drop designer with hundreds of pre-built actions for folder management, web scraping, terminal emulation, and UI automation. From our practical testing, running complex RPA scripts on a machine with at least 8GB of RAM ensures that the "attended" bot doesn't interfere significantly with the user's simultaneous background tasks.

3. AI Builder Service Credits

Artificial Intelligence is no longer a luxury but a necessity for processing unstructured data. A Power Automate Premium license includes 5,000 AI Builder service credits per month.

Practical Applications of AI Credits

These credits allow you to incorporate pre-built or custom AI models into your flows without needing a separate data science team. Common use cases include:

  • Document Processing: Automatically extracting data from invoices, receipts, or ID cards.
  • Sentiment Analysis: Scanning incoming customer emails to determine if they are frustrated or happy.
  • Object Detection: Analyzing images to count items or identify specific equipment.
  • Text Classification: Automatically tagging support tickets based on their content.

In a typical production environment, 5,000 credits might process approximately 100–500 pages of complex invoices, depending on the model's complexity. These credits are pooled at the tenant level, meaning if you have 10 Premium users, the organization has a collective pool of 50,000 credits to use each month.

4. Process and Task Mining

One of the newest additions to the Premium suite is access to Process Mining and Task Mining capabilities. This feature helps organizations move from "guessing" what to automate to "knowing" based on data.

  • Task Mining: This tool records user actions on their desktop (with privacy controls) to identify repetitive patterns. It generates a "map" of how employees actually perform a task, highlighting bottlenecks and steps that are prime candidates for RPA.
  • Process Mining: This analyzes event logs from systems like SAP or Salesforce to visualize the "as-is" state of a business process (e.g., Order-to-Cash).
  • Capacity: The Premium license provides 50 MB of process mining data storage per user, which is sufficient for analyzing mid-sized departmental processes.

5. Microsoft Dataverse Entitlements

Power Automate Premium is deeply integrated with Microsoft Dataverse, the scalable and secure data platform for the Power Platform. Each license provides:

  • 250 MB Database Capacity
  • 2 GB File Capacity

Dataverse is essential for "long-running" flows. For example, if you are building an approval process that might take three weeks to complete, storing the state of that process in Dataverse is far more reliable than relying on simple cloud flow variables. It also enables the use of "Solutions," which are required for professional Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and moving flows between Development, Test, and Production environments.

Comparing Power Automate Premium to Other Plans

Choosing the right license requires understanding the nuances between the different tiers offered by Microsoft.

Premium vs. Microsoft 365 "Seeded" Licenses

Many users start with the version of Power Automate included in their Office 365 or Microsoft 365 E3/E5 plans. The differences are stark:

  • Connectors: Seeded users are limited to "Standard" (e.g., SharePoint, OneDrive). Premium users get "Premium" and "Custom."
  • RPA: Seeded users cannot run desktop flows. Premium users have full Attended RPA rights.
  • AI: Seeded users have no AI Builder credits.
  • Governance: Premium users can be managed within "Managed Environments," giving IT admins better visibility into what is being built.

Premium (Per User) vs. Process (Per Bot/Flow)

A common point of confusion is when to use the Power Automate Process license (formerly Per Flow).

  • Power Automate Premium is for the maker. It covers one specific person and all the flows they create or run.
  • Power Automate Process is for the flow itself. It is typically used for "Unattended RPA" (bots running on a server without a human) or for critical flows that thousands of people in the company need to interact with, where licensing every single user would be too expensive.
Feature Premium (Per User) Process (Per Bot/Flow)
Price $15/user/month $150/bot/month
Best For Power users & developers Unattended bots & department-wide flows
RPA Mode Attended Unattended or Attended
Premium Connectors Included for the user Included for the flow

Real-World Scenario: The Value of Premium in Action

To understand why a business would pay $15/month for this, let's look at a common "Experience-based" scenario: Automated Vendor Invoice Entry.

The Manual Process

A staff member receives 50 PDF invoices a day via email. They open each PDF, read the vendor name, total amount, and due date, and then manually type this information into an old Windows-based ERP system that doesn't have an API.

The Premium Solution

  1. Cloud Flow (Premium Connector): A flow triggers when a new email arrives in a shared inbox.
  2. AI Builder (Included Credits): The flow sends the PDF to the "Invoice Processing" model, which extracts the data fields automatically.
  3. Dataverse (Included Storage): The extracted data is saved to a Dataverse table for auditing and tracking.
  4. Desktop Flow (Attended RPA): The flow then triggers a desktop bot on the user's machine. The bot opens the ERP software, logs in, navigates to the entry screen, and types in the data extracted by the AI.

The Result: A process that used to take 3 hours of manual data entry now takes 10 minutes of supervised "review" time. The $15/month cost is recovered in the first two days of use through saved labor hours and reduced data-entry errors.

Governance and Managed Environments

For IT Administrators, the Power Automate Premium license is not just about features; it's about control. Premium licenses unlock Managed Environments, a suite of capabilities that allow for:

  • Sharing Limits: Preventing users from sharing flows with the entire organization by accident.
  • Environment Routing: Automatically directing new makers into a safe, personal development environment.
  • Usage Insights: Detailed reports on which flows are most popular and which are failing.
  • DLP Policies: More granular Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies, such as blocking the movement of data from a SQL Server (Premium) to a personal Twitter account (Standard).

Is Power Automate Premium Worth It?

The decision to upgrade depends on two main factors: Data Complexity and Application Legacy.

If your automation needs are confined to moving files between SharePoint folders or sending email notifications, the standard Microsoft 365 "seeded" license is sufficient.

However, you should consider the Premium license if:

  1. You need to talk to a Database: If your data lives in SQL, SAP, or Oracle, the Premium license is mandatory.
  2. You have "Gap" Applications: If you use software that doesn't have an API, the RPA (Desktop Flow) capability in the Premium plan is the only way to automate it.
  3. You want to "Work Smarter" with AI: If you find yourself manually reading documents to find specific information, the AI Builder credits included in the Premium plan provide a massive ROI.

Summary

Power Automate Premium is a comprehensive toolkit that empowers individual users to solve complex business problems. By combining API-based cloud flows, UI-based desktop automation, and artificial intelligence, it provides a unified platform for modern digital transformation. While the $15/month price point is an increase over the "free" versions, the inclusion of AI credits, RPA capabilities, and Dataverse storage makes it one of the most cost-effective "Power User" tools in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is the difference between Power Automate Premium and the old "Per User with Attended RPA" plan?

They are essentially the same. Microsoft rebranded the "Power Automate per user with attended RPA" plan to "Power Automate Premium" to simplify its licensing lineup. The features remain largely the same, though Microsoft frequently adds new capabilities like Process Mining storage to the Premium tier.

Do I need a Premium license to just run a flow someone else built?

Yes, in most cases. If a flow uses Premium connectors or RPA, any user who triggers or runs that flow must have a Premium license. The exception is if the flow is covered by a "Power Automate Process" license, which licenses the flow itself for unlimited users.

Does Power Automate Premium include Unattended RPA?

No. Power Automate Premium only includes Attended RPA. This means the automation runs on a user's workstation while they are signed in. If you want a bot to run on a separate server without any human interaction (Unattended), you need to purchase the Power Automate Process license or the Hosted Process add-on.

Can I try Power Automate Premium for free?

Yes. Microsoft offers a 90-day trial for Power Automate Premium. This trial includes access to RPA, premium connectors, and most other features, though it may have limited AI Builder credits compared to the paid version.

How are AI Builder credits calculated?

Credits are consumed based on the type of AI model used. For example, using a custom "Form Processing" model might cost 30 credits per page, while a simpler "Sentiment Analysis" might cost significantly less. The 5,000 monthly credits provided with the Premium license are designed to cover the needs of a typical individual power user.