Power Automate Realities - Pt 2

Full disclosure: I work for Automation Anywhere. However this post does not discuss my employer’s product. I am merely seeking to counter misinformation in the market around Power Automate. To the best of my knowledge information is current and licencing data came from here. Opinions are my own.

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In this article (part 2 in a series) I take a look at the Power Automate licencing to see whether it is cheaper than other enterprise automation solutions on the market. Licencing is broken down into 3 components: Platform, Unattended & Attended.

Platform Licencing

I wrote a separate article here highlighting the enterprise features that you don’t get with Power Automate. I should highlight that although you get those features as standard with competing platforms, they are paid for in the "platform" licence fee. With Automation Anywhere it is the Control Room and with UIPath it is the Orchestrator that provide these capabilities. The difference with Microsoft licencing, is that most of these capabilities are charged per Gb / flow / action / etc. Therefore, you never really know what the cost will be until you get your bill. And because you are charged for every extra increment, this can become somewhat of a disincentive to automating more processes.

Verdict: True overall platform costs are very difficult to estimate. Power Automate lacks important features for governance and oversight. You can cobble together a set of governance capabilities, but that will be complex, difficult to setup and most likely expensive to maintain. Enterprise automation platforms have a clear up-front cost and provide strong governance OOTB.

Unattended Automation

For most organisations the biggest benefits are delivered by unattended automations. This is because human users are freed up completely when a process is automated this way. None of the basic Power Automate plans provide unattended automation. Unattended automation is charged per bot at $2,472 pa. I can only assume that per bot means per automation file. So that cost model is a disincentive to breaking down your automation logic into multiple files. This is a major problem. Only by breaking down your automation logic into smaller pieces (like functions in programming) can you promote reusability and make your automation logic easier to maintain. Encouraging all logic to go into a single file results in unmanageable spaghetti coding. If you break down you logic into multiple files then your unattended automations will be MUCH more expensive. And if you want a dev/test environment then I expect you will require even more unattended licences as that will mean extra bot files.

Enterprise automation platforms generally licence unattended automation by what is called a “bot runner”, or “digital worker”. These are effectively digital identities that control a computer and can run as many automations as you like, but generally only one automation at a time. So if you have four processes that must be run daily, and all of them fit within a 24hr period, then you only need one unattended bot runner licence.

Therefore, to make a direct comparison between Power Automate unattended licencing and enterprise automation platforms, you will need to know a little about your processes. But you can see that the more unattended processes you automate with enterprise platforms, the cheaper it becomes on a per automation basis. Whereas with Power Automate the platform actually becomes more complex to manage and more expensive.

Verdict: Once you automate more than two or three organisational processes the licence costs are similar. However the lack of governance features and the fact the unattended licences discourage re-usable logic means Power Automate is unsuitable for any serious level of unattended automation.

Attended (Desktop) Automation

Attended automation licencing starts with “Seeded Plans”, where Power Automate is bundled free with some other product (eg. Office 365). Under these licences you can only use Power Automate with the product it was seeded with. So let’s face it, these are nothing but an enhanced version of Excel macros. So let’s move on…

In Aug 2023 MSoft updated their licencing, so the next level of licencing seems to be Power Automate Premium at $20.60 mth (approx. $250 pa) for each user. Before Aug 2023 Microsoft called this Per User plan with attended RPA and it costed $54.90 mth (approx. $660 pa) for each user. So it seems they dropped the price significantly. You have to wonder why....

The Power Automate Premuim licence allows you to automate cloud hosted APIs and to automate on-premise and legacy business applications with the RPA client. If you only need to automate cloud APIs then consider that IFTT charges only $7.50 mth for what seems to be much the same capability. The bundled RPA client is however a differentiator to cheaper cloud based competitors like IFTT.

But let’s look at what you DON’T get:

• NO unattended automation of on-premise business applications (that costs extra, has severe limitations, and is explained above)
• NO forms capability (you will need Power Apps for that)
• Many connectors will cost extra (eg. Salesforce, Workday, SurveyMonkey…)
• No more than 40,000 steps can execute in a day. So if it takes 100 steps to process a transaction, you cannot process more than 400 transactions.

Power Automate will cost a bit extra per user once you pay for the extra capabilities listed above (which are typically included with other enterprise platforms) but for attended automation use cases the pricing is still very competitive.

Curiously, Microsoft licencing does not distinguish between developers of automations and consumers of automations.

Verdict: Power Automate is more expensive than competing products for simple cloud API based automation. For attended only use cases involving on-premise and UI based automation the pricing is very competitive. But note that the ROI for this type of automation is generally quite low. This is because the automation runs on the user's own desktop PC and they need to be "hands off" if it is UI based automation. So you are relying on the automation to run faster than the user for any time saving benefits to be realized.

Summary

Enterprise automation platform licences involve two main components:

1. The Control Room (AA name) / Orchestrator (UIPath name) which provides a single interface for all platform governance capabilities
2. The incremental licences for what you need to automate (unattended, attended, and consumer licences)

Power Automate does not provide the first component. You will need to assemble this yourself and the result will be a mess of different interfaces and licences that you will need to navigate. I can confidently say this will make far more work for you and could jeopardize the success of your automation program.

Power Automate is likely to be MORE expensive than other enterprise tools for unattended automation once you break down your logic into multiple bots. If you dont do this I can confidently say this will make more work for you and could jeopardize the success of your automation program.

Power Automate is cheaper then enterprise platforms if you ONLY want to implement attended automations that run on user desktops. But this type of automation doesn't generally provide much ROI anyway, and only delivers benefits in a limited set of use cases.