Using Power Automate with Office 365 licenses

In this article:

• Introduction
• Premium Connectors
• Service Limitations

Introduction

Power Automate is the latest way to run workflows in Office 365, replacing the soon-to-be-deprecated SharePoint 2010 and 2013 workflows. However since there is specific licensing available for Power Automate it can be unclear whether you can use Power Automate, which features you can use, and the limits to the service e.g. how many flows can be run per day?

The simple answer is Yes - Power Automate is included with Office 365 licenses, but without access to Premium Connectors, and with each user limited to 2000 API calls per day.

Premium Connectors

Premium Connectors are an easy one to explain because they are simply not usable without a specific Power Automate license. They are marked clearly in the interface when choosing actions for your flow. If you are not licensed for a Connector when you try to add it it will be shown as "Premium". You can see all these together in the Premium tab as below to determine whether you need any of them:

If you need to use any of these Premium Connectors you need to consider specific Power Automate licenses, which you can learn about here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/power-platform/admin/powerapps-flow-licensing-faq

Service Limitations

We mentioned before that each user is limited to 2000 API calls per day. But what does this really mean, and how can you determine how many API calls will be required to run a specific flow you've created?

While not very clear for end-users, it makes sense for Microsoft to approach this by limiting the number of API calls per day rather than the number of flow runs per day because some flows could have a single step to push information to a Connector, while others could have many steps to read SharePoint metadata, update approval status of items, send emails or Teams chat messages etc.