Desktop Flow Licensing: Attended, Unattended, and Hosted RPA Compared

As soon as a desktop flow in Power Automate needs to do more than run once at the push of a button, the licensing question inevitably comes up. Power Automate distinguishes three fundamentally different operating modes for desktop flows: attended, unattended, and hosted RPA, and each of them depends on its own license with its own logic. Anyone who doesn't clarify this in advance either buys too much or only discovers in production that the flow can't start automatically at all without an additional capacity license.

This article compares the three licensing models, explains what each of them is intended for, and shows what you should pay attention to when choosing. It is based on the current information from the official Microsoft documentation on Power Automate.

Attended RPA: the Premium license per person

Attended RPA means that a desktop flow runs under human supervision: a person starts the flow on their own, already-in-use computer, and the bot performs the actions while the person watches or keeps working in parallel, for example in picture-in-picture mode. According to the Overview of Power Automate license types the Power Automate Premium user license is intended for this: a classic user license assigned to exactly one person. It comes with a supervised bot and covers almost everything needed for daily use:

• Register a workstation to run desktop flows on it.
• Create an unlimited number of desktop flows and manage them in the Power Automate portal.
• Use premium and custom actions in a flow.
• Share flows with colleagues and create desktop flows in environments outside the default environment.

It's important to understand the difference from the free Power Automate license: the free version also allows local, attended desktop flows, but without sharing with others and without access to premium features. So for every RPA developer who builds and maintains desktop flows in the portal, you need at least a Premium license, regardless of whether unattended or hosted RPA is used later on.

Unattended RPA: the Process license per machine

Unattended RPA lets a desktop flow run without human supervision. The bot signs in to the target machine on its own, performs the actions, and then signs out again, typically at night, at fixed times, or triggered by a cloud flow. The Premium license alone is not enough for this. An additional Power Automate Process license is required, which according to the documentation is a capacity license and is assigned not to a person but to a machine or a cloud flow.

A few points that often cause confusion in practice:

• A Process license is assigned to a specific computer and provides an unattended bot there that can run one desktop flow at a time.
• If several unattended desktop flows are meant to run in parallel on the same machine, each additional parallel execution needs its own Process license.
• The associated capacity is managed per environment. Anyone using unattended RPA across multiple environments must assign the capacity separately in each of them.
• The computer on which the unattended bot runs must nevertheless have been registered beforehand by someone with a Premium license.

Historically, there was a separate unattended RPA add-on alongside the per-flow license for this. Both models were simplified in favor of the Process license, which since August 2023 covers both unattended RPA and digital process automation cloud flows and is available without a minimum purchase.

Hosted RPA: the Hosted Process license for machines from the cloud

The third variant, hosted RPA, solves a different problem: the physical machine itself. Instead of providing and maintaining your own Windows computer, Microsoft provides the machine from its own Azure infrastructure. The Introduction to hosted Power Automate RPA describes two forms:

• Hosted computers (Hosted Machines): individual Windows machines provided by Microsoft, on which RPA developers can build, test, and run desktop flows both attended and unattended, entirely without their own hardware.
• Hosted machine groups (Hosted Machine Groups): a collection of such machines that automatically scales up and down, absorbs load peaks, and balances utilization across multiple processes.

Both are licensed via the Power Automate Hosted Process license; the earlier name was the hosted RPA add-on. Since, according to the Licensing requirements for hosted machines is a superset of the normal Process license, every hosted bot automatically also covers unattended permission. Even so, it does not replace the Premium license: RPA developers still need a Premium license to create and manage desktop flows in the portal, and for hosted machines additional prerequisite licenses for Windows, Intune, and Microsoft Entra ID are required as well, because the machines are technically provisioned via Windows 365.

The three models compared directly

• Attended RPA (Premium license): user license, one attended bot per license, runs on your own, already-in-use computer, the basis for any RPA development in the portal.
• Unattended RPA (Process license): capacity license per machine or cloud flow, one unattended bot per license, for automatic, time- or event-triggered execution without supervision.
• Hosted RPA (Hosted Process license): capacity license for Microsoft-hosted machines, includes unattended permission, saves you your own hardware and infrastructure management, additional Windows, Intune, and Entra ID prerequisites required.

For practical purposes, this means: pure test automation on a single person's computer often gets by with just a Premium license. As soon as a flow needs to run at night or without a signed-in person, a Process license is added. And as soon as you no longer want to operate your own RPA machine, or the automation should grow and shrink depending on load, the Hosted Process license with hosted machines or machine groups is the right way to go. If you're unsure about the combination of licensing model, environments, and connectors, the Power Automate consulting from NordFlux helps you build a license structure that fits your actual automation needs. You retain control over which processes run under supervision and which run fully automatically.

Frequently asked questions

Is a Premium license enough to let desktop flows run automatically at night?

No. The Premium license only provides an attended bot that works with a person signed in at the computer. For executions without human supervision, such as at night or on a schedule, the machine additionally needs a Process license with unattended permission.

How many Process licenses do I need for several parallel desktop flows?

A separate Process license is needed for each parallel unattended execution on the same machine. If only one desktop flow ever runs at a time on a computer, one license for that machine is enough.

Does the Hosted Process license replace the Premium license for RPA developers?

No. The Hosted Process license licenses the hosted machine itself, not the person developing the flow. Anyone who creates and manages desktop flows in the Power Automate portal still needs their own Premium license.

What is the difference between hosted machines and hosted machine groups?

Hosted machines are individual machines provided by Microsoft, well suited for development, testing, and operation by individual departments. Hosted machine groups bundle several such machines and scale them automatically as needed, which is intended especially for unattended automation at a larger scale.

Do I need to assign separate licenses for each environment?

Yes. Both the Process capacity for unattended RPA and the Hosted Process capacity for hosted machines are assigned per environment. If you use multiple environments for unattended or hosted RPA, you must set up the appropriate capacity separately in each individual environment.