Premium vs. Process: which license for what (Flow groups as SMB cost-saver)

When planning a Power Automate budget for the first time, you almost always stumble over the same question: does this flow need a Premium license per person, or is a single Process license enough for the whole process? The confusion has a simple reason: Microsoft changed the names of the license models, but many forum posts and older guides still use the old terms. If you don't know the new naming convention, you'll quickly end up buying too many or the wrong licenses.

This article clarifies Premium and Process clearly, explains when each license applies, and shows a concrete cost lever for small and medium-sized enterprises with many small flows using the newly introduced flow groups. Status: July 2026.

Premium or Process: the difference in one sentence

The rule of thumb is: Premium licenses a person, Process licenses a process. A Power Automate Premium license belongs to an individual and allows them to build and manually trigger any number of flows with Premium and custom connectors. A Power Automate Process license, on the other hand, is attached to a cloud flow, a business process, or a machine and applies regardless of who starts or owns the flow. According to the Power Automate licensing FAQ from Microsoft a flow with an assigned Process license automatically gets the highest action limits and doesn't need a licensed owner anymore, even if it uses Premium connectors.

What were the licenses called before: observe the naming convention

If you encounter Per User plan or Per Flow plan in older offers, blog posts, or on powerusers.microsoft.com, those are the old names of today's licenses. The detailed license overview from Microsoft explicitly lists both as deprecated:

• Power Automate Per-User Plan (deprecated) has been replaced by the Power Automate Premium license at the same price but with more permissions.
• Power Automate Per-Flow Plan (deprecated) has been replaced by the Power Automate Process license.

Although already purchased legacy licenses still work, they should not be renewed according to Microsoft, but should be replaced with the new licenses at the next renewal. So when looking at offers, training materials, or price comparisons, pay attention to what name your counterpart actually means, because Premium and Process differ significantly in price structure and permissions.

When do you need the Premium license?

A Premium license makes sense for people, not for individual flows. According to the criteria in the official FAQ, you should plan for a Premium license if someone in your team:

• builds their own flows with Premium or custom connectors and operates them themselves,
• is an RPA developer creating and managing desktop flows in the Power Automate portal, because according to Microsoft this always requires a Premium license,
• uses attended RPA, meaning automations that actively work together with a person at the screen,
• manually triggers an instant flow with Premium connectors by button click; according to the FAQ, each person triggering the flow needs their own Premium license in this case, unless the flow runs under a Process license instead.

For pure administrative tasks with standard connectors like SharePoint, Outlook, or Teams, however, the free entitlement already included in your Microsoft 365 subscription is often sufficient, and an additional Premium license is not necessary.

When is the Process license worth it?

The Process license is designed for automations that run in the background for the entire company, not for an individual person. According to Microsoft, you need a Process license as soon as at least one of these criteria applies:

• Your flows control unattended RPA on machines, completely without human intervention.
• Your flows run under a Service Principal, for example because you cleanly separate dev, test, and production environments via a DevOps pipeline.
• Your flows process large volumes of data or run very frequently and therefore need high action volume.
• A Premium flow is triggered by multiple people; instead of giving each person a Premium license, a Process license covers any number of users.
• Guest users from external tenants should be able to use the flow, and you don't know or can't guarantee their Premium entitlement in their home tenant.

A Process license provides 250,000 actions per day and, according to Microsoft, can be stacked up to ten times on a single flow if demand exceeds this limit. But this is where the real cost problem for many SMBs comes in: if you buy ten individual Process licenses for ten small, independent flows, you're paying for capacity you never use.

Flow groups: the new cost lever for SMBs with many small flows

Microsoft introduced flow groups for exactly this scenario, which according to the official documentation on flow groups are being rolled out gradually starting in July 2026 and are automatically available once the feature reaches your environment. A flow group allows up to 25 cloud flows to share the capacity of a single Process license instead of each being assigned its own.

For an SMB with many small but each moderately used flows, such as approval workflows in HR, procurement, and accounting, this means in concrete terms:

• Cut costs: one Process license for up to 25 flows instead of one per flow.
• Improve utilization: unused capacity from flows that never come close to 250,000 actions per day is reused in the shared pool.
• Simplify management: related flows can be treated as a single licensed unit.

The prerequisite is that the flows are solution-capable, meaning they are stored in a solution, and that a Process license with available capacity already exists in the environment. According to Microsoft, not groupable are desktop flows (RPA), business process flows, as well as flows already covered by a per-user plan. There is no license stacking within a flow group as is possible for individual flows: if you need more than 250,000 actions per day across the entire group, you should consider removing heavily used flows and giving them their own dedicated Process license instead.

How do you set up a flow group?

According to the guide to creating and managing a flow group you proceed in five steps:

1. Review candidates: Open the analytics view for each flow and look at the average daily action count for the last 28 days. Good candidates are those with approximately 5,000 to 50,000 actions per day; flows that regularly exceed 100,000 actions should keep their own Process license.

2. Open the flow groups page: In Power Automate, go to the left menu, select Others and click Flow groups, and pin it for quick access.

3. Create a group: select New flow group, give it a name, and assign an available Process license.

4. Add flows: either select Shared Process License directly on the detail page of each flow, or add multiple flows at once from the group page.

5. Monitor capacity: the group page continuously shows how many flows, licenses, and actions per day are being consumed so you can take action in time if a single flow dominates the group.

Important for multi-environment setups: group membership and license assignment are environment-specific and are not automatically carried along during deployments via pipelines. After each deployment, you must re-check the group in the target environment and reassign the transferred flows there.

If you're unsure whether a flow group makes sense for your setup or if individual flows are better served with their own Process license, a preliminary inventory of all running flows and their action volumes is worthwhile. This way you stay on top of your license budget instead of automatically paying more every time a new small flow is added. For more on the practical cost trap with Premium connectors, see the article on Power Automate Premium Connector Costs. If you want to set up your licensing strategy together with an experienced partner, NordFlux's Power Automate Consulting can help you get production-ready workflows up and running in weeks instead of months.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the fundamental difference between Power Automate Premium and Process?

Premium licenses an individual person who is then allowed to build and trigger any number of flows with Premium connectors. Process, on the other hand, licenses a cloud flow, a business process, or a machine, regardless of who owns or triggers it, and provides a fixed allowance of 250,000 actions per day.

Do I have to immediately switch my old Per-User or Per-Flow licenses to Premium and Process?

No, according to Microsoft, already purchased Per-User and Per-Flow licenses remain usable. However, they are considered deprecated and should not be renewed at the next renewal, but rather replaced by Power Automate Premium or Power Automate Process respectively, as these offer more permissions at the same price.

How many Process licenses do I need if I have several small flows?

It depends on the usage pattern. If the flows belong to a single business process with a shared data source, according to Microsoft one Process license is typically sufficient for the entire process. However, if the flows are independent of each other but each only moderately utilized, a flow group is often cheaper than buying a Process license for each flow individually.

When is a flow group worth it for an SMB?

A flow group is especially worthwhile when multiple solution-capable flows each fall well short of 250,000 actions per day and would currently be licensed individually. Check the analytics view of each flow to do this: if several flows are in the range of approximately 5,000 to 50,000 actions daily, they can be bundled in a shared group with a single Process license.

Can desktop flows for unattended RPA be added to a flow group?

No, according to official documentation, desktop flows are explicitly excluded from flow groups, as are business process flows and flows already covered by a per-user Power Automate plan. Flow groups apply exclusively to solution-capable cloud flows and their subordinate flow runs.