RPA or Microsoft Power Automate – differences, costs and what to choose in a Microsoft 365 company

Microsoft sells two different tools under one name. The first is cloud flows, which connect applications through ready-made connections (called connectors in the program). They run in the background and do not click on any screen. For example: when an email with an order arrives in a shared mailbox, the flow saves the attachment to SharePoint and sends a notification to a Teams channel.

The second tool is Power Automate for desktop. This is an RPA robot, a program that performs the same clicks and keystrokes on a computer as an employee. It is useful where a program has no connection to other systems at all. A typical example is an old warehouse program into which someone retypes data from a spreadsheet every day.

This distinction clarifies the whole discussion. When someone compares “Power Automate with UiPath”, they are usually comparing the desktop robot with a traditional RPA platform. Cloud flows compete more with tools for connecting applications, such as Make or n8n.

The most common misunderstanding goes: “Power Automate is included in Microsoft 365, so robots will be free”. That is only partly true. Without an additional licence, the robot runs on the employee’s computer and a person starts it manually. If the robot needs to start on its own at 6 am or when an email arrives, you need a paid licence.

The table below shows four levels, based on Microsoft’s documentation and price list. Prices are list prices in US dollars with annual payment; the amount may differ through Polish sales channels. Bear in mind too that the robot only runs on Windows 10, Windows 11 or Windows Server – on Home editions it cannot be triggered from the cloud.

These three platforms were built for large-scale robotisation. What they have in common is a central console that distributes tasks across many robots, manages queues and retries tasks after an error. On top of that come extensive activity logs and tools for experienced developers to build robots.

In practice, the difference only shows at a larger scale. A single robot moving orders into an old system will work much the same in any of these tools. The difference appears when thirty robots handle a shared queue of thousands of cases, and every failure has to reach the right person with its full history.

The buying logic is different too. UiPath has a free version for learning and testing, and a Basic plan for very small deployments. However, prices for the Standard and Enterprise plans are set individually with the sales team, and the same goes for the other vendors. A comparison therefore needs a request for quotation, not a look at a price list.

Take a hypothetical distribution company with 120 employees that works in Microsoft 365. It wants to automate five processes: retyping orders into an old warehouse program, a daily sales report, payment reminders and two request approval workflows. Here, Power Automate is the natural choice for several reasons:

A traditional RPA platform starts to pay off in a few specific situations. If two or more of the following apply to you, it is worth also asking a vendor of such a platform for a quote. Choosing the cheaper tool in the wrong place usually ends with the robots being rebuilt two years later.

Suppose the company mentioned above needs three robots working overnight and two people to build them. In Power Automate, that means three Process licences (3 × USD 150) and two Premium licences (2 × USD 15). That comes to USD 480 a month, or USD 5,760 a year at list prices.

On top of the licences, you need to add the computers or servers the robots log on to, or choose the more expensive Hosted Process licence. For an RPA platform, you will only find out the equivalent amount from the vendor’s quote. However, a fair comparison also includes costs that do not appear on any price list:

In most mid-sized companies, the answer follows from a few simple questions. If all the answers point to the middle column of the table (“Points to Power Automate”), the choice is clear. If the answers are mixed, it is worth comparing two quotes for the same, precisely described process.

A robot that clicks on the screen is the answer for systems that cannot be connected any other way. If a program has an API, an agreed way of exchanging data with other programs, a direct connection is usually more stable. It does not break when the screen layout changes, and it does not need a computer for the robot to log on to.

The same applies to Microsoft 365 applications. For Outlook, Excel or SharePoint, you do not build a robot that clicks through windows, but a cloud flow with a ready-made connector. Keep the robot for old programs that have no such option.

The role of robots in invoicing has also changed. Since 1 February 2026, every company in Poland has received invoices through KSeF, Poland’s National e-Invoicing System, and since 1 April 2026 most companies have also issued them there. Invoices from domestic suppliers therefore arrive as structured data. As a result, retyping them from PDFs is no longer a typical first job for a robot.

Most bad decisions come not from choosing the wrong brand, but from wrong assumptions at the start. The mistakes below recur whichever tool the company eventually chooses.