On 2026-08-26, Microsoft lists Power Automate Premium at $15 per user per month, Process at $150 per bot, and Hosted Process at $215 per bot, all paid yearly. Those plans cover cloud flows, attended or unattended desktop automation, and a Microsoft-hosted VM at the top tier. The published pricing is unusually clear for enterprise automation.
That price buys access to an ecosystem along with the recorder.
The Microsoft path is hard to beat
Work that starts in Outlook, passes through Excel or Dataverse, needs an approval in Teams, and ends in SharePoint already has machine interfaces inside Power Automate. A connector can move the data without opening a page or finding a button.
Organizations that use Entra ID and the Power Platform also stay inside tools their administrators already know. I’d choose that path before adding screen automation, including ours.
Power Automate for desktop covers the remaining Windows work. Its recorder tracks mouse and keyboard activity against UI elements and generates both desktop and browser actions. The same recorder can capture UI Automation selectors for modern applications and MSAA selectors for older Windows software.
The last Windows form has a different failure
Some vendor operations still exist only in the form an employee uses. The connector may expose search but omit the write. The API may be unavailable to customers. A desktop flow can drive that form.
Clicking Save is easy. Proving that the right record changed once is the hard part.
Power Automate supplies flow actions, conditions, run history, and error handling. A builder can add an API read-back, a database query, a file check, or another postcondition after the UI action. Microsoft leaves that business-effect design to the flow author.
OpenAdapt starts from the exact transaction contract. A demonstration compiles into a program whose healthy path makes no model call. Qualification can bind the bundle to input, identity, effect, and policy checks. When delivery becomes uncertain after a possible write, the runtime preserves the evidence, returns RECONCILIATION_REQUIRED, and does not send the action again.
Power Automate can own email, approvals, connectors, and scheduling. OpenAdapt can own the bounded UI-only transaction inside a customer-controlled execution boundary. A read-only API or another independent interface can then verify the persisted result, when the target exposes enough evidence for that check.
This split keeps the screen-bound part small and lets each system do the job it was designed to do. It also gives the surrounding Power Platform process a typed result it can route.
The OpenAdapt and Power Automate comparison includes the current prices, deployment choices, verification model, and the cases where Microsoft’s platform should win.