8 Best Power Automate Alternatives in 2026

Pick by where your apps live

Almost every "which automation tool" argument comes down to one question: how much of your work happens inside Microsoft 365?

Power Automate is excellent in its own house and awkward outside it. Point it at Shopify, Notion, Slack and Stripe and its advantage fades, leaving a tool that is harder to learn than the alternatives. So before comparing anything, write down the five apps your automation has to touch, and note whether any of them is desktop software rather than a web app.

• Mostly SaaS apps: Zapier or Make.
• You want to own the servers and the credentials: n8n or Activepieces.
• Desktop software on Windows: UiPath.
• Already on Zoho: Zoho Flow. Enterprise with IT sign-off: Workato.

Every price on this page was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 25 September 2026. You can compare all of these tools, with their plans and limits, in our workflow automation directory.

What Power Automate costs, as the baseline

Microsoft's pricing page, read on 25 September 2026, lists no free plan for Power Automate, only a 30-day trial of UI-based cloud flows with standard connectors. The paid plans are:

• Premium: $15 per user a month, paid yearly. Cloud flows, attended desktop flows, and process and task mining with 50 MB of data.
• Process: $150 per bot a month, paid yearly, for unattended desktop flows.
• Hosted Process: $215 per bot a month, paid yearly, for unattended flows on a Microsoft-hosted virtual machine.

Two things follow. Per-user pricing grows with headcount rather than with how much you automate, which is the opposite of the task-metered tools below. And unattended desktop bots are the expensive part, so if you rely on them, that is the line to beat. The full plan list is on our Power Automate page.

How we chose these eight

We started from the workflow automation category of the Automate Basics directory and added two tools that are not yet in it: UiPath, because Power Automate is also a desktop-automation tool, and Zoho Flow, for teams on the Zoho suite. An entry had to:

1. Replace a real part of Power Automate: cloud flows between apps, or desktop automation.
2. Have a pricing page we could read on 25 September 2026. Where a vendor publishes no prices, we say so.
3. Be available to buy today.
4. Suit a specific kind of team, which each entry names, along with where it falls short.

The order is our editorial judgement of which tool a small team outside the Microsoft stack should look at first. It is not a score, and no vendor paid to appear. Prices change, so check the linked page before you buy.

Power Automate alternatives compared

1. Zapier

Best for: small teams on SaaS apps who want an automation working today.

Zapier's strength is reach and speed rather than depth. If your automation is "when this happens in one app, do that in another", it will be running before you have finished reading another tool's documentation.

Its pricing is per task: each successful action in a Zap counts as one, while filters, formatters and polling do not, according to its pricing page on 25 September 2026. The free plan gives 100 tasks a month on two-step Zaps. Professional costs $29.99 a month, or $19.99 billed yearly, for 750 tasks, and Team costs $103.50 a month, or $69 billed yearly, for 2,000 tasks. A 14-day trial of Professional needs no card.

Where it falls short: a flow that runs a hundred times a day with four actions spends four hundred tasks a day, and the plan you started on stops fitting. Our guide to Zapier alternatives covers what to do when that happens. For the direct comparison, see Zapier vs Power Automate, or open Zapier's plans.

Source: Zapier pricing page, read 25 September 2026.

2. Make

Best for: flows with conditions, lists and error handling, on a small budget.

Make covers the ground Power Automate covers once flows stop being simple: routers for branching, iterators for lists, error handlers, and re-running a failed step. People coming from Power Automate's step list usually find its visual canvas an easier jump than people starting from nothing.

On its pricing page, read on 25 September 2026, Core is listed from $9 a month for 10,000 credits with unlimited active scenarios and runs as often as every minute. The free plan gives 1,000 credits a month, 2 active scenarios and a 15-minute minimum interval. Make says it connects to over 3,000 apps.

Where it falls short: each module action spends a credit, so long scenarios cost more to run, and the first hour on the canvas is slower than on Zapier. Compare it on Make's directory page, or against its nearest rival in Zapier vs Make.

Source: Make pricing page, read 25 September 2026.

3. n8n

Best for: teams that need to know exactly where their data goes.

n8n answers the question the hosted tools cannot: where do the credentials and records live? Self-hosted, the Community Edition runs on your own server for free, and nothing routes through a third party. For client work or regulated data, that is the decision.

It also meters differently. n8n's pricing page counts workflow executions "with unlimited steps", so adding a step does not add cost. The hosted Starter plan covers 2,500 executions a month and Pro covers 10,000, at €20 and €50 a month billed yearly (the page showed us euro prices; your currency may differ), with a free trial and no card.

Where it falls short: self-hosting means someone owns upgrades, backups and the late-night restart. SSO and Git-based environments sit on the self-hosted Business plan, listed at €667 a month billed yearly. If it is new to you, the n8n basics guide is the place to start, and Make vs n8n sets it against the hosted option. Plans are on n8n's page.

Source: n8n pricing page, read 25 September 2026.

4. UiPath

Best for: teams whose main use of Power Automate was desktop flows that click through Windows software.

The cloud tools on this list automate apps through their APIs. None of them drives a desktop application that has no API, which is what Power Automate's desktop flows do. If that is what you depend on, the like-for-like replacement is a robotic process automation (RPA) platform, and UiPath is one widely used option.

Its pricing page, read on 25 September 2026, offers a free Community plan, a Basic plan from $25 a month for personal automations, and Standard and Enterprise plans priced by quote. Standard removes the scale limits and adds agents, document extraction and a choice of regions or on-premises hosting.

Where it falls short: Basic is limited in users and robots and was listed as European region only, so a team will quickly land in a sales conversation. It is a bigger platform than most small teams need for cloud-only flows. UiPath is not yet in our directory, so see UiPath's pricing page.

5. Activepieces

Best for: teams that want open source without starting on a server.

Activepieces lets you begin on its hosted cloud and move to the open-source Community Edition from GitHub later. On 25 September 2026 the free cloud plan gave 100 credits a day for one user, including flows, agents, tables and MCP access. Plus cost $20 a month for 10,000 credits and up to 5 users, and Team cost $200 a month for 50,000 credits, 25 users and SSO, with extra credits at $0.007 each.

Where it falls short: it connects to fewer apps than Zapier or Make, so check your five-app list against its catalogue first. Admin features such as SSO and roles are on paid plans. See the Activepieces page.

Source: Activepieces pricing page, read 25 September 2026.

6. Zoho Flow

Best for: businesses already running Zoho CRM, Books or Desk.

Zoho Flow plays the same role inside Zoho that Power Automate plays inside Microsoft. Its pricing page defines a task as each successful action in a flow. The free edition allows 5 flows and 100 tasks a month, Standard starts at 5,000 tasks a month with 15-minute polling, and Professional starts at 10,000 tasks with 5-minute polling, premium apps and on-premises integration. A 15-day trial of every premium feature needs no card.

Where it falls short: if you are not on Zoho, there is little reason to start here. Its prices did not render when we read the page on 25 September 2026, so check Zoho Flow's pricing page directly.

7. Workato

Best for: larger organisations that need governance, environments and audit trails across many systems.

If you have a compliance function and an IT team that approves every connection, Workato may be the one tool here that satisfies them. It targets the same enterprise buyers as Power Automate's governed deployments.

Where it falls short: its pricing page publishes no prices or self-serve plan and asks you to book a demo. Small teams will find it is not aimed at them. See Workato's directory page.

Source: Workato pricing page, read 25 September 2026.

8. Pabbly Connect

Best for: small businesses that need a lot of simple tasks for a fixed monthly cost.

Pabbly Connect sells volume. Its Standard plan includes 10,000 tasks a month, and it does not count internal steps such as filters, routers, formatters and iterators. It also sells one-payment lifetime plans capped at 3,000, 10,000 or 20,000 tasks a month, and the free plan gives 100 tasks a month with no card.

Where it falls short: the pricing page showed us rupee prices marked as discounts from a higher figure, so confirm the price in your currency at checkout. It has none of the tenant-level governance a Microsoft admin expects. Limits are on Pabbly Connect's page.

Source: Pabbly Connect pricing page, read 25 September 2026.

What decides it beyond the connector list

Three things separate these tools in practice, and none of them shows up in a feature grid:

Who holds the credentials. Every tool here stores access tokens to your email, files and CRM. On a hosted platform those tokens sit on the vendor's servers; self-hosted, they sit on yours. That is a real decision, not a technicality.

What happens when a run fails. A flow that breaks loudly is an inconvenience. One that breaks silently is something you hear about from a customer. Test how each tool alerts you to a failed run before you build anything important on it.

Whether you can leave. Flows do not move between these tools. Whatever you pick, switching later means a rebuild, so start with your two or three most valuable automations rather than migrating everything at once.

If you are staying on Power Automate

Plenty of teams should. If your apps are Outlook, SharePoint, Teams and Excel, nothing on this list beats in-tenant access on a licence you may already hold, and the better move is to get more from it.

Two good places to start are auto-filing email attachments into SharePoint and building an approval flow, which cover the two things most Microsoft teams automate first.

Build one thing before you migrate

Do not move everything. Take the single automation that would save you the most time this month and build only that one, in whichever tool your five-app list points to. Give it two weeks of real use.

One automation running for real will tell you more about fit than any comparison table, this one included. When you are ready to shortlist, compare the plans side by side in the workflow automation category.

Try this now

List the five apps your automation actually has to touch, and mark whether any of them is desktop software. The tools with real connectors for all five are your shortlist; everything else on this page is a tie-breaker.