Many SMEs face a difficult balancing act: driving growth and innovation while carefully managing costs and resources. This is the challenge that Microsoft Power Platform is designed to solve.
It’s a suite of user-friendly tools that allows your team to build custom solutions, automate workflows and generate data insights. Leading businesses are adopting it to improve not only their IT services but also functions like finance, HR and customer service, turning immediate operational challenges into opportunities.
Table of contents
- What is Microsoft Power Platform?
- What are the main products under Power Platform?
- Power Platform: licensing options
- How to choose the right licensing plan
- Power Platform: business benefits for SMEs
- How can Texaport help me implement Power Platform?
What is Microsoft Power Platform?
Microsoft Power Platform is a suite of low-code and no-code tools designed to enable your organisation to analyse data, automate processes, build solutions and create virtual agents. It’s built to easily connect with your existing systems, such as Microsoft 365 and Azure.
The real value of Microsoft Power Platform is that it puts powerful tools into everyone’s hands, not just technical teams. By making app building, automation and data insights accessible to all, it empowers people across your organisation to solve problems and innovate. Traditionally, creating a custom business application or an automated workflow took significant time, money, and specialist developer skills.
Microsoft Power Platform dramatically reduces these barriers. It enables your subject matter experts, the people who really understand the business needs, to actively participate in building the solution. This leads to faster resolution of pain points, higher adoption rates and a greater return on investment (ROI).
What are the main products under Power Platform?
The platform contains four integrated components, each designed to tackle a specific business need.
Power BI: turning data into insights
Power BI is a market-leading business analytics tool. It transforms your diverse data from different sources into coherent and interactive insights. With intuitive dashboards and reports, users can spot trends, forecast outcomes, understand performance at a glance and quickly make data-driven decisions.
Power Automate: streamlining repetitive tasks
In any SME, considerable time is lost to repetitive routine tasks like data entry, approval notifications or file synchronisation. Power Automate addresses this directly. It allows you to create automated workflows between your applications and services. You can automate business processes, synchronise files, collect data, and receive notifications without writing a single line of code, freeing your team to focus on higher-value work.
If you’d like to see practical examples of how this works in real businesses, we’ve put together a guide: 15 ways SMEs can be more productive with Microsoft Power Automate. It highlights scenarios ranging from approvals to reporting, where automation can quickly deliver measurable efficiency gains.
Power Apps: building custom apps without coding
Power Apps enables you to build low-code custom business apps. Whether you need a simple app for inventory tracking on a warehouse tablet or a more complex app to manage a client onboarding process, Power Apps provides the tools. Its low-code approach means professional developers can accelerate their work, while business users can build functional apps to solve immediate problems.
Copilot Studio
Copilot Studio allows you to build custom AI assistants, or Copilots, for Microsoft 365 apps. These virtual agents can handle routine customer enquiries, provide intelligent answers by connecting to your business data, and automate interactions across websites and apps. It’s a powerful way to enhance customer service, internal support, data analysis, content creation and market research, to name just a few of its capabilities.
Power Platform: licensing options
Purchasing software licences can be complex, so understanding the options first is key. Microsoft offers multiple plans for Power Platform to suit a wide range of user requirements.
First, licences for some other Microsoft products, such as Microsoft 365 and Office 365, allow different degrees of access to Power Apps and Power Automate. Second, licences are also available for users with wider and more complex requirements for each component, usually charged per user, per month.
Power BI licences
- Power BI Free: to create interactive reports for analytics
- Power BI Pro (£10.80 per user, per month): to publish and share reports
- Power BI Premium (£18.50 per user, per month): with all the same features as Power BI Pro, but with access to larger model sizes and more frequent refreshes
- Power BI Embedded (custom priced): to create customer-facing reports, dashboards and analytics in your own applications
For more details, please see Microsoft’s Power BI pricing, along with our guide to Microsoft Power BI for businesses.
Power Automate licences
- Power Automate free trial: a 30-day trial to experiment with UI-based cloud flows and standard connectors
- Power Automate Premium (£11.50 per user, per month): for cloud flows, attended desktop flows, and process and task mining
- Power Automate Process (£115.30 per bot, per month): similar functionality to Premium above, except Process is for unattended automation and is priced per bot, not per user
- Power Automate Hosted Process (£165.30 per bot, per month): again, similar to the above, except it is run with a virtual machine managed by Microsoft and hosted on Azure infrastructure
For more details, please see Microsoft’s Power Automate pricing.
Power Apps licences
- Power Apps Developer Plan (free): to build and test unlimited apps or up to 750 automation flows per month, but you cannot deploy apps
- Power Apps Premium (£15.40 per user, per month): to build, modernise and deploy unlimited applications
- Power Apps Premium with 2000 seat minimum (£9.20 per user, per month): similar to Premium above, except aimed at larger organisations with a minimum of 2000 licences
For more details, please see Microsoft’s Power Apps pricing and read our complete guide to Power Apps.
Copilot Studio licences
Copilot Studio is available on a pay-as-you-go basis to build and deploy agents across multiple channels. Alternatively, it is also available through the Microsoft 365 Copilot license at £153.80 for 25,000 chatbot interactions per month.
For more details, please see Microsoft’s Copilot Studio pricing.
How to choose the right licensing plan
As a result of the complexity involved, navigating Microsoft’s licences is often best done with expert guidance. While purchasing direct from Microsoft is sometimes an option, collaborating with a managed IT services provider, such as Texaport, will streamline your journey from selection to deployment.
Choosing the right plan depends entirely on your strategy. For example, will you have a central team building apps for the whole business, or are you looking to allow every department to build its own? An IT partner can conduct a thorough assessment of your needs and recommend the most efficient and economical licensing structure for your goals.
The role of a skilled partner, however, extends far beyond procurement. They will also help you to integrate the platform’s capabilities – from building tailored apps and designing automated processes, to developing public-facing websites – directly into your operations.
Power Platform: business benefits for SMEs
For SMEs, Power Platform is a game-changer. It levels the playing field, allowing you to compete with larger enterprises through agility and innovation. Projects that might have previously taken months can be prototyped and delivered in weeks. This agility leads to a much higher ROI, as solutions are deployed faster and begin delivering value immediately.
More specifically, a study commissioned by Microsoft in 2024 reported the following benefits:
- 224% ROI and a payback period of under six months
- 80% reduction in tech stack expenses within three years
- 35% total development time savings
- 25% average annual time savings related to process improvement
- 7% revenue growth directly attributable to accelerated processes
Plus, it fosters a culture of continuous improvement, where teams are empowered to refine and optimise their own workflows, leading to ongoing gains in productivity and operational resilience.
These benefits of reduced development timelines and IT costs translate into very substantial savings. For example, G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers saved over US$1.5 million by using Power Platform.
How can Texaport help me implement Power Platform?
At Texaport, we understand your technology and business challenges. We will work with you to:
- Develop a strategy to identify the processes and opportunities where Power Platform can deliver the most value.
- Build and deploy to create robust, scalable solutions, alongside training your teams to use the components effectively.
- Manage and support to ensure your Power Platform environment is secure and continues to evolve with your business.
The potential of Microsoft Power Platform to transform your operations is immense. It’s about working smarter, not harder, and unlocking the innovation that already exists within your teams.
If you’re ready to explore what Power Platform can do for your business, contact Texaport today.
