Kinds of connector
- Prebuilt: published for common services, from SharePoint and Outlook to Salesforce and Dropbox, and usable without modification.
- Standard and premium: prebuilt connectors come in two licence tiers, and a flow using a premium one needs the matching Power Automate licence for the person running it.
- Custom: built by the organisation as a wrapper around a REST or SOAP API that has no prebuilt connector, often an internal line-of-business system.
Microsoft uses one connector catalogue across Power Automate, Power Apps, Copilot Studio and Azure Logic Apps, and describes every connector as exposing actions, such as creating a file, and triggers, such as reacting when an item is added. The same connector therefore feeds a cloud flow, a low-code app and an AI agent. To use it, a person creates a connection by entering credentials for the target service, and the platform stores them so it does not ask again; that stored sign-in is what a flow borrows every time it fires, and what needs fixing when a password changes.
Governance by connector
Governance lives at the connector level. In a Power Platform data policy, administrators sort connectors into Business, Non-Business and Blocked groups, and a flow cannot combine connectors from different groups, so placing SharePoint under Business and Gmail under Non-Business prevents any automation from copying files between them. New connectors land in Non-Business by default. This is the automation-layer counterpart of least privilege and fits within wider identity and access management. A custom connector is, underneath, a description of a REST API, which is why teams that already publish a clean API find it quick to add. The workplace automation topic covers the flows that depend on all of this.