Moving from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace? How to Replace Your Power Automate Flows

Why the flows stay behind when the mailboxes move

Google's June 2026 announcement of its data import service lists what the tool carries across: Teams content, encrypted files and emails, plus settings such as Outlook rules, calendar settings and sensitivity labels. Flows aren't on that list, because a flow isn't content. It is logic attached to Microsoft connections and identities: a trigger on a Microsoft Forms response, an action against an Excel Online table, a message posted to a Teams channel. When the tenant and its licenses go away, the triggers and connections go with them.

The real exposure is in the flows nobody remembers. The approval someone built in 2022, the nightly sync owned by an employee who left last spring. They tend to surface on the first Monday after cutover, when something that used to arrive on its own stops arriving.

What Google offers as the replacement

Google's own migration post tells Microsoft 365 customers to replace Power Automate with Workspace Studio, and lists a lightweight workflow approvals feature, now generally available, next to it. Studio builds flows from a Gemini prompt bar and manages them from inside Gmail, Chat and Drive.

On September 17, 2026 Google added four features that close some of the earlier gaps: custom starters, custom steps written in Apps Script, webhooks, and third-party integrations in beta for Asana, Confluence, HubSpot, Jira, Mailchimp, QuickBooks, Salesforce and Slack. All four ship switched off. An admin turns them on in the Admin console under Apps, Google Workspace, Workspace Studio.

Studio is the first thing to try for simple flows, and many flows will fit. Know its ceilings before you commit. Google's Studio limits page lists 25 flows per user (on or off), 20 steps per flow, no more than 25 active flows started by Gmail events, and a daily run cap on all of a user's flows combined. It publishes no number for that cap, and it notes that limits are subject to change. The admin setup guide gives the same figures and adds that a user who hits the daily cap has every flow paused until the next 24-hour cycle. Older write-ups quote 100 flows, so check the current pages before you plan around any number.

Two of those limits shape a migration. A Power Automate flow with more than 20 actions has to be split into several Studio flows, and because the flow cap is per person, the number of flows each future owner will hold matters. Approval routing and directory lookups are the other place flows tend to outgrow Studio. We tested that on document approvals and wrote up the results in our Workspace Studio limitations test.

There is no straightforward way to export flows from Power Automate to Studio. Everything has to be done manually, including rebuilding the Forms, Tables and other assets the flows relied on. It might take months of IT time.

The flow limits are not the only stopper. The lack of integrations is also a huge one: integrations in Studio are still very limited.

On top of that, Google Workspace Studio doesn't support document generation, and many Power Automate workflows include this step. If these flows need to be rebuilt in Studio, a third-party tool is needed. Zenphi not only supports document generation out of the box, but it's also free, unlike Power Automate.

Step 1: Take inventory before you touch anything

Open Power Automate and check My flows, the flows shared with you, and the flows that live inside solutions. Admins can list every flow in an environment from the Power Platform admin center (Resources, then Flows), which catches the ones that belong to other people. The Power Automate analytics reports in the same admin center show run data by day, week and month, and a connectors report. Viewing them takes an admin role and a license.

For each flow, write down its name, its owner and whether that person still works there, the trigger, every connector it touches, how many actions it contains, how often it actually runs, and one sentence on what the business loses if it stops. The action count matters because Studio stops at 20 steps per flow.

Judge a flow by its actions and its run history, not by its name. The flow we used for the walkthrough below was named as if it sent an email, and its export contained no email step at all. A flow that hasn't run in months is a candidate for retirement, not for a rebuild, and asking "what breaks if this stops?" settles many of those calls in a minute. Our migration checklist covers the five workflows most teams need on day one, so start there for the rebuild order.

Step 2: Map each building block to its Google counterpart

A flow is a set of blocks, and most blocks have a Google-side counterpart. This table is our working map. The right-hand column is where the surprises are.

Step 3: Choose where each flow will live

You don't have to pick one tool for everything. Simple flows and complicated ones often belong in different places, and a hybrid organization, such as a holding company that keeps part of its Microsoft estate, may leave some flows exactly where they are.

Sort your flows in two minutes

Pick everything one flow uses, and the tool shows where each block lands and how much design work the flow needs. Add each flow to your list, then copy the list into a spreadsheet. The verdicts follow the map above. They are a rule of thumb for planning the order of work, not a guarantee that a tool will support a given step.

Step 4: Rebuild an exported flow with ZAIA

For the walkthrough we used a deliberately small flow: when a Microsoft Forms response arrives, add a row to an Excel Online table and post a message in Teams. ZAIA, the AI assistant inside Zenphi's flow designer, reads the Power Automate export and drafts an equivalent Zenphi flow. It is not a converter. ZAIA proposes a plan for you to review, and the flow it builds still needs connections and settings before it runs. The product labels ZAIA as a preview and asks you to review its suggestions before applying them.

1

Export the flow from Power Automate

Microsoft documents this route in Export and import a non-solution flow: open My flows, Cloud flows, select the flow, then choose Export and Package (.zip). It exports one flow at a time and bundles the flow's dependent resources. For several flows Microsoft points to solutions, and it states that flow packages can't be used with Dataverse solution packages. The Export package page asks for a name, then lists the flow and the connections it depends on. In our export that meant the flow itself plus an Excel Online (Business) connection and two other connections marked to be selected during import. Give the package a name, export it and save the ZIP. Our walkthrough used this package export. If your flows live in solutions, check that the tool you picked can read what a solution export produces before you plan around it.

2

Import the ZIP with ZAIA

Start a new flow in the Zenphi designer and open the ZAIA tab in the left panel. Attach the ZIP with the paperclip and ask ZAIA to convert it to a Zenphi flow.

3

Review the plan

ZAIA answers with a plan, not a finished flow. At the top is a services list: Microsoft Forms becomes a Zenphi Form or a Google Form, Excel Online (Business) becomes Google Sheets or a Zenphi Table, and Microsoft Teams becomes Google Chat, depending on your preferences. Just specify them in the prompt you put in ZAIA. Below it come the numbered steps, each with a "Was" line naming the Power Automate action it replaces. The second step, retrieving the response details, disappears on purpose, because Zenphi hands the submitted fields to the flow with the trigger.

Two sections at the bottom deserve a slow read. "I could not tell from the source" lists what the export didn't reveal. Here the flow's name promised an email, but the export contained no email step, and the original question labels and field types were missing. "You will need to finish these by hand" lists the connections, the destination sheet, the chat space and the form details.

4

Change the plan in plain language

Reply in the chat box. We told ZAIA to skip the email and to use Google services in place of the Microsoft ones. You can also refer to a numbered step to change one part of the plan and leave the rest alone.

5

Apply the flow

ZAIA revises the plan and adds a "Changes you asked for" section confirming that the email requirement was removed and each Microsoft service replaced. Once you approve, it builds the flow and shows a card with two buttons, Review and apply, and Keep what I have. Applying replaces whatever is on the canvas, so do it on an empty flow or one you can afford to overwrite.

6

Check the import dialog

Applying opens an Import your flow dialog with four stages: File, Connections, Vaults and AI models. Here ZAIA checks if anything is missing. This workflow is simple and requires establishing connections to Google Workspace apps — Gmail in this case. But for some flows, you'd need to upload files or specify the AI models you'll be using (Zenphi provides access to Claude, OpenAI and Gemini by default, but you can connect your own model as well). If any additional information is needed, you'll be notified at this stage.

7

Look at the flow ZAIA created

The canvas now holds a form trigger, an Append Row action and a Post Chat Message action. Both actions carry red warning icons until their settings are complete. ZAIA's summary in the left panel adds two facts you'll need later: the flow has no branches or loops, and the original export had no failure-handling path.

8

Ensure the trigger is set up properly

In this case, ZAIA generated a Zenphi Form with the necessary fields. You need to check if the fields are correct and whether you need to add or remove anything. If Form submission is not the right trigger, you can swap it for any other trigger available in Zenphi — email arrival, file added to a folder, Google admin actions (Google Directory event, Google audit event or Google Group events), an external event (say, an event in Salesforce or your HRIS), a scheduled trigger and an on-demand trigger.

9

Configure the actions

Open Append Row, choose the Google connection, the spreadsheet and the sheet name. The fields outlined in red are required. Columns A, B and C are already mapped to the form's ASSIGNMENT, MON and TUE values, and the Has Header switch tells the action whether row 1 holds column names. Then open Post Chat Message, connect Google Chat and pick the space. Each action has an Error Handling tab, which is the place to add the failure path the original flow never had. Finish with Test Run and one real submission: the row should appear and the message should post.

Run both versions before the licenses end

Keep the Power Automate flow running and feed the same inputs to both versions for a while. Compare what each one produces: the row in the sheet, the message in the chat space, the file in the folder. Check permissions with a real user account, especially anything that touches Shared Drives, because a flow that works for its builder often fails for everyone else. Confirm that alerts reach a person when a run fails, that schedules fire at the intended hour, and that no flow depends on one individual's personal account.

Turn each Power Automate flow off on purpose, after the new one has proven itself, rather than waiting for it to fail when the licenses lapse. Keep a short record of what each flow did and where it lives now, so the next owner doesn't start from scratch.

Cutover day is not shutdown day

Flows that won't translate

Only 2 types of flows can't be imported. Desktop flows drive Windows applications, and Workspace has nothing that does the same job. Flows started from Power Apps or Dataverse depend on data that stays in Microsoft's platform after the migration. In both cases, ask whether the process should exist at all before asking which tool should run it.

Everything that starts with SharePoint can be rebuilt in Zenphi, because it has native actions for SharePoint.

FAQ

Sources

• Google Workspace Blog — Simplify the move to Google Workspace (June 10, 2026)
• Google Workspace Updates — Custom starters, steps, integrations and webhooks in Workspace Studio (September 17, 2026)
• Google Help — Workspace Studio limits
• Google Workspace Admin Help — Workspace Studio set up guide (updated September 24, 2026)
• Microsoft Learn — Export and import a non-solution flow
• Microsoft Learn — Power Automate analytics
• Microsoft Learn — What happens when a Microsoft 365 for business subscription ends

Limits and lifecycle terms were checked on September 29, 2026 and can change.