Microsoft Flow – This is the limit!

A while back I created a post about limits in Microsoft Teams. Today I’m looking at limits within Microsoft Flow.

Number of Flows created by a user

When you are happily creating many flows and you think that there is no limit to what you can do with Microsoft Flow then you might run into this one! There is a limit of 250 flows that a single user can create. After this you simply get the following error and you can’t save any more flows.

If you hit the 250 limit you can raise a support ticket and then the limit will be raised.

Do Until limited to 60 runs by default

When running Do Until loops Flow will only run 60 times through the actions inside a Do until.  Luckily it is possible to change this limit within the flow editor.

The above limits I didn’t find on any of the Microsoft Limitation pages.

If you are interested in other limitation  here is the official Limits and configuration in Microsoft Flow post.

Some of the interesting limits from the above article I’ve included below.

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Run duration and retention

These are the limits for a single flow run.

Name	Limit	Notes
Run duration	30 days	Includes workflows with pending steps like approvals. After 30 days, any pending steps time-out. Timed-out approvals are removed from the approvals center. If someone attemps to approve a timed-out request, they’ll receive an error message.
Storage retention	30 days	This is from the run start time.
Min recurrence interval	1 minute
Max recurrence interval	500 days

Looping and debatching limits

These are limits for a single flow run.

Name	Limit	Notes
ForEach items	5,000	You can use the filter action to filter larger arrays as needed.
Until iterations	5,000
SplitOn items	5,000
ForEach Parallelism	1

Definition limits

These are limits for a single flow.

Name	Limit	Notes
Actions per workflow	250	You can add nested workflows to extend this as needed.
Allowed action nesting depth	5	You can add nested workflows to extend this as needed.
Max characters per expression	8,192
action/trigger name limit	80
description length limit	256

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What should we do with these Microsoft Flow Limitations?

When looking at the Definition limits. I’m slightly worried about the Actions per workflow and the Allowed action nesting depth most of the other limits you can easily work around. but these two limits mean that when your flow has grown to much you will be stuck and are forced to split your flow across multiple flows. This is where it becomes important to design your flows the right way straight from the beginning. Even when your flow is still quite small.