UiPath Competitors and Alternatives: UiPath vs Power Automate, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism Pricing

The short answer: the main UiPath competitors are Microsoft Power Automate at $15 per user per month or $150 per unattended bot per month, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, both of which publish no price at all, Microsoft Copilot Studio at $200 per month for 25,000 pooled credits, Salesforce Agentforce at $0 to $125 per user per month, Google Gemini Enterprise at $21 per seat, Amazon Quick at $20 per seat plus a $250 account fee, and Microsoft Agent 365 at $15 per user. UiPath itself publishes exactly one number, $25 a month for its Basic tier, and quotes everything else. Vendr reports a median UiPath contract of $45,338 a year against $41,877 for Automation Anywhere, so the two market leaders land within about 8% of each other on typical spend.

Every figure below was checked against the vendor's own site on August 29, 2026. Where a vendor publishes nothing, this article says so rather than repeating a number from a reseller blog.

Only one of the big four automation vendors publishes a price list

That is the single most useful thing to know before you start evaluating. It shapes how long the process takes and how much leverage you have.

The two absences in that table are not oversights. Requesting automationanywhere.com/pricing returns a 404, as do its product-level and company-level equivalents, and the Automation Anywhere homepage carries no link containing the word pricing. Blue Prism is the same, and its homepage does not contain the word pricing anywhere in the markup. Both companies route every commercial question to a sales conversation.

Practically, that means an Automation Anywhere or Blue Prism evaluation cannot start with a spreadsheet. It starts with a call, and your first real number arrives weeks in. If you are trying to build a business case this quarter, Microsoft is the only vendor here where you can price the whole thing yourself in an afternoon.

UiPath vs Power Automate: the comparison most buyers actually run

This is the head-to-head that decides most US deals, because Power Automate is already sitting inside a Microsoft 365 tenant that the company pays for.

On published numbers Microsoft wins on price and it is not close, particularly for attended work: $180 a year against a reseller-reported $3,500 to $5,000. The unattended comparison is murkier because UiPath's figure is not published and partner guides disagree with each other by a factor of five, quoting anywhere from $1,680 to $10,000 per robot per year. Against Power Automate Process at $1,800 a year, UiPath is either roughly at parity or roughly five times more expensive, and nobody outside the negotiation can tell you which.

Where UiPath earns its premium is the work Power Automate does less completely: self-healing UI automation that survives interface changes, process mining and simulation built into the same platform, and a document stack with a published per-page meter. If your automations run against legacy desktop applications with unstable UIs, that resilience is worth real money in maintenance you do not pay.

One structural point tends to settle it. Power Automate Premium is priced per user, so it scales with headcount, while UiPath's unattended robots are priced per runtime, so they scale with concurrency. A company automating one heavy overnight process needs one or two robots and very few seats. A company giving 500 people a desktop automation tool needs 500 seats. Work out which shape you are before you compare unit prices, because the cheaper unit is not always the cheaper bill. The full arithmetic is in our UiPath pricing breakdown and in Copilot Studio against Power Automate pricing.

UiPath vs Automation Anywhere: what buyers actually pay

Neither vendor publishes enough to compare directly, so the only honest reference is aggregated contract data. Vendr, which collects negotiated software deals, reports the following.

Two readings fall out of that. At the median the two are close, with UiPath about 8% higher, so anyone telling you one platform is fundamentally cheaper than the other is arguing from a deal rather than from the market. At the extremes they diverge sharply: UiPath's reported ceiling of $223,821 is roughly 3.1 times Automation Anywhere's $72,095, and its floor of $22,440 is about twice as high. UiPath's dataset stretches further in both directions, which fits a vendor selling more large, multi-product enterprise programs.

Neither number is a list price and neither should go into a board deck as one. Use them the way a salary benchmark works: to know whether the quote in front of you is normal.

Blue Prism and the rest of the traditional RPA field

Blue Prism, now part of SS&C Technologies, sells the same category on a digital worker model and publishes no price. Its practical position in 2026 is as an incumbent in regulated industries, particularly financial services, where it is defended by existing deployments rather than won in new bake-offs. If you are not already running it, the evaluation cost is high relative to what you learn, because there is no published number to start from at all.

The wider point about traditional RPA is worth saying plainly. All three of these vendors are repositioning around agents, and the underlying economics are changing with them. Classic RPA charged for a runtime that executed a fixed script. Agent pricing charges for reasoning, usually per model call, which means cost now scales with how much thinking a task requires rather than how long it runs. That is a different budgeting problem, and it is why UiPath's Platform Unit rate card matters more to a 2026 buyer than its robot count.

The agentic alternatives worth a look

If what you actually need is agents rather than screen automation, the field is wider and considerably more transparent.

There is also a size of company for which none of this is the right purchase. If you have three or four repetitive tasks and no automation team, a $45,000 platform contract is the wrong shape entirely, and it is usually faster to hand the task to an agent that runs it end to end than to license a builder and then staff it. The threshold worth watching is roughly when you have more processes than one person can maintain by hand, because that is the point at which orchestration, governance and audit logging start earning their cost.

Where UiPath genuinely wins

An honest comparison has to include this section, and most vendor-written ones do not.

• Legacy and desktop UI automation. Self-healing selectors and the depth of UiPath's UI automation library remain ahead of Power Automate's for old Windows applications, mainframe green screens and applications with no API.
• Document processing at volume. UiPath publishes an actual per-page meter: 0.04 Platform Units to classify a page, 0.16 to extract after classification, capped at 0.2 per page. Being able to model document cost per page before you buy is genuinely rare in this market.
• Process discovery in the same platform. Task mining, process mining and simulation live alongside the execution layer rather than as a separate $5,000 a month add-on.
• Ecosystem depth. A large partner network, a mature certification track and a big pool of experienced developers, which matters when you need to hire.
• Bring your own model. At the Enterprise tier you can point agents at your own model endpoint, which changes UiPath's meter from per model call to once per agent run.

That last one is the most underrated item on the list. A UiPath-hosted standard model costs 0.2 Platform Units per LLM call; a customer-managed model costs 0.2 units per agent run regardless of how many calls it makes. An agent that makes eight model calls to finish a task therefore consumes eight times more on a hosted model than on your own. No competitor in this comparison offers quite that trade in the same form.

Which UiPath alternative fits which company

Is UiPath better than Automation Anywhere?

Neither is better across the board, and the reported contract medians are within about 8% of each other, so price will not decide it. UiPath has the deeper developer ecosystem, stronger document processing and a published consumption rate card. Automation Anywhere has historically been the easier platform for business users to pick up and reports a lower entry point in contract data, with a floor around $11,378 a year against UiPath's $22,440. The decision usually comes down to which vendor's partner your team can actually hire.

What is the best free UiPath alternative?

There is no genuinely free enterprise RPA platform, and the free tiers that exist are narrower than they look. UiPath's Community edition is free and, under its July 27, 2026 agreement, an organization under $5 million in annual revenue may use it for internal commercial business purposes; above that line it is non-commercial only. Either way it caps agents at 250 model calls a day, which is a proof-of-concept allowance rather than a production one. Salesforce Agentforce Foundations is $0 but requires a Salesforce org and meters every agent action at $0.005 per Flex Credit, which is $0.10 per action. Microsoft offers a 30-day Power Automate trial. For a US business, the realistic free option is a trial long enough to measure your true run volume, not a permanent free tier.

How do I compare UiPath and its competitors on price?

Price all of them in three layers and keep the layers apart. Layer one is the platform or tier fee. Layer two is named licenses, meaning developer seats, business user seats and unattended runtimes. Layer three is consumption, meaning model calls, document pages and actions. Vendors are inconsistent about which layer they publish, which is exactly why headline prices are not comparable as printed. Once all three layers are filled in for each vendor, convert everything to fully loaded cost per month at your real headcount and volume. Our comparison of eleven AI agent platforms does that normalization across the wider market, and the AI agent marketplace guide covers where each vendor's prebuilt agents actually live.

The bottom line

If you already pay Microsoft, start with Power Automate, because it publishes every number and you can build the case without a sales call. If your automations fight legacy desktop applications or you process documents at volume, UiPath is worth the quote conversation, and go into it with a measured model-call count per agent run so the consumption estimate is yours rather than the vendor's. If you are choosing between UiPath and Automation Anywhere purely on cost, stop, because the reported medians are 8% apart and the difference will come from your negotiation rather than from the price list neither of them publishes.