UiPath vs Microsoft Power Automate vs Automation Anywhere: Real Agentic Automation Cost in 2026
UiPath's headline entry price of $25/month is real, and it is also close to meaningless for budgeting a real deployment. It buys Automation Cloud Basic — a Europe-only, 2-robot self-serve tier — while every actual production deployment runs on Standard or Enterprise pricing that UiPath doesn't publish. This article prices what a company actually pays, not the entry SKU that appears in search results.
The short answer
Microsoft Power Automate has the clearest published pricing of the three: $15/user/month for attended automation with premium connectors, $150/bot/month for unattended (Process), and $215/bot/month if Microsoft hosts the virtual machine for you (Hosted Process). UiPath's real per-unit cost is genuinely disputed across sources — reported attended-robot pricing ranges from $420/user/year in one procurement estimate to $135/robot/month (about $1,620/year) in another and $1,500–$3,000/user/year in a third — a spread wide enough that this article shows the full range rather than picking one number. Automation Anywhere publishes no pricing at all; reported figures for its unattended automation land close to UiPath's lower estimates. At small scale, Power Automate is confirmed cheaper than any credible reading of UiPath. At high volume with heavy unattended and document-processing workloads, the gap narrows and can reverse, because Power Automate's per-bot Process fee compounds differently than UiPath's per-robot licensing.
What's actually published, by vendor
| UiPath | Microsoft Power Automate | Automation Anywhere | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public rate card | Partial — only the Basic self-serve tier ($25/month, Europe-only, 2 robots) | Yes, fully published | None — Community Edition is free; everything else is "Contact Sales" |
| Attended automation | Reported figures conflict sharply: $420/user/year (one procurement source), $135/robot/month ≈ $1,620/year (another), $1,500–$3,000/user/year (a third), $3,500–$5,000/user/year (a fourth) | Premium: $15/user/month ($180/year), includes premium connectors and attended desktop flows | Reported $3,000–$4,500/year, close to UiPath's lower estimates |
| Unattended automation | Reported: $1,680/robot/year (one source) to $8,000–$10,000/robot/year (another, described as list pricing) | Process: $150/bot/month ($1,800/year); Hosted Process: $215/bot/month ($2,580/year) if Microsoft supplies the VM | Reported $7,500–$9,500/year |
| Pay-as-you-go option | Not published | $0.60 per cloud or desktop flow run, no license required — suited to low-volume, uneven workloads | Not published |
| M365 inclusion | Not applicable | Microsoft 365 E3/E5 licenses include Power Automate with standard connectors only; any premium connector (Salesforce, SAP, custom connectors) still requires the $15/user Premium license | Not applicable |
| Orchestrator/console | Included, per reported enterprise deployment sizing | Cloud flow orchestration built into the platform; no separate line item published | Bot Farm Units — a separate consumption metric reported at $4,000–$12,000 for small deployments |
| Free/community tier | Community Edition: free for individuals and small businesses, no execution cap in some readings | Included connectors inside an existing M365 E3/E5 seat | Community Edition: free |
| Document processing / AI | AI Center licensed separately; not itemized with a specific published rate | AI Builder credits (~5,000) included in the Premium per-user tier | Not itemized in available sources |
Why UiPath's real cost cannot be stated as one number
Four independent, seemingly current sources give four different figures for the same thing — UiPath's attended-robot annual cost — ranging from $420 to $5,000 per user per year, more than a tenfold spread. This is not simply different sources being wrong; it most likely reflects genuinely different discount levels, bundling assumptions, and negotiated versus list pricing being reported as if they were comparable. A single Vendr-style procurement estimate (n=49 deals, explicitly flagged as a small sample) is the most methodologically transparent of the sources found, but even that describes only a directional anchor, not a reliable list price. Any UiPath budget built from a single third-party figure should be treated as provisional until confirmed by UiPath's own sales process.
Modeling three deployments
Because UiPath's per-unit cost spans such a wide reported range, the scenarios below show both ends of that range explicitly rather than a false midpoint.
Small department: 5 automations, mostly attended
| Annual cost | |
|---|---|
| Power Automate (5 attended users, Premium) | 5 × $15 × 12 = $900/year |
| UiPath (5 attended robots, reported range) | 5 × $420 to 5 × $3,000 = $2,100–$15,000/year |
| Automation Anywhere (5 attended, reported) | 5 × $3,000 to 5 × $4,500 = $15,000–$22,500/year |
At this scale, Power Automate is confirmed cheaper than either credible reading of UiPath or Automation Anywhere, by a wide margin at every point in the reported ranges.
Mid-size operation: 25 workflows plus several unattended processes
Modeled as 20 attended and 5 unattended automations:
| Annual cost | |
|---|---|
| Power Automate (20 attended Premium + 5 unattended Process) | 20 × $15 × 12 + 5 × $150 × 12 = $3,600 + $9,000 = $12,600/year |
| UiPath (reported range) | (20 × $420 + 5 × $1,680) to (20 × $3,000 + 5 × $10,000) = $16,800–$110,000/year |
Power Automate remains the cheaper confirmed figure at this scale, though the gap narrows considerably at the low end of UiPath's reported range.
High-volume back office: dozens of unattended automations plus document processing
Modeled as 10 attended and 40 unattended automations:
| Annual cost | |
|---|---|
| Power Automate (10 attended Premium + 40 unattended Process) | 10 × $15 × 12 + 40 × $150 × 12 = $1,800 + $72,000 = $73,800/year |
| UiPath (reported range) | (10 × $420 + 40 × $1,680) to (10 × $3,000 + 40 × $10,000) = $71,400–$430,000/year |
This is the scale where the comparison genuinely reverses depending on which UiPath figure is accurate: at the low end of UiPath's reported range, it is essentially tied with Power Automate; at the high end, it is nearly six times more expensive. Neither figure includes AI Center, document-processing add-ons, or Orchestrator licensing for either platform, both of which are real costs at this deployment size and neither of which has a confirmed published rate.
What the advertised price misses
- Power Automate's $15/user Premium license is required for any flow touching a premium connector, even for users already covered under an M365 E3/E5 seat — a company assuming Power Automate is "free" because it already pays for Microsoft 365 will find this assumption wrong the moment a flow needs SQL, HTTP, Dataverse, Salesforce, or any custom connector.
- UiPath's Orchestrator and AI Center are licensed separately from robot counts, per multiple reported sources, meaning the per-robot figures in every scenario above understate real deployment cost by an unquantified amount.
- Automation Anywhere's Bot Farm Units are a distinct consumption metric, reported at $4,000–$12,000 for a small deployment scaling to $50,000–$120,000 for larger ones — a cost layer not captured in the simple per-bot annual figures used above.
- Pay-as-you-go Power Automate at $0.60/run is a genuinely different economic model for spiky or uneven workloads — a process running only occasionally can cost far less under this model than under either a per-user or per-bot subscription, a comparison this article's scenario tables don't capture since they model steady, dedicated automation counts.
Break-even: human hours per month needed to justify each platform
As an approximate formula: required monthly hours saved = annual platform cost ÷ 12 ÷ loaded hourly labor rate. At an illustrative $40/hour loaded cost for the manual work being automated, the mid-size scenario's Power Automate deployment ($12,600/year, or $1,050/month) needs to save about 26 hours of manual work a month to break even — roughly 1.2 hours per automation across 25 workflows, a low bar that most genuine automation candidates clear easily. The same calculation on UiPath's reported range ($16,800–$110,000/year, or $1,400–$9,167/month) requires 35 to 229 hours of manual work saved monthly — a bar that stays easy to clear at the low end of the range and becomes genuinely demanding at the high end, reinforcing that UiPath's real cost-justification depends heavily on which negotiated rate a specific company actually receives.
Which platform fits which situation
- A Microsoft-centric organization automating mostly attended, user-facing processes: Power Automate, given its confirmed, low, and fully published per-user rate, especially for organizations already on M365 E5 where some baseline capability is already included.
- A dedicated automation Centre of Excellence running complex, high-volume unattended processes with deep document understanding needs: UiPath, whose broader feature set (Orchestrator, AI Center, Studio) is reported to justify its premium for this specific use case — but get a written quote before assuming any single reported figure applies.
- A cloud-first enterprise wanting a fully managed unattended bot fleet without on-premises infrastructure: Automation Anywhere, priced against a direct quote rather than the reported ranges shown here, since no published rate card exists.
- Do not compare vendors using UiPath's $25/month entry tier or any similarly non-representative self-serve SKU — it is a genuinely different product (Europe-only, 2-robot cap) from the Standard or Enterprise pricing that any real deployment actually uses.
Limitations and uncertainty
Microsoft Power Automate's pricing is fully confirmed from Microsoft's own published pricing pages. UiPath publishes only its Basic self-serve tier; every attended and unattended robot figure used in this article's scenarios is reported by third-party sources, and those sources disagree with each other by roughly tenfold, a discrepancy this article presents explicitly rather than resolving. Automation Anywhere publishes no pricing at all; every figure attributed to it in this article is a third-party report, not a confirmed rate. The break-even calculations use an illustrative loaded hourly labor rate that is this article's own assumption.
Sources
Checked late September 2026. Microsoft Power Automate: microsoft.com/power-platform/products/power-automate/pricing. UiPath's Basic tier: uipath.com/pricing. All other UiPath and Automation Anywhere figures are drawn from multiple independent third-party procurement and pricing analyses, which conflict with each other and are presented as ranges rather than confirmed figures throughout this article.