If you are pricing UiPath alternatives for a renewal, Microsoft Power Automate is the only one that reliably costs less at list price. The saving is real only if your estate already runs on Windows and Microsoft 365 and your bots mostly drive Microsoft or browser apps. Automation Anywhere and SS&C Blue Prism are lateral moves: the same contact-sales pricing, plus the cost of rebuilding every bot. n8n and API-first rebuilds are cheaper still, but they replace a different thing (the integration), and they have no desktop robot. Computer-use agents handle the long tail of low-volume screens and are not yet a replacement for an unattended fleet.
Prices below were checked on each vendor's live pricing page on October 29, 2026. Where a vendor publishes no price, the table says so.
| Option | Published list price (checked 2026-10-29) | Licence unit | Unattended desktop bots | Who should NOT pick it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UiPath (stay) | Basic from $25/month; Standard and Enterprise contact sales | Plan + user/robot add-ons; agents draw Platform Units | Yes | Teams with under ~10 bots that mostly touch Microsoft apps |
| Power Automate | $15 user/month (attended), $150 bot/month (unattended), $215 bot/month (hosted VM), all paid yearly | Per user, per bot | Yes | Estates with no Windows/Entra footprint, or heavy non-Microsoft desktop apps |
| Automation Anywhere | No public price; pricing URL returns 404 | Quote (bot runner packages) | Yes | Anyone leaving UiPath to save money |
| SS&C Blue Prism | No public price; all products contact sales | Quote (digital workers) | Yes | Anyone not already in a regulated shop that standardised on it |
| n8n / API rebuild | Business €667/month billed annually (40K executions, self-hosted); Enterprise custom | Per instance, by executions | No | Processes whose only interface is a screen |
| Computer-use agents (Claude, OpenAI) | Model token rates | Per token | Partly, with supervision | High-volume, credentialed, regulated runs |
The recommendation: renegotiate UiPath with a priced Power Automate quote in hand, move any bot that calls a system with an API onto n8n or code, and leave the rest where it is until a rebuild is cheaper than the renewal delta.
What Each UiPath Alternative Costs on the Same Workload
On a defined workload of 10 unattended bots and 50 attended users, Power Automate lists at $27,000 a year, and no other desktop RPA vendor publishes a number you can compare it with.
The Power Automate arithmetic comes straight off Microsoft's pricing page: Premium is $15 per user per month, Process is $150 per bot per month, and Hosted Process (Microsoft supplies the Azure VM) is $215 per bot per month, all paid yearly. Fifty attended users cost $9,000 a year. Ten unattended bots cost $18,000 on your own machines or $25,800 hosted. The same page notes that a Process bot runs one unattended desktop flow at a time, so concurrency means buying more bots.
UiPath's pricing page shows a Basic plan from $25 per month with 2 robots, and puts Standard and Enterprise behind "Contact Sales." Users and robots are sold as add-ons with no rates shown. Procurement data from Vendr puts UiPath unattended robots at $8,000 to $10,000 per robot per year at list, before discounts. That is a third-party figure, and your contract is the real number, but it puts the 10-bot fleet at roughly $80,000 to $100,000 before you count attended users or agents.
Agents now bill separately. UiPath's agent licensing docs charge 0.2 Platform Units per LLM call on standard models, 0.4 on premium models and 0.16 on basic ones, and debug runs and evaluations consume units once the monthly allowance is spent. If your renewal adds agents, ask for the Platform Unit price per thousand and model a month of real calls before you sign.
Automation Anywhere publishes nothing current. Its pricing URL returned a 404 when checked for this piece, and Automation Atlas reported in July 2026 that enterprise pricing is quote-only. The $750-a-month starter figure still quoted around the web dates to a May 2020 announcement. SS&C Blue Prism is the same: all four products are contact sales, per Automation Atlas, which notes that the widely quoted figure of about $15,000 per digital worker per year is a third-party estimate. Treat both as estimates.
n8n's pricing page lists Business at €667 a month billed annually for 40,000 executions on a self-hosted instance, about €8,000 a year. One execution is one workflow run, however many steps it has. It is the cheapest line in the table, and it has no desktop robot, so it only replaces bots whose target system has an API.
Which Licences You Already Own Decide the Winner
The cheapest UiPath alternative is whichever one rides on licences you already pay for, so inventory those before you price anything.
Power Automate for desktop installs free on Windows 11. Microsoft's prerequisites page says Home users can build desktop flows and run them locally in attended mode, but cannot trigger them from the cloud; the cloud runtime, attended or unattended, needs Pro, Enterprise or Server editions plus a paid plan. For a team whose attended bots are personal productivity scripts, that can mean the attended line of the table costs nothing.
The credential story also leans on what you own. Power Automate stores desktop-flow credentials in Azure Key Vault, which requires an Azure subscription in the same tenant, a registered resource provider and Dataverse permissions on the vault. CyberArk is the other supported vault. If you have no Azure footprint, you are buying one alongside the bots.
A shop on Google Workspace, Okta and AWS gets none of that. Its Power Automate quote carries an Entra and Azure build-out the list price hides, and UiPath or Automation Anywhere, which plug into the vaults it already runs, may be cheaper in total.
How Much of Your UiPath Estate Converts
Plan to rebuild every bot. No platform vendor ships a converter that turns UiPath workflows into its own format, and the third-party tools that exist still leave manual work.
We found no Microsoft tool that imports UiPath projects into Power Automate. The migration work is sold by partners: Kanerika sells an accelerator called FLIP, and Blueprint Migrate exports from UiPath Orchestrator, Blue Prism and the Automation Anywhere Control Room. Robocorp's conversion documentation describes its converters as beta-level and calls Blue Prism the hardest source.
Automation Anywhere's own Bot Scanner analyses bots from its older Enterprise 10 and 11 versions only, and does not migrate them. We found nothing in its docs that imports UiPath projects.
What usually carries over is the process knowledge: the process definition document, the exception list, the test data, the selectors someone already debugged. What gets rebuilt is everything executable. A useful rule when you scope it: count the bots, multiply by your average build days from the original UiPath project, and compare that to three years of the renewal saving. If the rebuild is bigger, you have your answer for this cycle.
Attended vs Unattended: Where Each Alternative Is Weak
Attended automation runs on a person's desktop when they trigger it; unattended automation runs on a machine with nobody watching, on a schedule or a queue. Each alternative is strong on one and thin on the other.
Power Automate is strongest attended, because the desktop app is already on Windows 11 and Premium costs $15 a user. Its unattended model is plainer than UiPath's: one flow per bot at a time, so a queue that needs five parallel workers needs five Process licences.
Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism both run unattended fleets from a central control room, and both sell attended automation too. Neither publishes an attended price, so neither can show you a cheaper attended story than Power Automate's $15.
n8n and API rebuilds have no desktop robot at all. They are the right home for any bot that logs into a web app to do something the app's API already exposes, which in most UiPath estates is a meaningful share of the inventory. The workflow-tool comparison covers when to reach for a durable-execution engine like Temporal instead.
Computer-use agents sit between the two. They read the screen and click like a person, so they cope with layouts that break selectors. They are also slow, token-hungry (Anthropic's computer-use docs put each screenshot at roughly 1,000 to 1,800 input tokens) and supervised by design. Our Browserbase vs Playwright vs computer use test found the deterministic script still wins on a portal you run every day.
Governance, Credential Vaulting and Audit Logs for Regulated Workflows
For regulated workflows, the alternatives that match UiPath on credential vaulting and audit are Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism; Power Automate is close behind if you run Azure, and n8n needs its Enterprise tier to get there.
Automation Anywhere's Control Room supports seven external vaults: CyberArk, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, BeyondTrust, ARCON, HashiCorp Vault and Delinea. Its cloud integration docs say bootstrap and service-account retrieval are not supported on the Cloud Control Room, so a cloud move changes how the platform itself authenticates.
Blue Prism's audit log records credential creation, deletion and changes with the user's name, and its built-in Credential Manager releases passwords only to digital workers, per an SS&C consultant on the Blue Prism community forum. If your auditors already accept that model for a Blue Prism fleet you run, it is the strongest reason to consolidate there.
UiPath puts credential vaults, bring-your-own encryption keys and CI/CD pipelines in its Enterprise tier, per the pricing page. If you are on Standard today and your auditors ask for external vaulting, an alternative quote should be compared against UiPath Enterprise, not Standard.
n8n's external secrets (AWS, Azure, GCP, HashiCorp Vault, 1Password, Infisical) and its log streaming to tools like Datadog are both Enterprise-only, per its pricing page. The €667 Business price does not include either, so a regulated workload belongs on the custom-priced tier.
Computer-use agents are the weakest here, and the vendor says so. Anthropic's documentation recommends running them in a dedicated VM, keeping account login information away from the model, allowlisting domains and having a human confirm consequential actions. Most unattended RPA exists to log into systems with service credentials, so that guidance rules out the core workload today. Our coverage of OpenAI's hosted browser agent shows how coarse the approval controls still are.
The Loser: Automation Anywhere as a Cost Exit
Automation Anywhere is the wrong destination if the reason you are leaving UiPath is price. It is a capable platform with a wider external-vault list than any option here, and that is the steel-man: for a team unhappy with UiPath's support or roadmap, it is a like-for-like swap.
As a cost exit it fails. It publishes no price, so you trade one quote-only negotiation for another. It has no UiPath importer, so you pay the full rebuild. And its pricing model, bot runner packages sold through sales, gives you no more leverage than you have now. You absorb the migration and land in the same commercial position. The company's recent moves, including its agreement to acquire Boost.ai, point at conversational AI for banks and insurers.
Blue Prism fails the same test for the same reasons, with a narrower audience. If you are a bank already running it next to UiPath, consolidate there. Nobody else should move onto it to save money.
When Staying on UiPath Is the Right Answer
Stay on UiPath when the rebuild costs more than three years of the saving, which for a large unattended estate is most of the time.
Specifically, stay if you run more than a few dozen unattended bots against non-Microsoft desktop apps, if your processes depend on UiPath's document extraction or self-healing selectors, or if your auditors have already signed off on its credential and audit model. UiPath shipped its Delegate desktop agent at FUSION 2026 without a published price, so get the agent roadmap priced in writing during the renewal.
The case for leaving is strongest for small estates: under about 10 bots, mostly attended, mostly Outlook, Excel, SharePoint and browser apps, inside a Microsoft 365 tenant. There, Power Automate's published prices are a fraction of the third-party UiPath estimates, and the rebuild is small.
How to Decide: The Criteria That Predict Regret
The decisions that go wrong are priced on list rates and ignore three things: licences already owned, rebuild days and the audit model.
- Licence overlap. Do you already pay for Windows 11 Pro or Enterprise, Microsoft 365, Entra and Azure? If yes, Power Automate's marginal cost is the table price. If no, add the platform you would need.
- Rebuild size. Count executable bots and multiply by real build days. Compare to the three-year renewal delta, not the one-year one.
- API reachability. Every bot that drives a web app with a usable API should leave the RPA platform entirely, whichever vendor you pick.
- Audit and vaulting. If your regulator expects external vaulting and immutable logs, price the tier that includes them on every option, including n8n Enterprise and UiPath Enterprise.
- Concurrency. Power Automate's one-flow-per-bot rule turns a five-worker queue into five licences. Model your peak, not your average.
What changes the answer: a UiPath renewal that bundles Platform Units you will not use (push back, or move), a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement renewal in the same year (negotiate Power Automate in it), or a regulator finding on credential handling (buy the most mature audit model available, even at a higher price).
This Week:
- Export the bot inventory from Orchestrator with run counts, target applications and whether each one uses an API-capable system.
- Ask your Microsoft account team for a Power Automate Process and Premium quote against that inventory.
This Month:
- Rebuild your three hardest UiPath bots in Power Automate desktop as a timed test, and record the build days.
- Move one API-reachable bot to n8n or code and retire it from Orchestrator.
Before the Renewal Date:
- Take the priced Power Automate quote and the measured rebuild days into the UiPath negotiation.
- If the rebuild math wins, sign a one-year UiPath term to cover the migration window rather than a three-year one.
The Bottom Line
The RPA vendors face price pressure from two sides this renewal cycle. Microsoft puts desktop automation in Windows 11 and has added computer use to Copilot Studio, and smaller players are being bought, as with HCL's deal for Robotiq.ai. Both help you negotiate. None of the alternatives' quotes will include the cost of rebuilding a working unattended fleet, so put that number on the table yourself.
Get the Power Automate quote before you open the UiPath renewal conversation.
Continue Reading
- UiPath Shipped Delegate at FUSION 2026 and Left Its Price Blank
- Zapier and n8n Alternatives Once Workflows Become Agents
- Browserbase vs Playwright vs Computer Use: The Script Still Wins
- Microsoft Computer-Use GA: RPA's $100K Tax Just Ended
- HCL to Acquire Robotiq.ai for €9M to Expand Agentic Automation
- Automation Anywhere to Acquire Boost.ai for Conversational AI