Most RPA buying guides open with an analyst statistic. This one opens with a correction, because the previous version of this article carried a sentence that turned out to be false: “UiPath continues to dominate the RPA market in 2026, consistently ranked #1 by Gartner, Everest Group, and IDC.”

None of those three firms ranked UiPath #1. We traced the sentence to its source and cut it. The full explanation is below, because how that claim travelled tells you more about this category than any vendor datasheet will.

Here is the other thing nobody says out loud: RPA pricing is almost entirely invisible. Of the eleven platforms in this guide, exactly one publishes a real price list you can read without talking to a salesperson. That is not an oversight. It is the business model, and it should shape how you budget.

The UiPath ranking claim, and why we deleted it

The claim invoked three analyst firms at once without naming a single report, edition, or date. That shape is worth recognising, because it cannot be checked. There is nothing to look up.

So we looked up all three anyway.

Gartner. The 2025 Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation was published 23 June 2025 and evaluated 13 vendors. UiPath was named a Leader, for the seventh consecutive year, and was recognised highest for Ability to Execute. A Magic Quadrant places vendors in a quadrant. It does not rank anyone #1. Gartner’s own disclaimer, printed on that release, says the firm “does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings.”

Everest Group. The 2025 assessment is not an RPA report at all. It is the Intelligent Process Automation Platform PEAK Matrix, a broader category. UiPath was named a Leader and Star Performer and positioned highest for Vision and Market Impact. A PEAK Matrix sorts vendors into bands. Appian, Microsoft, Pega and UiPath all landed in the top band of full-suite providers.

IDC. The 2025 report is the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Business Automation Platforms, which covers eight technology segments and treats RPA as one of them. UiPath is a Leader there. IDC did publish an RPA-specific MarketScape in which UiPath scored highest across Current Offering, Strategy and Market Presence, and that is the closest thing to a genuine #1 in this whole story. It was the inaugural edition, and it covered 2021 to 2022. Citing it in 2026 means citing a four-year-old snapshot of a market that has since been rebuilt around AI agents.

Three real firms. Three real reports. Zero #1 rankings.

The sentence itself came from somewhere specific. It appears close to verbatim on a page published by Auxis, a consultancy whose own page describes it as a UiPath Diamond Partner and a “top 2% UiPath partner.” That is a reseller with a commercial interest in the ranking it reports.

Follow the chain. Gartner says “Leader.” UiPath’s own blog, written by its Director of Analyst Relations, says “a Leader, for the seventh consecutive year” and claims nothing more. A UiPath reseller upgrades “Leader” to “#1.” A roundup copies the reseller. Each hop is small. The endpoint is a fabrication.

The detail that should stop you: UiPath’s own marketing is more modest than the claim being made on its behalf. The vendor never said #1. Its partner did.

We could have softened this to “UiPath is widely regarded as a market leader.” We did not, and the reason matters. That phrasing keeps the assertion while deleting the evidence, so nobody can check it and nobody is accountable for it. Vague is not safer than wrong. It is wrong with the receipts torn up. The claim is gone.

What survives verification is narrower and more useful: UiPath has been a Gartner-recognised Leader in RPA for seven straight years and scored highest on Ability to Execute in the most recent Magic Quadrant. That is a real, dated, checkable fact. It is also not the same sentence.

What is actually new in RPA, and what got renamed

Every vendor in this category now sells “AI agents.” Some of that is real. A lot of it is the bot you were already licensing, with a new label on the box.

Start from what classic RPA is. A bot drives a user interface the way a person would: it clicks, reads pixels or DOM nodes, types, and moves on. It exists because the underlying system has no API, or has one you cannot get budget to integrate against. RPA was always a workaround dressed as a strategy, and the industry knew it. The screen-scraping bot is duct tape with a licence fee.

That workaround is being squeezed from two directions.

The first is API-first automation. Every SaaS product shipped in the last decade has a REST API. When the API exists, driving the GUI is strictly worse: slower, more brittle, and liable to break when a vendor moves a button four pixels left. A large share of the automations that justified RPA licences in 2018 should be HTTP calls today.

The second is language models, which handle the part RPA never could. Classic bots need deterministic input. Show one an invoice in an unfamiliar layout and it fails. A model reads the invoice. That is a genuine capability change, and it is why intelligent document processing is the one area where the AI story in this category holds up.

Now the honest part about the branding.

When a vendor says “agentic automation,” ask one question: does the agent decide what to do, or does it execute a flow a human drew in a designer? If it executes a predetermined flow, it is a bot. Calling it an agent is marketing. Most “AI agent” SKUs shipping in RPA today are an LLM bolted to the front of an existing orchestrator, handling the natural-language step at the edge while the deterministic bot does the work in the middle.

That is not worthless. An LLM that turns “reconcile these two ledgers” into a working flow saves real developer hours, and document understanding genuinely extends what can be automated at all. But it is an improvement to the tooling, not a new category, and it does not justify treating a 2018 bot estate as though it were an autonomous workforce.

The tell is the pricing page. Where vendors publish numbers, unattended bots are still licensed per bot, per month. That is the economics of a bot, not an agent. The label changed. The meter did not.

Why you cannot find RPA prices

This deserves its own section, because it is the single most useful thing a buyer can know before starting.

Ten of the eleven platforms here do not publish a usable price. Not “publish a confusing price.” Do not publish one at all. You fill in a form, you get a call, you get a quote built around your bot count, your seat count, and how much the salesperson thinks you can pay.

What that means practically: budget for a procurement cycle, not a credit card. Expect a discovery call before a number. Expect the number to be annual and committed. Expect unattended bot licences, orchestrator fees, and document-processing volume to be separate lines, because the bot licence is rarely the whole bill.

You will find plenty of specific-looking figures for these products online. Automation Anywhere at $750 a month is the most repeated. We could not verify a single one against a vendor page. Both of Automation Anywhere’s obvious pricing URLs return 404, and every “$750” we chased led to a resale aggregator, never to Automation Anywhere. Those numbers are estimates other people are selling you as facts, and this guide will not repeat them.

“Pricing is not published; enterprise quote only” is a real answer. It tells you the sales process you are about to enter. A fake number tells you nothing and costs you a planning cycle.

The 11 RPA platforms worth considering in 2026

1. UiPath

The biggest independent vendor in the category, and the one with the deepest partner and training ecosystem. If you need to hire RPA developers, more of them know UiPath than anything else. That is a genuine, boring, decisive advantage.

Pricing is the rare partial exception here. UiPath’s pricing page lists Automation Cloud Basic starting at $25 per month. Standard and Enterprise are both “Contact Sales.” There is no free community tier listed anymore, only trials. Note what the $25 does not include: the entry rung is not an enterprise deployment, and every serious configuration lands in the quote-only tiers.

In February 2026 UiPath acquired WorkFusion, folding financial-crime compliance agents (AML, KYC, sanctions screening) into its financial-services portfolio. Anyone still comparing UiPath against WorkFusion as rivals is comparing a company to itself.

Weak spot: cost at scale, and the gravitational pull of the platform. UiPath is a strategic commitment, not a tool you try. Teams with a handful of automations routinely overbuy here.

2. Microsoft Power Automate

The only platform in this guide with a real, readable price list. That alone changes the buying process.

Read the numbers carefully, because Microsoft displays them as monthly rates that are billed yearly:

  • Power Automate Premium – $15.00 per user/month, paid yearly. Cloud flows, attended desktop flows, process mining.
  • Power Automate Process – $150.00 per bot/month, paid yearly. Unattended desktop flows.
  • Power Automate Hosted Process – $215.00 per bot/month, paid yearly. Adds a Microsoft-hosted VM so you are not managing infrastructure.
  • Process Mining add-on – $5,000.00 per tenant/month, paid yearly.

Two corrections to what older roundups say. The per-flow plan is gone; it is not on the pricing page. And that $15 is not a month-to-month rate, so anyone quoting it as “$15/month” without the yearly commitment is quoting Microsoft’s display convention rather than a real monthly option.

Look at the gap between $15 and $150. Attended automation is cheap and unattended is ten times more, which is the actual shape of RPA economics laid bare. Every vendor charges this way. Microsoft is the one that shows you.

Weak spot: it is excellent inside Microsoft 365 and awkward outside it. If your estate is SAP and Oracle on-premise, the ecosystem advantage evaporates and you are comparing on raw capability, where it is not the strongest option.

3. Automation Anywhere

Automation 360 is the product, it is cloud-native, and it is the most credible direct alternative to UiPath at enterprise scale. Gartner placed it in the Leaders quadrant alongside UiPath in the 2025 Magic Quadrant.

On price, we have to be blunt. Automation Anywhere publishes nothing we could verify. The two obvious pricing URLs both 404. The widely circulated “Cloud Starter at $750 per user per month” traces only to resale aggregators, and even those pages concede that public pricing is not posted and sales contact is required. We are not printing a number we cannot source.

Weak spot: the same opacity. You cannot benchmark it without entering a sales process, which is a real cost when you are still deciding whether RPA is the answer at all.

4. SS&C Blue Prism

Blue Prism has not been an independent company for years. It is SS&C Blue Prism, and the product identity moved with the ownership.

In April 2026 SS&C launched SS&C Blue Prism WorkHQ, positioned as an agentic automation platform that puts people, AI agents, APIs and digital workers under one governed control plane. Alongside it sit Blue Prism Next Generation and Blue Prism Assistant, a conversational layer for building automations by asking rather than dragging.

The historic case for Blue Prism was governance. It was the platform built for people who have to explain to a regulator what a bot did and why, with audit trails treated as a first-class feature rather than a reporting afterthought. Banking and insurance bought it for that reason and largely still do.

Weak spot: momentum. Gartner’s 2025 Magic Quadrant placed Microsoft ahead of it on the strength of ecosystem alone, and the once-clear governance lead has narrowed as competitors caught up. Pricing is quote-only.

5. Pega Robotic Process Automation

Reports of Pega’s RPA death are exaggerated. We checked specifically, because “Pega killed RPA” circulates a lot: the product is documented, supported, and actively marketed, with an Extended Support Policy running up to 36 months per version.

What is true is that Pega does not really want to sell you RPA on its own. Pega’s argument has always been that RPA is a tactical patch and case management is the real fix, and its RPA exists mostly to bridge legacy systems into Pega workflows. Everest Group put Pega in the top band of full-suite automation providers in 2025.

Weak spot: if you want a standalone RPA tool, this is the wrong purchase. It makes sense as part of a Pega platform decision and very little sense outside one. Quote-only.

6. NICE

Contact centres. That is the answer.

NICE is strongest in attended automation, where a bot sits beside a human agent during a live call and does the swivel-chair work between six systems while the customer is still talking. That is a specific job, and NICE has spent years on it inside its wider CX suite.

Weak spot: outside the contact centre the case thins fast. If you are automating finance back-office processes, buy something else. Quote-only.

7. Appian RPA

Appian sits in the top band of Everest’s 2025 full-suite assessment, and its RPA is cloud-native and wired into the wider Appian low-code platform rather than sold as a bolt-on.

Worth knowing before you shortlist it: Appian RPA’s standalone mindshare in the RPA category sits around 1.3%. That is small. It is not a criticism of the technology, but it tells you something real about hiring, community answers, and how many implementation partners have done your exact integration before.

Weak spot: same structural issue as Pega. It is a reason to choose Appian, not a reason to choose Appian’s RPA. Quote-only.

8. IBM Robotic Process Automation

Read the lifecycle notices before the marketing, because they say more.

IBM RPA 21.0.x was withdrawn from support on 30 April 2025, with paid extended support available until April 2029. Version 23.0.20.x is the long-term support release and enters extended support on 30 September 2026. The older IBM RPA with Automation Anywhere v19 line reached end of support in September 2025, and IBM RPA with WDG Automation 20.x.x was withdrawn back in 2023.

Two acquired product lines wound down, and the current LTS version entering extended support this year. That is a maintenance posture, not a growth one.

Weak spot: hard to recommend as a new purchase in 2026 unless you are already deep in IBM automation and hybrid cloud. Existing customers have a supported path. New buyers have better options. Quote-only.

9. Tungsten RPA (formerly Kofax RPA)

If you are searching for “Kofax RPA” you are searching for a name that was retired more than two years ago. Kofax rebranded to Tungsten Automation in January 2024, and the RPA product, which some of you will remember as Kofax Kapow before that, is now Tungsten RPA. Licensing and contracts carried over; only the branding changed.

Its real strength is inherited from the Kofax capture heritage: document-heavy processes. If your automation is mostly “read this pile of unstructured paper and get it into a system,” this lineage is genuinely strong, and that is the one area where the AI story in RPA is not a rebrand.

Weak spot: outside document-centric work it is a harder sell, and the rebrand has left years of documentation, forum answers and job listings scattered across three product names. Quote-only.

10. ServiceNow RPA Hub

RPA Hub ships with ServiceNow’s Automation Engine and acts as the control centre for building, deploying and monitoring bots inside the ServiceNow platform.

The logic is the same as Microsoft’s, one platform down. If ServiceNow is already your system of record for IT and employee workflows, keeping automation inside it avoids an integration project and a second vendor relationship.

Weak spot: nobody buys ServiceNow for its RPA. It is a feature of a platform decision made for other reasons, and as a standalone RPA engine it does not lead on capability. Quote-only.

11. Nintex RPA

The messiest entry here, and the mess is the point.

Nintex acquired Kryon, and the result is two overlapping RPA lines. Nintex has said Kryon is the preferred platform going forward while committing to support Nintex RPA long-term, so customers are not forced to migrate their botflows. Meanwhile the Kryon public APIs are deprecated, with users pushed toward Nintex public APIs.

Preferred platform, supported alternative, deprecated APIs on the preferred one. If you are evaluating Nintex for RPA specifically, get clarity in writing about which line you are buying and what its roadmap is.

Weak spot: the ambiguity above, and Nintex’s centre of gravity is workflow and process management rather than RPA. Quote-only.

Comparison table

PlatformPublished priceBest forStandout
UiPathBasic from $25/mo; rest quote-onlyEnterprises standardising on one platformLargest talent pool; 7 years a Gartner Leader
Power Automate$15/user/mo; $150/bot/mo (paid yearly)Microsoft 365 estatesThe only real public price list
Automation AnywhereNone publishedEnterprise alternative to UiPathCloud-native Automation 360; Gartner Leader
SS&C Blue PrismNone publishedRegulated industriesGovernance and audit; WorkHQ (Apr 2026)
Pega RPANone publishedExisting Pega BPM customersCase management, not bot sprawl
NICENone publishedContact centresAttended automation beside live agents
Appian RPANone publishedExisting Appian customersNative to Appian low-code
IBM RPANone publishedExisting IBM automation estatesHybrid cloud fit (but see lifecycle dates)
Tungsten RPANone publishedDocument-heavy processesKofax capture heritage
ServiceNow RPA HubNone publishedServiceNow platform customersNo second vendor to integrate
Nintex RPANone publishedNintex workflow customersBroad process management suite

What did not make the cut

The earlier version of this guide listed 15 platforms. Four are gone, and the reasons are worth reading, because three of the four are still being listed as live options elsewhere.

SAP Intelligent RPA – retired. SAP pulled it from the CPEA service list on 15 June 2023. Its capabilities moved into SAP Build Process Automation, and the Agent 2 runtime on Intelligent RPA tenants hit end of maintenance on 30 June 2025. It was ranked in this article with a straight face. It has been a dead product for three years. If you are automating SAP, the answer is SAP Build Process Automation.

WorkFusion – acquired by UiPath. Announced 6 February 2026. The old article ranked WorkFusion at #6 as a competitor to UiPath at #1. They are the same company now. WorkFusion had also pivoted away from general RPA back in 2022, restructuring around financial-crime compliance agents, so it was arguably out of category before the acquisition.

Laiye – cut for unverifiable claims. Alive, but publishes no pricing, and the total cost is spread across bots, AI credits and the Commander orchestration tool in a way nobody outside a sales call can model. Not enough verifiable substance to rank.

Rocketbot – cut for unverifiable claims. Every description of its “affordable” licensing traces to aggregators and none to a published price. A pitch built entirely on cost, with no cost you can read, is not a pitch we can pass on.

How to choose

Before choosing a vendor, check whether you need RPA at all. This is the question the category is structurally incapable of asking you.

Take your top five candidate processes and ask whether the target systems have APIs. If they do, a small integration will beat a bot on cost and reliability, and it will not break when a vendor ships a UI update. RPA earns its licence on the systems where no API exists and none is coming: the mainframe, the vendor product that never modernised, the terminal emulator somebody wrote in 1997.

If you do need it, the decision usually collapses to three questions.

  • What platform do you already run? Microsoft 365 points to Power Automate. A ServiceNow, Appian or Pega estate points to that vendor’s RPA. The integration you avoid is worth more than a feature you gain.
  • Attended or unattended? Attended costs a fraction of unattended everywhere. Power Automate’s $15 against $150 is the honest illustration. Get this split right before you get a quote, because it drives the bill.
  • Are your inputs structured? Clean, predictable data suits any of these. Unstructured documents narrow the field to the platforms with real document processing, where Tungsten’s capture heritage and the UiPath and Automation Anywhere document stacks lead.

If you have no incumbent platform and no strong constraint, UiPath and Automation Anywhere are the two credible independent shortlists, and the hiring pool tips it toward UiPath.

One last piece of process advice. When a vendor tells you their agents are autonomous, ask them to show you an automation that decides its own steps at runtime. Watch what gets demoed. If it is a flow somebody drew in a designer, you are buying a bot, and you should price it like one.

RPA is a narrow tool for a specific problem: systems with no API. If your automations are cloud apps talking to cloud apps, you want general workflow automation software instead, which is a different category with different economics and mostly public pricing.

For the surrounding tooling, see our guides to project management software, project management tools, project tracking tools, and Asana alternatives.

Frequently asked questions

Is UiPath really ranked #1 by Gartner?

No. Gartner named UiPath a Leader in the 2025 Magic Quadrant for RPA, for the seventh consecutive year, and recognised it highest for Ability to Execute. A Magic Quadrant does not rank vendors #1; it places them in quadrants, and Gartner’s own disclaimer says it does not endorse vendors or advise buying only the highest-rated. The “#1” framing comes from partner and reseller marketing, not from Gartner.

How much does RPA software cost?

For ten of the eleven platforms here, there is no published price and you have to request a quote. The exception is Microsoft Power Automate: $15 per user/month for Premium, $150 per bot/month for Process, $215 per bot/month for Hosted Process, all paid yearly, plus a $5,000 per tenant/month process mining add-on. UiPath publishes Basic from $25/month and quotes everything above it.

Does Automation Anywhere cost $750 per month?

We could not verify that figure. Automation Anywhere’s obvious pricing URLs return 404, and every source repeating “$750” is a resale aggregator rather than the vendor. Several of those pages concede that public pricing is not posted. Treat $750 as an unsourced estimate, not a price.

Is SAP Intelligent RPA still available?

No. SAP retired it from the CPEA service list on 15 June 2023, and Agent 2 on Intelligent RPA tenants reached end of maintenance on 30 June 2025. The replacement is SAP Build Process Automation, and bots built in Intelligent RPA Studio can be imported into it.

What happened to Kofax RPA?

Kofax rebranded to Tungsten Automation in January 2024. Kofax RPA, previously Kofax Kapow, is now Tungsten RPA. Licensing, contracts and functionality carried over unchanged; only the name and branding moved.

Is WorkFusion still an independent RPA vendor?

No. UiPath announced its acquisition of WorkFusion on 6 February 2026, closing in UiPath’s first quarter of fiscal 2027. WorkFusion had already pivoted in 2022 from general RPA to AI agents for financial-crime compliance such as AML and KYC.

Is RPA being replaced by AI agents?

Partly, and less than the marketing suggests. Language models genuinely extend automation to unstructured input like documents, which classic bots could never handle. But most “AI agent” SKUs in RPA today are an LLM layered onto an existing orchestrator that still runs a human-designed flow. The clearest tell is that unattended bots are still licensed per bot, per month. The bigger threat to classic RPA is not agents; it is APIs.

Do I need RPA if my systems have APIs?

Usually not. If a supported API exists, integrating against it is cheaper and more reliable than a bot driving the interface, and it will not break when the vendor moves a button. RPA is for systems with no API and no prospect of one, such as mainframes, terminal emulators and legacy vendor products.

Is Pega RPA discontinued?

No. Pega Robotic Process Automation is documented, supported and marketed, with an Extended Support Policy of up to 36 months per version. Pega does position RPA as a bridge to legacy systems rather than a strategy in itself, which is probably why the “Pega killed RPA” story keeps circulating.

What is the difference between attended and unattended RPA?

Attended bots run on a person’s desktop and assist them during a task, such as a contact-centre agent on a live call. Unattended bots run on servers without a human, on a schedule or a trigger. Unattended costs far more everywhere it is priced publicly; Power Automate charges $15 per user/month for attended and $150 per bot/month for unattended.