In 2025, UiPath introduced AI Agents as part of its automation platform – essentially autonomous AI-driven bots that can perform tasks with minimal human input. If you're considering leveraging these AI Agents for your business, it’s important to understand how the pricing works and what costs to expect. This guide breaks down the available plans, pricing details, how AI Agent costs differ from traditional automation, when you’d need a paid plan, and alternative solutions on the market. We’ll keep things simple and non-technical, giving you an insider’s look at UiPath’s pricing structure.
Contents
Which UiPath AI Agents plans are there?
What does UiPath AI Agents cost?
Main differences between UiPath AI Agents and traditional UiPath RPA pricing
When should I pay for UiPath AI Agents?
What are the best UiPath AI Agents alternatives?
1. Which UiPath AI Agents plans are there?
UiPath offers several plans for its platform (including AI Agent capabilities), tailored to different needs. The main tiers are Community (Free), Basic, Standard, and Enterprise:
Community (Free) – A free plan intended for individual learners or small-scale use. It provides limited features and is for non-commercial, personal use (not licensed for full business deployments) (research.aimultiple.com). This is a good way to experiment with UiPath and AI Agents on a small scale without cost, but it has usage and support limitations (for example, no guaranteed service level or dedicated support). There is also a Free Trial option that businesses can use to test Standard/Enterprise features for a short time.
Basic – The entry-level paid tier, starting at $25 per month (uipath.com). This plan is designed for individuals or small teams just starting their automation journey (uipath.com). Basic includes the ability to build and run personal automations with limited scale (only a small number of users and robots are supported) (uipath.com). It’s a cloud-based subscription with essential features (99.9% uptime and “Bronze” level support from UiPath) to get you started. Keep in mind that the Basic plan is quite limited in capacity – it’s great for trying out AI Agents and simple automations, but it’s not meant for heavy enterprise workloads.
Standard – The mid-tier plan for businesses and larger teams. UiPath does not list a fixed price for Standard; instead, it’s available by contacting sales for a custom quote (uipath.com). The Standard plan includes everything in Basic, plus full access to AI Agents and enterprise automation features (uipath.com). In other words, with Standard you can build, test, run, and share more advanced automations (including those autonomous AI Agents) at scale. There are no hard limits on the number of automations, and you get stronger governance controls and the ability to host in various regions or even on-premises (uipath.com). Standard is the plan most mid-sized companies will use when they want to start an “agentic automation program” – meaning they plan to deploy AI Agents alongside regular RPA bots in their processes.
Enterprise – The top-tier plan for large organizations with advanced requirements. Like Standard, Enterprise pricing is available by custom quote (you must contact UiPath for pricing) (uipath.com). Enterprise includes everything in Standard, and adds further capabilities needed for company-wide, mission-critical automation (uipath.com). For example, Enterprise lets you build highly resilient, self-healing automations, bring your own AI models, manage your own encryption keys and credentials, and otherwise meet strict security and compliance needs (uipath.com). Essentially, Enterprise is a tailored solution – UiPath will work with you to include as many robot licenses, AI Agent usage, and add-on services as your organization requires. This plan comes with the highest level of support and flexibility (e.g. deploying on multiple cloud regions or on-premises). Enterprise is ideal for strategic, large-scale AI automation programs, but it comes at a premium cost (typically negotiated per contract).
To summarize, Basic is a low-cost starting point ($25/month) for small-scale use, Standard is the scalable business plan (price varies, with AI Agents enabled and no set limits on usage), and Enterprise is a fully customizable plan for heavy-duty needs (price via quote). There is also a free Community tier for learning and trial purposes. Each higher tier includes more features and capacity than the one before. For AI Agents specifically, note that the Standard and Enterprise plans are the ones that fully unlock those capabilities – the Basic tier is more limited and may not include the advanced agentic automation features needed for complex AI-driven workflows (uipath.com).
2. What does UiPath AI Agents cost?
Let’s talk about the actual costs you might incur when using UiPath AI Agents. The Basic plan costs $25 per month as a starting price (uipath.com). This is relatively affordable – roughly the cost of a typical software subscription – and is likely charged per organization (for one automation “tenant”) or per user license. In practical terms, $25/month on Basic might cover a single user or developer running a couple of personal automations. For example, a small startup could pay about $25 each month to automate a few tasks for one person. If you needed a few more users, the price would increase accordingly (e.g. two users might be around $50/month, and so on). Basic is a month-to-month subscription (with an option for discounted annual payment) (docs.uipath.com), so it’s low commitment. The key thing to remember is that Basic is cheap but intentionally limited in scale – it’s meant for small-scale or trial usage, not for running dozens of AI Agents in production.
For the Standard plan, costs are not published as a simple number – you’ll need to get a quote from UiPath’s sales team. Standard pricing depends on your usage requirements: how many robots, AI Agent runs, and users you need, and any additional services. Although UiPath doesn’t publicly state the price, industry research provides some clues. According to a 2025 RPA pricing analysis, an average professional UiPath package (suitable for a small business) was roughly $420 per month for a bundle including an unattended robot and a couple of attended robots (research.aimultiple.com). This $420/month figure is a ballpark for a mid-level “Pro” plan that likely corresponds to what Standard offers – it included one unattended automation bot and two attended bots in that scenario (research.aimultiple.com). Keep in mind, $420/month is just an example; your actual quote could be higher or lower. If you have more processes or need more AI Agent capacity, the cost will scale up. UiPath might charge, for instance, an annual license fee per “robot” (often a few thousands of dollars each per year) plus additional fees for AI Agent usage. In fact, a basic unattended robot license has been cited at around $4,000 per year (~$333/month) as a starting point (getmonetizely.com), and more powerful configurations cost more. So, a Standard plan for a mid-sized team could easily run in the several thousand dollars per year range once you factor in multiple bots and AI Agent functionality.
When it comes to the Enterprise plan, costs can become quite significant. Enterprise pricing is custom-tailored, so it often involves a bundled annual contract. Large companies might spend tens of thousands of dollars (or more) per year on UiPath Enterprise to get a whole suite of robot licenses, AI capacity, premium support, and so on. One unofficial report pegged a UiPath enterprise deal at around $87,000 in a year for a broad deployment (research.aimultiple.com), though exact prices vary widely. Essentially, Enterprise pricing is negotiated based on the scale of your automation program – number of users, number of AI Agent invocations, how many studios and environments, etc. The more you need, the higher the cost. UiPath will typically package everything into a single contract (perhaps including a certain number of AI Agent runs or AI computing credits, orchestrator services, and support). For budgeting purposes, if you’re a large enterprise, be prepared that UiPath’s top-tier solution can be a six-figure annual investment for extensive agentic automation across the company.
Nuances and additional costs: A key aspect of AI Agents is that they involve AI model usage, such as calls to large language models (LLMs) that power the agents’ “brains.” UiPath’s pricing model is evolving to account for this. Rather than charging only flat license fees, UiPath now often uses consumption-based units for AI services. This means some costs are metered based on how much you use the AI. For example, running an AI Agent might consume “Agent Units” – a unit that measures actions like LLM API calls. According to UiPath’s documentation, every time an AI Agent executes tasks, it consumes Agent Units correlating to the number of LLM calls (the exact units per call can depend on the complexity of the model used) (docs.uipath.com). In simple terms, if your AI Agent writes a report by making 10 calls to a GPT-4 model, that might use roughly 10 units. UiPath may include a certain allowance of these AI units in your plan, and if you go beyond that, you’d pay for the extra usage. This is similar to how cloud services charge for the amount of data or compute you use. For instance, if you’re on an older “Flex” licensing plan, you might have to purchase separate AI Units and Agent Units add-ons for AI features; on the newer unified pricing, all consumption is consolidated into Platform Units credits (forum.uipath.com). The upshot for your wallet is that heavy use of AI (lots of documents processed, or long chat conversations by agents) could increase your costs beyond the base license. It’s wise to discuss expected AI workload with UiPath sales so they can structure a plan (or additional unit bundles) that covers your needs and avoids surprise overages.
To give a practical example: suppose your company has a Standard plan with one unattended robot and uses AI Agents to handle customer emails. The base license might cost in the few hundreds per month, but if your AI Agent is parsing thousands of emails (hitting the LLM many times), you could incur additional consumption charges. UiPath’s goal is to align pricing with value – small usage stays cheap, larger usage costs more (but presumably yields more productivity). Always ask for clarity on what is included (e.g. “How many AI Agent runs or AI units come with this plan?”). In summary, Basic is a fixed low fee, Standard/Enterprise are higher and custom-priced, and AI Agent usage may introduce pay-as-you-go elements if you utilize the AI heavily (getmonetizely.com). All these factors combined make UiPath’s AI Agent pricing flexible but also potentially complex, so be sure to review your quote carefully.
3. Main differences between UiPath AI Agents and traditional UiPath RPA pricing
It’s important to understand how AI Agents pricing differs from traditional RPA (Robotic Process Automation) pricing in the UiPath ecosystem. UiPath’s original model (for classic RPA bots) has typically been license-based – you pay for a certain number of Robot licenses, Studio (developer) licenses, and Orchestrator (control center) licenses, usually as annual subscriptions. In that traditional approach, each software robot (attended or unattended) might cost a fixed fee per year (often several thousand dollars each), and you could run as many processes on that bot as you want for that price (getmonetizely.com). In other words, classic UiPath pricing was per bot and per user – e.g. you buy an unattended robot license for the year and it can perform unlimited runs, and you buy a Studio license for each developer. This model is somewhat analogous to software seat licenses. For example, you might pay $6,000–$8,000 per year for an unattended robot license and ~$3,000/year for a developer seat, etc., in a traditional setup (these are ballpark figures from industry reports).
With AI Agents (agentic automation), UiPath is introducing a more usage-based pricing element alongside the traditional licenses (getmonetizely.com). The AI Agents themselves are not “robots” you buy one-by-one; instead, they are a capability within the platform that uses AI resources. The biggest difference is that AI Agents consume AI model calls, which cost money per use. So while you still likely need a base platform license (Standard or Enterprise plan), the marginal cost of running AI Agents comes down to how much work they do. This contrasts with a fixed robot license where the cost is the same no matter if the robot sits idle or runs 24/7. With AI Agents, if you run them a lot – say, hundreds of thousands of AI-driven tasks – you’ll pay more in consumption. If you run them sparingly, you pay less. This consumption-based approach is becoming more common for cloud AI services, and UiPath is blending it into their pricing to reflect the “compute cost” of AI. They measure usage in units (as mentioned earlier: Agent Units, AI Units, or Platform Units depending on the plan), which tie back to things like LLM processing time or volume of data processed (docs.uipath.com).
Another difference is in packaging and entitlement. In the traditional RPA pricing, buying a higher tier (like Enterprise) mainly gave you quantity (more robots, multi-environment support, etc.) and some extra modules (like process mining or test automation). In the new agentic automation world, higher tiers (Standard/Enterprise) actually unlock qualitatively new capabilities – specifically the AI Agent features. For instance, the Basic $25 plan is quite limited and geared towards simple personal automations; it may not allow full use of generative AI agents (the Standard plan explicitly mentions including Agents) (uipath.com). So, a company might find that to do any serious AI-driven automation, they have to be on at least the Standard tier. This is a difference from earlier days where even a smaller edition could run bots (albeit fewer of them) – now, you need the appropriate plan to even access the AI Agent technology. Essentially, AI Agents are a premium feature meant for the higher plans, ensuring that businesses pay for the advanced AI capability.
There’s also a shift in how scaling is priced. Traditionally, scaling meant buying more robot licenses (each with a fixed cost). If you needed to automate more processes concurrently, you’d deploy more bots and pay for each one. In contrast, scaling with AI Agents might mean simply running more agent instances or more AI sessions in parallel – you don’t “buy 10 AI Agents licenses”; instead, you ensure your plan allows unlimited agents (Standard/Enterprise have no set limit on the number of Agents or automations) (uipath.com) and then your costs scale by consumption. This can be more efficient for some use cases: for example, if you have a burst of activity one month and quiet the next, you’re not paying for idle licenses during the quiet period – you pay for the burst usage. On the other hand, if your AI Agents are running constantly at high volume, the cumulative consumption charges could end up higher than a traditional fixed license model. UiPath’s Unified Pricing initiative (mentioned in their docs) aims to simplify this by converting everything into a single system of credits, but the principle remains that AI work is metered in a way that pure RPA clicks were not.
In summary, the main differences are: (a) Pricing for AI Agents involves usage-based components, whereas classic RPA was mostly fixed-cost per robot; (b) Access to AI Agent functionality requires being on higher-tier plans (no full AI capability in the lowest tier), whereas RPA functionality was available at all levels (just limited in scale); and (c) The notion of “licensing a bot” is evolving into “licensing a platform” – you buy into UiPath’s platform (Basic/Standard/Enterprise) and then pay for how much you use advanced AI features. For customers, this means you should plan for potential variable costs with AI Agents and carefully monitor your agent usage. It also means that if you’re comparing UiPath to others, you’ll want to consider not just flat license fees but also how much AI work you expect to run. Traditional UiPath RPA pricing was straightforward but could be expensive at scale (e.g. buying many bot licenses), whereas AI Agent pricing can start low but increase with heavy use, aligning cost with actual AI-driven workload (getmonetizely.com). This difference reflects a broader trend: as automation becomes smarter and more cloud-driven, pricing models are becoming more flexible and consumption-based.
4. When should I pay for UiPath AI Agents?
You might be wondering at what point you need to move from free usage to a paid plan for UiPath (specifically to use AI Agents). The short answer is: as soon as you want to use it for real business work or beyond very small-scale tests, you should plan on paying for a UiPath plan. Here are some guidelines for when to upgrade:
Commercial use and production deployment: UiPath’s free Community edition is intended only for individual, non-commercial use (research.aimultiple.com). This means if you’re just learning the tool or automating personal tasks, you can stick with the free tier. However, the moment you want to use UiPath (and AI Agents) in a company or business context – even a small business – you should transition to a paid plan. UiPath does have a “Free” tier for small-scale commercial use (sometimes called the Free for small business plan) but it’s quite limited in what it includes (for example, it allows only a couple of attended bots and no unattended bots) (research.aimultiple.com). If your goal is to actually deploy an AI Agent to handle a business process (like customer support inquiries or finance document processing), relying on the free tier is not practical or even permitted by the license. So, you should pay for at least the Basic plan once you move to genuine business use of AI Agents. Think of it this way: Community edition is like a free trial car for a test drive in a parking lot; if you want to drive on the highway (production environment), you need to buy or lease the car (get a paid license).
Need for unattended automation or scaling up: One key trigger to pay is if you need unattended automation or scaling beyond a couple of users. The free versions of UiPath do not include unattended robot capabilities (unattended robots are the ones that run in the background without a human starting them each time) (research.aimultiple.com). Many AI Agent scenarios involve unattended operation (since the whole point is the agent works autonomously). For example, if you want an AI Agent to monitor an inbox and automatically respond to emails 24/7, that’s an unattended process. To do this, you’ll need a paid plan (Basic or higher) that supports unattended bots or always-on execution. Similarly, the free tier might allow only 1 or 2 human users; if you have a team of people collaborating on automation, you need a paid plan to add more users and robots. In short, when your automation project grows beyond a one-person demo, it’s time to pay. Basic at $25/month is a low barrier for getting started with a small team, and as soon as you need the full AI Agent capabilities or more scale, you would move to Standard.
Reliability, support, and compliance: Another consideration is when you need reliability and support guarantees. Paid plans come with service level agreements (for uptime) and support from UiPath. The Basic plan offers 99.9% uptime and “Bronze” support, and higher plans offer even more robust support. If your AI Agents are doing something business-critical, you likely can’t afford downtime or glitches without help. Paying for UiPath ensures you have a level of support (e.g. you can reach UiPath support for issues, and you get updates and patches). Also, if your industry has compliance requirements (data residency, security), the paid plans allow things like choosing data region, opting out of cloud data collection, and even on-premises hosting in Enterprise (uipath.com) (uipath.com). For example, a healthcare company might need to keep data in a certain region and have strict privacy – that means they should at least be on Standard or Enterprise. So, you should pay when you require guaranteed uptime, official support, or specific hosting options for your AI Agents.
After proof-of-concept success: Many organizations will start with a small proof-of-concept using the free or trial version of UiPath Agentic automation. Once that proof-of-concept is successful and you decide to deploy it more widely, that’s the moment to invest in a paid plan. UiPath provides trials (like a 60-day trial of Standard) to evaluate features. But once you’re convinced the AI Agent solution will add value, you’ll want to pay to get the full-fledged environment. This often happens when the manual workaround or the free tool can’t handle the volume or complexity of real operations. For instance, you might test an AI Agent to see if it can draft responses to customers – you do it on a trial with a small data set. It works well, so now you want it running every day for all customer emails – at that point, you’ll upgrade to a paid license so it can run continuously and at scale.
Exceeding free usage limits: UiPath’s free offerings have specific limits (even aside from the non-commercial restriction). If you notice you’re hitting those ceilings – e.g. you’re running out of the allowed automation runs, or you need more AI document processing than the free tier permits – that’s a clear indicator to move to a paid plan. The Basic plan’s cost ($25) is relatively trivial in a business context, so it usually makes sense to upgrade as soon as the free tier becomes a bottleneck. Also, as mentioned earlier, advanced AI features (like certain AI models or high-volume AI calls) might not even be available without a paid plan due to the unit consumption model. UiPath actually gives Enterprise users some free daily AI Agent runs (LLM calls) as part of their user licenses for development purposes (docs.uipath.com) (docs.uipath.com) – this implies that outside of those development allowances, any real runs will consume your paid units.
In summary, you should start paying for UiPath AI Agents when you transition from learning/experimenting to real-world usage. This could be as soon as you have a business automation in mind that you want to deploy, when you need an unattended agent running, or when multiple people need to collaborate on automation. The free resources are great for initial exploration, but serious AI-driven automation requires a subscription. The good news is UiPath’s lowest paid tier (Basic) is relatively inexpensive, so even small businesses can afford to get on board when they’re ready to implement AI Agents in production. And as your usage grows, you can scale up to Standard or Enterprise accordingly. Investing in the right plan ensures your AI Agents can run reliably, securely, and with the support you need.
5. What are the best UiPath AI Agents alternatives?
UiPath is a leading player in this space, but it’s not the only platform offering AI-powered automation or “agentic” AI solutions. If you’re exploring alternatives (either for feature comparison or to consider pricing differences), here are some of the notable ones:
Automation Anywhere – A major RPA competitor to UiPath that is also incorporating generative AI into its platform. Automation Anywhere offers an intelligent automation platform where you can build bots and integrate AI models (they have features like IQ Bot for documents and announced partnerships for GPT integration). In terms of pricing, Automation Anywhere tends to use a license model too – for example, one estimate put 1 unattended bot + 1 developer + control room at about $750 per month (research.aimultiple.com). Additional bots cost extra (around $500/month for each additional unattended bot, and ~$125/month per extra attended user) (research.aimultiple.com). So, cost-wise it can be a bit higher than UiPath for similar capacity, but it’s in the same ballpark of enterprise pricing. If you are already considering AI Agents, Automation Anywhere’s approach (“Gen AI” features within their bots) might be an alternative, especially if your organization is already familiar with their tools.
Microsoft Power Automate (with AI Builder and Copilot) – Microsoft’s Power Platform includes Power Automate for workflow automation, and they have been adding AI capabilities (like AI Builder for forms and the new Microsoft 365 Copilot which brings AI into Office apps). While Power Automate isn’t as full-featured in RPA as UiPath, it’s often considered for automation needs, particularly in Microsoft-centric environments. The pricing model is different: Power Automate can be licensed per user or per flow. Microsoft introduced an attended RPA plan around $15 per user/month, and an unattended add-on or plan around $150 per month for each unattended bot (research.aimultiple.com). The Microsoft 365 Copilot (which acts as an AI assistant in Office) is an add-on at $30 per user/month as well (getmonetizely.com). For an organization with many Office users, this could be a significant cost, but it’s a flat per-user fee for AI assistance in that context. Microsoft’s solution might be appealing if your needs are more modest or you want a tightly integrated Office AI assistant rather than a full RPA+AI platform. However, for complex process automation, Power Automate may not reach the sophistication of UiPath’s agentic automation. It can be a more affordable starting point, but enterprise features and scalability differ.
O-mega.ai – An emerging platform focused specifically on AI agents for business processes. O-mega positions itself as a “productivity platform for multi-agent teams,” essentially letting you create teams of AI workers (“digital employees”) to automate tasks. One key difference in O-mega’s model is its credit-based pricing – instead of paying per bot or per user, you purchase credits and each AI agent action costs 1 credit (o-mega.ai). For example, if an O-mega AI agent creates an invoice or posts a social media update, that consumes one credit. This usage-based model can be flexible: you can create unlimited agents in O-mega (no extra charge for more agent entities) and just pay for the work they actually do (o-mega.ai). O-mega.ai is relatively new (launched around 2025) and targets businesses looking for out-of-the-box AI agents that connect with many tools. It can be seen as an alternative if you want a more AI-centric approach from the ground up, potentially complementing or replacing some UiPath functions. Pricing-wise, since it’s pay-per-action, the cost will depend on your volume of tasks – for light usage it could be very cost-effective, whereas heavy usage means buying larger credit packages. It’s worth evaluating if you prefer an on-demand cost structure and a pure AI-agent workforce concept.
IBM watsonx Orchestrate – IBM’s answer to AI digital workers. Watsonx Orchestrate (often just called IBM Orchestrate) provides AI “digital employees” that can perform business tasks by connecting to enterprise apps (like an AI that can update records in SAP, send emails, schedule meetings, etc.). IBM markets this as a personal assistant for professionals that can take on routine tasks through natural language commands. In terms of pricing, IBM usually handles this in enterprise deal style – custom quotes, potentially based on number of “digital employees” and their usage. IBM even provides an ROI-based pricing calculator to help justify the costs (research.aimultiple.com). So while exact figures aren’t public, expect it to be in line with enterprise software pricing (probably similar magnitude to UiPath’s Enterprise costs, depending on scope). IBM Orchestrate might appeal to companies already invested in IBM’s ecosystem or those looking for very curated AI assistants with IBM’s backing. It’s an alternative to UiPath in the sense that it tackles the “AI worker” idea, though it might not offer the same general-purpose RPA tooling that UiPath does.
In addition to the above, other notable mentions include SAP’s automation offerings (SAP has an Intelligent RPA service and is integrating AI into it, relevant if you are an SAP-centric organization), and open-source or custom-built AI agent frameworks (like using OpenAI’s API with custom code or open-source agent frameworks such as LangChain/AutoGPT for very tech-savvy teams – these have no licensing cost but require significant development effort and don’t come with support). However, for a non-technical team, going with a commercial platform like UiPath, Automation Anywhere, or O-mega.ai will be more practical.
When comparing alternatives, consider both features and pricing structure. UiPath’s AI Agents are part of a comprehensive automation platform (with lots of enterprise features, and the pricing reflects that maturity). Some alternatives might be cheaper or have simpler pricing (e.g. pay-per-use) but could lack certain capabilities or integration depth. Others might be similarly enterprise-oriented and cost a similar amount. For instance, many find UiPath on the higher end of pricing but also very powerful; Microsoft might be lower cost to start but you might need multiple MS products to cover what UiPath does (Power Automate, plus Azure AI services, etc., which add up). Ultimately, the “best” alternative will depend on your specific needs – but the ones above are a great starting point to investigate if you’re looking at AI-powered automation solutions alongside UiPath’s offering. Each of these options has its own pricing model, so you can choose the one that aligns best with your budget and usage pattern (whether you prefer fixed subscription or pay-as-you-go). (research.aimultiple.com) (research.aimultiple.com)