RPA vs AI agents: five vendor claims checked against list prices and documentation (October 2026)

How I checked the claims

For each tool I read the pricing page and the documentation for billing, agents and, where one existed, self-healing. I added Gartner as an analyst source and Anthropic's computer use documentation, because the RPA vendors have a stake in the answer. How we review explains the general method.

Two gaps shaped the result. Make's pricing page showed a security check instead of prices when I opened it, and I did not go around it, so for Make I relied on its credits documentation alone and left it out of the price count. Automation Anywhere, Laiye and Relevance AI publish no commercial price, which I report as "not published" and did not estimate.

Sources: [1][2]

Claim 1, agents replace RPA: does not hold

The vendors that sell RPA say no, and they are not neutral. UiPath asks on its own page whether agentic automation will replace RPA and answers "decidedly no". It says RPA "will perform with much higher efficiency, reliability, and precision" on predictable, rules-based tasks and calls RPA robots the force behind "a great majority of tasks" in an agentic workflow.

The product pages say the same in feature form. UiPath's Standard plan lists "orchestrate agents, robots, and people". Automation Anywhere promises to coordinate "agents, bots, APIs, and documents". Laiye splits the work: "Agents handle intent and decisions; APA handles high-frequency, deterministic system operations." Microsoft sells an unattended Power Automate bot at $150 a month next to its Copilot Studio agents.

The independent source is Gartner. Its release of June 25, 2025 predicts that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 because of costs, unclear value or weak risk controls. It also describes "agent washing", the rebranding of products such as RPA and chatbots without real agentic capability, and counts only about 130 of the thousands of agentic AI vendors as real. Many use cases sold as agentic, Gartner says, do not need an agent.

What this means for you: when a vendor says its agent replaces your bots, ask which steps still run as fixed scripts underneath. Every vendor above keeps them, and Gartner's own advice is agents where decisions are needed and automation for routine workflows.

Sources: [3][4][5][6][7][8]

Claim 2, agents adapt when the screen changes and bots break: partly

Microsoft's documentation for computer use in Copilot Studio says: "Because it's AI-powered, it adapts to interface changes." It publishes no failure rate. The model vendor's own guide is more careful. Anthropic's computer use documentation says Claude "might make mistakes or hallucinate" when it outputs coordinates, that reliability "might be lower" with niche applications or several applications at once, and that it should not be used for tasks needing perfect precision without human oversight.

The RPA side has the same problem and sells the same cure. UiPath's documentation describes UI automation as facing "the constantly evolving nature of user interfaces" and offers Healing Agent, an AI feature that detects a failure and applies a recovery such as adjusting a selector or closing a pop-up. Self-healing UI automation is listed under UiPath's Enterprise plan, and the docs say UiPath licenses heals through an add-on or Platform Units. In UiPath's testing product, self-healing is an add-on at $5K for 5K heals.

Both camps now sell an AI layer that repairs or navigates a changed screen, and neither publishes how often it works. You can avoid the problem by skipping the screen. n8n and Zapier connect to apps through connectors instead of screens, which works only where the system offers one.

What this means for you: before paying for either, ask the vendor in writing how often its self-healing or its agent succeeds on your three most change-prone screens. If the system has an API or a connector, use that.

Sources: [9][10][11][4][12]

Claim 3, agents are cheaper than bots: does not hold, per step

The two kinds of product bill different things. Microsoft Power Automate charges $15 per user and month for attended bots and $150 per bot and month, paid yearly, for an unattended bot, with a Microsoft-hosted version at $215. UiPath sells users and robots, and agent runs draw Platform Units: 0.2 per LLM call on standard models, 0.4 on premium models in preview. UiPath does not publish a price per Platform Unit, so I could not turn that into dollars.

Microsoft is the one vendor that prices both kinds on one list, so I took it as the base for the comparison. In Microsoft Copilot Studio an agent action costs 5 Copilot Credits. Computer use bills at that rate per step, or 15 credits with a premium model. A scripted agent flow costs 13 credits per 100 actions, which is 0.13 per action, about 38 times less than an agent action. A pack of 25,000 credits costs $200 a month, so a credit costs $0.008 if you use them all: $0.04 per agent action, $0.12 per premium computer-use step and $0.00104 per flow action. These are not identical units of work, but they are the units Microsoft bills.

Other vendors count differently. n8n bills per workflow run whatever the number of steps: €50 a month for 10,000 runs on Pro, billed yearly. Zapier bills one task per successful step, and one MCP tool call uses 2 tasks. Zapier Agents is a separate product metered in activities, with 1,500 a month for $33.33 on Pro billed yearly. Make charges 1 credit per operation by default.

The calculator multiplies your monthly steps by these list prices. Microsoft sells whole packs only and unused credits expire monthly, so real bills round up to whole $200 packs.

What this means for you: with repeatable steps, an agent that decides at every step costs far more than a script that decides once. At 40,000 steps a month the calculator shows $1,600 for agent actions, $4,800 for premium computer-use steps, about $42 pro rata for flow actions (one $200 pack in practice) and $150 for one bot. Agents may save build and upkeep time instead, and none of the pages I read puts a number on that.

Sources: [7][13][14][9][15][16][12][2]

Claim 4, RPA prices are a secret and agent prices are clear: partly

Of the 10 vendors where I could read a pricing page, 7 publish at least an entry price and 3 publish nothing: Automation Anywhere, Laiye and Relevance AI. Two of the three sell RPA and one sells an agent builder, and both Microsoft products, one RPA and one agent platform, publish their prices. UiPath sits in between: Community is free, Basic starts at $25 a month with limited scale and European hosting only, and Standard and Enterprise say "Contact Sales".

Published prices are still hard to compare, because each vendor counts something different. The list shows the unit, and a 10,000-run month is a different purchase in each.

Our directory shows the same split by category. The block below filters the main-niche entries by RPA, agent builders and workflow tools. Three entries needed a fix after my check, and one I could not settle: I corrected Dify's pricing model, which was empty although it publishes Sandbox, Professional and Team plans, UiPath's free-trial field, which was empty although Standard offers a 60-day trial, and Laiye's free-plan field, since its Community Edition is a free download. A fourth I could not settle: our Langdock entry says workflow packages start at €539 a month, while the package list on its page shows €449 for 40,000 runs, so I left Langdock's workflow price out.

What this means for you: before you ask for quotes, ask each vendor to price the same job in its own unit. Compare the three results, not the three price pages.

Sources: [4][17][6][18][19][20][16][12][1]

Claim 5, agents can run unattended today: partly, with a cap and a reviewer

The documentation of agent products describes supervision as part of the setup. Anthropic's guide says to ask a person to confirm decisions with real consequences, such as financial transactions, and to review actions and logs. Microsoft lets an admin name who is emailed when a computer-use agent detects potentially harmful instructions. I looked for a published success rate for agents or for self-healing on every page I read and found none.

The budget behaves differently from a bot's too. Copilot Studio enforces prepaid capacity monthly, unused credits do not carry over, and at 125% of prepaid capacity custom agents are disabled, which pay-as-you-go environments avoid. UiPath's licensing page says that on Unified Pricing, agent runtime execution is not allowed without purchased units. A per-bot license has no per-step meter that can run dry.

What this means for you: before an agent touches money, customer data or deletions, set a monthly cap and name a reviewer. Keep the fixed, high-volume steps in the bot or workflow.

Sources: [10][9][14][21][15]

Where to start, and who should skip which tool

Four questions separate the cases: whether the steps are fixed, whether an API exists, whether the input varies and whether a person can check the result. If the helper lands on a workflow tool, the n8n vs Zapier comparison is the next page to read.

Take a constructed example: an accounts payable team that posts 10,000 invoices a month into an ERP with a desktop client and no API, and also answers supplier emails. Posting is fixed rules without an API, so a bot fits, and at Microsoft list price one unattended bot is $150 a month. The email replies are free text that a person can check before sending, so an agent drafts them. At 3 agent actions per draft, 10,000 drafts are 150,000 credits, or six packs and $1,200 a month. The agent costs eight times the bot and handles the free-text part that a script cannot.

Sources: [4][14][16][12][2][19][20][18]