Power Automate vs UiPath vs Automation Anywhere - Which RPA Tool
Every RPA tool vendor will tell you they're the best. Every analyst report will pick a different winner depending on who's paid them. And every prospect we talk to has been pitched by at least two of these three vendors before they come to us.
So here's the straight version. After running RPA programs across dozens of Australian organisations, including a few where we inherited a half-built UiPath estate from a previous consulting firm and had to decide whether to keep it or rip it out, I have strong opinions about when each tool is the right pick and when it isn't.
Quick disclosure: we're a Microsoft partner, so we naturally do more Power Automate work than the others. But we have engineers who've shipped real production work on all three, and we don't push Power Automate when it's the wrong choice. There are situations where UiPath is genuinely better. There are even situations (fewer) where Automation Anywhere is the right pick.
The honest summary if you don't want to read the whole thing
If you're a Microsoft 365 shop, Power Automate is almost certainly the right answer. It's not because Power Automate is technically superior - it isn't, in some areas - but because the bundled licensing and the integration with the rest of your stack make it irresistible from a TCO perspective.
If you're a large enterprise with serious unattended automation requirements at scale (think 500+ bots running 24/7 against terminal emulators, mainframes, and legacy desktop apps), UiPath is still the strongest pure-play platform. It's also the most expensive.
Automation Anywhere has been losing ground in Australia. It's still strong in a few specific industries (banking, particularly), but most of our clients evaluating it end up picking one of the other two. I'll explain why below.
Where each tool actually came from (and why this matters)
The lineage of these products tells you a lot about how they behave today.
UiPath started life as a pure-play RPA company. Everything in the product is built around the assumption that you're automating a Windows desktop or a browser. The studio is mature, the orchestrator is mature, and the engineering culture is very RPA-first. They've been pushing hard into AI agents and generative AI, but the foundation is desktop automation.
Automation Anywhere has a similar background. Older codebase, cloud-first rebuild over the last few years (A360). They've been aggressive on the "cloud-native" messaging but in practice we've seen reliability and tooling gaps that don't show up in the demos.
Power Automate is two products glued together. Power Automate (cloud flows) is the old Flow product, which started as Microsoft's answer to Zapier. Power Automate Desktop is the rebadged WinAutomation product Microsoft acquired in 2020. The integration between the two is reasonable but not seamless, and the desktop product still feels less polished than UiPath Studio.
The pricing reality in Australian dollars
This is where the comparison gets interesting, because the three vendors price completely differently.
Power Automate has the most complex pricing model and the cheapest entry point. Cloud flows are included free in most Microsoft 365 business licences, with limits. The Premium licence (which adds premium connectors, custom connectors, desktop flows in attended mode, and AI Builder) is AUD $22/user/month. Power Automate Process (unattended desktop flow capacity) is AUD $225/bot/month. There's also a Power Automate Hosted Process option that includes the VM for around AUD $315/bot/month.
For a typical Australian mid-market client running 10-20 attended automations and 5-10 unattended bots, the annual Power Automate bill lands somewhere between AUD $30,000 and AUD $100,000.
UiPath uses a unit-based licensing model. Attended robots are around USD $1,800-$2,400/year each. Unattended robots are around USD $8,000-$10,000/year each. Add Orchestrator (around USD $25,000-$50,000/year for cloud), AI Center for ML models, Document Understanding for OCR, and various other modules. A typical mid-market UiPath deployment lands at AUD $150,000-$400,000/year all-in.
Automation Anywhere is in a similar price band to UiPath, with bot runners typically AUD $9,000-$15,000/year each plus the control room and ancillary products. They're more open to negotiation than UiPath in our experience, but the list price is still high.
The bigger point is that Power Automate is usually 3-5x cheaper than the other two for equivalent work. This matters a lot when you're trying to justify the program to a CFO who's heard the RPA hype before and wants to see actual ROI.
Side-by-side capability comparison
| Capability | Power Automate | UiPath | Automation Anywhere |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud workflows (API-to-API) | Strong, 1000+ connectors | Adequate, fewer connectors | Adequate |
| Desktop automation | Good (PAD), still maturing | Excellent, the benchmark | Good |
| OCR / document understanding | AI Builder, integrates with Azure | Document Understanding, very strong | IQ Bot |
| AI agents / generative AI | Strong via Copilot Studio integration | Strong, Autopilot platform | Improving |
| Mainframe / terminal emulators | Limited | Strongest of the three | Strong |
| SAP automation | Good via connector | Excellent, certified | Good |
| Process mining | Process Advisor | UiPath Process Mining (acquired ProcessGold) | Discovery Bot |
| Orchestration / scheduling | Good | Excellent | Good |
| Citizen developer friendliness | Strongest | Improving | Weakest |
| Enterprise governance | Power Platform admin centre, mature | Orchestrator, very mature | Control Room |
| Source control / CI/CD | ALM Accelerator, improving | Studio Git integration, mature | Bot Insight, limited |
| Australian data residency | Yes, multiple regions | Yes, via AWS Sydney | Yes, via AWS Sydney |
| Vendor lock-in | High (Microsoft stack) | Medium | Medium |
When Power Automate is the right answer (most of the time)
Power Automate wins for most Australian organisations because of three things.
First, the bundled licensing. If your organisation already has Microsoft 365 E3 or E5, you have Power Automate cloud flows included. You probably also have premium licences for at least some users through Office or M365 Copilot. The marginal cost of doing more work in Power Automate is much lower than standing up a separate UiPath estate.
Second, the integration with the rest of the Microsoft stack. Power Automate flows can be triggered from Teams messages, SharePoint events, Outlook emails, Dataverse changes, and dozens of other places that your business already uses. When you build a flow that updates a SharePoint list, you don't need to think about authentication, connection management, or service accounts in the same way you do with a third-party RPA platform.
Third, the Copilot Studio integration. We're now building a lot of automations where the entry point is a conversational agent in Teams, not a button on a form. Power Automate flows are the action layer for those agents. If you're heading toward AI-driven automation rather than just classic RPA, the Microsoft stack is hard to beat.
We've written more on Power Automate vs custom chatbots and the broader AI process automation story if you want to see how this fits together.
Power Automate isn't perfect. The desktop automation product is genuinely behind UiPath in reliability for complex desktop work. The error handling story for cloud flows is still weaker than UiPath's. And the governance model in Power Platform requires real discipline or it becomes a sprawling mess of citizen-developed flows that no one owns.
But for 70-80% of Australian mid-market work, these problems are manageable, and the cost savings are real.
When UiPath is genuinely the better choice
We tell clients to pick UiPath when:
They have serious volume of unattended automation against legacy systems. If you're running 200+ bots that process work against AS/400 green-screens, SAP GUI, custom Win32 applications, and PDFs all day, UiPath is more reliable. The desktop automation engine has had longer to mature, and the orchestrator handles failure modes better at scale.
They need first-class document understanding for high-volume work. UiPath Document Understanding handles complex semi-structured documents (invoices, purchase orders, claim forms) more accurately out of the box than AI Builder. For an insurance or finance shop processing 100,000+ documents a month, this matters.
They have an existing UiPath investment that works. We don't rip out working software. If you have 50+ production UiPath automations with proper governance and a CoE running, switching to Power Automate is probably more expensive than it's worth.
They're a large enterprise with a dedicated automation team. UiPath's tooling assumes professional developers. The studio is more powerful than Power Automate Desktop. The Orchestrator gives you more control. If you have a team of 5-15 dedicated RPA developers, the additional capability pays for itself.
The big downside of UiPath is the cost. The licensing is heavy, the implementation services are expensive, and the talent market in Australia is small enough that experienced UiPath developers command premium rates. If you can't get the volume of automations up high enough to justify the fixed costs, the unit economics don't work.
When Automation Anywhere is the right pick (rarely)
I'll be honest. We see Automation Anywhere less and less in Australia. The vendor was a strong player five years ago and has been losing ground steadily.
Where they still win is in organisations that committed to Automation Anywhere early, have a working A360 estate, and have a Centre of Excellence built around the platform. In that case, switching is rarely worth the disruption.
We also see Automation Anywhere stay in play in a few large Australian banks and financial services organisations where existing enterprise agreements include Automation Anywhere alongside other tools. Even there, new automation work is increasingly going to Power Automate or UiPath rather than Automation Anywhere.
If you're starting fresh in 2026, we'd struggle to recommend Automation Anywhere over the other two. Not because it's a bad product, but because the product roadmap and partner ecosystem in Australia is weaker than the alternatives.
The decision framework we actually use with clients
When a client asks us which RPA tool to pick, we walk them through these questions.
Are you a Microsoft 365 organisation with E3 or E5 licensing? If yes, Power Automate is the default. You need a strong reason to pick something else.
Do you have an existing investment in one of these tools with working automations in production? If yes, the cost of switching is rarely justified. Keep what you have, fix what's broken, and build new work on the same platform unless there's a strategic reason to change.
Is your automation portfolio dominated by complex desktop or legacy system work? If yes, lean UiPath. The desktop automation reliability gap is real for serious workloads.
Is your automation portfolio dominated by API-to-API integration and lightweight workflow? If yes, Power Automate. The connector library is unmatched.
Do you need to deploy at very large scale (500+ bots)? UiPath. The orchestration story is the most mature.
Are you trying to enable citizen developers as part of a broader Power Platform strategy? Power Automate. The governance and citizen development story is the strongest.
Is your automation strategy increasingly converging with AI and agents? Lean Power Automate, because the Copilot Studio integration is genuinely ahead of the competition right now.
What people get wrong about RPA tool selection
A few misconceptions worth addressing.
"We'll pick the most powerful tool to future-proof ourselves." Pick the right tool for the work you have. The most powerful tool you don't fully use is just expense. We've seen organisations buy UiPath because it was the "Gartner leader" and then never use 80% of the capability.
"Cheaper tools are weaker tools." Not true with Power Automate. The capability gap has closed dramatically over the last three years. There are still gaps, but for most workloads, Power Automate is competitive.
"We need to standardise on one tool." Single-tool environments are easier to govern, but if you have valid reasons to use two (for example, UiPath for legacy desktop work and Power Automate for cloud-first workflow), that's defensible. The cost of standardisation has to be lower than the cost of maintaining two estates.
"RPA is the same as AI." It isn't. Classic RPA is rules-based automation of UI interactions. AI agents are something different. The vendors are blurring the lines because they want to sell both, but the technical and operational requirements are different. Read our piece on going beyond RPA with AI process automation for more on this.
What an honest implementation actually costs
For an Australian mid-market organisation starting a new RPA program, here's what we typically quote.
A 12-week pilot to deliver 5-8 production automations using Power Automate runs AUD $80,000 to $150,000 in consulting fees, plus AUD $20,000-$40,000 in annual licensing. The same scope on UiPath runs AUD $150,000-$250,000 in consulting and AUD $80,000-$150,000 in licensing.
A full enterprise program to deliver 30-50 automations over a year with a CoE structure runs AUD $400,000-$800,000 on Power Automate and AUD $800,000-$1,500,000 on UiPath, depending on complexity.
These numbers include real engineering work, governance, change management, and handover. They don't include the half-baked "we'll automate everything in 6 weeks" pitches you hear at the top end of town.
When to bring in a consultant
If you've already picked a tool and you have an internal team that can build automations, you might not need consulting help for the build itself. Where consulting actually adds value is in three places.
The first is the tool selection decision itself. We do a lot of these reviews and they're harder than they look. The vendors all sound the same in a sales pitch.
The second is the program design. RPA programs fail more often than they succeed, and the failure mode is almost always governance, not technology. Setting up a CoE, defining intake processes, getting business buy-in, and structuring the team are all work that internal staff struggle with because they don't have a comparison point.
The third is the high-complexity automations that need experienced engineers. The 80% case can be done internally. The 20% with complex error handling, legacy system interaction, and AI integration usually benefits from a hand from people who've done it before.
Our Power Automate consultants team in Australia handles all three. We also do broader AI automation consulting work if your roadmap is heading from RPA into AI agents, which most are.
If you want a no-strings second opinion on which RPA tool fits your situation, get in touch through the contact page. We do an initial assessment at no cost. You'll get an honest answer, even if the answer is "you should pick UiPath, not us."