UiPath vs Blue Prism
UiPath covers attended and unattended robots, can be learned for free and has a large skills market. Blue Prism runs only unattended digital workers under central control with a full audit trail, licensed per worker per year. Banks and insurers with regulated back-office processing gravitate to Blue Prism; most other teams find UiPath faster and more flexible.
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Choose UiPath ifyou want robots that can assist people at their desks as well as run unattended, plan to hire your own developers, and value building quickly over formal process.
Choose Blue Prism ifyou are a bank, insurer or similar regulated operation automating back-office processing, and you want nothing running on anyone's laptop and every action reconstructable afterwards.
UiPath and Blue Prism side by side
| UiPath | Blue Prism | |
|---|---|---|
| Our robotic process automation rank | #2 of 13 | #7 of 13 |
| Established in | United States | United Kingdom |
| Pricing | Per user and per robot per month, published for smaller tiers; enterprise quoted | Quoted per digital worker per year |
| Free tier | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Self-hostable | — | — |
| Built for | Organisations building an in-house automation team they intend to keep | Banks and insurers automating back-office work under strict central control |
| Not for | Companies wanting one cheap robot and no platform | Teams wanting a robot to help a person during a call |
Both are reviewed in full in our robotic process automation ranking: UiPath and Blue Prism.
Where they differ
UiPath 2 · Blue Prism 1 · open 1- 01
Robots that work alongside a person
Blue Prism has no attended robots, by deliberate choice: desktop assistance, such as a robot helping an agent during a call, is simply out of scope. UiPath licenses attended seats and unattended robots separately and supports both. If any part of the plan involves automation on an employee's own screen, only one of these two can do it.
Edge: UiPath
- 02
Central control in a regulated back office
This is what Blue Prism is for. Everything is centrally scheduled and fully logged, nothing runs on a person's machine, and the separation between developer and runtime is enforced, which is why banks and insurers standardised on it. UiPath has version control, environment separation and change logs, but allows the looser attended model that Blue Prism rules out.
Edge: Blue Prism
- 03
Build speed and finding developers
Development in Blue Prism is slower and more formal, needs trained specialists and is usually partner-delivered. UiPath has a free developer edition, an active community that answers questions and a large skills market, so a team can learn it without a contract and recruit for it afterwards. For pace and independence from consultants, UiPath is clearly ahead.
Edge: UiPath
- 04
How the licence counts
Blue Prism is quoted per digital worker per year, which prices capacity and not the value delivered. UiPath charges per user and per robot, with published prices for smaller tiers, but costs climb once orchestration and unattended robots are added and frequent repackaging unsettles multi-year budgets. Blue Prism's model is rigid but stable; UiPath's is more open but shifts.
Depends on the buyer
When neither fits
If the systems expose APIs, n8n does the work without screen-driving robots at all. If you want enterprise audit controls such as credential vaulting and role separation on a cloud-native platform for a very large programme, Automation Anywhere is the closer match.
UiPath or Blue Prism: questions
3 answersWhy do banks choose Blue Prism over UiPath?
Because Blue Prism runs everything unattended under central control with a full audit trail, and enforces separation between the people who build a process and the environment that runs it.
For a regulated back office that conservative design is the point, even though development is slower than in UiPath.
Does Blue Prism or UiPath have the more active roadmap?
Our data notes that Blue Prism's roadmap has been quieter since SS&C acquired it. UiPath has the opposite issue: the platform has been renamed and repackaged often enough to make three-year budgeting awkward. One risks standing still, the other changes commercial shape frequently.
Is UiPath or Blue Prism easier to run without consultants?
UiPath. A developer can learn it on the free edition and there is a wide hiring pool, which makes an in-house team realistic.
Blue Prism needs trained specialists and is usually partner-delivered, so plan for longer dependence on outside help and insist the source stays in your own repository.