RPA Pricing: Comparison of Leading RPA Vendors’ Fees in 2023 (2023)

Digital transformation is critical for a modern enterprise, and RPA is one of the most common automation tools enabling it. However, the TCO of running RPA bots can be complex to calculate. That’s because RPA software costs depend on the:

• Environment (e.g. cloud vs on-premise),
• Number of bots,
• Type of bots,
• Number of users,
• Frequency of usage

If you forget to take the full cost base into account, you run the risk of:

• Your project’s ROI being significantly different
• Ending up doing projects with limited ROI because you miscalculated the costs

Most RPA vendors, like most B2B tech vendors, are not transparent about their RPA pricing structure and only provide pricing details after multiple sales calls.

We put together all the relevant information on RPA pricing to save you time & effort.

In this article, we are sharing estimates of what you should expect to pay to get up and running with RPA bots. Please note that these are pricing for starter packages targeted at Small and Medium Businesses (SMEs). These prices are less relevant for:

• Enterprises that can earn significant volume discounts
• Individual users that can rely on the limited but free community editions

Note that we sorted the vendors by the complexity of their pricing models, starting from the simplest ones.

IBM

IBM’s cloud-based RPA tool is priced at $908/month. It includes:

• Attended bots
• Unattended bots
• An RPA Studio for bot development
• OCR functionality
• IVA (interactive virtual agent)

How IBM’s pricing scales and whether it depends on the number of bots, licenses, studio, or other factors was not shared publicly.

Automation Anywhere

Automation Anywhere’s Cloud Starter Pack is their offering for small businesses. Its pricing depends onthe:

• Number of bots
• Number of bot utility (e.g. bot creator and control room) licenses

The Cloud Starter pack is priced at $750/month, for 1 bot creator, 1 control room, and one unattended bot runner. Each additional unattended bot is $500/month, and each attended bot is $125/month.

UiPath RPA

UiPath’s pricing depends on the:

• Number of bots
• Level of support
• Number of bot utility licenses which include items like
  • Action Center for human-in-the-loop
  • Studio or Studio X for bot building

UiPath offers three packages for SMEs:

1. Automation Developer comes with 1 attended robot and 1 action center for $420/month
2. Unattended Automation comes with 1 attended and 1 unattended robot and 1 action center for $1,380/month
3. Automation Team comes with 1 unattended robot, 4 attended robots, and 4 action centers for $1,930/month

Explore UiPath’s 3 pricing models in more details.

Appian

Appian’s standard platform contains RPA, IDP (Intelligent Document Processing), Smart Services, AI, process mining, and Business Rules.

Its pricing depends on:

• The number of developers
• The number of end-users
• Frequency of usage
• Mode of usage (e.g. only input providing users pay less)

Appian manages these pricing dimensions by providing 3 user levels:

1. Standard package users have “admin access, development capabilities, and normal day-to-day functions.” for $75/user/month.
2. Infrequent package users can have 3 or fewer, 24-hour sessions/month for $9/user/month
3. Input-only package users are internal or external users with the ability to submit forms/requests to the application for $2/user/month

Microsoft’s Power Automate (PA)

Microsoft PA’s pricing depends on:

• Number of developers (not only active developer users but also those who interact with the bots)
• Number of end-users
• Number of users whose data is being accessed by the bot
• Number of bots (i.e. flows in Microsoft lingo) but this only applied to unattended bots
• Use of unattended bots
• Use of modules (e.g. AI Builder)
• Use of premium connectors (these are connectors to various systems like Adobe Creative Cloud

If you want to get into the details, here’s a tabular summary view from Microsoft’s Power Platform Licensing Guide:

Pricing for different companies

A table of prices for different sizes of companies having different numbers of bots can make it easier for you to get an idea of the license costs.

Note that we’ve made the following assumptions for each vendor:

* Buying 10x of the starter package provides 10x developer seats.

** $750 + 9 x $500 + 10 x $125

*** We assumed that all employees are either users or their data needs to be accessed by bots, therefore all employees require licenses. Therefore volume is based on the total number of employees which equals developers plus end users. Price per user equals $40/month for attended RPA and $150/month for unattended RPA add-on. We have 2 cases to highlight extreme points here: Case 1: End-users only use attended RPA. Case 2: All end users either need to use or their data needs to be processed by unattended RPA bots

**** Appian’s pricing model has a policy of a minimum of 100 users.

***** Appian has 3 classes of users and the distribution of users needs to be estimated to calculate pricing. In all cases, the number of developer users is provided by our assumptions. For non-developer users, we share 3 cases. Case 1: All end users use the input-only package. Case 2: 20% of users use the standard package, 30% of users use the infrequent package, and 50% of users use the input-only package. These are arbitrary assumptions but we picked them to provide a more realistic case than the other 2 cases which show the extreme points of the pricing landscape. Case 3: All end users use the standard package

Disclaimers

This exercise is based on vendors’ publicly shared pricing data. Potential sources of errors include changes in vendors’ pricing models or our misunderstanding of vendor pricing. Please highlight such issues in the comments or by reaching out to us.

Note that the pricing we outlined may change significantly with respect to:

• The number of licenses: We gave just 4 combinations of the number of employees and number of bots. Different combinations can of course lead to drastically different costs
• Enterprise discounts: For larger purchases or for purchases by large companies, volume discounts would be applied to the prices that we shared
• The pricing model was chosen by the buyer: For example, a company only looking to leverage unattended bots can use Microsoft’s Flow pricing model to have their installation priced per unattended bot and get completely different pricing compared to what we outlined above
• Distribution of attended and unattended bots: We assumed that buyers would buy an equal number of attended and unattended bots. Different distributions of bots would change prices significantly
• Use of premium components: Certain components require additional pricing. For example, in the case of Microsoft, users need to pay additional fees to use the AI Builder or premium connectors
• Operating environment: For example, cloud or on-premise. On-premise bots may be provided at a higher cost

Transparency statement

AIMultiple works with multiple RPA companies including IBM mentioned in this article.

For more on RPA

If you are interested in learning more about RPA, read:

• UiPath vs IBM RPA: Detailed Comparison of 13 Features
• 11 Steps to Successfully Implement RPA

For an in-depth look into RPA use cases and best practices, download our RPA whitepaper:

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And if you are looking to adopt an RPA solution, we have a data-driven list of RPA vendors prepared.

We can help you if you have more questions:

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