Agentic Index

Celonis vs UiPath (2026)

Celonis and UiPath are compared constantly but do different jobs: Celonis is process intelligence, mining your systems to show where work actually breaks, sold enterprise only on multi year contracts with no public pricing (one unverified third party estimate put a one year subscription near thirty thousand dollars), while UiPath is automation execution, the robots and agents that then do the work, licensed by consumption and role through Automation Cloud or Automation Suite. Many enterprises run both: Celonis to find and prioritize the problems, UiPath to automate the fixes. If you must pick a starting point, start where your pain is: visibility or execution.

At a glance Celonis UiPath
Category Enterprise operations agent Enterprise operations agent
Entry price Contact sales; no public pricing. Enterprise, multi year contracts. Contact sales (Autopilot included; free tier to start)
Free / trial Free academic and trial tiers exist historically; enterprise platform is quote based Free Automation Cloud community tier and free training; Autopilot for everyone announced free to start
Pricing confidence contact only contact only
Feature
U
UiPath
Action & orchestration

Integrations & Tool Calling

Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools.

Full / Explicit Full / Explicit

Workflow Orchestration

Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps.

Full / Explicit Full / Explicit

Triggers & Channel Coverage

How agents wake up and where they work: schedules, webhooks, message events, CRM events, inbox events, chat, email, voice, and collaboration tools.

Full / Explicit Full / Explicit
Knowledge & context

Knowledge Grounding & RAG

Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers.

Full / Explicit Full / Explicit

Memory & State Persistence

Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer.

Partial Full / Explicit
Control & trust

Human Oversight & Guardrails

Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls.

Full / Explicit Full / Explicit

Security, Identity & Governance

RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy.

Full / Explicit Full / Explicit

Observability & Auditability

Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior.

Full / Explicit Full / Explicit

Deployment & Data Residency

Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting.

Partial Full / Explicit
Solution readiness

Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs

Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value.

Full / Explicit Full / Explicit
Platform extensibility

Model Flexibility & Routing

Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys.

Full / Explicit Full / Explicit

APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility

Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems.

Full / Explicit Full / Explicit

Testing, Debugging & Optimization

Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment.

Partial Full / Explicit
Specialist automation

Browser & Computer Use

Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone.

No / Not documented Partial

Pricing snapshot

Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.

Pricing
U
UiPath

Entry price

Lowest public entry point

Contact sales; no public pricing. Enterprise, multi year contracts. Contact sales (Autopilot included; free tier to start)

Pricing confidence

How public the numbers are

Contact only Contact only

Billing

Primary billing axis

not disclosed; enterprise platform subscription consumption and role (robots, agents, platform units)

Variable cost

Workload / overage exposure

Medium variable cost High variable cost

Free tier / trial

Try before you buy

No free tier
Free tierTrial

Buying motion

Self-serve vs sales call

Sales call Sales call

Choose Celonis if

  • You do not yet know where your processes leak time and money; visibility comes first.
  • Process mining evidence is how you will build the business case for automation.
  • Continuous process monitoring across ERP and core systems is the standing need.

Choose UiPath if

  • You already know what to automate and need execution capacity now.
  • A developer ecosystem for building and maintaining automations matters most.
  • Agentic features layered on your existing automation estate is the near term win.

Contact us

Found a vendor we missed? Have feedback on the index? We'd love to hear from you.