Agentic Index
ServiceNow vs UiPath (2026)
Both vendors last verified
ServiceNow and UiPath both run AI agents at enterprise scale, and they come at agents from different places. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
ServiceNow builds agents into the workflow platform that already runs IT, HR, customer service and security operations, so agents act where the ticket and the record already live. Out of the box agents and the Autonomous Workforce take on whole jobs, any tool can run supervised so a person approves the action first, and Action Fabric lets Claude, ChatGPT or another outside agent run governed ServiceNow actions over MCP and A2A. UiPath comes from robotic process automation, so its agents work alongside robots and people across any system, including old applications with no API, where robots drive the screen and Healing Agent recovers when an interface changes. Its agents escalate to a person through Action Center, are scored against evaluation sets before release, and can be built with coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex, which work natively with UiPath. Automation Suite runs the whole platform on your own premises. ServiceNow includes AI in every product, in tiers quoted through sales, while UiPath publishes a free Community plan and Basic from $25 a month, with Standard and Enterprise quoted. Choose ServiceNow when the work is already a ticket or a record in a process it owns. Choose UiPath when the work crosses systems, including ones only a screen can reach.
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. ServiceNow and UiPath are each graded against the same 14 capability Agentic Index taxonomy, from the vendor's own public materials under the Agentic Index verification standard, alongside 1,084 researched vendors. No vendor pays for placement and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
Choose ServiceNow if
- Your IT, HR, customer service or security work already runs as records in ServiceNow.
- Each tool an agent uses should run supervised or autonomously, set tool by tool.
- Outside agents such as Claude or ChatGPT should run governed actions in your workflows.
- Teams of AI specialists should take on whole jobs from start to finish.
- You want AI included in the products you buy, not a separate purchase.
Choose UiPath if
- Your work crosses many systems, including legacy applications with no API.
- Agents, robots and people should run together in one orchestrated process.
- Agents should escalate to a person for validation or approval, and be scored against evaluation sets before release.
- The platform has to run on your own premises, or your developers build with Claude Code, Cursor or Codex.
- You want to start free or from $25 a month before talking to sales.
| Feature | S ServiceNow |
U UiPath |
|---|---|---|
| Action & orchestration | ||
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Integrations & Tool Calling Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools. |
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ServiceNowIntegrations & Tool Calling Agents act through tools added in the guided setup, such as catalog items, and reach outside systems as an MCP client through Action Fabric, which ServiceNow describes as MCP server, MCP client and A2A together, with A2A used to orchestrate multiple systems and processes. Sourceservicenow.com/platform/action-fabric.htmlread 2026-09-18 |
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UiPathIntegrations & Tool Calling Tools connect an agent's reasoning to real actions, giving it access to data in business applications and the ability to execute functions, and an agent can only act through tools it has been explicitly granted, described in the system prompt with when to use them. Integration Service adds an MCP Connector that lets workflows call tools from any compatible MCP server as a native activity, Database Hub to read and write systems such as SQL Server, Oracle and Databricks without custom code, and Relay to reach on premises systems from cloud automations. Sourcedocs.uipath.com/agents (agent tools) and uipath.com/newsroom/uipath-platform-updates-fusionread 2026-10-24 |
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Workflow Orchestration Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps. |
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ServiceNowWorkflow Orchestration The Autonomous Workforce deploys AI specialists that do whole jobs and orchestrate teams of AI agents to deliver outcomes from start to finish. Action Fabric uses the A2A protocol for complex multi agent workflows across systems and processes. Sourceservicenow.com/products/ai-agents.htmlread 2026-09-18 |
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UiPathWorkflow Orchestration UiPath orchestrates agents of every origin, UiPath system agents, low-code agents, coded agents and external agents, inside one platform, where agents work alongside activities, other agents, apps, human tasks and Maestro for business process orchestration, and are managed, scheduled and monitored through Orchestrator. Sourcedocs.uipath.com/agents/automation-cloud/latest/user-guide/agent-capabilities-in-the-uipath-platform.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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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. |
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ServiceNowTriggers & Channel Coverage In the guided setup, an administrator adds triggers that run the AI agent automatically when certain conditions are met, so the agent starts when an event occurs rather than only in chat. Agents also work conversationally through the ServiceNow Otto panel and Virtual Agent. Sourceraw.githubusercontent.com/servicenow/servicenowdocs/australia/markdown/intelligent-experiences/add-trigger-aia.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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UiPathTriggers & Channel Coverage Agents deploy as processes in Orchestrator, which schedules and launches jobs through time triggers at regular intervals and queue triggers that start the automation whenever new items are added to a queue, so agents run without anyone asking. Sourcedocs.uipath.com/orchestrator/automation-cloud/latest/user-guide/about-triggers.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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| Knowledge & context | ||
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Knowledge Grounding & RAG Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers. |
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ServiceNowKnowledge Grounding & RAG When an AI agent is set up, tools and the customer's own information are added to it, including Knowledge Graphs that give the agent the relationships between real world entities to improve its outputs, for example a Knowledge Graph added to an approval agent. New knowledge is added this way, without retraining the model. Sourceraw.githubusercontent.com/servicenow/servicenowdocs/australia/markdown/intelligent-experiences/add-tool-aia.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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UiPathKnowledge Grounding & RAG An index added as agent context gives the agent access to a permissioned knowledge base of the customer's own content, and the builder configures the search strategy and scope that decide what the agent retrieves. Sourcedocs.uipath.com/agents/automation-cloud/latest/user-guide/agent-contexts.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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Memory & State Persistence Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer. |
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ServiceNowMemory & State Persistence AI agents keep a long term memory of user specific facts and preferences. When an agent runs, an LLM checks the interaction for facts that match the agent's configured memory categories and stores them as semantic memory records in the AI Agent Memories table, scoped to the user and category and kept apart from business data. Categories such as software preferences, workplace context and communication style are defined globally and mapped to individual agents, and agents can also learn from the outcomes of past executions. Administrators decide whether agents may retain user information, apply it in conversations or learn from past runs, and the stored facts can be viewed by user and agent. How long memories are kept, and how one user's memories are deleted, is not stated. Sourceservicenow.com/docs long term memory categories and set up long term memoryread 2026-10-25 |
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UiPathMemory & State Persistence Agent memory, in preview, keeps memory spaces that several agents can share. Episodic memory holds the inputs, outputs and outcomes of past cases with the feedback attached to them, and items enter it when a person promotes feedback from an agent run. Escalation memory stores how a person resolved an escalation in Action Center. Before each run a recall step embeds the current inputs, finds similar items and adds them to the agent's context as examples, and before raising an escalation the agent checks for a matching resolution. Memory items can be inspected, edited and deleted from the Memory spaces tab. Nothing is written to memory by the agent on its own, and no retention period or expiry is stated. Sourcedocs.uipath.com agents user guide, agent memoryread 2026-10-25 |
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| Control & trust | ||
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Human Oversight & Guardrails Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls. |
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ServiceNowHuman Oversight & Guardrails Each tool an AI agent uses can be set to run in supervised execution mode, chosen as the execution mode when the tool is added in the guided setup, so a person oversees the tool's actions and the potential impact of an agent not executing as expected is contained, while other tools run autonomously. The mode is set per tool, so low risk and high risk actions can run under different levels of autonomy, and AI Agent Studio also sets guardrails on each agent. Sourceraw.githubusercontent.com/servicenow/servicenowdocs/australia/markdown/intelligent-experiences/add-tool-aia.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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UiPathHuman Oversight & Guardrails Escalations, powered by Action apps in Action Center, let a developer have the agent validate business details with a person before running a tool, request approval, or ask for manual assistance on a business exception. Each escalation carries a prompt that tells the agent when to raise it, and is routed to a specific user, to the least-loaded member of a group, to all group members, or round robin. Runtime Checker validates agent behavior against defined policies while the agent is running, not only when it was built, and an LLM as judge guardrail evaluates outputs against custom criteria. Sourcedocs.uipath.com/agents (agent escalations) and uipath.com/newsroom/uipath-platform-updates-fusionread 2026-10-24 |
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Security, Identity & Governance RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy. |
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ServiceNowSecurity, Identity & Governance ServiceNow's Trust and Compliance Center lists FedRAMP authorization for its Government Community Cloud. Platform controls include SAML 2.0 single sign on, including SSO across multiple providers, role based multi factor authentication and access control, and agents run as dedicated service accounts with scoped roles. Sourceservicenow.com/company/trust.htmlread 2026-09-18 |
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UiPathSecurity, Identity & Governance UiPath's trust portal publishes a SOC 2 Type 2 report, an ISO 27001 certificate, a HITRUST certificate, C5, IRAP, HIPAA and Spain's ENS certificate of conformity. The customer-facing controls on the agent layer are Automation Ops policies applied through the AI Trust Layer at tenant level, which control whether users can access and use agents across the organization. Sourcetrust.uipath.comread 2026-09-18 |
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Observability & Auditability Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior. |
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ServiceNowObservability & Auditability Agent runs are recorded as sessions, traces and spans kept for analysis, and the customer sets the retention. Session, trace and span data is kept for 30 days by default, and a system administrator can shorten the window or stop retaining trace data for data minimization requirements, and choose whether the data stays available for analysis. AI agents using desktop actions also report each action they take back to the user in the ServiceNow Otto panel. Sourceraw.githubusercontent.com/servicenow/servicenowdocs/australia/markdown/intelligent-experiences/mon-ai-configure-trace-retention.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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UiPathObservability & Auditability Every agent run leaves a trace, a detailed record of the steps taken, data processed, decisions made and results generated, with timestamps, errors, inputs and outputs, so a failed tool call can be inspected at the exact step with its inputs, outputs and error. UiPath positions traces for debugging, performance analysis of latency, errors and throughput, and compliance and auditing as a verifiable record of what the agent did, when and how. Sourcedocs.uipath.com/agents/automation-cloud/latest/user-guide/agent-traces.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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Deployment & Data Residency Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting. |
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ServiceNowDeployment & Data Residency ServiceNow offers a separate environment for regulated customers, the Government Community Cloud with FedRAMP, alongside its standard cloud, and customers that need a government authorized boundary run there. Sourceservicenow.com/company/trust.htmlread 2026-09-18 |
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UiPathDeployment & Data Residency UiPath comes in two delivery models, Automation Cloud, its cloud service, and Automation Suite, which runs the platform on the customer's own premises, each with its own documentation set. Automation Suite now runs on Linux with the full agentic AI stack, so agents, robots and people work inside infrastructure the enterprise already operates. Sourcedocs.uipath.com/llms.txt and uipath.com/newsroom/uipath-platform-updates-fusionread 2026-10-24 |
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| Solution readiness | ||
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Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value. |
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ServiceNowPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Buyers deploy out of the box AI agents or build their own, and ServiceNow names ready made agents across domains, such as change request planning, change template suggestion, supplier approval, asset evaluation and post incident review agents. Sourceservicenow.com/products/ai-agents.htmlread 2026-09-18 |
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UiPathPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs UiPath ships agent templates, available on the Agents page in Automation Cloud and in UiPath Marketplace, each preconfigured for a specific task with a system prompt, activity tools with descriptions and starter evaluation sets, needing only minimum configuration to run and open to modification. Sourcedocs.uipath.com/agents/automation-cloud/latest/user-guide/using-agent-templates.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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| Platform extensibility | ||
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Model Flexibility & Routing Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys. |
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ServiceNowModel Flexibility & Routing An administrator chooses the model provider for AI agents. In AI Agent Studio settings, the model provider tab leads to AI Admin Hub, where the default provider is selected from Now LLM Service, AWS Claude, Azure OpenAI and Google Gemini, and models can be tested in the skill kit before switching. ServiceNow notes that agents should be retested after the global model changes, and that in some regions using a different provider requires consent. Sourceraw.githubusercontent.com/servicenow/servicenowdocs/australia/markdown/intelligent-experiences/select-aia-llm.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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UiPathModel Flexibility & Routing The builder chooses the model for each agent at design time and refines that choice once evaluations show how different models perform on accuracy, stability, speed and cost, and a custom model can be configured for Context Grounding through the admin guide's LLM configuration. Sourcedocs.uipath.com/agents/automation-cloud/latest/user-guide/choosing-the-best-model-for-your-agent.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems. |
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ServiceNowAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Action Fabric lets any AI agent, including Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, execute governed ServiceNow actions headlessly through MCP, A2A and traditional protocols. The MCP Server Console is a central control plane for exposing ServiceNow resources to external AI agents with native governance, and ServiceNow can also act as a secondary agent over A2A. Sourceservicenow.com/platform/action-fabric.htmlread 2026-09-18 |
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UiPathAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility With a UiPath SDK, developers build coded agents in their own IDE, package them and deploy them to Orchestrator as standard packages, where they run as processes under the same governance as other automations, and they can connect the project to Studio Web for debugging, evaluation and publishing. Sourcedocs.uipath.com/agents/automation-cloud/latest/user-guide/about-coded-agents.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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Testing, Debugging & Optimization Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment. |
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ServiceNowTesting, Debugging & Optimization Agentic evaluations run AI agents and agentic workflows against defined datasets to verify quality before deployment. Each run scores performance, identifies issues and suggests optimizations, with custom metrics added through a parser tool and a results page for analysis. Sourceraw.githubusercontent.com/servicenow/servicenowdocs/australia/markdown/intelligent-experiences/agentic-evals.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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UiPathTesting, Debugging & Optimization Evaluations check agents against defined cases before and during release. An evaluation pairs an input with an evaluator that checks the agent's output or trajectory against the expected result, evaluation sets group evaluations, and each run produces a score from 0 to 100 with traces of the evaluation runs to diagnose failures and re-run. Evaluations can be created from correct past runs, and evaluation results guide model choice. Sourcedocs.uipath.com/agents/automation-cloud/latest/user-guide/agent-evaluations.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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| Specialist automation | ||
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Browser & Computer Use Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone. |
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ServiceNowBrowser & Computer Use With AI Desktop Actions, an agent triggered from the ServiceNow Otto panel performs tasks on an external website or web application, opening the site in a separate browser tab, carrying out the steps and reporting its actions back in the panel, through the ServiceNow Web Automation Chrome extension connected to the instance. Adaptive desktop actions handle interactions beyond custom UI, including triple-click, double-click, right-click, native prompts, dialogues and alerts, administrators configure the allowed websites, and the agent runs as a dedicated service account. Sourceraw.githubusercontent.com/servicenow/servicenowdocs/australia/markdown/intelligent-experiences/na-ai-wa-access-using-nap.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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UiPathBrowser & Computer Use Robots operate real application interfaces in attended and unattended automation, and Healing Agent autonomously detects and recovers from UI automation failures caused by changing interfaces, network throughput and evolving UI frameworks, using just-in-time analysis of the automation to choose a recovery strategy. Sourcedocs.uipath.com/agents/automation-cloud/latest/user-guide-ha/what-is-healing-agent.mdread 2026-09-18 |
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Pricing snapshot
Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.
| Pricing | S ServiceNow |
U UiPath |
|---|---|---|
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Entry price Lowest public entry point |
No public price. AI is included in every ServiceNow product, in tiers quoted through enterprise sales. | Basic starts at $25 per month, and Standard and Enterprise are quoted by sales. The Community plan is free, and Autopilot is included in the platform license. |
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Pricing confidence How public the numbers are |
Contact only | Public, partial |
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Billing Primary billing axis |
Product and package subscriptions sold through enterprise sales, with AI included in each product and tiered from AI assistance to fully autonomous operations. | Consumption and role based licensing, across robots, agents and platform units. |
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Variable cost Workload / overage exposure |
High variable cost | High variable cost |
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Free tier / trial Try before you buy |
No free tierTrial
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Free tierTrial
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Buying motion Self-serve vs sales call |
Sales call | Sales call |
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Pricing verified When this pricing was last checked |
Product updates
Newest first, each linked to its source.
ServiceNow
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· Security / enterprise
ServiceNow's August and September updates to AI Control Tower add an AI Asset Inventory with domain separation, integrations for governance and monitoring, and expanded oversight features.
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· Agent capability
ServiceNow introduced AI Specialists, a new agentic capability designed to autonomously handle end-to-end workflows such as incident resolution.
Source -
· Human approval / guardrails
ServiceNow rebranded Now Assist for Creator to ServiceNow Otto for Creator and introduced several updates to its Build Agent.
Source
UiPath
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· Workflow orchestration
Building Maestro BPMN processes with a coding agent is now in public preview in UiPath for Coding Agents.
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· Human approval / guardrails
Administrators can now bring their own safety vendor into UiPath's AI Trust Layer, in preview, so agent guardrails run under the customer's own vendor agreement and region.
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· Agent capability
UiPath announced the general availability of Autopilot as a coding agent within Studio Desktop STS.
Source
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