UiPath vs IBM RPA: 14 Features Compared in 2025

A comparison of IBM RPA and UiPath will be conducted across 14 categories. To minimize biases and ensure a user-driven benchmarking of the features, the winner of each category will be determined by the RPA platform with the highest number of positive user reviews.

In addition, we will share insights from our RPA tools benchmark tests to provide a more comprehensive perspective on how these platforms perform in real-world scenarios:

1. Cost

The RPA tool that you pick should be cost-effective. IBM’s platform starter pack costs $989 compared to UiPath’s $420.

So, IBM’s software seems to cost more. But IBM offers more licenses. And users criticize UiPath’s high and flat annual costs (Review 1). Licenses are important because to use each tool to automate a process, you need a valid license, like driving a car. And if you’re in an industry with lots of rule-based, mature, automatable processes, you would need a lot of licenses.

UiPath’s high licensing costs make their services unattainable for an organization with a limited budget (Review 2).

In comparison, the licensing rate for the IBM RPA platform is calculated per usage capacity, making their pricing more flexible and tailored to business needs (Review 3).

So, in the long run, UiPath is more cost-effective. And UiPath offers a better value for the price (Review 4).

2. Cognitive capability

Cognitive capabilities improve the performance of the bots as they repeatedly interact with data.

UiPath has higher scores when it comes to cognitive capability. These tools power intelligent process automation with limited human intervention (Review 5).

UiPath is stronger in cognitive capabilities than IBM RPA, especially in AI-enabled process automation and tasks that do not require human intervention (Review 6).

3. Debugging capability

Debugging is used in RPA testing to eliminate implementation issues. Performance and scalability are the biggest deployment issues for businesses. Suboptimal debugging lowers process efficiency, and delays deployment and roll-out.

According to our benchmarks, UiPath provides a more robust debugging capability. UiPath’s platform includes comprehensive debugging tools that allow users to identify and resolve issues efficiently, improving overall process flow and reducing deployment delays. (Review 7).

4. OCR functionality

OCR software robots enable intelligent reading, data extraction, and data transfer (ETL) from all the customers’ documents onto pre-built templates without human error and human intervention. Especially if the RPA platform is deployed in an industry that deals with lots of contracts and documents, OCR and NLP features are important.

IBM intelligent reading is adequate, but it can’t understand foreign languages in images and PDFs, which limits its usability in international organizations that deal with languages other than English (Review 8).

UiPath’s software robots can sometimes be inaccurate. Inaccurate data entry is costly, and an organization would implement an RPA solution to reduce error-related costs, not compound them (Review 9).

But in general, there is more user satisfaction for UiPath than for IBM (Review 10). And although IBM has advanced data extraction and feeding features, such as IBM data cap, UiPath gets the point here because of higher user review counts.

5. Process mining integration

We’ve looked at UiPath’s process mining integration vs IBM’s before. Process mining deployment is important in an RPA platform because it shows the automation-readiness and a high-level view of your systems and processes.

This allows the company to start automating the systems that can benefit the most from automation, which translates to a faster ROI.

What we found was that the IBM robotic process automation tool had better process mining support, number of users, integration, and features, such as process analysis, process notation, etc (Review 11).

6. Customer support

According to Gartner, a positive customer experience convinces 82% of existing clients to repurchase the product. And because changing vendors isn’t easy/cheap, your partnership with a vendor should be viewed as a long-term project.

In Gartner’s reviews, IBM’s digital business automation solution and UiPath offer almost the same level of customer support.

But on G2, IBM in comparison to UiPath, is significantly rated higher, 9.2 vs. 8.8. This implies that the processing of user complaints, reach-outs, and ticket resolution is done faster and more efficiently with IBM.

7. Ease of Setup/Deployment

Ease of use and ease of setup/deployment significantly affect customer satisfaction. The easier and quicker pilots are taken live, the faster the business needs are automated and digital transformation is achieved.

That is more important especially if the organization is deploying multiple attended bots/unattended bots for automating different business processes. The ease of use, setup, and implementation is higher for the IBM platform. This enables their adopters to automate their repetitive tasks quicker (Review 14).

The other downside is that the UiPath platform sometimes receives too many version updates, which decreases its usability and efficiency (Review 15).

8. No-code functionality

Modern RPA tools all claim to have decent no-code software that enables the user to build multiple bots with little to no programming knowledge. Both IBM RPA and UiPath platforms rank high in this category.

So in deployment, building, and processing, features such as screen recording, drag and drop interface, and prebuilt templates facilitate bots creation.

Both RPA platforms rank high in the no-code category/ease of bot creation. However, IBM RPA ultimately beats UiPath on all factors related to bot building (Review 16). Especially for small businesses that cannot afford the services of RPA developers, a no-code tool in a solution can be the most important factor in choosing a vendor.

9. Bot management

Bot management in an RPA platform refers to:

• Bot scheduling
• Attended and unattended automation features
• Visible dashboard for process monitoring and analytics
• Robust rules governance, visible audit logs, and data security features which lower operational and compliance risk

In these areas, IBM robotic process automation delivers a better performance than UiPath (Review 17). So for instance, a user can run their attended bots better on IBM software or can take over from them more efficiently, when needed.

10. Scalability

Scalability enables the RPA platform to take on additional processes or deal with large amounts of data more easily. A scalable RPA platform is important because it enables the automation of more business processes.

The majority of UiPath RPA platform user base is composed of companies with +1000 employees. In comparison, IBM users are mainly small businesses with 50 employees or less.

This is a token that UiPath has a stronger scalability power for automating more of the existing processes (Review 18).

11. Language support

With advancements in translating models, language barriers should no longer be a barrier to automation. IBM RPA can support 10 languages: English, German, Italian, Chinese, French, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese and Korean.

In comparison, UiPath’s platform supports 12 languages: English, French, Japanese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, German, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish. So if your IT team is composed of a workforce not comfortable with English on the application interface, the IBM robotic process automation platform gives them more options.

12. Pre-Built Templates

When it comes to getting started quickly with RPA, Templates answer a variety of use cases, from basic tasks like data extraction to more complex workflows.

According to our benchmark tests, UiPath’s templates are versatile. In contrast, although IBM RPA offers templates, they are generally fewer and less diverse than those offered by UiPath.

13. Prompt to Automation

Prompt to Automation feature significantly simplifies the automation process, especially for those without coding expertise. It enables users to quickly automate business processes by just specifying the trigger event and the desired action, all without needing to dive deep into complex configurations or programming.

UiPath has a prompt automation system that works well according to our benchmarks (Review 20).

In contrast, IBM RPA lacks a similar “Prompt to Automation” feature which requires more manual effort.

14. OS support

With more offices today using Mac than before, the RPA platform should work on macOS and Windows. UiPath doesn’t offer native macOS support.

IBM automation, too, doesn’t natively have macOS integration. We tried both IBM and UiPath on a Mac computer to check the experience. IBM offers its service on a virtual, cloud-based Windows desktop.

In comparison, the UiPath service is offered via a virtualization of UiPath Studio on Mac (Review 21). We found theirs harder to set up on Mac. But because no user mentioned that, we will not count it in our performance assessment.

Disclaimer

If we say, “The user is happy with vendor X,” that’s not true for all customers. This means that based on the reviews we could read across multiple platforms in a limited time, we generally saw Vendor X’s customers saying they were happy.

Or if we say, “Vendor Y can improve its Z capability,” we are talking on behalf of Vendor Y’s adopters. We can’t independently test all functionalities. It would depend on the organization, industry, use case, etc.

For more on RPA vendors

To learn more about other RPA vendors comparison articles, read:

• Top 3 Blue Prism Alternatives According to Business Users
• 3 Appian Alternatives Suitable For Larger Companies
• Top 4 Power Automate Alternatives for Process Automation

If you are ready to invest in RPA software, we have a data-driven list of RPA vendors prepared.

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