Automation and integrations decision
UiPath Basic
A narrow, personal/small-team RPA orchestration (Basic-level) can be built and self-hosted by a capable engineer, but reproducing UiPath's full platform, enterprise integrations, and ecosystem is not practical.
Visit website↗$25/mo
$300/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off80 h to build
$0/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All UiPath Basic alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Run simple automations: design a workflow, schedule/trigger it, execute on a worker (robot), and view run logs/results.
What it still won’t have
- Enterprise-grade governance, compliance, and certifications
- Scale-infrastructure and multi-region hosting managed by vendor
- Prebuilt connectors, marketplace automations, and certified integrations
- Commercial support and SLA-backed uptime
- Advanced low-code features, agentic AI capabilities, and built-in document mining
What remains hard
- Brand trust
UiPath named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Document Mining And Analytics Platforms, Q2 2026.
- Brand trust
Gallery of Customer Achievement Omega Healthcare With a steady stream of claims, Omega Healthcare turned to UiPath for relief. The result? 100% increase in productivity and 50% faster turnaround on invoices.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal self-hosted RPA orchestrator in Node.js + PostgreSQL, with a tiny React web UI. In scope: (1) a simple workflow JSON format and web designer to save workflows to Postgres, (2) a worker (Python) that pulls jobs from a Postgres queue and runs browser automations via Playwright and basic desktop steps via pywinauto/AutoHotkey, (3) an orchestrator API to enqueue/schedule jobs, view job status, and return logs, (4) basic auth (single admin user), job retries, and email/webhook alerts. Out of scope: low-code drag/drop parity with UiPath Studio, enterprise governance, multi-tenant isolation, and advanced AI/document extraction. Include error handling, health checks, and unit/integration tests for the API and worker flows.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score67
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productUiPath home
- official pricingUiPath pricing
- official productUiPath product
- open sourcesaucepleez/taskt
- open sourceShuffle/Shuffle
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
