MAIA Brain vs UiPath — 2026 Comparison Guide

Reconsidering UiPath?
Discover What Truly Intelligent Automation Looks Like. At up to 60% lower cost.

An honest, detailed comparison of two enterprise automation platforms. MAIA Brain does everything UiPath does — and goes far beyond rule-based robots. Live in weeks. No consultants required. EU AI Act ready from day one.

60%
Lower cost than
UiPath — on average
4–6
Weeks to go live
(vs 3–6 months)
500+
Enterprise integrations
out of the box
100%
EU AI Act ready &
on-premise capable

The Plain-English Answer

UiPath is a powerful rule-based automation platform — it executes defined sequences of actions with exceptional precision. But when something unexpected happens, it stops and waits for a human. MAIA Brain does all of that and goes further: it reasons through exceptions, understands unstructured documents without add-ons, learns from every task it completes, and keeps your business moving even when processes change or edge cases arise.

Because MAIA is built on a more efficient AI architecture, it uses a fraction of the computing resources required by UiPath for the same workload — which is why it can be delivered at up to 60% less cost, with setup included and no consultants required.

MAIA does everything UiPath does — and handles every situation UiPath cannot
Side-by-Side

How They Compare — In Plain English

We've taken UiPath's own advertised capabilities and compared them honestly with MAIA Brain across 13 criteria that matter to enterprise buyers. No marketing speak. No spin.

What You Need It to Do UiPath MAIA Brain
Automate repetitive daily tasks Yes Yes — and learns from each cycle
Read and understand unstructured documents (emails, PDFs, invoices) Requires paid AI add-on Built in — no add-ons needed
Handle unexpected situations without stopping Stops; waits for human intervention Reasons it out and continues
Connect existing software (SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft 365) Yes — via UiPath Marketplace Yes — 500+ integrations included
Multi-language support across European markets Partial — English primary focus Full multilingual — EN, IT, DE, FR, ES + more
Configure automation using plain language — no coding required Requires developer training Natural language process configuration
Orchestrate multiple AI agents working in parallel Limited — enterprise tier only Multi-agent orchestration — all plans
Monitor performance and self-improve over time Basic analytics dashboards only Continuous AI self-improvement
Run on your own servers (no cloud required) Enterprise tier — at significant premium On-premise available on all plans
EU AI Act & GDPR compliance — built in, not bolted on Requires extra configuration & add-ons Designed for EU AI Act from the ground up
Full decision explainability and audit trail Limited explainability Full reasoning transparency — every decision
Set up without a dedicated RPA consultant team Typically requires specialist consultants MAIA's team onboards you — included
Time to first live results 3–6 months 4–6 weeks
Cost Advantage

Significantly Less. Everything Included.

MAIA Brain's architecture is fundamentally more efficient than UiPath — it requires fewer computing resources to deliver the same or better results. That saving is passed directly to you. And unlike UiPath, where the base licence is just the starting point, MAIA includes everything you need from day one.

MAIA Brain is up to 60% cheaper than a comparable UiPath deployment

This figure accounts for base licences, consultant setup fees, AI add-on modules, compliance tooling, and on-premise deployment costs — all of which UiPath charges separately, and all of which are included in MAIA. Most customers report achieving the same or greater automation coverage at a significantly lower total investment.

MAIA Brain — Everything Included

  • Core AI automation platform — intelligent process automation that handles exceptions, not just predefined sequences
  • Full onboarding & setup support — MAIA's specialists configure and deploy your first automations
  • Cognitive document processing — reads emails, PDFs, invoices and free-form documents with no add-on required
  • EU AI Act & GDPR compliance tools — decision audit trails, explainability, and data residency controls
  • On-premise or cloud deployment — your choice, at no additional tier charge
  • 500+ enterprise integrations — SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Oracle, and hundreds more
  • Continuous learning & improvement — MAIA gets smarter over time without reprogramming
  • Ongoing support & platform updates — no separate maintenance contract required

UiPath — Common Additional Costs

  • Base licence fee — varies significantly by plan tier and number of bots
  • Specialist consultant setup fees — enterprise deployments frequently require dedicated RPA consultants
  • AI document understanding add-on — charged separately, not included in base plans
  • Compliance & governance modules — EU AI Act tooling requires additional configuration and licences
  • Enterprise on-premise tier — on-premise deployment is a premium upgrade, not standard
  • Marketplace connector licences — some integrations carry additional per-connector costs
  • Annual maintenance & support contracts — support tiers are separately priced
  • Training & certification costs — UiPath's learning academy charges for advanced training
UiPath cost items are based on publicly available information as of February 2026.
Capabilities

Everything UiPath Does — MAIA Does Better

Here's a detailed look at how MAIA Brain handles UiPath's core use cases — and goes significantly further — across every capability that matters to enterprise operations teams.

Intelligent Process Automation

UiPath bots follow defined rules and repeat them precisely. When a form changes, a layout shifts, or a step is out of sequence, the bot breaks and your team has to intervene. MAIA Brain approaches each task with understanding — it reads intent, adapts to changes in real time, and completes the work without raising an exception. Your team stops being a safety net for fragile automation scripts.

Adapts to change automatically
vs UiPath: Fails on unexpected input; requires developer fix

Cognitive Document Processing

Invoices, supplier emails, customer contracts, insurance claims, HR documents — most business data arrives in unstructured formats that traditional bots cannot read without expensive OCR and NLP add-ons. MAIA Brain understands any document type out of the box. It extracts the right information, classifies the document, routes it correctly, and initiates the next process step — all without human intervention or separate licences.

No add-ons — built in as standard
vs UiPath: Requires Document Understanding add-on at extra cost

End-to-End Process Orchestration

UiPath automates individual steps in isolation — each bot handles one part of a process. MAIA Brain orchestrates entire workflows from the first trigger to the final output, managing dependencies between steps, tracking the status of every task in flight, automatically escalating genuine exceptions to the right person with full context, and providing real-time visibility of where each process stands at any given moment.

Full end-to-end — not just individual steps
vs UiPath: Orchestrator manages bots; human coordination still required

Enterprise Integration — 500+ Connectors

Every business runs on a unique combination of software — SAP for ERP, Salesforce for CRM, Microsoft 365 for communication, Oracle for finance, custom-built systems for everything else. MAIA Brain connects to 500+ enterprise tools out of the box, with the same depth of integration that UiPath's Marketplace provides, but without per-connector licence fees. Connecting a new system takes hours, not months.

500+ connectors — all included
vs UiPath: Marketplace connectors; some incur additional licensing costs

Privacy-First & EU-Compliant

Regulatory requirements in Europe are becoming more demanding, not less. MAIA Brain is designed with the EU AI Act, GDPR, and sector-specific regulations built in from the architecture level — not patched on through configuration modules. Every decision MAIA makes is fully explainable and logged. Your data stays in your environment by default, with on-premise deployment available on every plan, not just enterprise tiers.

EU AI Act ready — no extra configuration
vs UiPath: Compliance tools require additional paid modules and setup

Continuous Self-Learning

UiPath bots do exactly what they were programmed to do — every time, forever. The moment your business changes, someone has to reprogramme them. MAIA Brain learns from every task it completes. It recognises patterns you haven't identified yet, suggests process improvements autonomously, and gets measurably faster and more accurate over time — without a development sprint or an IT change request. Your automation ROI compounds rather than plateauing.

Improves automatically — no reprogramming
vs UiPath: Static bots require developer intervention to update or improve
Implementation

Live in Weeks, Not Months

While UiPath enterprise deployments typically take 3–6 months and require a team of specialist consultants, MAIA Brain follows a streamlined, three-phase delivery model that gets your first automation live in 4–6 weeks — with MAIA's team doing the heavy lifting.

01

Discover

MAIA's specialists work with your team to map existing workflows, identify the highest-value automation opportunities, and define the initial deployment scope. We analyse your current tech stack, data flows, and business priorities — so the first automation delivers measurable ROI from day one, not after months of trial and error.

02

Deploy

Your first MAIA automation goes live in 4–6 weeks. We handle configuration, integration with your existing tools, testing, and go-live — you don't need an in-house RPA team or external consultants. MAIA connects to your environment, learns your processes, and begins operating immediately. Your team reviews outputs; MAIA handles the work.

03

Evolve

Unlike rule-based bots that require reprogramming every time your business changes, MAIA Brain learns continuously from every task it handles. It identifies new optimisation opportunities, reports on performance improvements, and expands its capabilities autonomously. Your automation gets measurably better every month — without a single developer sprint.

Honest Advice

Which Platform Is Right for You?

We believe in straightforward advice. Here is an honest assessment of when each platform makes the most sense — based on your organisation's situation, not our preference.

Choose MAIA Brain if…

  • You want your first automation live in weeks, not months
  • You need automation that handles exceptions without stopping and waiting for humans
  • Your processes involve unstructured documents — emails, PDFs, contracts, forms
  • Budget certainty matters and you want total cost transparency from day one
  • Your data must remain in your own environment (GDPR, EU AI Act, sector regulations)
  • You want one platform that handles automation and document understanding without bolt-ons
  • You don't have an in-house RPA or developer team and need a managed implementation
  • You want the platform to get smarter over time, not require constant reprogramming
  • You are subject to EU AI Act obligations and need built-in explainability and audit

UiPath may suit you if…

  • You already have a large, dedicated in-house RPA team trained specifically on UiPath
  • Your processes are highly stable, simple, and virtually never change
  • You have made a major existing investment in the UiPath ecosystem that would be costly to transition away from
  • You have long-term Microsoft Azure commitments that UiPath's native integration leverages directly
  • Your governance requirements mandate a specific legacy RPA vendor already approved by your board
Customer Experience

"We spent 18 months and a significant consulting budget trying to make UiPath work for our invoice and document processing workflows. When something changed — a new supplier format, a different email layout — we were back to square one with our RPA team. MAIA was live in five weeks, handled our document exceptions from day one without anyone touching it, and we are spending well under half what we paid for our UiPath deployment. It just works — and it keeps getting better on its own."

M
Maria G., Operations Director
Financial Services — 850 employees — [Customer name to be confirmed before publishing]

Trusted by enterprise teams across

Common Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

Answers to the questions we hear most from organisations evaluating MAIA Brain against their existing or planned UiPath investment.

Yes — and the 60% figure is a total-cost comparison, not just a headline licence price. When you account for everything a realistic UiPath deployment involves — the base licence, the specialist RPA consultant fees to design and deploy your bots, the separate Document Understanding AI module, the compliance and governance add-ons, the premium enterprise tier required for on-premise deployment, and annual support contracts — the true cost of UiPath is substantially higher than the entry price suggests. MAIA Brain includes all of these capabilities and services in a single offering. For most organisations, particularly those that need document understanding and EU compliance tools, the total saving regularly reaches or exceeds 60% compared to a like-for-like UiPath deployment.
Yes, and significantly more. MAIA Brain handles every category of automation covered by UiPath — repetitive task automation, software integrations, process orchestration, and workflow management — while also adding capabilities that UiPath either cannot provide or charges separately for. Specifically: MAIA understands unstructured documents (emails, PDFs, free-form text) out of the box without add-ons; MAIA handles exceptions autonomously instead of stopping and waiting for human intervention; MAIA can be configured using plain language rather than requiring developer training; and MAIA learns continuously, improving its performance over time without reprogramming. Think of UiPath as a highly reliable rule-following machine and MAIA as an intelligent agent that understands what the outcome should be and finds the best way to achieve it.
MAIA Brain is typically live in 4–6 weeks. Enterprise UiPath deployments typically require between 3 and 6 months before the first process goes live — and that timeline assumes experienced RPA consultants are on the project from day one. The gap exists for two reasons: first, MAIA's AI-native architecture requires significantly less configuration per process than building UiPath bots from scratch; and second, MAIA's implementation team manages the entire delivery on your behalf. There is no lengthy design phase, no consultant handover, and no extended user acceptance testing cycle. Your team approves the scope and reviews outputs — MAIA's team builds and deploys.
No. A phased transition is often the most practical approach, and MAIA Brain is designed to run alongside your existing UiPath deployment during the changeover period. Most organisations begin by identifying the processes where UiPath's limitations are causing the most operational pain — typically those involving document exceptions, unstructured data, or high bot maintenance overhead — and start MAIA there. Once the results are clear (and the cost comparison is visible), most teams choose to expand MAIA's scope at a pace that aligns with their contract renewal dates and budget cycles. There is no requirement to make a wholesale switch before you are ready.
Yes — and it is important to understand the difference between "compliant by design" and "configurable to be compliant." MAIA Brain is built from the ground up with EU AI Act readiness, GDPR data residency requirements, and sector-specific regulatory obligations in mind. Every decision MAIA makes is fully explainable and audit-logged — a core requirement under the EU AI Act for automated business decisions. On-premise deployment is available on all plans, meaning your data never leaves your own environment unless you specifically choose cloud hosting. UiPath offers compliance tools, but they are typically implemented through additional configuration work, paid add-on modules, and often require specialist knowledge to set up correctly. With MAIA, compliance is not a configuration project — it is the default.
The core difference is the underlying approach: UiPath is robotic process automation — it records and replays sequences of actions with precision. When you show it what to do, it does it exactly, repeatedly. That is extremely useful for stable, predictable tasks. But the moment something outside the defined sequence occurs, the bot fails and waits. MAIA Brain is an AI agent — it understands the goal of a process, not just the steps. When something unexpected happens, MAIA reasons through the situation and determines the most appropriate response based on context, business rules, and past outcomes. The analogy is the difference between a very precise machine following a checklist and an experienced employee who understands what the outcome should be and finds a way to achieve it even when the situation is unusual. MAIA also learns continuously — so unlike UiPath bots, which remain static until reprogrammed, MAIA's performance improves automatically over time.
Next Step

Ready to See Smarter Automation in Action?
It Takes 30 Minutes — Not 6 Months.

Book a free, no-obligation demonstration. MAIA's team will show you exactly what intelligent automation looks like for your specific processes — and provide a clear, personalised cost comparison against your current or planned UiPath investment.

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