Work Ahead Webinar Series: Start Automating Now with The Automation Cloud

Frequently Asked Questions

UiPath Automation Cloud Webinar Q&A


About community cloud vs. enterprise cloud

About the UiPath Automation Cloud

About Studio and automation activities in the UiPath Automation Cloud

About Robots in the UiPath Automation Cloud

About the first demo (“the transactionator”)

About Youtube channels (and whether we have them)

About community cloud vs. enterprise cloud

Q: Did you say community cloud is free for small businesses? Please give a link!

A: We did say that, and here is your link (also free)!

If the community cloud meets your needs, it’s on us, you’re welcome! Please note that you can move to enterprise cloud at any time from community cloud, if you wish, but you can also try enterprise cloud free for 60 days if you already know you will want the additional features or need more robots than community cloud offers. A summary of the differences is on this page (and in the next question).

Finally, a friendly reminder that while anyone can use community cloud to try things out, per our terms you need to have a company of <250 users/machines and < 5m USD-equivalent revenue to use the free product in production.

Q: What are some features available in the UiPath Automation Cloud for enterprise (enterprise cloud) that are not available in the UiPath Automation Cloud for community (community cloud)

A: The most important features in enterprise cloud that are not in community cloud are:

  • You can add as many robots and studios as you wish (community allows 2 attended robots, 1 unattended robot and 2 studios)
  • You get support from UiPath support team (vs. forum support)
  • You get an uptime guarantee
  • You get to create multiple tenants (to separate management, or create dev/test/production environments) and the ability to choose which region (US, EU, Japan) business and robot data is held in, per-tenant if you wish. All community cloud accounts are hosted in the EU.

Q: Both community and enterprise trials last for 60 days?

A: Actually no, community cloud is not a trial - it is free ongoing, with a limited number of robots and some usage terms outlined in questions above. Enterprise cloud, by comparison, has a 60 day trial.

Q: Can you move from the community cloud to the enterprise cloud?

A: Yes, at any time. Your existing tenant and automations will continue to work, and will be moved to the enterprise cloud for you within a few days, too, so you get the additional uptime guarantee benefits, etc., on it.

Q: Is my data only secure in the enterprise cloud?

A: Certainly not, it’s secure whichever UiPath Automation Cloud you choose! We covered compliance in the enterprise section but did not mean to give the impression it only applied to the enterprise cloud. The same encryption, virtual separation is deployed for both community cloud and enterprise cloud, and the platform certifications are for both.

Q: What is the proper way to upgrade to Enterprise? Do we need to uninstall first and then install using the link on Automation Cloud?

A: No, if you want to move from community cloud to enterprise cloud the community tenant can just be upgraded using the link on the cloud portal.

Q: If you buy (or upgrade to) Enterprise Cloud, you won't get the licenses that are included with the community version, right?

A: Correct. Enterprise cloud licenses are provided for the 60 day trial period, but all production enterprise licenses must be purchased.

About the UiPath Automation Cloud

Q: Is this the same as the UiPath cloud platform, or something different?

A: The same. UiPath Automation Cloud is the launch name for the UiPath cloud platform.

The formal names are “UiPath Automation Cloud for enterprise” and “UiPath Automation Cloud for community”. You’ll see us refer to them as “enterprise cloud” and “community cloud” sometimes too, as a shorthand.

Q: UiPath Automation Cloud will work with my Mac, right? What about Linux?

A: The cloud services themselves will all work just fine on a Mac or Linux machine. The Studio development environment and Robot are Windows applications and would require the use of virtualization technology (e.g. Parallels) on a Mac. [Needless trivia: one of your two webinar presenters uses a Mac as his primary machine every day!]. We are evaluating further cross-platform support and Linux options for the future.

Q: What platform is the UiPath Automation Cloud hosted on?

A: Microsoft Azure. Note that typically, robots can be hosted in any 3rd party cloud or on-premises, as appropriate.

More detail on that: Robots securely communicate with the service via HTTPS (port 443) and all connections are initiated outbound - so as long as robots have access to the internet, and outbound port 443 connections are not restricted at the firewall, they can be hosted on any network/service. It may be beneficial to host them close to the apps they are interacting and exchanging data with, where possible, depending on the architecture of the specific automations.

Q: What are the pricing options?

A: The UiPath Automation Cloud for community is always free, and may be used in production (ongoing) by organizations with fewer then 250 users or machines and less than $5m USD equivalent in revenue. If you need more at some future time, you can move to the enterprise cloud, and we will move anything you have built in your community cloud tenant to your new enterprise cloud

The UiPath Automation Cloud for enterprise has a per-robot/studio pricing model. The cloud orchestration service itself, additional tenants etc. are not charged separately. The cost of each cloud-orchestrated robot or studio license covers the cost of the service, therefore your costs only increase as you add RPA capacity to your business with more robots or studios. You can start with a little as one Robot and one Studio, and scale to as many as you need over time.

Enterprise cloud also has a 60 day free trial which includes 5 attended and 5 unattended robots, as well as 5 studios, for use over the 60 day period. During or prior to a trial, you can discuss your exact needs with UiPath or a partner.

Q: Are you planning to provide inter region failover capability?

A: No. We have intra-region failover and disaster recovery, but deliberately do not move robot or business data between regions since many customers do not wish for their data to leave their region.

Q: I have existing unattended bots, Studio and Orchestrator and Flexicapture. Can I use the existing bot infrastructure and also blend with the cloud licenses?

A: To connect robots and studios to the UiPath Automation Cloud, you need a cloud-orchestrated robot or studio license. There are offers that help you transition existing licenses to cloud (contact your partner or UiPath account manager), or you could add new cloud orchestrated robots and studios for new processes and keep running existing processes on premises. It’s up to you what combination you want, and you can migrate from on-prem to cloud over time, too, if you want to.

Q: What is the price of unattended robot licenses if we upgrade to the Enterprise version?

A: Pricing varies based on volumes and the exact scenarios you are working on. You can discuss with our sales team or a partner at any time.

Q: If I am automating an end to end process (and let’s say there is more than one robot supporting this process and let’s say I have robots operating on UiPath cloud and some on-premises). Can this scenario work out including some unattended robots interfacing with humans through Action Center as well?

A: Most things are ultimately possible, but typically you would run the robots for a given automation like this from the same Orchestrator instance so that they could take advantage of Orchestrator features to easily and securely share information between each other, using Orchestrator features like assets or storage buckets in the cloud. Robots can only be connected to one Orchestrator at a time (be it in the UiPath Automation Cloud or on-prem).

So while you can absolutely manage some robots and processes from Orchestrator on-prem and some from the UiPath Automation Cloud (many customers do this, especially during migration), your solution is likely to be simpler if all the robots for your scenario are managed from one or other Orchestrator instance. Could you work around it? Probably, it would just be likely to make the automations more complex.

Q: Are there are any plans to have a cloud data center in Canada in near future? Data residency requirements in some industries require that.

A: We are evaluating our future regions based on customer demand. We do not have an immediate plan for a Canada region. We work closely with our local teams to evaluate demand so please make sure they are aware of your interest locally, too. Thanks for your interest!

Q: Where can I download these programs for practice please?

A: From! Just hit the Try UiPath Free button in the header and you will be taken to the community cloud signup page.

Q: What is the level of maintenance and support that needs to be planned in terms of resourcing, etc., for making robots run without any issues?

A: This varies considerably with usage scenario so it’s hard to be precise, but a couple of key points:

  1. UiPath is a leader in the resiliency of robots and activities, and invests in further improving these all the time. For example, Computer Vision is a technology largely designed to make recognition of objects on the screen even more robust, and thus make automations better able to deal with changes in app design or similar, which is a key driver of maintenance needs.
  2. The UiPath Automation cloud minimizes the level of maintenance by offering key services as SaaS, and thus removing the need for local installation, updating and maintenance. The UiPath Automation Cloud for community also minimizes the overhead of updating locally installed components by updating as needed. Recognizing that enterprises often prefer to manage testing and updating of locally installed software, the enterprise components do not update automatically.
  3. UiPath maintains a product lifecycle. The UiPath Automation Cloud service is updated every 2 weeks (as Tarek discussed in the webinar, there is a rigorous quality process behind that). All supported versions of Robot and Studio are tested to work with each update.

Q: Is there any limitation on the size of data that can be stored in the cloud? What are the limits and/or cost to extend it if necessary?

A: Queue items are limited to 50k. We also have some time limits – for example, we store robot logs for 30 days (these can be downloaded from the UI or via API for longer-term local storage if you wish).

Q: Are there guarantees on data protection on the cloud?

A: Please see our security whitepaper. The UiPath Automation Cloud is Veracode Continuous and ISO 27001 certified, and is being audited for SOC 2 compliance at present.

Q: Is pricing based on number of robots deployed or transactions/usage oriented?

A: UiPath Automation Cloud for enterprise pricing is based on the number of robot and studio licenses purchased. It is not based on transactions or usage, to make it easier to predict costs.

UiPath Automation Cloud for community is free ongoing to qualifying individuals and small teams.

Q: If a separate tenant is used for development from production, it would seem an essential tool to control release management.

A: Many enterprise cloud customers do indeed use different tenants to separate dev/test and production environments. Please note that although community cloud customers cannot create multiple tenants, Orchestrator within a single tenant also offers RBAC and versioning controls for release management of automations to robots, and indeed the entire automation lifecycle, described here.

Q: Can the enterprise cloud export logs to Splunk/Elastic Search/AWS?

A: Almost. Today, we keep robot logs for 30 days and you can download them either manually each month or programmatically via an API (or get a robot to do it for you). Within the next two months we expect to ship the ability to stream logs to your location of choice, from where you can use Splunk, Kibana/ES, or Power BI to analyze them.

Q: From the cloud Orchestrator can you access monitoring of a queue of jobs and how long it takes to execute them? Would it be possible to get API’s for external monitoring?

A: Yes to everything on that. The UiPath Orchestrator has monitoring and dashboard views for queues (and queues items can have SLA’s, too) which show execution performance. It’s broadly like the jobs dashboard shown in the webinar second demo (starting at approximately 51:00) but focused on queues. All Orchestrator capabilities in the UiPath Automation Cloud are available via API, details here and here.

Q: Have you had any kind of security issue reported while you are implementing? (from the client side)

A: We run regular security and penetration testing by our own team. This does occasionally uncover issues that require remedy. These issues are always treated as a top priority by the team and get mitigated within hours. We have not had any customer-reported security issues to-date.

About Studio and automation activities in the UiPath Automation Cloud

Q: Where did you download the Studio and Robot from?

A: As soon as you log into your cloud account, the community Studio and Robot download are right there on the right hand side of the home screen (note that they are both contained in the same package, even though it is labeled as Studio). In the resource center, the enterprise Studio and Robot download is also available.

You may use either community or enterprise Studio, but we recommend using the appropriate one for community cloud or enterprise cloud. A key difference is that the community cloud Studio and Robot are kept up to date automatically; the enterprise cloud studio needs to be updated by the user (or, more typically, the user’s IT department).

Q: I am trying to build a specific automation, and I’ve got stuck! Where can I get help?

A: UiPath has a huge community of over 750,000 people! The UiPath Forum is a very active, helpful nexus of developers, administrators and users, so that’s a great place to start if you have a specific issue (please pay it forward if you can by sharing your knowledge, too!).

We also offer extensive free training if you are looking to build skills more generally, and we have complete documentation for Studio, Orchestrator, Robots, and the Automation Cloud.

If you want professional services to assist with or deliver completed automation solutions, UiPath has an extensive network of great partners, and our own professional services team.

Q: What is the difference between Studio and StudioX

A: UiPath StudioX is a simplified “no code” experience aimed at citizen developers. UiPath Studio is a full featured experience designed for RPA developers. Studio Pro adds additional capabilities, primarily around test scenarios. All 3 are available for use as part of community cloud.

Q: What version of Studio has Testing Capabilities?

A: Studio Pro, available as part of community cloud for small teams and enterprise cloud trial for 60 days.

Q: Is Studio Pro (with its testing features) available in community cloud?

A: Yes, 2 licenses of Studio Pro are included as the default SKU in the UiPath Automation Cloud for community. (please see the next question, too!)

Q: I only seem to be able to license Studio Pro, not Studio or StudioX, from the community cloud? Why can’t I get Studio X?

A: You can! Once you install and license the community Studio from the community cloud portal (on the home page or in the resource center), you can change the profile to Studio or StudioX from within Studio whenever you wish. It’s under settings/license and profile in Studio. So you effectively have instant access to all 3 editions of Studio whenever you need them – in the community cloud there’s no need to download again or change licenses.

Q: With document understanding, are there predefined structures and what is the level of accuracy?

A: Yes, we support common document types like receipts and invoices out of the box. You can also easily define smart templates for other documents yourself. One stage of processing is classification to decide what kind of document it is. Then the appropriate model or template for recognition can be applied. Handwriting recognition is quite reliable, and we also support mixed documents that are partially handwritten and partially typed.

Q: How do you manage error handling?

A: Please see here for a detailed answer. High level: a lot of flexibility and options. Both technical errors and customized business exceptions can be handled, and choices for how to handle them are coded in Studio. All logs and errors are reported to Orchestrator in the UiPath Automation Cloud (they are stored for 30 days by default and can be downloaded for longer storage).

Q: Where can I get sample apps to test?

A: There are many examples in and

Q: Are the workflows created on previous versions compatible with latest versions?

A: In almost all cases yes. Sometimes re-publication of packages in the latest version of Studio to update activity versions used is recommended (for example, when moving to Modern Folders in Orchestrator).

Q: Will you demo Document Understanding in more detail in a future webinar?

A: Yes, there will be more on document understanding. In fact there was also a webinar on it just a few days ago that is available on demand. Enjoy!

About Robots in the UiPath Automation Cloud

Q: What is the difference between attended and unattended robots?

A: An attended robot runs on a user’s machine and works alongside them, with automations triggered by the user or an event on the user’s desktop. An unattended robot runs on a server or VM in the back office, is completely remotely controlled, and is dedicated to working on specific processes, for example, invoice processing. These processes are usually triggered automatically by events (e.g. an invoice comes in) or time (e.g. once a month, reconcile all invoices with payments).

About the first demo (“the transactionator”)

Q: Do you have to have both apps open, or will it open them if needed?

A: The robot will definitely open them if needed. In this case I opened them to show the set up. I should have closed them to make that point. If you need to, of course, you can also write an automation that works with whatever you have open on the screen at the time (for example, take a row I highlighted myself in Excel, and take some action with it from there).

Q: Where do you store user and password of the application you access?

A: You have options. There is an inbuilt asset store in Orchestrator in the UiPath Automation Cloud (256 AES encrypted) which can store many different types of data asset. Credentials is one, so it can be there. You can also store them in Azure Key Vault. Automations can retrieve credentials from those stores via the Orchestrator in Automation Cloud to log in when needed. Unattended automations also run in the context of a specific user on the machine they are running on (this is set for each process or trigger).

Q: Can you make the process trigger unattended when something happens? Say a mail arrives?

A: To do this unattended, you would probably architect a solution where a process was polling for that event, and then have it kick off the process.

You can do this with an attended automation on your own machine also, but note that some activities require the app to be open and therefore will interrupt what you are doing if you trigger them automatically. In my demo, the app accepting the transactions and returning the transaction # needed to be open on the screen so the robot could type data into it and click the accept button. The activity that gets the data from Excel row, on the other hand, does not require Excel to be visible on the screen, as it integrates programmatically. So there are more considerations if you try to make an attended robot behave more like an unattended one would.

Q: Can RPA built-in activities let the spreadsheet open while reading or writing? We generally get the error that the spreadsheet is already being used.

A: This depends a little on how you implement it. There are activities that use the Excel program and others that function programmatically (for example O365 activity). It can also depend on the version of Excel and whether the spreadsheet is configured for multi-use access or not. You may want to try the UiPath forum for this question.

Q: Is there a tutorial on how to connect the robot to the UiPath Automation Cloud?

A: Yes! There is a video on the main portal page, or here are all the steps required to connect Robots to Orchestrator. When you are using the UiPath Automation Cloud, the orchestrator URL is (you can copy this from the browser bar when you are in the cloud Orchestrator, just ignore any following characters).

Q: Does the machine with the robot have to be running and connected to the Internet? Can unattended bots be run with the machine turned off?

A: All robots need to have somewhere to run when they are working. It can be on a (running) machine, or it could also be in a cloud VM. The robot needs to get its instructions and send logs to the UiPath Automation Cloud, so that requires an Internet connection available from wherever it’s running (all communications are HTTPS on port 443).

Please note that UiPath does also offer on-premises and 3rd party cloud installation options for Orchestrator (including air-gapped architectures that run on the local network only) for customers who have a specific requirement not to connect to the Internet - but the UiPath Automation Cloud requires Internet access.

Q: Why in the demo is the transaction ID 184021 repeated but all other ID’s are unique?

A: Kudos to all 4 eagle-eyed people who asked a variation of this question! Obviously, those numbers should be unique. Let’s look more closely at what happened and how we’d reliably avoid it in a production situation.

First, it’s not an error in the automation flow or robot itself. It’s actually all about the mouse. If you watch closely, you’ll see while the robot was running and actively moving the mouse around the app to type and copy information, I decided to try and show the reminder feature on the UiPath Assistant, and was trying to move the mouse to do so. I happened to do this just as the robot was trying to position it over the DoubleUI app transaction number so it could copy it. You can actually see the battle for mouse supremacy live on screen around 27:40 (nobody wins). With the mouse in a random place, the robot couldn’t copy the transaction number, so it pasted the last one it had. Ergo, duplicate numbers.

In a production situation, there are multiple ways to avoid this happening or mitigate. Here are a few:

  1. The cool way: UiPath’s brand new “Picture in Picture” technology would run this attended automation in an isolated Window, so what I did in the main window would not affect it. Check it out! This is still an experimental feature, but it is very powerful. Why did I not show this? Excellent question.
  2. The unattended way: as I mentioned in the demo, you could have an unattended robot run this on schedule, rather than an attended one (no competition for the mouse then!), as there’s really no need for human interaction at all.
  3. The pre-emptive way: the automation could be designed differently. It could run a validation pass for duplicates or missed transactions at the end of the run and alert any issues. Or, the automation could check in real time and stop with a warning if the next number is the same as the previous. The flexibility in automation design gives you a host of both technical and business error checking options you would use in production design (and I should have used here).
  4. The simple way: Take a computer break and leave the mouse/keyboard alone while the robot is running the automation. Probably best combined with one or three above, though, for rigor.

It’s also worth noting that different activities use different methods to move information around, and not all need the mouse and keyboard. Even in this demo, the Excel activity programmatically extracts the Excel data, and Excel doesn’t need to be visible for it to do that (it is visible so you can watch, but it doesn’t need to be). The “DoubleUI” app, on the other hand, is showing a common way of interacting with a legacy app, which is just to have the robot literally simulate the way a human would interact with the app, so it does need to be visible and have control of the mouse and keyboard.

Sorry for an imperfect demo, but it did let me pass on some additional information here in the Q&A!

Q: Will an unattended robot be interrupted if you do other things on your computer while its running?

A: It depends on the activities you use to build the automation. You can definitely build automations that run in the background alongside a user. Often (and ideally), unattended robots will run on their own machine, though.

About Youtube channels (and whether we have them)

Q: Do you have a Youtube channel?

A: UiPath does have a Youtube channel, at The animated UiPath Automation Cloud Video we showed at the start of the webcast (cut from the download deck for size) is also available here: