Automa Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

TLDR

Automa is a no-code RPA platform that pairs desktop and mobile bots with LLM assisted workflow building. The engine is genuinely capable and the Pro price is low, but the pricing page hides its own numbers and the plan matrix contradicts itself. Best for: small ops teams automating legacy desktop software. Price: Free plan, Pro from $14.50/mo. Rating: 6.3/10

What is Automa?

Automa is a no-code automation platform that combines classic robotic process automation with AI agents. It does not connect apps through APIs the way Zapier does. It drives the actual interface: clicking, typing, scrolling and reading the screen on Windows, macOS and Linux, and doing the same thing inside mobile apps. That makes it useful for the software that never got a decent API, like an ageing ERP, a bank portal, or a desktop accounting package that only exists as a Windows executable.

The company behind it is Shadowbot HK Ltd, the international arm of Shadowbot, a Hangzhou RPA vendor founded in 2019 by Jin Lijian, a former Alibaba engineer. Shadowbot has raised roughly $200 million across six rounds from investors including Goldman Sachs, Tencent and Sequoia China, so this is not a weekend project. The Automa brand itself came from an acquisition: Shadowbot’s parent bought the open source Automa browser extension and reused the name for its global launch. We flag that early because it causes real friction. Search for “Automa” today and you are as likely to land on the free browser extension as on this platform.

What Are Automa’s Key Features?

Cross platform desktop and mobile bots

This is the reason to look at Automa at all. Bots run on Windows, macOS including Apple Silicon, and Linux, and the platform also automates mobile apps at scale with tap, swipe, type and data extraction across multiple devices. Most cloud automation tools quietly assume everything you touch has a REST endpoint. Automa assumes nothing, which is why it handles the invoice portal your supplier refuses to modernise. It keeps a reusable element and image repository so a selector you captured once can be shared across processes, and it takes error screenshots when an exception fires so you can see exactly which button moved.

Magic Commands and Magic Flows

The AI layer sits on the Pro tier and above. Magic Commands turn a plain English description into working steps, and Magic Flows assemble multi step processes the same way. Alongside that you get AI OCR and NLP for reading scanned documents, CAPTCHA handling, and AI assisted XPath anchor capture, which is the feature that actually saves time. Brittle selectors are the number one reason RPA bots break, and anything that makes anchors more resilient pays for itself. None of these AI features exist on the free plan, so the free tier is a demo rather than a working setup.

Recorder with a Python and JavaScript escape hatch

You can build three ways: drag and drop in the visual canvas, record your screen and let Automa convert the actions into a workflow, or drop into Python and JavaScript when the logic gets ugly. That third option matters more than the marketing suggests. Pure no-code builders hit a wall the moment you need a custom date parser or a retry loop with backoff, and having a scripting escape hatch inside the same canvas keeps you from rebuilding the process elsewhere.

Marketplace, triggers and the management console

Automa ships a public marketplace of prebuilt apps and connectors, real time triggers on file changes, emails and keyboard shortcuts, plus live dashboards and analytics. The catch is tiering. Cloud triggers, work queues, dispatch mode, the advanced scheduler and API access are all marked as unavailable on Pro in the comparison table. If you want unattended scheduled runs orchestrated from the cloud rather than from your own machine, you are looking at an Enterprise conversation, not a $14.50 subscription.

How Much Does Automa Cost?

Automa Pro is $14.50 per month billed annually, and the free plan is genuinely free forever with no card required. The free tier gives you one editable self-built application, 30 minutes per day of runtime for third party apps from the marketplace, custom triggers, screen recording and basic debugging. Pro removes both limits, adds the whole AI feature set, and comes with a 14 day trial. The pricing page advertises 50 percent off for annual billing, which puts the month to month rate at roughly $29. Enterprise is custom quoted and adds the management console, SSO and 2FA, RBAC, audit trails, on-premise or hybrid deployment, OEM packaging and 24/7 support.

Here is our real complaint. The prices are not printed on the pricing page in any static form. They load from an API after the page renders, which means the page can show a full feature comparison table and no numbers at all. We had to confirm the $14.50 figure from Automa’s own blog and from third party software directories, and those directories do not agree with each other. For a vendor whose entire pitch against UiPath is transparent flat rate pricing, that is a self-inflicted wound.

On raw cost, Automa is cheap. n8n Cloud starts at $20 per month for Starter and is free if you self-host, but n8n is an API workflow tool and cannot drive a desktop application. Microsoft Power Automate Premium runs about $15 per user per month, and unattended Process licences are roughly $150 per bot per month, so a handful of unattended bots outprices Automa many times over. UiPath publishes a limited personal tier around $25 per month, but genuine team deployments land in the hundreds to thousands per month before you count certified developers. Automa at $14.50 undercuts all of them for a single builder.

Who is Automa Best For?

Use Automa if you are a solo operator or a small ops team with one or two high value manual processes stuck inside desktop or mobile software. Invoice keying, portal downloads, report pulls, data entry between two systems that will never speak to each other: this is exactly the shape of work Automa handles well, and at $14.50 a month the payback period is measured in hours. Mac heavy teams should pay particular attention, because native Apple Silicon support without a Windows virtual machine is rare in this category.

• Finance teams keying invoices from a portal into an accounting package
• Agencies pulling the same weekly reports out of five client dashboards
• Ecommerce operators updating listings or checking stock in a supplier tool with no API
• QA and growth teams running repetitive taps and swipes across real mobile devices

Skip Automa if your stack is already API first. If everything you touch is Stripe, HubSpot, Slack and Airtable, an RPA layer is the wrong abstraction and n8n or Make will be faster to build and far less brittle. Skip it too if you need unattended orchestration, work queues or API access without an enterprise contract, because those sit above Pro. And think hard if procurement will ask questions, because the third party review base is thin. Major directories list Automa with zero user reviews, so you are buying without the usual crowd sourced safety net.

Best Automa Alternatives

n8n

n8n is the obvious cheap alternative if your work is API shaped. Cloud plans start at $20 per month for Starter with 2,500 executions, and the self-hosted community edition is free, which is a better deal than anything Automa offers if you have someone who can run a container. n8n also has a far larger community and a huge node library. What it cannot do is control a desktop application or a phone, so it is a replacement only when your target systems have endpoints.

Microsoft Power Automate

If your company already lives in Microsoft 365, Power Automate is the path of least resistance. Premium is around $15 per user per month, roughly the same as Automa Pro, and desktop flows cover much of the same screen automation ground. Governance, identity and audit are handled by tooling your IT team already runs. The sting is unattended automation: Process licences at roughly $150 per bot per month make scaling expensive fast, and process mining is a separate five figure add-on.

UiPath

UiPath is the category leader and the honest choice when the automation programme is large enough to justify it. It has the deepest orchestrator, the strongest partner ecosystem and the best certification pipeline. It is also expensive: a limited personal tier sits around $25 per month, while real deployments run into the hundreds or thousands monthly, and certified RPA developers command six figure salaries in the US. Choose UiPath when you are automating dozens of processes with a dedicated team, not when you want to stop typing invoices.

Final Verdict: Is Automa Worth It?

One more practical note on fit. Because bots run on your machine on the Pro plan, that machine has to stay awake and logged in for a workflow to fire. Teams treat that as a minor detail until the laptop sleeps mid run and the month end reconciliation silently fails. Budget for a cheap always-on box or a virtual machine if a process genuinely needs to run unattended overnight, and factor that into the cost comparison rather than reading $14.50 as the total.

The product underneath is stronger than the buying experience. Automa gives a single operator real desktop, web and mobile automation for less than the cost of a Zapier starter plan, with an AI assist layer that meaningfully reduces the pain of building selectors. Backed by a company that has raised around $200 million, it is not going to disappear next quarter. For the narrow job of automating a legacy interface on a small budget, it is a good buy.

We landed on 6.3 because everything around that product is muddled. The pricing page will not show you a price without JavaScript, third party listings quote different numbers, the Pro feature card promises virtual desktop automation while the comparison table on the same page marks it unavailable on Pro, the site’s own user counts range from 10,000 teams to 30,000 teams depending on which page you read, and the brand collides with a well known free browser extension. Try the free plan first, confirm your exact price in the checkout before you commit, and get the plan limits in writing if you are buying for a team.