Choosing an execution surface

Comparison of the five robot execution surfaces by workload support, infrastructure ownership, robot version management, and platform availability.

A workload runs on one of five execution surfaces. They differ in three ways that decide which one fits: which workload types they can run, who owns the host, and who controls the robot version installed on it.

Ownership and version control

Surface	Host owned by	Robot version controlled by
Self-hosted robot	You, on your own machines	You
Automation Cloud Robots — VM	UiPath	UiPath, with an opt-out
Automation Cloud Robots — Serverless	UiPath	UiPath
Elastic Robot Orchestration	You, in your own cloud account	UiPath, with an opt-out
Automation Suite robots	You, in your Automation Suite cluster	Your Automation Suite version

What each surface suits

Surface	Fits when
Self-hosted robot	Execution has to stay inside your own estate, or the workload needs the user session, local dependencies, or direct network reach.
Automation Cloud Robots — Serverless	Background, unattended work with no infrastructure to provision.
Automation Cloud Robots — VM	A fully configured virtual machine is needed, but you would rather not provision or operate it.
Elastic Robot Orchestration	Demand varies and the compute belongs in your own cloud account rather than in UiPath's.
Automation Suite robots	The platform is Automation Suite, including Automation Cloud Dedicated.

Platform availability differs by cloud offering — for example, Automation Suite robots are the offering used on Automation Cloud Dedicated in place of the Automation Cloud Robots products. For the full breakdown, refer to Cloud robots feature availability.

Note:

This page compares the execution surfaces at a concept level. Workload-by-workload support (for example, whether a given surface currently supports attended RPA, or Agent, Function, and API workloads through Unified Runtime) depends on the robot version and platform, and requires confirmation with product/engineering before being published as a definitive matrix. Refer to each surface's own overview page and to Cloud robots feature availability for what is currently documented.