I am new to RPA licensing. Can someone explain the difference between attended and unattended bots in plain English? My team thinks we need a bunch of unattended bots, but I suspect they could get by with attended ones if we train them properly. What are the pros and cons for a small mid-sized firm?
Attended bots function as human-triggered assistants for localized tasks, whereas unattended bots operate autonomously on centralized infrastructure, making them suitable for high-volume, rules-based processes that lack the need for continuous human supervision.
3 answers
I remember walking into a mid-sized firm that thought exactly like your team, insisting that every process needed to run in the background without human intervention. They bought twenty unattended licenses only to realize that half their processes required real-time human judgment or credentials that couldn't be stored securely in a headless environment.
We ended up migrating most of those back to attended bots because the team actually liked the oversight of clicking a button to start their reporting cycles. It turns out that control is often more valuable than raw automation, especially when you are just starting out and don't have the IT support to babysit failing server processes.
Attended bots act as digital assistants triggered by your staff, while unattended bots operate autonomously on server infrastructure according to a schedule. If you are leaning toward attended because you want to save money, keep in mind that you are effectively adding a tax to every employee's daily workflow by forcing them to manage bot execution.
Choosing between these two depends entirely on your process requirements and infrastructure capacity.
- Attended bots are designed for front-office tasks where the human remains in the loop to handle exceptions or provide input during the execution.
- Unattended bots are built for high-volume back-office operations that function independently of user sessions.
- Consider the cost of server maintenance and orchestration when moving away from a decentralized model.
