After 3 years of building RPA solutions, I’m seeing a lot of confusion around when to use traditional REFramework vs the new Agentic Processes. I’ve worked on 10+ production bots and recently started experimenting with Studio Web’s Agent Builder.
My Current Take:
REFramework: Still perfect for high-volume transactional work (invoice processing, data migration)
Agentic Processes: Game-changer for decision-heavy workflows and user interactions
Real Example:
Last month I built a vendor onboarding process. Started with REFramework but realized 60% of the logic was exception handling and human decisions. Rebuilt it as an Agentic Process - reduced development time by 40% and maintenance is much easier.
Questions for the community:
Are you mixing both approaches in enterprise projects?
How do you handle governance with Agentic Processes?
Any performance comparisons between REFramework vs Maestro orchestration?
Would love to hear experiences from other developers who’ve made this transition! Especially curious about enterprise deployment strategies.
I have been building in the ‘agentic’ style, which I consider to be called ‘Orchestration’ since 2021, doing a background process built in Studio, historically with flowcharts but now with the long running BPMN canvas.
I do this for pretty much every project cause of what a great design pattern it is to separate the business logic from the Ui actions, as such it is second nature to me to mix both in a project, as the Orchestration will determine the business flow and then pass the Ui work to a performer robot, built in the REFramework style, so they always go together.
The downside of doing it in Maestro is the high cost, so I havent deployed anything in Maestro yet as I cannot justify that cost for the features currently as I get the majority of them already in Studio, with the resume from fail being a notable exception that only Maestro can do. Super nice, but not yet worth $1 per job for me.
I would say, the default REFramework is still not really fit to integrate in Maestro, and Maestro hadnt focused on queue item integration well, however I have worked hard to alert this to their product team, who are really working hard to fix that.
I’ve also raised it with the agents team, that tools shouldnt just be RPA workflows, and that an agent should be able to use a Queue as a ‘tool’, creating a queue item to perhaps get data and waiting for a REFramework robot to do the work.
I think the REFramework is still at the core offering of UiPath, and its actually been a mistake for them to not give it the TLC it deserves and update it well for the 2025 era (the fact it still manages assets via the Excel is an example of its legacy technical debt in its design). They should also ground things like Maestro by connecting it strongly to the REFramework to both make it understandable to users but to also build on the strongest foundations of the platform.
I’ve tried combining REFramework with Agentic Processes in enterprise projects and it works well where transactional stability is needed alongside decision-based flows. Governance is easier if you align Agentic Processes with Action Center and Orchestrator logging. Performance with Maestro orchestration has been smoother for adaptive tasks compared to strict queue-based REFramework. You should try the official approach explained here:
