Better Buy for 2026: This Emerging Tech Stock or the Market Leader?

When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) orchestration, Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ: PLTR) has become the clear market leader. The company experienced tremendous growth as its AI platform became one of the best tools to unlock the potential of AI models to solve real-world problems in mission-critical settings.

With its platform essentially acting as an AI operating system that can gather data and connect it to real-world assets, Palantir is now the main orchestration platform for AI that helps reduce errors and makes insights more actionable. That's a powerful position within the AI ecosystem.

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With the pullback in software-as-a-service (SaaS) names, Palantir has become more appealing, with the stock trading more than 35% below its highs, as of this writing. However, the stock still isn't cheap, trading at a forward price-to-sales (P/S) multiple of 42 times based on 2026 analyst estimates.

Given Palantir's still hefty valuation, I think that UiPath (NYSE: PATH) could be the more interesting stock to own.

An emerging player in agentic AI orchestration

Like Palantir, UiPath is looking to become an AI orchestration platform, but for AI agents. The company is just starting down this road with its Maestro platform, but its background in robotic process automation (RPA) gives it a strong foundation to be a leader in the agentic AI orchestration space.

The reason for this is that RPA requires the management of software bots that automate simple rule-based tasks, such as data entry. As such, its RPA platform has already established strong governance and compliance standards. These guardrails can then be transferred over to help manage and oversee AI agents while also keeping humans in the loop when necessary to make sure an AI agent doesn't go rogue.

And while AI agents could theoretically replace software bots, given that they are much more advanced, software bots are a much more economical option in many cases. One of the beauties of UiPath's platform is that it can manage both AI agents and software bots, assigning them the tasks for which they are best suited. This can help lower AI token usage and help save customers money over time.

UiPath is just beginning to see the early benefits of its transformation to an agentic AI orchestration platform. However, as AI agents become more commonplace, the need to manage agents from various vendors will only grow over time. That's a huge opportunity for UiPath, one that it is just now starting to tap into.

Meanwhile, the stock is cheap, trading at a forward P/S ratio of below 3.5 times, based on analysts' estimates for fiscal 2027 (ending January), and a forward price-to-earnings (P/E) of less than 15 times. If the company can become an agentic AI orchestration leader and accelerate its growth, its upside is tremendous, making the stock a better buy than Palantir at current levels.

Geoffrey Seiler has positions in UiPath. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Palantir Technologies and UiPath. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.