Investors Are Piling Into Palantir, but This AI Competitor Might Outperform It in 2026

• Palantir's banal emergence has been driven by its AI platform, which acts arsenic an AI operating system.

• UiPath's Maestro platform, which acts arsenic an orchestration level for AI agents, could beryllium a akin maturation driver.

• 10 stocks we similar amended than UiPath ›

For 3 years successful a row, Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ: PLTR) has seen its banal soar by triple-digit percentages. It roseate 167% successful 2023, 340% successful 2024, and has much than doubled truthful acold successful 2025. Those gains person travel connected the backmost of its beardown and accelerating gross growth, which deed 63% past quarter.

The cardinal to the company's occurrence has been its Artificial Intelligence (AI) Platform, which U.S. commercialized customers person been progressively adopting. AIP is designed to enactment arsenic an AI operating system, helping customers use third-party ample connection models (LLMs) to much easy lick their real-world problems. It does this archetypal by gathering an organization's information from a assortment of sources and past organizing it into an ontology, creating a clean, structured root of information for AI models to use. It past links that information to carnal assets and concepts, specified arsenic lawsuit orders.

AIP is present being utilized by clients crossed industries to supply managers with insights and assistance them lick a wide array of problems. Palantir's gross maturation has accelerated for the past 9 quarters arsenic caller commercialized customers articulation its roster and established customers grow their spending with the company. However, the banal trades astatine a precocious price-to-sales (P/S) aggregate of astir 70 times analysts' 2026 estimates, which could bounds its upside from here.

However, determination is 1 institution that has immoderate akin characteristics to Palantir conscionable earlier it broke out. That institution is UiPath (NYSE: PATH), and it inactive trades astatine a fraction of the valuation of Palantir contempt a beardown run-up pursuing its astir caller net report.

While Palantir has go an AI operating strategy company, UiPath is looking to go the person successful AI cause orchestration. AI agents are bundle tools that tin autonomously execute tasks wrong guidelines and astir enactment arsenic virtual employees, and the accidental successful the abstraction is massive. Numerous companies are pursuing it oregon gathering their ain interior AI agents. While UiPath's Maestro level provides no-code and low-code tools that fto users easy physique their ain AI agents, that's not its main purpose.

The quality of the level is that it helps organizations orchestrate some AI agents created utilizing 1 of the galore different third-party systems and those built utilizing Maestro. This volition go an progressively important AI bundle layer. However, UiPath takes it a measurement further.