2025 saw the continued push to make better and better large language models (LLMs), but as artificial intelligence (AI) advances, having an AI orchestration layer is becoming even more important. Two companies at the forefront of this burgeoning field are Palantir (PLTR 5.55%) and UiPath (PATH 0.96%). Both stocks have performed well in 2025, but it was Palantir leading the charge with a more than 135% gain, as of this writing, compared to a more than 25% for UiPath.
Let's examine which stock looks poised to outperform next year.
The case for Palantir
NASDAQ: PLTR
Key Data Points
There haven't been many growth stories as good as Palantir. The company has seen its revenue growth accelerate each of the past nine quarters, with its revenue soaring a whopping 63% in Q3.
Palantir's rapid growth stems from the company's AI platform (AIP), which essentially acts as an operating system to make AI more useful. The company does this by gathering data from disparate sources and then organizing it into an ontology that it then connects to real-world assets and processes. This clean, organized data that links directly to actual objects and concepts helps significantly reduce AI hallucinations (made-up information) and helps solve real-life problems.
The company has been adding commercial customers at a strong clip, with its customer count up 45% last quarter. But even more impressive is how quickly customers who sign up for AIP are expanding. Its net revenue retention was a robust 134% over the past 12 months, and this only includes expansion from customers that have been with Palantir for a year or more. Meanwhile, its total U.S. commercial contract value surged 342% last quarter.
The company is also seeing strong growth from its largest customer, the U.S. government, which continues to turn to Palantir to help modernize its military and intelligence branches. The potential use cases for Palantir's AI technology are just so wide that the company has a long runway of growth ahead.
Image source: Getty Images
The case for UiPath
NYSE: PATH
Key Data Points
UiPath could very well be where Palantir was a few years ago, before it saw its revenue growth begin to accelerate. The company is transforming itself into an AI agent orchestration platform, and growth has just started to pick up.
UiPath's background is in robotic process automation (RPA), which is the use of software bots to perform repetitive, rules-based tasks. The company has been helping manage software bots for many years, and as such, its platform already links to legacy systems and has a compliance and governance framework in place. It is now taking that system and applying it to AI agents.
The company's Maestro platform lets customers create AI agents through no-code and low-code tools, but its real strength is that it not only manages these internally built AI agents, but also those from third-party vendors. With so many companies going after the AI agent space, there is going to be a plethora of AI agents running around from different vendors. Agent sprawl is going to be a growing problem that organizations are going to have to deal with, and Maestro will be there to help manage it.
Another big selling point of UiPath is that Maestro can coordinate both AI agents and software bots and assign which tasks are best suited for each. Software bots can handle simple duties, like data entry, and are cheaper than AI agents, which can tackle more complex situations. By coordinating AI agents and software bots, Maestro can help customers save money.
The verdict
Palantir is showing incredible growth, but the stock is very expensive, trading at a forward price-to-sales (P/S) multiple of 68 times 2026 analyst revenue estimates. Meanwhile, UiPath trades at a forward P/S multiple of just 5 times.
UiPath saw its revenue growth accelerate to 16% growth last quarter from 14% growth in Q2, which isn't that different from the revenue growth acceleration that Palantir first saw in 2023 when it introduced AIP. If Maestro catches on, UiPath's stock has huge upside from here, given its valuation. As such, I think it is the stock set to outperform in 2026.
