ABBYY Vantage Reviews

Our primary use case for this solution is invoice processing. We have many different invoices on different maps so we use it as a tool to classify those documents and get the information that we enter into the SAP systems.

ABBYY Vantage is easy to use and allows us to run through documents and extract information.

The overall integration could be better. For example, the modelling, classification and handwritten information are not great. From my perspective, Hyperscience does the handwritten processes a lot better than ABBYY Vantage. Additionally, the overall end-to-end processes experience can also be improved in terms of how information is fed to ABBYY. By having the overall process flow built with ABBYY Vantage, it can hold up as an independent tool.

We have been using this solution for approximately one year. We deploy this solution on cloud and are currently using the latest version.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. We can add new users without any issues. However, we do not need to add users often because the primary point is to reduce the number of users. Additionally, we are consultants, so we build and deploy solutions for our clients. Currently, we have five people involved in this process who are using and leveraging this product.

We have not had to contact customer service and support yet.

The initial setup was straightforward, and deployment was very quick as we used the ABBYY cloud setup that was provided. We didn't have to separate the installation and setup process. It was primarily structured on passing on documents and getting the information back.

The ROI is visible when there is enough volume of documents available. For example, if there are two documents a week, there would not be a good ROI, but if we have many invoices from large companies, there will be a high ROI.

I cannot give a specific figure for pricing because it is unique to each client. We negotiate at different times for different clients, depending on the size of their organization. However, I believe the price is a bundled package.

ABBYY Vantage is a good tool. In this space that we work in, Hyperscience and ABBYY Vantage are two essential tools that we work with. Others include Bioscript and many more, but these two are the primary tools because of their maturity and capability. Therefore, these are our tools of choice.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. The solution is good and stable, but its overall integration could be improved. Our advice to customers will be to understand their business cases because it is attached to document processing, so there is a bundled cost with this product. It is necessary to understand the volumes and the documents being worked with. Understanding the volume and quality of documents that are being processed is necessary to ensure success.

Our large scanning department receives documents from a variety of sources, including clients, suppliers, and others. We then standardize these documents by converting them into either electronic invoices or standardized PDF invoices. These are then uploaded to a web host, which transfers them to ABBYY for optical character recognition. Once converted to text, we extract relevant data from the invoices and transform it into an XML format. Finally, the XML data is sent to another service platform for further processing by a different provider. This provider reconstructs the invoices in a more consistent and detailed format.

ABBYY's interface is user-friendly after mastering the basics, and ABBYY University serves as a comprehensive knowledge base like Wikipedia. While updates sometimes require updates to the University as well, ABBYY does a great job of keeping it relevant and current.

The fast learning function was impressive, but we pushed it beyond its intended use. Despite using the software for an unintended purpose, the ABBYY team provided exceptional support that ultimately enabled the software to handle our needs. The OCR and overall document reading capabilities were excellent. Any issues we encountered stemmed from the supplier or the invoices themselves, not from ABBYY. Overall, ABBYY's product and its AI integrations are truly outstanding.

It handles our multilingual invoices well, recognizing Hindi, English, Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese. However, it struggles with international invoices that switch languages, like those starting in Chinese and ending in French. The blank area between languages confuses ABBYY's fast learning system, which focuses on character recognition. Unlike machine learning, fast learning can't adapt to the presence of multiple languages and struggles to differentiate between them. This limitation was anticipated when we implemented the system.

ABBYY's recent updates have been incredibly beneficial. The OCR accuracy has noticeably improved, allowing us to extract more data from documents and break down fields into even the smallest details. This granularity, down to individual notes on invoices, has been a game-changer.

The pre-trained AI extraction models have significantly improved our invoice processing efficiency. Previously, our data entry team could only manage around 150-200 invoices per person per day, which created a bottleneck when we were receiving 500-600 invoices daily. Now, with the AI handling the processing, we can effortlessly manage a much higher volume, closer to 2,000 invoices per day.

ABBYY has saved us around 85 percent of our time.

While ABBYY's straight-through processing initially appealed to us, we recently observed minor accuracy issues in the results. This suggests that our use case might be pushing ABBYY Vantage to its limits, as no one has likely used it for such a demanding task before.

ABBYY stands out for its collaborative approach. When we encountered issues or identified growth opportunities, they were receptive to our ideas, even implementing some of them into the product. This is evident in the recent Oceana sector updates, where many of our suggestions were incorporated. This responsiveness demonstrates that ABBYY truly values customer feedback.

While I understand that ABBYY eventually addressed the communication issue and apologized for it, the initial lack of response was frustrating. A simple explanation at the beginning could have prevented the whole problem. In my opinion, clear communication is the most important aspect of any service. Even if a company has a less-than-perfect product, I, as a customer, have chosen them for a reason. That's why I believe the best thing a supplier can do is prioritize communication, even if it's just automated responses acknowledging receipt of a message and providing an estimated response time. This is where ABBYY initially fell short, but things improved significantly once a director got involved.

The lack of patch update notifications creates a blind spot. Without them, we're unaware of new patches and can't proactively check if our code is compatible, potentially leading to issues down the line.

I have been using ABBYY Vantage for eight months.

ABBYY is stable, I'd rate it a nine out of ten, but there's still room for growth to improve both the company and its product.

I would rate ABBYY's scalability ten out of ten.

Before switching to ABBYY, we relied on a software solution developed internally by our own team.

Our initial deployment went smoothly thanks to excellent coordination and a well-structured plan. The clear separation between our development and production environments further ensured a successful rollout.

Our deployment typically takes a few weeks, even for large clients with heavy ABBYY processing. One such client was up and running in under a month. Our lengthy deployment was an exception and unrelated to ABBYY's performance.

ABBYY is fairly priced.

I would rate ABBYY nine out of ten.

Our organization has 12 ABBYY users, including developers, project managers, and general administrative staff.

Our target market isn't limited to a particular industry; rather, we focus on serving large-scale enterprise businesses, with a primary focus on the biggest players.

It doesn't require any maintenance from our side.

ABBYY offers competitive pricing and flexibility in their lease agreements. To help you decide, they'll provide a trial period and even generate a dummy invoice showing the estimated cost.

I recommend ABBYY for large businesses and enterprise users, rather than just any document processing unit. It caters to high-end users who need the advanced features it offers.

I mainly use ABBYY Vantage to process loan originations for cars.

ABBYY Vantage has reduced our data because it can classify and extract information from documents.

ABBYY Vantage's most valuable feature is auto-learning.

ABBYY Vantage's reporting could be improved - they don't have any out-of-the-box or detailed advanced reports.

I've been using ABBYY Vantage for about a year.

I would rate ABBYY Vantage's stability five out of ten.

I would rate ABBYY Vantage's scalability eight out of ten.

We've seen an ROI from ABBYY Vantage.

I'd give ABBYY Vantage's pricing a rating of seven out of ten.

I'd recommend ABBYY Vantage to other users and give it a rating of seven out of ten.

We use the solution to extract the contents from documents like invoices and passports.

Verification Station is valuable. If the confidence level is lower than what we set, we can view it in Verification Station and correct it if there are any issues. For example, if the confidence value is 90%, and the confidence level of the extracted content is below 90, the documents will be pushed to Verification Station. We can check whether the document has been extracted correctly. If the values do not match, we can correct them.

It would be good if the product provided an AI-based prebuilt model that predicts and gives output. We can then verify and make changes if necessary.

I have been using the solution for almost three years.

I rate the solution’s stability a seven out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a nine out of ten. Five to ten of our clients are using the solution. The number of users has reduced. There are other vendors who offer OCR solutions. Our clients are enterprise-level businesses.

Whenever we have issues, we raise a ticket, and we get a response from the support team.

Positive

The initial setup is not easy, but it is not complicated. It was pretty straightforward. I rate the ease of setup a five or six out of ten. The vendor provided all the documentation. We could raise a ticket if we had any doubts, and the team would help us.

Compared to most solutions, it is a good product. It has a lot of features. The extraction it provides is much better than any other vendor. Overall, I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

We had to extract some data from a commercial policy, which can run up to 300 pages, for a client. It was a challenge to look for the action data and extract it out of those 300 pages. With ABBYY FlexiCapture, we were able to do that easily by using its repeating group feature. It was helpful. For doing the same in Kofax, we would have had to heavily rely on scripting. There is no way of doing it with low code.

Its ease of use is valuable. It is easy to use and configure.

Its ICR is really good at handwriting recognition. The last version of ABBYY FlexiCapture that I used was better than other tools such as Captiva and Kofax. The base OCR engine of ABBYY is also very good. In fact, Kofax was using ABBYY's OCR engine in the last version, but they came up with their own engine.

One good thing about ABBYY is the training. All the training courses are available in ABBYY University. They were not free initially. They were instructor-led, but now, ABBYY has made them open for everyone to learn, whereas with Kofax, you have to purchase training courses, and then you can learn. With ABBYY, everything is there in their knowledge base.

I have not used it in the last six months, but at that time, there were some stability-related issues. These were known issues. They might have already fixed them, and it might have been improved by now. We had raised tickets, and they were working on various tickets. The known bugs included crashing of the application when there were more than 500 pages in the configuration window. It did not work in such cases.

There were also issues related to the classification by training. There is a feature in ABBYY where you can classify the type of a document, but it was not very effective when you trained it on a lot of variations. It worked fine for up to 10 or 15 variations but for anything beyond that, it was a mess. It wouldn’t work.

They can have more advanced workflows. They can have some custom status in their workflow. It was there, but they can introduce more cases such as triggering an email or interacting with other systems with APIs. They can be included as stages in their workflow rather than doing it all by scripting. 

They can also work more on connectors. The ABBYY connectors are there for SAP and SharePoint, but they can include more connectors. ABBYY's usage has increased. I have seen many companies using ABBYY in recent times, and it will help a great deal if there are more connectors to connect with the end systems.

I had worked with ABBYY FlexiCapture for around five years. Currently, I'm working with Kofax, and I have not worked with ABBYY for the last six months. The last version that I used was version 12.

I have not seen FlexiCapture environments with a lot of users. At the most, I have seen 20 users, which included five or six business users, five or six developers, and a few people from the admin and config team. That could be because at the time of implementing a project, not many people were required. When we handed over the project, more business users would have been created. It all depends on the phase of the project.

We did try to reach out to them for some of the challenges. They wanted us to take some proper services consulting, but we were able to manage on our own. We did not interact with the services consultant from ABBYY.

I used ABBYY FlexiCapture in my previous organization. Currently, I'm working with Kofax. Both of these organizations are service-based, and they provide services related to implementation, development, and other things. The tool that we use is decided by the client. When we approach a client, if they have already purchased a license of ABBYY or Kofax, we have to execute the use cases by using that tool. Otherwise, it will be a loss of a lot of money for them. 

If they don't have a tool, we do try to suggest what would be best for them, but it is up to them to decide which tool they want to go for. They can go for ABBYY, Kofax, TotalAgility, or any other tool.

I would recommend ABBYY FlexiCapture for those use cases where only OCR is needed, and there is no need for business processes. That's because not much branching is there in the workflow. It does not have a powerful workflow feature. If you are using it in association with any BPM or RPA tool, there is the ease of configuration, extraction, and classification. That's one thing that I like about ABBYY.

FlexiCapture is a good product. It can be used for any kind of use case that requires OCR. Except for the unstructured content part, which is there in Kofax, I cannot think of a use case that cannot be solved by using this solution. It caters to most needs of the projects. ABBYY is positioning this tool as only an OCR tool, not as a BPM tool. Kofax is an OCR and BPM tool. That's the difference, but I would not like ABBYY to change it because that's what makes ABBYY the simplest. There is a single component, which makes it easier to understand. When you add more features and modules, the complexity also increases from an understanding perspective. We can suggest more features, but it would be a trade-off.

It is a straightforward setup. If you have a cloud deployment, you just need your tenant. You simply start using it after installing a thin client on your machine. 

I have used ABBYY on the cloud. I had used ABBYY as a standalone installation on my machine. I have used ABBYY as a distributed solution within our VPN.

Deploying simple bug fixes in ABBYY doesn't take much time. It can be done within two minutes. When deploying the whole project from scratch, I have not seen it take more than 10 minutes. It can be done easily, and it is a straightforward process. To import from one environment, you just change the variables to cater to the needs of another environment. You just go there and import it. It is that simple.

You need to purchase user licenses, and you also need to purchase the license for the pages. User licenses are required for your developers to use the developer tools, and you also need to ensure that there is a pool of licenses for the business users so that they can log in and perform their activities.

It has a very simple GUI. When a person is using ABBYY FlexiCapture for the first time, I would suggest exploring all the features, especially the Flexilayout Language, because it is very easy to explore all the features. It provides you with a great level of flexibility to configure complex documents. ABBYY is no-code, but there are a lot of things that you can do by scripting in Flexilayout Language. So, I would recommend not restricting yourself to the GUI-based commands. You should go and try Flexilayout Language. It is a very powerful feature in ABBYY.

ABBYY is launching new products. It is not that they're not changing anything. They have launched Vantage 2.1, which is very good at cognitive capabilities.

While pitching their tool, every product's sales team tells clients about certain cognitive capabilities and other features, which might not be possible for specific use cases. So, client expectations should be set correctly. One of the clients was expecting us to use the cognitive capabilities of FlexiCapture, but FlexiCapture is not that cognitive. Vantage is cognitive, but FlexiCapture is not.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. There is ease of use and ease of configuration, but they need to include more features. They need to make the product more stable in dealing with more variants.

Our primary use case is for processing documents and extracting data from them - using the OCR capabilities. Documents include invoices, purchase orders, things like that. I'm an IT solution manager and we are customers of ABBYY. 

We've had two main benefits from ABBYY. Screening documents is a time-consuming activity, which has no real added value by itself so the solution saves the company a lot of time. The second benefit relates to the energy involved in employees going through documents. It's tiring work and mistakes creep in. We now have an increased level of accuracy by using the solution. 

Clearly the OCR capability of ABBYY is the top feature in our context. We can rely on the ABBYY knowledge and experience to extract data and recognize texts in different situations and especially in different languages, particularly English and Chinese. 

The main thing they need to work on is simplification of the solution, particularly use of the search tool. Configuring is quite complex and it's not very user friendly, particularly the user interface if you're trying to figure it out by yourself and create some configurations for processing documents. I know they are working on it. We used the new ideas on page projects they recently released and that has been great for enabling non-IT proficient users to start configuring and using it.

The stability of the solution is good. 

It's quite easy to scale. We currently have around 10 users, mainly IT professionals but also other users. I'm responsible for managing and maintaining the solution with a support team, and we generally carry out an annual upgrade, rather than an upgrade whenever ABBYY releases a new version. We use it every day and hope to increase usage as it would help more and more people at the company. 

The technical support was good. 

The initial setup was quite simple, perhaps slightly more complicated because it's on premise so it includes taking care of the architecture. I managed the project and we built a platform in a few months. A consultant worked with me and another solution architect during the initial period. The total setup took between two to three months. 

We haven't measured ROI but definitely as mentioned, there are many time-saving benefits.

We are on-prem so we're just paying the license fee. They have a clear pricing model. You pay extra for the training content. 

The main difficulty, as I mentioned, is to get people started on it if they're not specifically trained on ABBYY or not an IT professional. It's initially quite difficult and more so now that the learning material is not freely accessible online. Other than that, it's just a matter of following the documentation and using it. 

I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

I specialize in RPA. So, I started learning FlexiCapture to include it in the automation process. Instead of users having to manually enter information into a database or something like that, they can just load their digital documents to a certain location for ABBYY to decipher them, and then the bot and the automation could just continue along with that.

For one of the projects, it was deployed on a public cloud. For the other project, it was on-premise.

The whole idea of designing your own templates is pretty much the bread and butter of the product, but that's really the best part because you can design flexible templates.

There is also the AI part. They have their machine learning models that are pre-setup for invoices and things like that, which is also very handy. It is a really good feature.

There is always room for improvement in any product. Some of the configurations for the machine learning models for invoice reading are fairly complicated. There is so much customization that is possible with that sort of thing, so it makes sense that there are a lot of options, but some of the more important ones can be a little better streamlined or more upfront. Currently, machine learning models are a little bit difficult to configure satisfactorily.

There are a lot of solutions for different things, and they are all kind of headed in the same direction where they all do everything. I know that ABBYY wants to try and do a little more RPA. Solutions like UiPath, for example, want to eat ABBYY's lunch too. They all are trying to make an all-in-one solution for all possible automation needs. In that sense, ABBYY as a standalone product could use some more automation features. They are not there yet.

Its integrations with strictly RPA products, such as UiPath, Blue Prism, and other solutions, work when they work, but when they don't, it is a kind of a pain. Those integrations could use a little bit more support.

I have run into issues with the connectors that they developed for UiPath. I had one issue with that. It didn't want to do what we wanted. We had to change how it worked a little bit as far as the automation goes. It wasn't a huge issue, but it would have been much more convenient if had worked the way it was designed to. Otherwise, in terms of the stability of the project itself, I've never seen it crash.

Its performance is usually dependent on the hardware it is installed upon. That's not really an issue with the software itself. Its accuracy is good. It is probably one of the better optical character recognition packages that I've seen, but it still is not perfect because none of them are. It is the nature of the software, but it is pretty good. As long as the clients can provide reasonably readable documents, then it has got no problems as far as I'm concerned.

It is actually relatively simple to increase the scale of the infrastructure that you install. When I was dealing with it, the licensing structure that they had was relatively affordable as compared to other solutions. The bigger the scale, the more affordable it is. These things change all the time, so I don't know if it is still current.

The projects I've been on were proof of concept and then we just rolled them into production on the first stage. It was pretty small scale, but they had plans to go large scale. One of the projects actually from my end was still just the small-scale stuff, but other departments in the company had already procured a rather large-scale ABBYY license, and it was in production. I had nothing to do with that section, but the company as a whole had a pretty large infrastructure for ABBYY itself. They were dealing with millions of pages per month or so.

For proof of concept, there were probably about four or five test users. For the second one that I worked on, it was planned to go to production from the get-go. It started out on small scale again with probably four or five users. So far, the scale is 20.

I have used tech support, and they've been extremely helpful. There was a part of the solution I couldn't figure out myself. So, I enlisted their help, and they walked me through how to do what I needed to do. They set up a time within the next day or so, and they spent an hour with me. We figured it all out, and it was good. There is always room for improvement. Other instances haven't been as perfect as that, but that was certainly a shining example.

When we did the first project, which was just the proof of concept that I was part of, they had older software from 20 years ago. There wasn't support for it anymore or something like that. They were looking for something that could handle a larger scale. So, they switched. We suggested them ABBYY, and that's where they went.

For the clients for whom I worked with ABBYY, we would arrange for them to provide an environment. We would go into the environment and install ABBYY servers. If required, we'd also walk them through installing the clients on their machines, but generally, what we've been doing so far has been the support to an RPA project. They didn't really need to use ABBYY clients. It has all been pretty much backend stuff. We would install the infrastructure, set up the automation and its interactions with ABBYY, and then run tests in UAT. Once everything is ready to go, we do the final production deployment. After that, we have a week or two of maintenance before it gets off to a specialized maintenance team.

It takes about a week for the installation, but the development planning usually takes months or longer. At the time, I was pretty much doing it myself with support from a business analyst. The deployment of the infrastructure, the development of the automation and the ABBYY components, and then running the testing was usually just a one-man job with support from a couple of other people, such as a project manager.

Once we have developed the solution, there is a testing period where we just put it in their hands, and they throw all sorts of scenarios at it. We fix the bugs as it goes along. ABBYY does have a learning function where it can pick up on these changes when things arise, as long as the users are able and familiar with how to train it, which we show them how to do. So, maintainability is pretty good as far as I'm concerned. If there is something completely wrong and it is not reading anything right, then we have to go in and edit the templates, etc. Generally, if we set it up right and they learn how to teach it right, it is pretty stable.

The client got an ROI in reducing the number of hours that the users have to spend on a given task. Again, my solutions are not purely ABBYY, so it is hard to say how much of the benefit the ABBYY section alone was. Usually, ABBYY is involved because the users are spending a lot of time entering the information they see on a piece of paper into the system, whereas ABBYY can read it all in seconds. So, there is certainly great time savings. It then becomes a matter of comparing the cost of installation and the cost of developing the solution, licensing, and everything else with the costs and the time of those users. Even if it is pretty close to equal, they usually go for it because it is a much better environment for the users to work in and is less tedium. So, they have more employee satisfaction.

It is more on the reasonable side as compared to the competition that I am aware of. I'm not an expert on pricing schemes for all sorts of things, but when we offer them a solution, we like to say we're agnostic. So, we offer more than one solution when possible. Amongst the ones that we've offered, ABBYY usually is the more reasonable solution on a big scale. On a small scale, they're all pretty similar.

As far as I understand, you pay a license for a number of pages, and that's pretty much it. It has just the rate per page, and it decreases as you scale.

I've never done a strictly ABBYY solution. My solutions have all been ABBYY plus UiPath or something like that. After a solution has been deployed, there have always been bug fixes. Other than that, clients have always been extremely happy with this solution. They're excited they have to do less work.

If you have the right use case, it is definitely worth it. As a solution, I would rate ABBYY a nine out of 10. It is a solid solution, and support is there. It is good.

We are using this solution for PDF reading capabilities for some invoices. We also utilize it to read DW4 forms.

There are many others to compare with such as Google and Microsoft, but we haven't seen any specific distinction that stood out with Abbyy.

They were the most used, which is the reason we chose them.

Abbyy is really good in terms of reading OCR.

There has always been a challenge with Word and PDF reading capabilities. This is an area that needs improvement.

There are certain controls like radio buttons and checkboxes that when reading PDFs, really doesn't go well with the RPA.

We work with Abbyy and UiPath. Abbyy provides its API to be utilized with UiPath, and that is how we use it.

We have been working with Abbyy for at least one year. We have one or two projects that we have worked on with Abbyy.

Abbyy is a stable solution.

It's not really scalable. When it comes to PDF reading, we are very specific to that particular document and that template with some of the verbiage.

I have not seen it to be more scalable with any OCR capabilities.

I have not contacted technical support.

Previously, we didn't try any other solutions. We have to have that screen gripping capabilities and OCR. UiPath with Abbyy was the right choice.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We did not go with the licensed version of this solution.

It's more trial and error, but Abbyy is still really good in terms of OCR. If you have a consistent use case, then I think that Abbyy is the right fit.

I would rate Abbyy Vantage an eight out of ten.