ABBYY Vantage Reviews

ABBYY Vantage is used for reading documents that require OCR or document intelligence, such as sales invoices.

The UI is user-friendly and ABBYY Vantage supports over 100 languages.

The handwritten recognition has room for improvement.

ABBYY Vantage is mainly available on the public cloud but for clients that use a private cloud, it is complicated to set up the solution.

I have been using ABBYY Vantage for two years.

I give the stability of ABBYY Vantage an eight out of ten.

I give the scalability of ABBYY Vantage a nine out of ten. The solution can handle millions of documents.

I give the initial setup an eight out of ten. There are two ways to utilize the solution. An individual can use the web-based user interface, which is easy to set up. If we intend to use the solution for bulk sorting, we'll need to use the API, which is also straightforward to set up. The full deployment can take a couple of days.

We implement the solution for our customers.

The price for ABBYY Vantage is at par with its competitors. I give the price a six out of ten.

I give ABBYY Vantage an eight out of ten.

We have over 1,000 people using the solution.

ABBYY Vantage offers better language support compared to its competitors, and it also demonstrates good connectivity and accuracy.

ABBYY Vantage is primarily designed as an enterprise-level solution that effectively fulfills OCR requirements. However, I do not suggest this solution for small companies or individuals.

Our most common use case is sales order and invoice processing. The solution is used for this processing very, very frequently. 

We also use the solution as an OCR or OTP character reader that extracts data from unsecured documents. 

In the UK, there are particular protocols. For example, if you are getting a driver's license you have to go to the transport authority. They will check your eyes to ensure that you are not blind and are able drive a car.

We use the solution to extract that information and store it to our specs. We do OCR and then send the data to the UK government.

The solution allows us and the government to process information in a very accurate and fast manner.  

The solution's AI technology is genius. 

The solution has its own research and development center that is doing great work. 

The price for trainings or certifications are on the very, very high side. For example, if you want to get a certification, it might cost around 200 pounds for a six-hour course. 

The price is too high, in particular for typical development countries like Poland, Portugal, India, and the Philippines. As a result, it is not easy to get developers for when we are implementing projects. 

I have been using the solution for more than two years. I am currently working with the latest version but also used the previous version. 

In my company, I am the program manager and chief architect for all solutions. 

The solution is absolutely stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

If you have the on-premises model, then you might have to circle back with the vendor to procure more licenses or upgrade current licenses. Then you go to your workstation and install them. 

If you have the cloud model, then you can scale in ten minutes with a single click. 

We have contacted technical support a few times.

For example, we contacted them about documents that included handwriting. The handwriting was not as good as Oxford students. They determined that the AI was not yet mature enough to handle the handwriting.

They gave us a very, very satisfactory answer. Most companies would try to say that their product could perform. Instead, we got a concrete answer that was helpful and appreciated. 

The setup is very, very easy. 

We implement the solution in-house. First, we clear the licenses and then we give them to our developers. There is a technical process called templatization where developers create all types of sales orders, invoices, and documents. They do this using information that is provided by our store members or organization members. Once that is done, developers feed the items to the app system.

The app itself gives you the interface. The left hand side shows the original document and the right hand side shows you the digital document that has been converted by the solution. This process allows you to render changes if needed.

After that, everything is forwarded to the next development team such as our AI or machine learning team. 

The entire life cycle is not very long. It totally depends on the customer's volume but usually happens within two weeks. Ten templates might take two days. A volume of 10,000 templates might take six months. 

If you buy the IV licenses, then ongoing maintenance is included. 

Some of our customers have already experienced ROI and some have not. 

The solution offers both cloud and on-premises models but the pricing is on the higher side. Trainings and certifications are also expensive. 

The pricing changed very recently. It is based on how many scans or pages you convert from physical to digital. I am not on the finance side, but I think it costs around $20,000 USD for one million pages. 

The pricing is rated a six out of ten.

In the market, the best product is still Kofax Capture. It has been in the market a long time so is a much better product than others. 

In my opinion, the solution is the second best product for securing data from physical documents to digital format. It is a wonderful solution within the price range of many medium-sized companies. 

In a competitive analysis, I would rate Kofax a ten out of ten and the solution an eight out of ten. 

Before choosing the solution, it is important to consider the value or ROI you will get for the money. 

There are open-source tools in the market that do the same things for free. AWS has a tool that is pretty much open source or one-tenth the cost of the solution. Google and Azure also have solutions. 

If you want a truly accurate and exact enterprise solution, then you might want to move to the solution. 

I rate the solution an eight 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.

I use ABBYY Vantage in my company for extracting data from invoices, IDs, and contracts. I have also used ABBYY Vantage to extract data in English from different documents.

As my company operates in the Middle East, it is important for us to have a solution that accepts Arabic characters from documents. The most valuable feature of the solution is the extraction of data from passports and national IDs, a task that is generally difficult for most of the OCR engines to check data from such documents.

ABBYY Vantage is a product that does not include the Arabic language. From an improvement perspective, ABBYY Vantage should include the Arabic language.

I have been using ABBYY Vantage since 2018. My company has a partnership with ABBYY.

It is a very stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

I work in a software company where there are more than 50 users of ABBYY Vantage.

The solution's technical support is very supportive.

In the past, my company used to use IQ Bot from Automation Anywhere. My company moved from IQ Bot to ABBYY Vantage to avail the latter product's features.

The product's initial setup is neither simple nor difficult.

If one uses ABBYY Vantage and is familiar with its components, I believe one can handle its setup phase. I think it is not a very basic solution.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. Depending on the projects undertaken by my company, I have also used the product on the cloud services by AWS.

ABBYY Vantage is a bit of an expensive tool. The payment model for ABBYY Vantage is such that a user needs to make payments for the number of pages consumed with the help of the tool.

I think my company chose ABBYY Vantage over other products in the market owing to the fact that it is a reliable product that offers stability, features, and capabilities to extract data from different documents. In our company, we tested ABBYY Vantage for many of our projects and saw that it delivers results.

I recommend ABBYY Vantage to those who plan to use it in the future, especially if you deal with complex, semi-structured, or unstructured documents since it is a dependable tool that provides high accuracy. Suppose a user wants to use a product to segregate financial documents and needs a tool that provides very high accuracy, then my company recommends ABBYY Vantage.

I rate the overall tool a nine 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.

For ABBYY Vantage, we have access to various use cases involving different languages, primarily related to invoices. However, we have recently started receiving multiple types of documents, including those used for billing purposes in factories or warehouses. Therefore, we do not have a specific use case but multiple use cases for ABBYY Vantage.

Regarding features, the pre-trained models in ABBYY Vantage are extremely useful. They are capable of detecting a majority of the fields that we need.

One major area that requires improvement in ABBYY Vantage is its current JSON output format. We expect an upgrade from ABBYY that will offer XML or CSV formats. In FlexiCapture, we can download the output in a CSV format. In Vantage, we receive the output in JSON format. Then, we need to extract the JSON output and use various APIs to convert it to an Excel format, which can be troublesome. Therefore, we hope that ABBYY will address this concern with an upgrade.

As of now, ABBYY Vantage is working fine. I want the solution to have a very good pre-trained model that can be trained using only two to three documents for new templates instead of the current requirement of ten documents for different templates. That kind of smart pre-trained model is what I want in ABBYY. ABBYY already has a pre-trained model, but they need more because they only have three to four at present. Make additional models for different areas so that the solution can detect information not just from tables or documents but also directly from images.

I am currently using ABBYY Vantage, but after being introduced to Nanonets, I started comparing their parameters, which led me to peerspot.com. I have been using ABBYY FlexiCapture for the past three years. However, in our company, we have been using ABBYY Vantage since October 2022. My company has a partnership with ABBYY.

Stability-wise, I rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Based on our business operations currently, the solution isn't very scalable. Maybe in the future, it might change when we have better use cases in our organization. So, scalability-wise, I rate this solution an eight out of ten.

At present, there are 22 team members in our organization who are currently using the solution. However, we have not yet provided access to other teams or for business uses directly. So, taking into account the developers or the support staff, a total of 22 people are currently using the solution.

We currently have full technical support from our vendor, a direct partner of ABBYY. Our organization has also established a good relationship with ABBYY, which allows us to benefit from their technical expertise whenever needed. Based on my experience, I would rate the support provided by ABBYY Vantage as high.

ABBYY Vantage has been designed as a user-friendly solution, making the setup process require only a couple of days. It typically takes no longer than a day to create an instance and begin using the software. Additionally, once the user has received some training or has access to ABBYY's generic documents, they can quickly learn how to use the solution. In our organization, the solution's deployment was done on the cloud.

While I am not aware if anyone was involved in the implementation process, I can confirm that we have consultants. However, we are looking for opportunities where we can provide direct access to our business. This would involve the need to create and deploy the entire project taking our help, but we do have another consultant to do that since we have multiple projects across the globe.

Our company receives discounts because of our good partnership with the vendor and our vendor's partnership with ABBYY. So, from a pricing point of view, I rate this solution a nine out of ten. This rating is after considering other tools similar to ABBYY Vantage in the market, for which the prices are pretty high compared to the price of Vantage, which is less.

Like ABBYY Vantage, Nanonets also provides powerful pre-trained models that effectively detect required fields. We have been trying both Nanonets and ABBYY Vantage. We have been utilizing Vantage in multiple projects, but we have recently discovered Nanonets, which is a new and good tool. So, that is why I was looking for a comparison of the parameters of both solutions online.

Even though we have become aware of Nanonets at our company, we still prefer using ABBYY Vantage. At the moment, I am evaluating both tools. However, I believe that if we can provide direct access to the Onepage tool for our business and create different instances for our business partners so that they use our ABBYY licenses on their projects, then we would recommend ABBYY. The inability to do so would be a disadvantage, and we would consider recommending a different tool.

I recommend ABBYY Vantage to those who are planning to use it. The major requirement considered by business partners is the access provided by the solution. They also want the tool to be user-friendly. The business partners want the solution to allow direct training without needing external vendors such as consultants or developers. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use this solution to extract data, and to combine it with other solutions to provide end to end processes.

We like the fact that this solution is enterprise-ready, so it can be deployed on-premises, scale it, etc.

We would like the workflow building within this solution to be more transparent, which would allow us to model the process.

Also, the large number of components within this tool can make deploying and managing the solution quite complex.

Lastly, we feel that the usability of the interface could be improved by the use of cognitive capabilities, to make it more user-friendly. At present it is quite complicated to understand how to use this solution, and can take time to master effectively.

We have been working with this solution for two years, but we have been more actively engaging with it for the past year.

This is a fairly stable solution. In our experience there have ben some issues, but these have not stopped production. Instead it has cost us time in order to contact support, understand the issue, and then to mitigate future risk.

This is a scalable solution, as far as we are aware.

The support for this solution tend to respond in a timely fashion. However, more complex issues may mean a delay in replies.

Positive

This solution is fairly complex, even for expert users, to setup and deploy. There are a lot of components involved in the initial setup, and a lot of documentation to go through in order to deploy the tool successfully.

The licenses for this solution are payable on a yearly basis, and are transferable from one year to the next, if they go unused.  The license payment also includes a number of support hours from the vendor.

I would recommend organizations to evaluate this solution if they are looking into data extraction products. It is complex to implement and use, meaning it will require time to use effectively, but it provides good results.

We would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our company uses the solution for processing invoices that follow a particular template. We have some standard invoices on a monthly basis and use UiPath to download them from our suppliers. The downloads are extracted and exported to the solution.

We previously used the solution's on-premises version but it is no longer supported. We used the trial cloud version until we bought our license one month ago. 

We are in the development phase but once we go live, we will have many users for the verification station.

The solution has its own language that can be configured many ways and with higher accuracy than other products.

Programming interfaces should include intelligence or documentation. It is difficult to find documentation and implement without some information included in the backend scripting pages.

The support network is weak and needs improvement.

I have been using the solution for one year.

The solution is stable for documents that are standard format.

The solution is scalable.

The support is weak and it is difficult to find answers for day-to-day problems. There is no forum for answers and not many users are familiar with the solution to help with issues. The provider should have documentation for everything but it is not reaching end users.

Tickets are not responded to in a timely manner and it is difficult to get email responses or escalations. There is no standard format for support and they just respond whenever they like. In contrast, UiPath helped with anything needed.

I rate support a four out of ten.

Neutral

We used UiPath's Document Understanding but it had issues finding items that were marked in particular locations.

Accuracy is comparatively higher for the solution. You have the option to write rules in the backend which can be manually verified if a document does not satisfy conditions. Once verification is complete, the document feeds back and the solution picks up the rest of the processing. This flexibility was not available in UiPath.

UiPath also required too much user involvement at the time of our implementation, but I believe this has improved over time.

The cloud setup is straightforward and only requires configuring the development environment which includes flexi layout studio and product setup station. Any security concerns can be addressed through an SSO or AD integration.

The on-premises setup is a bit complex because it requires understanding connections.

We implemented the solution in-house.

Maintenance and updates for the cloud version are handled by ABBYY. We receive notification of updates in advance. Typically, an update requires some upgrade in the development environment to ensure there is no impact to users.

Our license is $6,000 and includes unlimited users for the verification station.

Licensing is a bit on the high side.

We looked at ABBYY's invoice processing but were not satisfied with the results so we moved to the solution.

The solution is the best for use cases with standard document templates. If your documents do not follow a particular format, then you cannot use the solution. 

The features for AI and processing lag behind so I rate AI a five out of ten.

Overall, for our purpose with standard document templates, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.