Blue Prism Cloud Reviews

The user-friendliness needs improvement. It's still a bit more IT-minded. I'm personally looking for a more business-minded RPA. It's the two big ways of using RPA in my experience. You can implement that RPA from an IT perspective, and then it's just one of the many tools, and it's not really a revolution, it's just a small state, or you can see it as really a business tool.

Business people use it and automate their own business processes and it's really revolutionary because you don't need any IT knowledge. You just need a good app for processes. Those are the two ways of approaching RPAs, and for my part, I'm interested in the business parts.

We have been using Blue Prism for two years. 

Scalability all depends on what kind of processes. If it's a process that goes to the whole enterprise, adopt the RPA goal, it will be of strong importance. All the IT tools are much more powerful, fast and reliable.

If it's the business side and it's all small tasks and processes that can be automated. That's the interesting part. That's the scalability of RPA on the business side, but it's all small tasks and processes. The scalability will be how many processes you perform, and which structure you put in place so that everything runs smoothly, and you can do proper maintenance and change management.

I haven't had any issues with technical support. From the UiPath side, they're not really responsive when we ask things. It can be months before they answer. With UiPath, you are all on your own. There's no real support. I haven't experienced any support, but that's also because it's a free tool, until a certain level.

I also use the free UiPath platform. It's a very strong go-to-market proposition. You can't have that with Blue Prism. UiPath is also user-friendly. I found UiPath much easier to use and more straightforward than Blue Prism. 

I haven't seen any technical differences between both products. Everything I could do with Blue Prism, I can do with UiPath.

Blue Prism is able to scale up at an enterprise-level. It's what I used when I was working for a big bank in Belgium. UiPath is better for smaller companies and SMBs because of its user-friendliness.

If a product is offered for free, just to step in, instead of directly paying heavy investments, I think a lot of enterprises, especially in the SME, SMB business, will have much more interest in such kind of products.

I would rate Blue Prism a seven out of ten.

They should improve the user-friendliness and they should change their business model. Because companies need to become a partner and have to pay €60,000 upfront, or be a member upfront, to be partners. So, it's a bit of a waste of money. I don't understand their business model.

The tool is there but it should be a self-service tool where people just buy the program and use it. Why make it so complicated? 

It is really a program for business users, so why make it so complicated with implementers and partnerships et cetera? 

Our primary use case for Blue Prism Cloud depends on what our client's needs are. If they want something that is cloud-based but they do not have their own cloud infrastructure — like Azure or something like that — they need additional support. If they want the features that come with Blue Prism Cloud, like OCR (Optical Character Recognition) functionality or anything in particular on the service desk, that is usually when clients would choose Blue Prism Cloud as an option for automating processes.  

We deliver RPA (Robotic Process Automation) solutions for our clients. We go out to them and do the discovery and identify processes that are candidates for automation with them. Then we deliver that for them by building out the processes and deploying Blue Prism. We do the whole thing up to that point.  

I have not had much direct feedback from clients about what they find the most valuable in Blue Prism. I guess I would say probably the additional functionality over and above Blue Prism Enterprise and the fact that it is cloud-based are things that would attract them to the product. Additionally, it will be secure on secured cloud servers. There is a lot less to worry about.   

I think some of the issues we have experienced have been more painful because of the support. In the past, support was a bit weak. It would take a while to get a response and it could take a while to get an issue resolved. If we had a client that wanted Blue Prism Cloud Thoughtonomy, then it could take a little while to get that up and running. In comparison, getting Enterprise up and running is much quicker. I suppose the cost of Enterprise is quite a lot in comparison as there is an investment in the hardware.  

I do not really develop in Blue Prism Cloud, so I do not really know what can be improved on the development side. I do not really have any level of detail about it or feedback from appropriate users.  

We were working with Blue Prism Cloud before it was Blue Prism Cloud. It was still Thoughtonomy (acquisition announced July 17, 2019). So we have got a fair bit of experience with it throughout the product's history.  

I think Blue Prism Cloud has been fairly stable.  

This product is quite scalable. I mean we have not done scaling to huge numbers by percentage. We have done a reasonable volume up to about 50 processes at a time. It has been fine from that standpoint. It does not seem most people using it will make huge jumps in the number of processes that they use all at once.  

I have not personally had to contact technical support, but I know my colleagues have. We do deploy the product for our clients as part of the process of delivery in creating automated solutions for them. That is where it stops as we are not providing maintenance for the product to customers. But during the installations and development, there has been some contact with support. There have not been any notable complaints beyond the level of difficulty sometimes encountered during the setup and installation.  

In our experience setup and installation for Blue Prism has been relatively complex, but it is getting better. The deployment used to take somewhere around anywhere up to a month before. I would say it could be as little as a few days now.  

Typically the value of Blue Prism Cloud depends on the user's needs. Most people would only really need Blue Prism Enterprise on-premises but people like the additional functionality of being on the cloud. Both products are good solutions. I do think that a lot of our clients going for Blue Prism Cloud when in reality they could probably get away with the Enterprise version — or even something else. We often deal with people who are early in their RPA journey, so they are just starting out and getting to know the advantages of the products and automation. So I would typically recommend that they go with Enterprise and if they feel like they need to move on to Cloud then they can do that later. But a lot of people like that functionality, they want the OCR and they want the AI capability that comes with the cloud. So often they choose cloud but they may just be doing that because it either seems new or it is progressive and advanced or whatever.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate Blue Prism Cloud as a seven-out-of-ten. I am no expert on using it first-hand, but I think reducing the costs, speeding up the deployment, maybe adding a few other product package offerings in order to make it a little bit easier to adopt — those things might make it more attractive to a broader range of users. Right now you have to buy into it all in one go and that might be daunting to people who hardly know what they are getting into. I think improving support and making it less complex to sort of get up and running could be key areas to focus on.  

We did not ultimately deploy Blue Prism because we chose to use UiPath instead. However, I have detailed knowledge of this solution.

The primary use case is the building of clean, automated processes. These are then easily used and maintained by the architecture.

The most valuable feature is the Studio.

With respect to the long-term deliverables, this is a quality product.

Blue Prism is slightly difficult for the non-technical user.

The centralized, client-server model that this solution uses does not work well and should be broken down into something that is web-based and locally controlled. Designing something in a client-server model is okay, but distributing those packages into a cloud model would be more appropriate.

It is not easy to get training online. They recently opened up their online training for a month, but that is not sufficient for training an individual who has other jobs to do.

Blue Prism has to tidy up their licensing policies. They are restrictive and the minimum length is three years. Smaller organizations do not have the budget for this and would prefer a one-year contractual period. Many smaller businesses plan ahead perhaps six months or a year, and they do not have a multi-year detailed vision or plan. Three years is quite long for this business model.

I have been familiar with Blue Prism for about a year.

I would say that the stability of Blue Prism is superior to any of the competing products because of the maintainability of the features and the openness of the tool. Even UI navigation can be quickly adapted for your processes.

Being a client-server architecture, I see it as a slight barrier to scalability. If an organization has a dedicated infrastructure set up then it will be easier, but the modern ways of plug and play, and more app-driven the way UiPath is, makes for better scalability.

We did not contact technical support while evaluating this solution.

Ultimately, we chose not to implement this solution for production.

Compared to UiPath, the initial setup is slightly complex. You need to set up a database and other support systems. It will take perhaps a day to deploy and configure properly. If you have all of the tools, permissions, and policies configured then it should not take longer than that.

The licensing structure is complex and the minimum contract length is three years.

We evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism together.

Blue Prism has good features and the tool has the full capability to deliver timely solutions. However, technical training is something that needs to be addressed because making it more available is necessary in order to help an organization grow.

Compared to other products, from a technical point of view with the architecture and the openness of the product, I rate this solution close to the top. Compared to UiPath, this is a very clear and well-presented tool. However, it suffers in terms of marketing and licensing. It is also difficult for people to initially learn. It will take time for an individual or a developer to pick it up, although once they do, it works well. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.