Blue Prism Reviews

We have about 20 use cases in production. Probably half of them are related to finance, monthly closures in our company, invoices, and bank reconciliations. On the IT side, use cases are about audit requirements with user attestations, user reviews, and schedules.

We're currently using the on-premises version, but we're internally moving to Azure cloud rather than moving to Blue Prism cloud.

The ease of development is the most valuable. Standard VBOs are pretty useful there with Excel and different things. Our custom developments for SAP and things like that are pretty easy to set up and quick to get going.

The control room is its worst feature. It can be laggy, and it is not as user-friendly.

We're with staying Blue Prism, but we're moving it from on-premises to Microsoft cloud for cost savings. We looked into Blue Prism cloud. It has a lot of features, but it comes with a lot of costs. Right now, we have six spots, and we're only at 13% utilization. The cost didn't really weigh out for us for moving to Blue Prism cloud, but on-premises, it is working for what we need.

Once it is set up and gets the steamroll, it seems pretty good to stay. It is self-sufficient in many ways with the processes. Change control and password are a bit of a struggle sometimes, but that's general with automation and trying to be fast-moving. Overall, it is pretty stable and self-sustaining.

It is scalable. We are using some central objects.

We probably haven't gone through their standard support channels, but we reach out to our contact there when needed, and he gets us in touch with somebody right away. So, within a week, we're talking to an expert and getting some assistance.

We just started with Blue Prism. We didn't deploy anything else previously.

I'm more on the production side. I didn't really do any of the setup functions.

I don't recall what it was. Initially, we had our licensing through the consultant, and when we stopped using them, we renegotiated licensing. Blue Prism gave us temporary licenses during the negotiation. When all things were said and done, it came out to a decent price even without the vendor. So, our management has been happy with that.

Try to think of standard automation questions related to security, change control, and things like that before you get started because once you get developing, it is hard to go back and implement those things.

I would rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten.

The product is pretty good so far.

The initial setup is not complex.

It's not too difficult to configure everything.

It's fast to get up and running if you use a cloud deployment.

We haven't really used it extensively. I can say that even though it feels like a good product, there are some things that are completely missing the mark for me in Blue Prism.

The solution isn't complete. There are items that you have to pay extra for, such as the Interact. Those things should be part and parcel of the Blue Prism solution. I can't see it as a standalone separate service, therefore, why do I have to buy this separately? It should be part of the base offering.

From a monitoring perspective, the way the screens are set up, or the reporting within Blue Prism, is not really user-friendly. You need a technical person to basically put that up. It's not necessarily easily viewable.

As far as the assessment is concerned, the assessment tools need to be refined as it is really difficult for one to just use it out of the box. The cloud offering basically says that you can start right away, and you don't have to wait for all of these configurations and things. However, we have purchased the on-premise solution and not the cloud solution. For me, I just need a better experience on that deployment, even though it should have been the more mature solution.

From a Blue Prism perspective, user-friendliness is really an issue. The components that I now have to buy extra to do automation, things that, if I look at a tool like UiPath, that is already part of their toolset. You don't have to buy any user integration with other solutions. I can't understand why Blue Prism doesn't do the same.

They are not really very innovative. There's nothing that wows me if I would compare them to the newer tools that are coming out that's got the cognitive automation tools that are built into the product.

Within Blue Prism it's very difficult to manage a team of coders, for instance, or a team of developers developing on the same application. That is not in Blue Prism. You can't do that. It's one developer at a time working with one thing. The source code management within the toolset really needs to improve. They don't seem so managed and packaged well, and integration to maybe other repositories where one can store that information would be better. That is where it's lacking at the moment. The configuration, as I said, of the reporting, of the dashboard, out-of-the-box, should actually be easy to configure and not so challenging.

I've been using this solution for about six months.

I've worked with UiPath in the past.

The solution's initial setup has a sort of medium level of difficulty. I won't say it was complex per se. I would definitely not say it was complex to do it or to configure it. 

The price is low and it's reasonable, however, I expected more to be included in the product. Now, if I have to go and buy all these other extras, that price is going to go up. For instance, if I use OCR capability and I'm not using their product, the Decipher product, I have to go and buy an ABBYY license separately. That means I have to manage more licenses. It's not included in the package where I have a good OCR solution that works with it, I must now go and buy and manage separate licenses. It is just a nightmare.

If you look at the supply chain, you now need to get a separate license from another company if you want to buy licenses to OCR with Blue Prism. And that is where the cost increases and then the investment becomes a little bit more difficult to justify. 

I'm a customer and an end-user.

I'm in a position within our company where people are saying to me, "We've got Power Automate from Microsoft, why should I use Blue Prism?" And with the Microsoft suite, Power Automate, and all of the cognitive automation is already included as part of Azure. And here I sit with Blue Prism, and now I need new gateways to integrate with that. It's going to be a little bit more work to make it work with Microsoft Azure than the product that is already there in Microsoft Azure. I must now basically justify to the business why do I need Blue Prism.

It makes it very difficult in terms of their strategy if all the extra products that we want, we have to buy additionally. Whereas, if I compare it to the Microsoft Azure Suite of things, you get all of these features without having to buy them separately as you would need to with Blue Prism. It's a very difficult sell to the business.

I would advise others to go straight to the cloud and not mess around with the on-premise solution. The reason is the on-premise solution will take you six months before you can start to show anything. Going to the cloud is probably a better option to get the results out faster.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

The primary use case of Blue Prism is for financial services. It can't be accessed via a simple web application like you can do with its competitors. For financial services where the main requirement is to retain data in-house, Blue Prism is the way to go. I'm an RPA engineer and we are customers of Blue Prism. 

Blue Prism has helped the company in areas such as invoicing, requests on an augment coming from customers and things like that.

I love the development phase of Blue Prism because there are simple things you can put in place that help you understand workflow and how implementation acts. I love how Blue Prism can use the same variables and objects used on other processes, the really key value is the object sharing. I like that you can forward so you can speed up the process while it's executing which you can do on other RPA tools, but you can also simulate the feed tool from two to four and reach the output quite nicely.

For me, a web application that can improve the connection between robot and human, and share information simply without any file sharing, without any access from the machine, that has the tower controlling it, is the easiest way to share information.

The user interface could be improved and I would like to see a web interface to easily access robot information. The key value of Blue Prism is also its main weakness because Blue Prism is quite connected to its data, so anything you do on Blue Prism is logged on the database. It's quite difficult to read these logs, so I would like to have a more valuable way of understanding how robots work on the environment. Blue Prism doesn't manage variables well. It's annoying because you have to declare visually every variable but there's not a list of the variables. You have to open the graphical elements and check the variables.

I've been using this solution for one year. 

It's a stable solution. It has a quite simple architecture and is very connected to the machine on which Blue Prism works. The RPA tools are connected with the machine, with the applications, with the credentials, and that improves stability.

The solution is very scalable because you can deploy a robot on the machine and with the same licenses you can deploy another robot on another machine. 

Technical support is quite good although I think not as good as with some other solutions. UiPath, for example, has great support, great speed, and they're right on the issues. Blue Prism has that too but they're not as good as the others. 

The initial setup is quite straightforward and similar to other solutions. 

This is an expensive solution. I think Blue Prism has a licensing mode quite different from the other RPA tools.

Blue Prism is a very secure solution because you can implement a structure as a high availability infrastructure. If you have, for example, three machines and one license, you can put this license on any of the machines. If the first machine is down, then you can put that license on another machine.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

The use cases range from document ingestion, process enablement, and data management, including financial records cleanup.

So it's essentially the arms and legs for digital processes. So the clients have processes that have tech enablement, but there's stuff that needs to orchestrate the different tools and bring them all together into an end-to-end automated process.

There is room for improvement in the pricing. 

I have been working with this solution since 2017. So, we have a mix in our portfolio. So, some of them still have the older versions, but some of the newer clients are on the latest versions.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. Because a lot of times, there are specific versions of things that you have to use. So browsers, plugins, all that good stuff. 

For example, some of our clients had their clients on auto-update. And what happened was it was updated during the auto-update, and then the bots would fail because there were plugins or features that were specific to versions of Chrome that we included in the solution. But on the upgrade, they would then fail. On some of the older versions, some of the challenges were around the actual configuring of the virtual machines and their allocation of memory.

In essence, you had the physical memory on the machines, but virtual machines weren't configured properly, so they would run out of memory.

The scalability of the solution is a two-factor thing. 

The ability to scale up and scale out of the Blue Prism portfolio, meaning the agent server monitors all that good stuff, is pretty straightforward. I would rate the scalability for on-prem a seven out of ten and about eight out of ten for the cloud. 

But the second factor is a lot of the scalability has to do with the latency of what you're connecting to. And so if you're connecting to something that isn't particularly scalable, it doesn't matter how many robots you scale out. You're constrained by the latency and the size of the application or solution or service that the robot is using. 

Therefore, scaling is normally an organizational issue such as procurement.

We have around nine customers using this solution. 

The customer service and support depend on your customer level. So, if you're a platinum implementation partner or a platinum client, you obviously get better support than if you're just using the standard features. But we've been involved with Blue Prism from the beginning, so we have a bit of a privilege for this.

The difference is UiPath, you are part of the community, and getting support from within the user community is actually quite effective. But it's just because of a significantly larger install base.

Positive

The biggest challenge is at the infrastructure layer, especially if you're doing on-prem. Getting all the network and firewalls and all of that sorted out because many clients want you to use the robot on the production systems, but the production systems are in tightly controlled network environments. It normally means opening a firewall, subnetting, and all that kind of stuff. But getting the software up and running and getting the agents up and running, all that type of stuff, that's pretty straightforward. 

On the cloud side of things, it's providing access from the cloud platform to on-prem data. So it's more client-specific security and networking issues that are the challenge versus installing the software if you do on-prem or configuring it if you do it in the cloud.

We provide the maintenance for the solution for some of our customers. We are the solution provider. That's a full-stack contract, meaning that we run it, manage it, maintain it. 

And then, for some of our customers, we are an enablement partner that's really about providing design and build and training. And for some of them, we provide secondary or second-level support.

I've considered other options because of how Blue Prism's product and its acquisition by ACM have shaped its direction. Blue Prism seems to be moving into a more confined space and may not be as open as UiPath. 

In UiPath, the ecosystem just feels a lot broader, and there's a lot more innovation and commercial models. 

With Blue Prism, everyone wants to charge for everything, whereas in UiPath, you know, the community guard. There's a lot of really good stuff and useful stuff coming out of the community guard that are solving problems because they need to be solved, not necessarily because there's a business model or a commercial model sitting behind it. 

Blue Prism is definitely more about the seats and tires, whereas UiPath is for the sneakers and jeans guys.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. The only reason that I'd rate it as a seven is because of the commercial model. Blue Prism has some great features from a technology point of view, but they're more on the pricier side compared to UiPath. The difference in technology and the solution doesn't warrant the difference in pricing.

We have various use cases for the solution and deploy it on AWS Cloud.

When we need specific reports, the default reports posted in the interactive clients are not helpful but can be useful. However, this means we can utilize only the minimum level, but we want to use more input data from the Blue Prism tool, which means we need to fetch more of the data from the table side, and for this, we need to integrate many tables for this integrating of data. So it becomes difficult to get a BP database onwards.

We are additionally migrating the Blue Prism database to different clouds. Blue Prism currently supports SQL Servers, and structured data, it is stored as an income performer. When we migrate to a process from a different environment, we either need to go with the complete restoration of the GP or we need to lose the data. This is because if you have ten processes, five processes may complete the testing. Other processes may still depend on the current environment when we move to live production. So since it can take weeks or months, we may lose the data while waiting, and we cannot integrate both from different clouds. 

Hence, the solution can be improved by enhancing the process's data storage and by including a common check. Sometimes, if the developer fails to identify a timetable directly, it will impact other processes. Currently, all processes are stored on the various tables in the Blue Prism, and the pre-check can ensure the developer is notified.

The solution can be improved by switching off data DB and including a report section with a morphing feature, like more reporting waste.

We have been using the solution for a year and a half, and we are recently migrated to version 6.10.2.

The solution is stable. I rate the stability a nine out of ten. 

I rate scalability an eight out of ten, but when we interact with different environments, it is difficult to communicate, and DB synchronization is problematic. We currently have approximately 50 people utilizing the solution in our organization.

Technical support is often delayed as it takes four to five days to resolve issues since some people work across different time zones under constraints. Additionally, they are not traceable when we need to forward the case to a high level, and it takes another week to escalate to a higher level, which is unacceptable.

Deployment depends on the process' complexity level. It depends on if you want a straightforward process or gradual deployment over two weeks. For example, one week for the UIT testing and another week for SIT testing, four days for UIT testing and working at the QI level, and the following week for production, and in one month, we can take up hyper care. This is the best practice.

We did light scale mode for the deployment process, so when one process came into the picture, we ensured that the production environment would be ready for that process. So far from size, without any delays in the project deadlines and once the process is developed and code reviews are completed, we take internal approval to move the code to the following environments. So we can use duplicate and use different tools for pushing this code in the CIPD environment level or move this cycle management, like import and export processes.

We implemented it in-house.

The license is expensive, however, I cannot share the exact cost.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We are using Blue Prism's process automation software to eliminate low-return, high-risk, manual data entry, and processing work for our financial processing in manufacturing. We are not a direct partner with Blue Prism, what we do is when our clients have bought the Blue Prism solution for someone we implement Blue Prism for them. We are acting as the integrator.

Blue Prism has improved process efficiencies. We can get some maximum optimization with ticket processing. Blue Prism provides a large variety of robots that can automate and manipulate processes with very few problems. Furthermore, we can program multiple methods within a single bot.

We found the unassisted bots very useful because they can program a variety of different processes. This is a valuable feature of Blue Prism, especially when compared to other tools on the market.

Blue Prism needs to provide better customer support because there are some bugs in the product that make implementation tricky.

It is designed more for operational than transactional processes. If Blue Prism incorporated a lot of IQ bots and cognitive processing, then it might be of better value at a lower cost. 

The issue of the cost of the tool needs to be addressed. To become a Blue Prism partner, it's costly. I think that this is one of the negative aspects of using Blue Prism. 

In terms of the stability of the solution, I think that Blue Prism is a really good tool. It's a stable solution.

Blue Prism scalability is good. 

The requirements for deployment and maintenance differs from process to process. Certain processes take around three programmers and one solution architect and technical architect. It really depends on the project scope.

In total, we require a minimum of four to five people for deployment and maintenance. 

Technical support has a local team, but they have not been very supportive. We manage our technical support through our internal team. We have not received a sufficient level of support from the Blue Prism's professional support team. They don't respond, and when they do respond, they say that it's the job of the implementors to do whatever it is we are requesting from them. Blue Prism is good at selling the product, but implementation support, technical support is not that good.

The initial setup was a little complex. We needed a specialist with good coding experience to implement it.

Blue Prism is by and large a standalone type of tool, with quite a lot of optimization required. I think that this is an issue, especially when compared to some other solutions on the market that don't require any coding knowledge. With Blue Prism, you need somebody with good coding experience for implementation.

Our initial implementation strategy for Blue Prism took between two to three months per process. For the implementation strategy, we used both a technical architect and a solutions architect, both experts in implementing Blue Prism.
For deployment, we have been using partners who already bought directly from Blue Prism. 

Pricing is on an annual basis. Blue Prism is around 8,000 GBP while other tools vary between 3,000 to 6,000 USD. 

The standard licensing fees for Blue Prism are around 3,000 to 4,000 USD for a partner. In addition to the tools, you have implementation costs to consider. There are no additional fees. 

Before choosing, we didn't evaluate other options. But now we are looking at a lot of competing tools in the market. We have considered migrating to EdgeVerve.

My advice to others would be to let them start with the standard enterprise-wide robotic automation solution. If they're looking for fewer process automation bots, Blue Prism would be incredibly expensive. They should have a ballpark figure of the number of people under the processes, then Blue Prism is an excellent tool, but if you lessen the number of processes then it's costly.

On a scale of one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate this product around seven. Blue Prism is the same for enterprise-wide implementation but if you're considering the entire tool, technical support, implementation needs all these things; I would adjust my rating.

We use the solution for features such as two-factor authentications, product compatibility, etc. Also, we use it to monitor dashboards and for logging different applications.

The solution's most valuable features are RPA automation, auditing, and validation of metrics in web applications.

They should incorporate more functionalities in the analytics tool.

We have been using the solution for a year.

It is a stable solution. Sometimes service failure occurs. But it fails due to the infrastructure rather than the tool.

I once raised a query regarding the user bucket issues.

Positive

We have used Micro Focus earlier for IT operations management and HPE operation orchestration features.

The installation process takes a week to complete. It gets installed in three stages, development, test, and production environments. Sometimes, while configuring the solution with Windows servers, we are restricted from testing a few functions for security purposes. We can't test Blue Prism's Agent components because of the restrictions.

Our team of three executives, including me, a Database Administrator, and an Operating Systems Administrator, implement the solution for customers.

I rate the solution as a nine out of ten.

The solution has cross-application features where it can be set up with SAP, email, or SharePoint.

The solution could be more user-friendly. I would like the see the inclusion of a recording feature as in Microsoft, SAP, and other legacy systems. Users can play the recording and use it for future use cases. The recording can help with the automation and configuration. I would rate the tool’s interface a seven out of ten. It needs to improve.

We have been using the solution for around two to three years.

The product is quite stable.

The solution is scalable. We have around 100 users for it in our company and we intend to scale up the numbers.

We have never contacted the tech support team since we have our own internal technical team.

The solution is enterprise software so we will try to maximize our usage during the available slots. We will get ROI with the high price since there will be some value added with automation. I think that after doing a cost-benefit analysis, we are on the positive side.

I would rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.