Blue Prism Reviews

I use the tool for automation in various sectors like banking, telecommunication, and trading. 

We've automated web applications in the banking domain using Blue Prism. This involved automating long and complex banking processes. Every action we automate with the tool generates an audit log, which is safe within the LogRhythm environment. I do find the Decipher feature very useful when it comes to document automation. 

I would like to see a cloud version of Blue Prism available. Both cloud and on-premise options would be beneficial, as they would reduce maintenance costs. I'm using the Blue Prism desktop, which is still in the initial stages. I want enhancements in the Object Explorer and Application Model features to ensure stability in upcoming versions. I have suggested a few ideas, such as incorporating triggering mechanisms, but I haven't seen them implemented yet.

I have been using the product for the past six years. 

Earlier versions of Blue Prism, like version six, used to have a lot of issues with browser automation. Now, it has been fixed in version seven and onwards. Now, it looks good. 

Regarding scalability, we design processes very modularly with separate object and process layers for each application. This modular approach makes it highly scalable. 

The tool's installation is easier than that of other RPA tools. When deploying a process to production, we ensure that we work in a separate, unmonitored environment with restricted access. We install a centralized application server on a separate machine to avoid database load issues. Additionally, access restrictions are enforced so that only authorized personnel with restricted access can deploy packages in the production environment.

The deployment time for one process varies depending on its complexity. Complex processes could take one to two months or even longer. Testing and deployment typically take about two to three weeks for a single person working on a process from design to development.

A dedicated support team facilitates maintenance, especially when best practices are followed and a robust solution design is in place. However, the ease of maintenance also depends on the applications involved in the process.

The tool offers the best security compared to other automation tools. However, the lack of a cloud version can lead to higher maintenance costs when using Blue Prism.

Given the current market situation, I would recommend Blue Prism to other users, especially if a cloud version becomes available. Everyone has been running back behind the Gen AI and AI center. integrating it would be good. 

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten. 

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've implemented Blue Prism for various banking operations for HSBC. It's used to provide support for various areas of business like mortgages, screening teams, and payment processing. So based on the process requirement, we prepare best cases and use cases, then we cater to the requirements of the business. There are around a hundred people at HSBC divided up among four digital operations center teams. These are spread across the globe in India, China, Europe, and Hong Kong.

For payment processing, our department needs to handle all inbound and outbound payments. Each transaction has to be reviewed and screened at two levels. This entire process takes around 40 minutes of uptime. So that is the time actually, whenever we initiate any NEFT or IMPS payments. So it takes generally 20 to 40 minutes time to deposit the funds. So in this scenario, RPA helps this particular department to reduce that processing time. 

So earlier it was taking around 30 to 40 minutes to complete this entire cycle. Now the first level has been automated, and the robots are processing this payment. 
Level one is completed within a few minutes, so the payment automatically goes to the level two team. This has cut the processing time by around 30%. Now it takes less than 20 minutes to process. That's just how it helped in this particular department. There are other examples of similar time savings in other departments of HSBC.

We use Blue Prism's automation features for any activity that is repetitive and has to be done repeatedly.  We have implemented this solution for our existing processes where the management transformation team has conducted a proper investigation and proper methodology.  All of the processes that we've automated have been completed successfully, and the bots are able to process them as expected.

There are a couple of challenges in Blue Prism's latest version. So the main difficulty is when the bots are in a run state. If the schedule calls that, then the schedule information is not being received by bots in the right way. It means the bot is already running, and there is a schedule in place that is not functioning as expected. Also, there is a scenario where the bots are not handling volume as expected, especially when there are challenges with other environments. So there are a couple of areas where we have found that bots are not working as expected, especially in version 6.4.

I have a total of four years of experience with Blue Prism, two of which I spent working for digital worker management where we were specifically responsible for run activities. I know how to react to any situation where the bots are not working. I know what action needs to be taken, who to contact, and how to prioritize each action. In these areas, I'm very strong. So based on my experience, my efforts, and my inputs, I have had the opportunity to move to as a configurator or a developer. So for the last two years, again, I've been part of this development team.

We have been working with the bots for the last two years, and they're working as expected as of now. 

There are a couple of projects where data science using the R language has been integrated into the Blue Prism solution. The R language data science specialists have designed a solution that helped us to process the payments based on previous investigations or previous decisions. So looking at previous decisions and creating models about the probability of approving or denying payments helps the bots process decisions quicker. So in this way, R language has been integrated with Blue Prism. This particular solution has been producing good results. It's able to make better decisions than a human and faster.

Most technical issues are handled in-house. There are two teams. One is the configurator or development team. The other is the worker-management team or digital workforce management team, which is nothing but the run team. If they find any issues, they create an incident ticket and send this to the program team or development team. So these teams will actually add that work on it to resolve the issue. That's how it happens.

Four years ago, the bank did not have a specialized team for this RPA solution, so they started taking support from Accenture or Ernst & Young teams. So the initial processeswere automated by these teams. Two years ago, HSBC started its own teams to develop the solutions using Blue Prism. Blue prism is the only automation solution HSBC has used so far. 

It depends on the types of applications and processes being automated as well as the number of applications being used for that particular process. As the number of applications increases, so will the complexity depending on the situation.

When the DOC team shares our stats with the operations department, we quantify the potential cost savings of using a particular automation solution. Generally, we speak in terms of the number of full-time employees used for a particular process. So, if there are 10 people working to complete a particular task, how many people do we need after implementing Blue Prism? If the remaining work is being completed by seven people after the implementation of RPA, then we have saved 30% using Blue Prism.

We are on a yearly license. There are two types of licenses. One is for the VDI license and the other one is for the Blue Prism license. For HSBC we have yearly licenses. Altogether, I think $750 per annum needs to be paid for this VDI license and the Blue Prism license is different. 

Blue Prism is a bit higher priced compared to other payment-related or investment-related solutions. At the same time, it also provides more security than those solutions, specifically for the banking and insurance sectors. Moreover, this Blue Prism provides the flexibility to automate daily banking-related activities. 

So that's how Blue Prism is being used for the banking sector. Senior management team is looking into alternatives. For example, Alteryx is the one tool that is being introduced to HSBC. Currently, we are undergoing training for Alteryx and are exploring ways to cut down on costs.

If you are looking to automate repetitive standard activities that need to be done by a human investigator or any manual process involved, Blue Prism will help. But when you need to automate other types of activity UiPath can offer better results than Blue Prism. In terms of cost, UiPath is a bit cheaper when compared to Blue Prism.

There are pros and cons to this particular application, Blue Prism helps us complete a particular process in a better way. It may give us better results or produce the same result faster. But there are many unknown challenges, like application latencies. Maybe Blue Prism or automated processes might not be able to handle those situations properly or it might not be able to deliver the expected results sometimes.

I would rate Blue Prism a seven out of 10. 

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. 

We are a relatively new company, which specializes primarily in finance. I believe roughly 5% of our company uses this solution, which is quite low.

Some fields in our company require the use of this solution daily, but other fields use it only monthly. So, we use it on-demand.

When we initially started using Bue Prism, it was actually acquired by the financial department in our company, but soon after, it was put across as a legacy to IT. We then expanded our use cases to other areas of IT throughout our company, but primarily, our major footprint in Baxter has been in finance. Blue Prism dominates in finance at the moment. We also have a few use cases relating to HR.

Blue Prism was our first automation platform. Originally, we used version 6.2, which was very geared toward core development. You need to have some development background to develop the bots, and they were pretty much heavy in terms of the monolithic way of the solution. But from version 6.4 onwards, there became a feature known as an API call. Technically speaking, they have actually increased their capability in API calls, which means that Blue Prism has a lot of flexibility to integrate with other enterprise applications. This API feature, which is available in version 6.4, has made our lives a lot easier compared to version 6.2.

I have been speaking directly with Blue Prism's engagement manager about making the solution more web-based. It's not quite there yet. Currently, the latest version is still under the beta version, so, as a customer, we don't have access to it. They are making it much more web-based, but for now, everything you have to log into requires an enterprise server — It's still more client-based than web-based. They are aware of these issues, but it's not available yet. If they would have done this earlier, it would have helped them occupy the market space better.

In the next release of Blue Prism, they are bringing in some great features, like deployment. I believe it's really going to focus on centralized monitoring. They are making it web-based. I think the scalability and the ease of installation are also going to get an upgrade in the new version. They are working on merging technology, like OCR capabilities — they are bringing everything under one banner. That's definitely going to help. This reboot of Blue Prism is definitely required. It's a little late, but at least they're doing it.

We have been using Blue Prism for roughly three years.

We used to have some issues with the older version of Blue Prism, which required technical support, but this has been addressed in the newer versions. Overall, after the upgrade, I'd say it's very stable.

Is it scalable? Yes and no. From Blue Prism's perspective, it's easy: you spin up a server and start deploying your blocked runners, making sure to keep them running; but from an organization's point of view, there is a lot to do on the infrastructure side — you have to pay special attention to the infrastructure where you can run your bots. So, it's scalable, but there is a cost associated with it. Every organization needs to be very careful in regard to how they're scaling it: are you going to scale it horizontally? Are you going to scale it vertically? Are you going to scale out? These are the questions that must be carefully considered when scaling it up. Otherwise, your cost will be exponentially higher if you don't pay attention to these factors.

As I mentioned earlier, we get our support from a third-party vendor and our partner — they log the tickets with Blue Prism. They engage all of the support that we are entitled to, for example, tier one, two, and three. Also, we have client engagement from Blue Prism who is constantly in touch with us, and they are always open to our feedback surrounding areas of improvement. Overall, I would say our relationship has been good with Blue Prism.

We also have experience with Automation Anywhere. From a marketing perspective, Automation Anywhere has done a lot, but since we have just started using Automation Anywhere, our lower environments are built, but our higher environment is yet to be built. 

So, why did we make the choice to use Automation Anywhere when we have Blue Prism? The simple answer is because the marketing of Automation Anywhere is better. They were offering IQ bots and attended bot runners; Blue Prism wasn't really offering these. These were big areas of consideration between the two, because when we were actually evaluating, Blue Prism didn't have a similar offering for IQ bots or attended bots that Automation Anywhere had.

The initial setup sounded simple when we started, but when we were upgrading to version 6.4, we needed our vendor partner and Blue Prism to come together. Originally, the upgrading process was estimated to take eight weeks, but we almost spent four to five months getting it set up. I think there's still a lot of complexity involved, It's not that simple. They are not very lightweight yet. There is a lot of heavy software involved, which makes the set up a little complex.

The maintenance is primarily done by us. We do have a complete license, including support, and we are in a tough IT agreement with the vendors, so we do have premium support with Blue Prism. If we require assistance, we write a ticket on the vendor platform and they will eventually hook up the Blue Prism guide. In short, we do have content enterprise support with them.

We got a discounted price after negotiating with Blue Prism, as well as Automation Anywhere through our procurement. From a list-price perspective (due to the marketing strategy of Automation Anywhere), Automation Anywhere appears to be much cheaper compared to Blue Prism; however, if you do a detailed analysis in regards to the total pricing, I think both are pretty much at war with each other. Automation Anywhere has broken down the licensing costs into multiple factors, whereas Blue Prism is very straightforward — you purchase a production license, that's it. This looks much more expensive compared to Automation Anywhere prices, but with Automation Anywhere, you have to start from scratch. I'd say they are pretty much head-to-head with each other. 

With Blue Prism, there are no additional fees. The price depends on the number of processes that you run in production and you get a license for that. Also, the lower environments are free of cost. It's pretty straightforward.

I think it's very important for an organization to evaluate what kind of use cases they have: what's their roadmap and how long is the journey that they're looking at. As the market says, most organizations are looking for this digital transformation, and Blue RP is only part of it. For any organization that needs to adapt to a digital transformation, automation RP does play a good role. They need to evaluate what exactly they want to do and then engage with Blue Prism about how to go about doing it. Remember to always bring in the experts in the market at the beginning of your journey, and work together. That helps a lot.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Blue Prism a rating of seven.

In the financial environment, such as in the banking and insurance sectors, we use them to automate mundane tasks, the kinds that require repetitive human work with not much thought process involved.

We use it for simple things like automating the processing of work queues, reading information from an email, extracting the attachments and forwarding those to available people.

It helps us reduce the number of people involved in mundane tasks.

In the case of Absa, it has really impacted them, the way the customer interacts with the organization when it comes to certain processes. They have become one of the better banks in terms of technology now.

When having to fill out an application, for example, there's an app. In the back-end of that app, the whole process is automated. They get an acknowledgment within a couple of seconds. That is the way it has a positive impact on the organization. If the end-user or the client is happy about the way things are going now, as oppose to the way things were before, then that's a big win.

The automation in version 6 seems to be a lot better than it was in previous versions. In my opinion, that is great. 

The matrix in terms of reporting is becoming more friendly. It can be used with other analytics tools and that too is a great thing. You can pull stuff into stats, you can pull stuff into any kind of data analytics tool, like Tableau for example.

You can easily see where all your problems lie, in a visual way. It's always nice to have a visual representation of things, whether you're a kid in school or whether you're a professor at a university. Seeing things at one glance makes a lot of difference, instead of having to read through the fine print and see where the issues are.

Another feature I like about Blue Prism is the Control Room and how easy it is to find exceptions, to find common issues, and to troubleshoot your exceptions. Your Control Room person, without any development skills, can easily pick up what the problem is, with the exceptions, especially when there are a lot of exceptions related to one use case or process.

Blue Prism is lagging in terms of artificial intelligence. There is no artificial intelligence in version 4 or 5, which most people are still using as far as I'm aware. To be fair, they do have AI in version 6. Still, it's lagging terribly. Blue Prism is the inventor of the name of the term "RPA," and it's disappointing to see they are sitting around.

Blue Prism, in my opinion, is very solid because it has so many years of evolution and backing. It's more solid than the other platforms but I feel that the intelligent automation needs to be jacked up to where the other platforms are, at least.

Cognitive learning, for example, where it can actually follow your movements on the screen, is not there in Blue Prism. The bot will only do what you program it to do, whatever processes and objects that you refer to. It only follows that. There is no cognitive learning happening, whereas Automation Anywhere or UiPath can actually follow your movements, follow the steps that you're doing and then, bang, can go ahead and repeat those processes. And at the same time, it will learn to do it better as well.

Also, when exceptions are being passed to Excel, there's a huge issue dealing with the date format. You actually have to program your date as a text, as opposed to as a date, and that is something I would like to see improved. I cannot say whether it has been fixed, as I don't have exposure to the new version.

We have had the odd case of the robot falling for no reason. Then you restart the whole thing and you find it runs okay. To me, that's a very big problem with stability.

The stability issue is there, especially when you scale it up. If you're doing 1000 processes a minute or every 10 minutes, and then you scale it up to 10,000, I think Blue Prism has a problem with that. Guys from the banks have told me they really don't look at Blue Prism as being scalable enterprise-wide because it does tend to fall over.

Having said that, I haven't necessarily heard of issues like that in the international environment, but I have heard of issues like that here in South Africa. Having read of the success stories, worldwide, and the extent to which they've been involved in enterprise-level, I wouldn't necessarily say this issue has come to the fore.

I'm sorry to say their technical support is very bad.

The technical support, the client support, the academic support, are almost nonexistent, if you ask me. I have had very nasty experiences where we're stuck in a deployment and we are about to go live and there's an issue and we ask for help and we get a reply a day later or two days later, if they reply at all. In my case, I had to rely on the community that I'm involved in - the LinkedIn group and WhatsApp groups that I have connections with. I was able to solve problems that way. If I have a problem with Blue Prism I won't go to Blue Prism for help. That's how bad it is.

I would generously rate technical support at four out of 10.

Blue Prims was the first tool that I used in automation and, in some ways, I got stuck with it. There was a huge demand for it in South Africa so I have always followed the Blue Prism path. But after having used Blue Prism, I used Automation Anywhere and am extremely happy with it. Their support is extremely good.

Depending on your environment, setup can become very complex, especially if the permissions and access are not dealt with correctly. Your change management has to be very clearly outlined and mapped out before you even go into an environment where you try to implement Blue Prism.

You have to have access to a SQL Database and if that is not all sorted out, you're going to struggle. Even just deploying it, and your bot access and your VDI access, etc., it's really quite difficult to do in a very secure, locked up environment.

Blue Prism is pretty steep compared to the others, much more than Automation Anywhere. That can be a hindrance as well.

In terms of world usage, the market slice Blue Prism has, it is only in third place now, simply because it has been lacking in certain areas. The lackluster Robotic Process Automation Blue Prism is a dumb robot, as opposed to Automation Anywhere which is capable of cognitive learning - and that's a big plus. Even if it's in a very simple manner, even if it's not an IQ Bot, there is a lot of cognitive learning that's built into the other platforms which I find much better to use.

Even if you take out UiPath which is bigger - it now has a huge amount of money that was invested by Israeli investors who have pushed UiPath to a point where it has expanded to almost every country now, including trying to get themselves established in South Africa. Even if you take them out of the picture, and they are the biggest threat, Automation Anywhere, which is much younger than Blue Prism, is still way better and rated much higher than Blue Prism in terms of market share and popularity, ease, etc.

If I wanted to choose a platform, depending on the environment, I would not be fixed on one platform. The companies that I worked for previously only focused on Blue Prism while others only focused on Automation Anywhere. That's the wrong approach. You should be agnostic, you should use a tool that is appropriate for the scenario. There are some things that, obviously, Blue Prism will do way better, way faster than Automation Anywhere and there are some cases where Automation Anywhere would be more suitable.

For example, if you are looking into natural language processing, Automation Anywhere does a far better job of it in terms of reading an email and making a decision based on the content of the email. Blue Prism can't do that.

I would also say you need to get your planning right. Once you have that right, you'll have no issues with implementation. Seek advice from people that have successfully implemented it. There are many community groups and a lot of people in the Blue Prism community, so become part of the community; there's a lot to be learned from that.

Overall, it's pretty solid, it's pretty good if you want to start doing things in robotics or process automation, but it's definitely not the end of it. I would suggest that people always look at other platforms and see where they could be used in a given situation.

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.

We have got the Blue Prism license for financial auditing purposes. 

The whole auditing activity is run at the backend without any screen scraping activity and other stuff that generally requires human involvement. It was deployed for this purpose, and it has been working perfectly well so far. There are certain hiccups that come in between, but our team is able to handle them. So, it is mainly being used for high-volume backend batch processing.

It works very well for batch processing at the backend. Scalability-wise, it is very robust. It is also stable.

Its front end is not very good for things like screen scraping. UiPath and AA are very good for that. Blue Prism's license is costlier than UiPath and AA. They should be improving its price.

Its artificial intelligence and cognitive features are not that strong enough. Cognitive automation should be their next area of improvement.

The decoding of the bot is a highly painful activity, and this is an area of improvement for Blue Prism. It is tough to find variables and get the code in place. You have to open the whole bonnet of the car to get things in place. 

Their training should also be improved. UiPath and AA have their learning communities. They provide free of cost basic certification. As a result, you get trained workforce in the market that can directly work on projects, but this is not the case with Blue Prism. It is costly to get the resources trained, which increases the overall cost of getting a resource for Blue Prism.

Their tech support can also be improved. Many times, the issues that should have been addressed by L1 have gone to L2.

I have been using this solution for one and a half years.

It is stable. There are no issues.

Scalability is not at all a problem. It works perfectly well for a batch operation.

In terms of usage, we have seven users who use this solution.

Their tech support is good but can be improved. Every ticket first goes to L1, and then it goes to L2. Many times, the issues that should have been addressed by L1 have gone to L2.

It was a bit complex because we were already using AA, and we were more habitual of that interface. That's why it took us some time with Blue Prism.

It took around two months to set it up and get the first use case in place from the development perspective.

Its license is costlier than UiPath and AA. They should improve its price.

We have a two-year contract with them.

Blue Prism is best for backend processing, but its artificial intelligence and cognitive features are not strong enough. It could be because we have not explored it that much. My experience with this solution is more related to backend processing. If you are looking for backend processing that is quite heavy in nature and you have a team that is trained in Blue Prism, you should go for it without any doubt.

I would rate Blue Prism a seven out of ten.