BotFarm Reviews

I have used BotFarm to automate web applications and Microsoft products. I have also automated mainframe applications for a healthcare product. I automated around five to six processes for them. All together I have automated more than fifteen processes with this solution that we have deployed in-house.

The task bots are good features. I also like enabling the IQ bots to read PDF documents and automate PDF projects and invoices. Because we employ so many people, it is very useful to automate any processes compatible with Automation Anywhere.

We are not permitted to use web applications, so we find ourselves using Object Cloning and web control commands instead. Sometimes I feel like it doesn't work properly and we are not able to provide the dexterity needed. Also, on multiple occasions, the service bot deactivates without reason and Automation Anywhere will not function properly until it is reactivated.

In general, everything is fine but they should remove the unattended or attended bot feature. This can be confusing to customers because an unattended bot license costs around $5,000, whereas an attended bot license costs roughly $1,500, which can cause customers to think: “why should I purchase an expensive unattended bot license when I can purchase an attend bot license for much cheaper?” Also, if I want to install my runner license on another machine, for example: if you install your license on a specific machine and a second vendor (like we did), you’re now installed on machine B but you can’t log in on machine B with your credentials from machine A. This is meant to be a security feature, but it makes things very difficult for customers and clients.

I've been working with BotFarm for the last four years. I started with version 10.10 and currently, I am exploring A2019 which was just launched by Automation Anywhere.

Scheduling bots has been an issue. For example, if you want to schedule automation and it’s set for 5:00 pm, it means that you would need to execute it on the client’s machine every day at 5:00 pm. The issue though, is that it fails a lot because I could have it scheduled but sometimes the bots don’t get involved. That’s an issue that has been a struggle.

The scalability is good. We have a team that uses Automation Anywhere on a daily basis, automating processes.

In terms of customer support, they are very good. I am an Automation Anywhere vendor and if I have a problem, I can create a ticket on their portal, they will call or set up a Zoom or WebEx meeting within half an hour, and they always provide a solution. 

They give very active support and will definitely help you and provide the solution to the issue you are experiencing. They are very, very good.

I used to use UiPath, Kofax and Blue Prism. Automation Anywhere is great for people who are not very "techie". For example, the code can easily be read and understood, line by line, by anyone with or without a technical background.

Automation Anywhere provides and facilitates cloud service, which means you can access your license from anywhere, easily executing and developing your bots from anywhere in the world.  

Any RPA tool provides the commands to automate any process, but what is the difference between them? How can you understand a new product? Automation Anywhere provides a very flexible UI. It allows you to easily read and build code.

Depending on the system that you are installing, the setup can be complex. Installation time is not predictable and you may have to pay customer support for help with the installation procedure.

If I am installing on five machines but one is taking too long, then they all will take a long time, but if all five machines are installing at the same time, then the procedure can be done within five minutes. These ongoing issues make it very complicated to predict how long the installation will take. Someone has to create a ticket with Automation Anywhere customer support and pay for service personnel to help. Installing Automation Anywhere is complex.

In regards to deployment, it's quite simple. Anyone can deploy a bot on a client's machine after one or two days of training.

Also, Automation Anywhere now provides the facility for cloud service, because of this, you can access your license from anywhere. For example, if you are in London and you are heading to another country, you can easily access your license and execute and develop your bots from anywhere. In 2011, this was a desktop application and the client’s version was based on a desktop, but right now it’s not based on a desktop, which is a good thing. The main reason to choose Automation Anywhere is because no one else is providing cloud service.

I purchased a package from Automation Anywhere that included one control room, two developer licenses, and two bot-runner licenses. I think payment can vary but it's a re-occurring fee that needs to be paid every year. 

In RPA, we have so many products available to choose from which we can use to automate any applications. I have used Blue Prism, UiPath and other third-party applications. I have used all of these tools to automate various processes under RPA technology.

It’s hard to give any advice without seeing the project you are working with. If you want to purchase any RPA tool, then I’d have to check the project or your process so that I can identify the requirement and I can see which product will completely fulfill your requirement. Make sure to choose your solution based completely on the project you wish to automate. In other words, I can’t give you any direct answer. If you’re automating a web application, then I would use UiPath. If you’re also automating their applications but you have to automate PDFs as well, then I would definitely choose Automation Anywhere, but the selection of the tool is completely based on the project you wish to automate.

I am rating Automation Anywhere 7.5 out of 10 in terms of their activity. Sometimes, when I am in the middle of something, I experience issues or my work gets stuck. This rating is based on my three years of experience with Automation Anywhere. Although they give very good support, I still wasted a lot of time because of the above mentioned issues. So, for this reason, I am giving Automation Anywhere a rating of 7.5 out of 10.

Lots of different use cases, such as front office customer experience, repetitive tasks, multi-login screens, document processing, and screen notification.

We have been solving a lot of our productivity issues in different areas. And of course, in the core business. Productivity increased far more than thirty percent.

I can not think of just one the whole solution is very good. Maybe because it is user-friendly.

The discovery suite that they just acquired could be included. The more I think, maybe it's going to be targeted to be integrated with the process discovery piece, after the acquisition of FortressIQ.

I have been using BotFarm for the past five years.

BotFarm is very stable from our experience.

The has been proven to be effective and we are building bots every day now.

The initial setup it was simple and deployed in less than two months.

We have seen a return on investment in less than six months from the time we started using it.

I would recommend BotFarm an eight out of ten.

We use the Bot Farm solution for two use cases. One is for procurement and the other is for finance. Both use cases required the liquid license availability of the task bot. Therefore, at month-end or the middle of the month, the processing needs to be on a faster pace as we had SLA activity involved with the processing of the invoices and the financial auditing purpose. 

Basically, we use floating licenses which are automatically applied when there was a high peak on the load, and the floating licenses resulted in the shorter processing cycle of the activity.

The scalability is the solution's most valuable aspect. The reason Bot Farm is used is to have only one license availability whenever you have a spike in the transactions. That is a core feature. That is something which we are using to the maximum. It's working well due to the fact that the solution use case is quite structured. The only ask was to have additional bot licenses be present to incorporate it. That way, we don't have to get stuck with the license cost as it's generally on a yearly basis. Right now, it's just on the basis of the usage that we are paying.

The solution has been very user-friendly.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The interface is seamless.

The solution is very stable and quite reliable.

For the intelligent bots, it is still not quite structured, as far as I can see. I checked for IQ Bot. These licenses are having certain issues. We stopped around the pricing part. It's not just the price, however. It was also not fitting the capability. Based on the on-prem model, if they can include an intelligent bot there, it will be helpful with all the security and the pricing parts involved.

The dashboard needs improvement. For Bot Farm, the visualization is not that good compared to the main Automation Anywhere dashboard.

We've been using the solution at least over the last 12 or so months. We are continuing to use it.

The solution is quite stable. It's very reliable. When you're adding the additional licenses the basic structure is there. It's just the licensing that gets involved. It's more on the configuration side. Otherwise, it is quite seamless with the interface. The preliminary interface is Automation Anywhere, so there are no issues there.

The solution can scale very well.

We have two teams using the solution currently.

We are using this solution specifically in the India region, with the two departments of finance and procurement. We don't have that much load as everything gets outsourced here in India. We are still looking for opportunities where a load of taking Bot Farm license mechanisms can be used. Therefore, I can't speak to if we will increase usage or not.

Technical support has been very good. Many a time, there was an issue with the configuration part, or the licenses were not automatically deployed for the execution of the tasks. We had to connect with them, and we always found them to be helpful and responsive. I would say we are satisfied so far.

We have three RPA solutions that we are using. We also use UiPath and Blue Prism.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. We were pretty comfortable with it already. We are already using Automation Anywhere for the past four years and therefore, it was not a challenge for us.

With approvals, customization, et cetera, the deployment took us about 15 or so days.

We have a team of five that is able to handle the deployment and maintenance. We have a two-year maintenance contract lined up.

We pay based on usage, which is quite good for us. We like this licensing model. From the maintenance perspective, we have a contract signed for two years and it has reduced our pay per basis cost.

Real cost savings come with long-term relationships with the company. For four years we have been there. Therefore, the pricing is substantially lower for us.

We are just a customer.

Bot Farm is a cloud solution. We already have A2019, and Bot Farm is one of the products of Automation Anywhere. It's a cloud version we are using and due to it being on the cloud, it is always continuously updated to the latest version.

Bot Farm is for firms that have reached a certain level of maturity. You don't require Bot Farm if you are having applications that are not consuming your licenses. It becomes very useful when you have a use case that has spiked the variation in the load. Regardless, you need to do the math correctly to get the ROI associated with the licensing costs, the value, and the use case intended. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

The best aspect is the UI, as it is very user-friendly. A business user can employ the tool as efficiently as a full developer.

The intelligent and cognitive controls that they offer are helpful.

The machine learning needs to be improved so that they perform better in terms of predictive analysis and sentiment analysis.

The documentation needs to be improved because it does not shed much light on how the product can be used. In general, the support can be improved.

The stability can be improved.

Having the ability to control the system from the cloud would be helpful, rather than setting up the environment locally.

I have been working with BotFarm for between four and six months.

Stability is something that they need to work on.

This is certainly a scalable tool. It is spread throughout the organization and our user count is perhaps in the hundreds. The roles of our users are varied. For example, it is used by the service processing team, and it is also used by the client where the product is implemented. There are also administrators who manage the overall control.

I would rate the technical support a six out of ten, as there is improvement needed.

In terms of RPA, I have experience with both Automation Anywhere and UiPath.

The initial setup is straightforward. I did not look at the cloud-based implementation, but the MSI installer for the on-premises deployment is a quick one. If the firewall and other things are set up correctly then the deployment will take between 15 and 30 minutes to complete.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to have a proof of concept first. It is important because it may be that some of the features required by the client are not included in BotFarm. As this is a very user-friendly product, it can scale into the organization once the PoC is complete.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

• We use the solution for automating a noise cancellation process.
  
  
• In our business, we have a certain requirement to gather information from multiple applications in our customer services team, before we can troubleshoot an issue the support engineer has to handle 14 different applications to get the required information. This means the engineer spends approximately 25 minutes getting the required information even before they can start troubleshooting the issue. In the customer support space, we use this solution for automating the gathering of information from 15 disparate applications.
  
  
• In the customer service space, we have three bots and in the finance space, we have one bot.
  
  
• We have a few use cases where we use the bots to essentially increasing efficiency and reducing manual work in different areas.

The most valuable features I have found to be the screen scraping and the integration with third-party solutions.

The user experience could be made a little better with this solution. I find it difficult to find qualified people to be able to use the solution. 

In the future, I would like to see machine learning built in to support marketing use cases.

I have been using the solution within the last 12 months.

Based on my experience, the solution is stable.

I have approximately 47 users using the solution in my organization. Currently, have this solution deployed in one country and in two departments. Next year we plan to increase have the solution operation in three countries and across 14 departments.

I have previously used Blue Prism and UiPath.

The installation is straightforward.

The license of this solution is on an annual basis. The price is fair. However, what we did initially was a POC, but now we are looking at moving from a POC to expanding it out further. I would appreciate some kind of discount.

I have evaluated Blue Prism and UiPath recently.

Those wanting to implement this solution make sure you have a team that can support you. Getting individuals with the qualified skillsets required has proven to be difficult.

I rate BotFarm a seven out of ten.

We used the solution primarily for reconciliations. As a service, it requires matching the debit and credit information for the fund, so it's basically a combination of a custom-built application, integrating with Outlook and with Excel. It functions on the Windows 10 platform.

From a solution standpoint, screen capture and tight integration with Outlook are valuable features. We tried the same TOC with Blue Prism but it was more complicated.

From a simplified perspective, in terms of improvement, we use the bot for the maker position, not for the checker. It's about how well the bot can be utilized. For now, it's not utilized 24/7 because only business clients use it. I would definitely be wanting to see OCR features for improving the solution.

A human brain can easily distinguish between red and blue by looking at the screen. If there's an easy way for the bot to differentiate between the colors without being sequential that would be great.

More integrations with third-party applications would be a great additional feature. 

We've been using BotFarm for the past 18 months. 

It's a stable solution. 

The solution is definitely scalable. The bot is not utilized. We need more business sponsorship to make sure that we can have more projects with bots. We have close to 50 bots in production. And you can just scale it up to what is required. We have between 25-30 projects in the pipeline that we can carry out using Automation Anywhere.

I've been in touch with Automation Anywhere technical support. They've been handy. And they're pretty good when it comes to helping us. I'm satisfied.

We previously used another solution but it was not a fully automated process solution. It required a lot of manual intervention.

I am aware of the initial setup process - we set it up ourselves. It's pretty straightforward. I don't think there's any complexity in the architecture from a UI point of view, sometimes there are slight differences but the setup is straightforward.

We carried out the deployment by ourselves. We also had the robotics process monitoring team setup nearby. The assistance we required related more to the documenting and business process flows.

We evaluated other tools like WorkFusion. 

From a technical standpoint, you need to be careful with the UI application. There might be issues with it in cases where object recognition is going to be tougher. I would definitely look at what the UI interface needs in order to be automated from a UI perspective. Be careful with what you choose. 

I would rate this product a nine out of 10. 

We have several bots in Colombia. We can't anticipate how many bot runners we need to use to solve one use case. This is what BotFarm is used for.

The most valuable feature of BotFarm is the fact that we can use escalations when we need more computer power to fulfill all embargo that we receive in one day.

Normally we need to monitor the solution using an AWS console and the control room. We would like to have a standardized dashboard to see all the information in one place. 

I have been using this solution for three years. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. 

The primary use case is to use the bot peer-to-peer (P2P) billing. 

We deal with a few customers where we automate billed services for accounts received with invoice, debit and credit notes.

An additional feature that is missing from BotFarm is the ability for complete, AI-driven automation.

Automation can be divided into two types, namely, full automation (does not require human intervention) and semi-automation (requires human intervention). However, most companies are not able to give all their data from their ERP system to perform full automation. There is a missing feature in the software which allows for this solution to be solved.

Additionally, by using AI, I would like the bot to pull reports automatically from the ERP system, but at the moment I have to log into the system to retrieve reports.

Another area that needs improvement is with regards to machine-bound licenses. When installing the solution on a clients laptop or desktop and creating a license, that license is bound to that computer. I cannot use the users ID or password on any other machine.

I have been using the solution for about 8 months and we have developed around six process automations.

The system is stable and very little maintenance is required, assuming the bots process is perfectly designed.

For example, if the interface of the ERP system changes, maintenance would be required to adjust the bot settings to point to moved buttons/features.

I have called customer service three times and the experience has not been good. They do not offer 24/7 support, which forces us to wait till the next working day to solve a problem.

The initial setup is simple. However, creating a bot requires development experience.

The deployment does not take much time, assuming you already have a complete process that has been defined and approved.

The solution was implemented in-house.

It is too expensive and not worth the price.