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Automation Anywhere vs Blue Prism comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Automation Anywhere
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
517
Ranking in other categories
Process Mining (1st)
Blue Prism
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
87
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2024, in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category, the mindshare of Automation Anywhere is 12.2%, down from 15.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Blue Prism is 12.9%, up from 11.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
 

Q&A Highlights

JD
Jun 29, 2021
 

Featured Reviews

Nelson F. Guerrero - PeerSpot reviewer
Jul 1, 2024
Saved us half a million dollars and 10,000 hours in the first year
There have been numerous improvements in the organization. We have saved hours and time and hard dollars. In the first year, we saved over half a million dollars. That was about six months of time. After that, we have done at least three million year over year, and we have increased that very much. As far as time saved, it is well over 10,000 hours in the first year alone, and we continue to grow. This year, we are projecting 30,000 manual hours saved. Prior to the implementation of Automation Anywhere, we had lots and lots of manual work. People would go into Excel and copy data from one master sheet to many sheets. They would compile data. They would take lots of time to do these things. Today, they can go in, press a button, and launch it. They can download hundreds and thousands of invoices, whereas previously, they used to do it manually. One of our use cases saved two people four days a week of time, which is 32 hours each. We now do that automatically in six hours. The learning curve is initially a little daunting, but after you are in there and you understand how it works, it is very seamless. It is very easy to pick up and very intuitive, and then from there, it is pretty much you go and get your hands dirty. The tools that we integrate with Automation Anywhere so far have been Python scripts and PowerShell. We have got Power Automate and Power Flows from Microsoft. We are starting to do some cognitive RPA. We are implementing OpenAI through Azure. We have got a lot of that going right now. The integration with all of the documents and APIs is very seamless. There are packages available in the store if you do not have the integration built-in out of the box. They are available to everyone. Everything that we have been able to use has been just drag and drop. We can just pop in our credentials and be done. Automation Anywhere has affected us in a positive way in terms of employee capacity and compliance. We have not had to backfill roles. We have not necessarily replaced people, and that is by intent. We did not want to replace people, but we also did not want to have to backfill people. We wanted people to focus on things that they value and be more productive instead of doing mind-numbing things that get no value, but they just have to do it. Our time and cost savings have been immense since the beginning. In our first year, after we started launching the bots in June or July of 2019, we saved half a million dollars and 10,000 man-hours. Since then, we have grown more than 70% year over year. This year, we are on track to go up to about 40,000 man-hours saved and more than three million hard dollars saved. They have been able to provide automation at scale pretty well. We fired up and started off with only three production machines. We are now up at five. Officially, we were going up to seven as of next week. We have heard about people here at the Imagine conference who, for example, have hundreds, so the point is proven, and the facts are there. They can scale up very quickly. The main Automation Anywhere Program offering we use is Pathfinder. We have not utilized our partner services or anything like that, but Pathfinder has been great. Their user groups have been great. To be able to focus and see the product launches beforehand has always been advantageous. The ability to see that has been good.
Mohamed Salah Baccouche - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 24, 2023
Way more efficient for debugging than other tools but the UI is complicated
Our company uses the solution's automation processes to develop a fleet of robots for one of our clients. To date, we have developed more than 40 robots.  We also have clients in the banking and insurance industries.  We currently use both the 6.10.2 and 7.0 versions of the solution.  The solution…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I like Automation Anywhere's cloud-based nature. You don't need any on-prem infrastructure to host it."
"IQ Bot is one of the most valuable features because it helps in processing different formats from different vendors."
"For me, the best feature of Automation Anywhere is that it is totally cloud-based. We do not need to set up anything in VMs or other machines. It can directly work on the cloud."
"It has helped us a lot with our digitized work."
"This RPA software has good scalability and stability, is easy to understand and easy to use, even for users who have no experience with automation software."
"The Capture command has been a lifesaver for me in each of my use cases and the advanced Excel functionalities like running macro, reading and manipulating data, etc. It allows the bot creator to leverage the inbuilt functionalities that AA2019 has to offer to a great extent."
"The support team responds quickly."
"The general features, that we can automate a task that takes hours into minutes, are valuable."
"The most valuable improvement in utilizing process automation is the cost savings, but we have also had cases where the customer experience is enhanced."
"With Blue Prism, you automate the back-end processes. Blue Prism is more like service-side automation. It is not off-circuit automation. It is more like attended automation."
"As a developer, I liked the layout and UI, specifically referring to testing. I was able to watch the process through stages."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to do surface automation, allowing interaction with legacy systems where terminal emulation is still in use."
"We started with a very small team and small projects. As the project started getting success with Blue Prism we have a large number of teams now just for automating all the business procedures. Larger time was saved after automating the processes."
"It is a scalable solution."
"It's quite easy to use and easy to understand the process studio."
"It's fast to get up and running if you use a cloud deployment."
 

Cons

"It would be useful to have some updates for the control room in terms of analytics."
"The technical support has been a little slow to respond to our inquiries."
"Improvement areas will be there for everybody. I think one area which I would like to see improvement is in IQ Bot. Maybe it has improved a lot in version 11 X but I think that that's one area which definitely scope to improve."
"The focus on usability and user experience is bang on. Addressing several personas and making it easy for every persona to adopt and embrace is the spot on focus. That's an area that has a lot more room to improve. In the absence of that, the skills and expertise in the industry are going to struggle and if you need broader adoption, which has maximum potential, the persona-based user experience is a focus and I'd say Automation Anywhere is already working on."
"The OCR can be a little better because sometimes while scrapping, it leads to data loss."
"I want Automation Anywhere to work on IQ Bot further to help evolve the tool more and create a certain set of solutions using IQ Bot. They can maybe use better machine learning algorithms to come up with better accuracy for OCR extractions. This is an area that I want them to work on."
"Web automation capability needs to be improved."
"What I am suggesting, when using A2019, if there are any additional features to exclude those antivirus scans until after my task is completed, then the antivirus can start scheduling. Then, I can easily tell the client that the priority are running and the Automation Anywhere scans can wait until after the release."
"The solution is pretty high priced. The tool's support also needs to be better."
"Blue Prism can improve on the ease of use of its graphic user interface(GUI)."
"There are a lot of things coming up, such as Discovery Bot and Process Discovery. A lot of other aspects are also maturing. We have definitely started using it for our clients, and it is maturing as a solution, but it is all about how you integrate the enterprise with all the automation projects, such as your chatbot, Conversational AI, and robotics. How they are integrated and talk to each other creates a very good business case with all three aspects. The next level should be about integrating it with other automation tools as well. It can have integration with other tools or automation projects, such as your chatbot, Conversational AI, and robotics."
"The assisted automation functionality needs improvement."
"Blue Prism needs to work in a web-based account. I think that the Blue Prism will need to have the main features be web-based so that you can control the box in a web-based environment and not in a client's environment."
"Though Blue Prism has now come up with features like decipher and computer vision, it is still not able to address most of the issues, making it an area of concern where improvements are required."
"Optical character recognition has room for improvement."
"Emerging technologies adoption is a challenge for every organization, especially the products which address productivity/automation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Automation Anywhere is affordable."
"The pricing model can be a bit more flexible."
"We only deal in annual licenses. There are no pay-as-you-go licenses."
"The pricing is reasonable and one can achieve ROI faster when compared to other tools."
"Our costs are approximately between $5,000 to $10,000 per license."
"My understanding is that the license cost of Automation Anywhere is more reasonable than UiPath and Blue Prism."
"The Community Edition is a good offering from the company."
"There are a lot of savings in terms of effort and time as well as costs. Automation Anywhere automates a lot of processes. It allows an organization to save the efforts of a lot people. It saves a lot of time because people can't work a whole day (24/7), but Automation Anywhere bots can."
"The licensing fees are low compared to other tools."
"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."
"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."
"Its license is costlier than UiPath and AA. They should improve its price. We have a two-year contract with them."
"This is a very expensive product and this is the reason that they're losing their market share."
"Blue Prism is quite costly."
"Our customers pay for an annual license."
"We have a three-year contract that is paid on a yearly basis."
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Answers from the Community

JD
Jun 29, 2021
Jun 29, 2021
@reviewer1356150 @Nilesh Pawar @reviewer1390509 @Alex Yuan @Hayaa Kayasseh you've all recently written reviews for one of these products. Do you have any insight to share with @reviewer1373997 about governance and business continuity requirements for these products?
See 2 answers
Rony_Sklar - PeerSpot reviewer
Jul 20, 2020
@reviewer1356150 @Nilesh Pawar @reviewer1390509 @Alex Yuan @Hayaa Kayasseh you've all recently written reviews for one of these products. Do you have any insight to share with @reviewer1373997 about governance and business continuity requirements for these products?
Mohammed Tafazal - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 29, 2021
For any RPA tool it required have a generic /universal governance model where  1. sponsor or Head of RPA implementation 2. Business analysts 3.Architects(solution/technical) 4.Developers ( Full stack - Build, Test and SIT) 5.Scrum master or Sprints head or Project manager 6. QA ( Test automation) - optional Above generic governance model/structure roles for handling any kind of RPA process. One proven way to implement centralized automation management is via a CoE. The best practices of Robotic Process Automation states that the use of bots doesn’t increase negative risks for the organization in the development of reusable solutions. The responsibilities of a Centre of Excellence will depend on the exact governance model used. The most common activities include the following: Drive RPA in the business, training teams, and increasing awareness of RPA in those. Calculate the criticality and quality of the developed solutions, ensuring the application of best practices. Monitor the operation of bots and guarantee that execution SLAs (service-level agreement) are met. Follow and report the main development stages. Guarantee the execution of established governance processes. Guarantee the continual improvement of processes and tools. Business Continuity Requirements: To have backup or disaster recovery machines for the critical RPA processes with load balancing using central orchestration in different clusters. For any of the RPA there is orchestration tool which handles all the initiation and processing from one location have it maintained well from risks and disasters with load balancing. This will helps in business continuity.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is very good in certain situations but lacks in others. For me, it's more the team tha...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applications that AA has limitations for, such as the Oracle. For web-based applicatio...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
Should I choose Blue Prism or Microsoft Power Automate?
Hello Netanya, it depends on your needs and your expertise. In my humble opinion you can start a big RPA project implementation with Blue Prism which is stable and mature software, in order to ser...
I am evaluating Blue Prism and UiPath for RPA for my company. Which one do you recommend?
I'm very familiar with UiPath and the RPA industry: was hired by Daniel Dines in 2015 when there were 35 employees and left in 2019 when there were 3K+. I'm a big believer in the product, leadershi...
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Coca-Cola, Walgreens, American Express, Royal Bank of Canada, Pfizer, Shop Direct, O2, Siemens, Ascension Healthcare, Jaguar Land Rover
Find out what your peers are saying about Automation Anywhere vs. Blue Prism and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,325 professionals have used our research since 2012.