Automation Anywhere (AA) vs Blue Prism vs UiPath comparison

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Automation Anywhere (AA)

Blue Prism

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Automation Anywhere (AA), Blue Prism, and UiPath based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about UiPath, Microsoft, Automation Anywhere and others in Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

To learn more, read our detailed Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Report (Updated: August 2024).

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

August 2024

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Helped 800,688 peers since 2012

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2024, in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category, the mindshare of Automation Anywhere (AA) is 12.3%, down from 15.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Blue Prism is 12.8%, up from 10.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of UiPath is 27.2%, up from 26.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Q&A Highlights

reviewer1373997

Analyst, Intelligent Automation at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Jun 29, 2021

RPA Governance and Business Continuity requirements for a large multi-national corporate financial services provider

@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?

Saved us half a million dollars and 10,000 hours in the first year

Featured Reviews

Nelson F. Guerrero

Senior Manager & Principal Automation Architect, AI + Automation at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 1, 2024

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.

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Gul Ansari

Solution Architect-Intelligent Automation at Kone Oyj

Mar 15, 2023

Has very clear guidelines and demarcation on processes and objects which is not present in other tools

The solution’s use case for our company is HR hire automation. When an employee gets onboarded there are a lot of formalities that HR should do like collecting data for payroll. Another use case is tender creation. We use the product for tender creation whenever a lead is converted into an…

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BalkishanSingh

RPA Developer at Finesse

Dec 12, 2019

Constantly updated, and the activities available in Studio are enough to automate all types of tasks

I would like to see the computer vision activity updated. There should be a click-event-update activity present in the UI Studio where we can click a link and the result should act as a button. Right now, this feature is not available in such conditions. The OCR should be made faster to save more time. If I am buying production licenses from UiPath it should provide at least two or three nonproduction licenses for further use. The Studio should be made interactive like Orchestrator. The debug option in Studio is not working on breakpoints, which is an issue that I have already highlighted in the forum.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the SAP application and the DLLs that Automation Anywhere provides. These DLLs help automate the SAP application."

"The OCR is the most valuable feature, though this is a third party feature that we have integrated. It is quite easy to integrate with other solutions."

"The overall UI of the tool is so user-friendly that even a beginner can use it easily."

"From a manageability perspective, this solution is very good."

"The most valuable feature of Automation Anywhere is the ease with which it integrates with our existing APIs."

"The platform is easy to use, especially for business users."

"Having a cloud-based deployment provides more flexibility because we just need an internet connection for connecting the agent into the AA cloud."

"The product has improved our organization cost-wise and bank savings in transactions. Everything has been changed for the better."

More Automation Anywhere (AA) pros

"The development interface is quite easy to work with."

"The automation on offer is great."

"The only feature that stands out in Blue Prism, as compared to other tools, is security. This is the only reason for still having Blue Prism in our bucket. It is very secure and reliable, and it has also been in the market for a very long time. We automated a lot of federal and government automation processes very recently with this solution."

"Blue Prism supports the multi-bot architecture, which is really good. It is also really good at OCR. Blue Prism is integrated with Abbey OCR, and it provides at least 90% right information on period documents. This is something that is really good in Blue Prism. Blue Prism can deal with huge amounts of data. We can track each and every record, and then we can see the data. If you don't have much coding experience, it makes it easy to build automations and deploy them. It is also easy to learn and easy to work with. It has a lot of features, which makes it reliable for any sort of automation."

"The support is good."

"Blue Prism is highly scalable and reliable."

"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."

"Blue Prism provides both on-premises and cloud versions."

More Blue Prism pros

"I think the most valuable feature is being able to run processes in an unattended way where we can schedule them, and then have the report sent to the process owner's inbox in the morning."

"Technical support has been good. I am happy with their response times."

"UiPath saves us time and increases productivity for our organization."

"I find the solution easier to use than other platforms and it's a user-friendly way to automate."

"The GUI is valuable, and it's extremely stable. I've had six or seven Studios open at the same time working on different things and nothing has crashed on it."

"You can set up processes using macros without basic knowledge of coding."

"UiPath's most valuable feature is Orchestrator."

"It takes a very manual, key punch-oriented job and automates it, so the user can do more intelligent work."

More UiPath pros

Cons

"The overall product in Automation Anywhere is good, but they need to improve a little bit on the overall architecture side."

"With the user interface, a lot of the parts of it I really like, but there are some things that could be made a little simpler. A little less clicking around here and dragging over there to use."

"We want to have greater control on deciding when we want to upgrade to a newer version"

"Replacing the list of search options with voice commands for each item would be great."

"I need high value products to be created, so I need integration with other solutions. Machine learning and AI need to be integrated with Automation Anywhere. While IQ Bot is a good beginning, our company does not work with manual paperwork since we are already digital. We would like to see more integration with cognitive tools going forward."

"While the ease of use for non-tech users is good, it could be improved."

"Instead of depending on other open-source BPM products, AA should provide their own BPM for attended automations."

"Automation Anywhere's stability could improve. It isn't completely stable, but it's getting better daily."

More Automation Anywhere (AA) cons

"Developing is more time consuming than with other products."

"User interface could be improved and a web interface included for easy access to robot information."

"There are many reasons why many companies don't go for Blue Prism. It is not open, and the community addition is not available. Blue Prism provides support through partnership. You need to do a partnership with them, which is a major disadvantage. You contact a Blue Prism team, and they will schedule a meeting with you. They will give you a demo and help you set up everything, whereas with UiPath and Automation Anywhere, you can try the community edition, and if it fits your needs, you simply buy a license for that. The initial setup of Blue Prism is complex. They simply provide a PDF or documentation for you to go through it, whereas, if you go with UiPath or Automation Anywhere, they have several videos and community support to guide you. The documentation of Blue Prism is static. They don't have any sort of videos or open forums. Other tools have got a lot of community support, but Blue Prism doesn't have that. Its training is also hard to attain, and they also don't provide any certification."

"Blue Prism can improve on the ease of use of its graphic user interface(GUI)."

"Blue Prism is a little behind Automation Anywhere in the topics related to maintenance and report building."

"We didn't find it much useful for unstructured data. It is not easy to do the automation with Blue Prism if you have unstructured data. It should have better automation processes or connectors for unstructured data such as PDFs or pictures. It has a connector for different applications, such as SAP, but we use a few other applications for which it doesn't have a connector. It should have a more comprehensive dashboard that we can use to see the processes that are running and control the parameters."

"Emerging technologies adoption is a challenge for every organization, especially the products which address productivity/automation."

"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."

More Blue Prism cons

"UiPath support should be more accessible. We should be able to connect to support faster and resolve the issues sooner. When we open a ticket, we would prefer to get a call instead of an email. A priority issue is easier to resolve over the phone, so that would be preferable."

"UiPath's process mining needs to improve a lot. The generated reports are difficult to analyze by ordinary people. Task mining reports are also difficult."

"I would like to see the replacement of VB.NET with some more popular programming language as the program's backbone."

"I would like to see ongoing integrations with different applications. For example, we have UKG, which is an HRIS or HCM system. I'd love to see if there could be some sort of connection there because there are definitely some HR stuff from onboarding and offboarding that we do in the HCM that I'd love to have UiPath help with."

"Building automations can be difficult at times with some of the activity packages and documentation being out of date, but we have a TAM that we work with that is very helpful in making sure that RRGs are known and that we get the results within the UiPath structure."

"AI machine learning has room for improvement."

"What we have in mind in terms of what the robots could do for us is significantly more than what UiPath does now, but it takes more work. From my perspective, there is just a wide scope of implementation that goes beyond what we're starting right now. That is essentially the improvement."

"Governing components in the solution, such as the Orchestrator, and configuring the robots should be easier. The vendor should also come up with more offerings or features involving AI."

More UiPath cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Automation Anywhere is competitive... Pega is somewhat comparable, but Pega also requires a lot more infrastructure and a lot more experience to get up and running."

"I'm not sure what the monthly licensing cost is, as that is taken care of by another team, but I would say it's around $100,000."

"The pricing of AA is similar to UiPath."

"We purchase on a bot basis. Our costs are approximately $5,000."

"In most of the cases, the product value is very good. If the infrastructure, implementation, and framework are good, then generally, the client can get a good return on investment."

"I think it's $5,500 per license."

"We would like them to change the license model of charging per bot."

"We generally follow the Gain-Sharing Pricing model, which enables the customer to start getting the RPA benefits right from day one of their implementation."

More Automation Anywhere (AA) pricing and cost advice

"The solution is not that expensive and a five-year license costs about 20k euros."

"I chose Blue Prism because it is priced well. The pricing was right for me at that moment even though Automation Anywhere is better in other aspects."

"The license for Blue Prism is very straightforward, we only need one license."

"Blue Prism has a higher cost with respect to RPA enablement, particularly if you are trying to start with RPA."

"There is a one-time purchase fee for this solution."

"We really don't bear the costs. The cost is borne by the customer. It runs into about $100,000 per year per customer for Blue Prism. We normally budget around $30,000 for the first year for the hardware, setup, and people cost."

"The price is on par with other products in the market."

"It is a bit higher in cost as compared to Automation Anywhere and UiPath. The rate also differs from client to client. Margins are also important when it comes to costing and licensing. There are some additional costs involved besides the standard licensing costs. You have the development team cost, which includes the project manager, development team, analyst, and testers. You also need a team manager. You also have the tools cost, architecture cost, platform cost, and the licensing cost of each bot."

More Blue Prism pricing and cost advice

"Some of the licenses, such as for Document Understanding, are a little bit expensive. We hope that they will reduce the prices over time, but it's still something new. I understand that it cannot be given away too cheaply in the beginning."

"It is super cheap for the value you get. Their free version is good enough to implement. When you are building a solution, it takes months of effort, and sometimes, it takes years. Its free version is good enough for you to test out everything, so when you are developing, you do not need to pay. After that, there is a Pro version at $420. It is reasonable for the value it is offering. Their basic support is also very good, which comes with the Pro version. The Enterprise license is suitable when you need a hundred automation licenses. It is also reasonable. They give good pricing when you negotiate."

"I can't speak to the exact price, however, recently I heard in a meeting that one license for Studio Path costs 2,825 Euros per year. This price is approximate and may fluctuate."

"Compared to other solutions, the pricing is moderate."

"The licensing is close to optimum; however, there is room for improvement in both the cost and flexibility of the licenses."

"We have a cost model for operating expense savings. It is usually about $100,000 to $125,000 and takes us six weeks to develop and implement. That's development, testing, and implementation. We do code reviews on everything. That does not include all the documentation, assessment, etc."

"It is cheaper than Microsoft Power Automate and saves us between 50 and 70 percent on costs. UiPath's pricing is moderate and something everyone can afford."

"It is one of those things where you pay for convenience. Pricing-wise, UiPath is definitely way more expensive than other solutions that we have seen, especially since we also have Microsoft Power Automate, which is one of the latest tools. UiPath is on the higher end, but it is one of those decisions, "Is it worth the investment? How much are you getting as an ROI?" That is usually how the conversation goes."

More UiPath pricing and cost advice

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Answers from the Community

reviewer1373997

Analyst, Intelligent Automation at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Jun 29, 2021

RPA Governance and Business Continuity requirements for a large multi-national corporate financial services provider

See 2 answers

Rony_Sklar

Community Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Jul 20, 2020

Read full answer

Mohammed Tafazal

RPA Lead Architect and Manager at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

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 ver...

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 applic...

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 imp...

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 an...

What do you like most about Blue Prism?

It is a stable solution.

Best RPA tools for IBM iSeries

I can only speak to UiPath since that is the only RPA solution that I have used. I know that there are specific packa...

RPA that Bots can run without centralized control?

Yes, Attended Bots which can run without centralized control Module. RPA Tools like Automation Anywhere, uiPath ,Pow...

How do I choose between UiPath and Microsoft Power Automate?

Microsoft‌ ‌Power‌ ‌Automate‌ ‌is‌ ‌intuitive‌ ‌and‌ ‌easy‌ ‌to‌ ‌integrate‌ ‌and‌ ‌use.‌ ‌I‌ ‌like‌ ‌that‌ ‌there‌ ‌...

Microsoft Power Automate vs Automation Anywhere (AA)

Comparisons

Compared 34% of the time

Tricentis Tosca vs Automation Anywhere (AA)

Compared 4% of the time

IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vs Automation Anywhere (AA)

Compared 3% of the time

Pega Robotic Process Automation vs Automation Anywhere (AA)

Compared 2% of the time

SAP Intelligent RPA vs Automation Anywhere (AA)

Compared 2% of the time

More Automation Anywhere (AA) Competitors

Microsoft Power Automate vs Blue Prism

Compared 36% of the time

Pega Robotic Process Automation vs Blue Prism

Compared 4% of the time

Tungsten RPA vs Blue Prism

Compared 2% of the time

Blue Prism Cloud vs Blue Prism

Compared 2% of the time

IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vs Blue Prism

Compared 2% of the time

More Blue Prism Competitors

Microsoft Power Automate vs UiPath

Compared 28% of the time

Robocorp vs UiPath

Compared 6% of the time

Pega Robotic Process Automation vs UiPath

Compared 6% of the time

Tungsten RPA vs UiPath

Compared 4% of the time

WorkFusion vs UiPath

Compared 3% of the time

More UiPath Competitors

Product Reports

Download Automation Anywhere (AA) product report

Automation Anywhere (AA)

September 2024

Download Blue Prism product report

Blue Prism

September 2024

Download UiPath product report

August 2024

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise

No data available

Learn More

Automation Anywhere

SS&C Blue Prism

Overview

Automation Anywhere is the leader in intelligent automation solutions that put AI to work across every aspect of an organization. The company’s Automation Success Platform is powered with specialized AI, generative AI and offers process discovery, RPA, end-to-end process orchestration, document processing, and analytics, with a security and governance-first approach. Automation Anywhere empowers organizations worldwide to unleash productivity gains, drive innovation, improve customer service and accelerate business growth. The company is guided by its vision to fuel the future of work by unleashing human potential through intelligent automation.

Learn more at http://www.automationanywhere.com/.

Blue Prism is an intelligent, business-developed, no-code automation platform for SaaS deployments as well as for on-premises, public cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid environments. Unlike other automation technology, Blue Prism combines robotic process automation with expanded artificial intelligence and cognitive capabilities. Blue Prism gives users instant access to the tools you need for building and delegating automations, as well as a digital workforce that is already AI-equipped.

With Blue Prism’s code-free RPA, deployed through use of their Robotic Operating Model, your business can scale efficiently, improve customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and augment its talent to take on new responsibilities. Blue Prism helps to accelerate operational agility and efficiency by making it easy to automate the most important processes. Allocating everyday tasks to your Digital Workforce gives you immediate increased capacity and allows your teams to focus on their strategic goals. In addition, it delivers a return on investment, increases efficiency gains, and can even introduce new revenue streams.

“Workforce of the Future”

Blue Prism’s all-in-one intelligent automation platform consists of:

Design Studio with drag-and-drop process automation building, reusable “objects” across your business, and updates to objects and processes saved throughout the process library.
Control Room where you can assign processes to digital workers, scale digital worker and task volume ondemand, and gain real-time transparency of process proficiencies.
Digital Workforce of autonomous software robots that can learn and mimic business processes like humans and are equipped with six intelligent automation skills:
1. Knowledge and Insight - The ability to harvest, understand, and deliver insights from multiple disparate data sources.
2. Visual Perception - The ability to read, understand, and contextualize visual information.
3. Learning - The ability to derive contextual meaning and adapt to evolving process patterns.
4. Planning and Sequencing - The ability to optimize workloads and identify opportunities for better outcomes.
5. Problem-solving - The ability to autonomously solve system, logic, and business problems.
6. Collaboration - The ability to seamlessly work with both people and systems.

Reviews from Real Users

Blue Prism stands out for its enterprise-level functionality, which is why many companies choose it over its competitors. PeerSpot users note that the solution is easy to use, stable, and robust scalability-wise. The security is also top-notch. One user pointed out that "One of the most powerful features in Blue Prism is exception handling. It's one of the features that really differentiates it from other platforms." Blue Prism helps businesses with everything from compliance to quality control and error-avoidance.

UiPath is a user-friendly automation software that streamlines business processes by automating repetitive tasks. It offers extensive automation capabilities, seamless integration with other systems, and robust security measures.

Users appreciate its intuitive design, ease of use, and ability to automate complex workflows.

Its seamless integration with various applications ensures smooth data exchange and enhances workflow management, while strong security measures protect sensitive data and maintain compliance with industry standards.

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

1. Accenture 2. Deloitte 3. PwC 4. IBM 5. Capgemini 6. KPMG 7. Ernst & Young 8. Infosys 9. Cognizant 10. Wipro 11. Tata Consultancy Services 12. HCL Technologies 13. Genpact 14. Tech Mahindra 15. DXC Technology 16. Atos 17. NTT Data 18. CGI 19. L&T Infotech 20. Hexaware Technologies 21. Mindtree 22. Mphasis 23. Virtusa 24. Syntel 25. Zensar Technologies 26. WNS Global Services 27. Hexaware Technologies 28. Larsen & Toubro Infotech 29. Persistent Systems 30. QuEST Global 31. Sonata Software 32. Zensar Technologies