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Automation Anywhere vs Blue Prism Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Automation Anywhere
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
522
Ranking in other categories
Process Mining (1st)
Blue Prism Cloud
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category, the mindshare of Automation Anywhere is 11.9%, down from 15.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Blue Prism Cloud is 1.3%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
 

Featured Reviews

Nelson F. Guerrero - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Keith Mcdowell - PeerSpot reviewer
It helps us save on staff costs
I rate Blue Prism Cloud eight out of 10 for ease of setup. It's a cloud-based solution, so it isn't hard to set up. The deployment time is hard to quantify because I work for the government, and we need to go through all these internal reviews, but the technical part takes three to four weeks. The biggest challenge is security because we need to integrate it with Active Directory and set up VPN tunnels, security profiles, etc. We deployed Blue Prism in-house and used three people to set it up. One solution engineer is enough to maintain it.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"MetaBot is the most valuable feature. Other products have robotic functionality but MetaBot is a kind of functionality by which code is created... so business users who do not have coding knowledge can drag and drop."
"This most valuable features of this solution are the drag-and-drop interface, and it is easy to code."
"From an SAP point of view, we have in-built features. They have integrated everything together, so it's much easier for us to use that."
"Scheduling helps to generate and send reports without any delay."
"So far, we have seen that a valuable feature of Automation Anywhere is the ease of integrating it with multiple systems. It can very easily integrate with an environment of an organization. It helps in a quick go to access and implementation. You don't have to spend days implementing Automation Anywhere software. You can quickly go drag and drop and do an ease of configuration. You can actually get your bot up and running very fast, which is one important advantage."
"Automation Anywhere includes IQ Bots. So, IQ Bots is the key part of Automation Anywhere. You can work on any type of PDF, images, invoices, or billing things in any company. You can just upload it and extract the data, then use it as you require. It is a key part of Automation Anywhere: the best part."
"It has definitely helped automating a lot of processes, but it is very difficult to build resilient bots. It is very difficult to find skilled developers in the market, who actually build resilient bots with appropriate error handling. Maintaining the bots is another challenge as the applications keep changing."
"AA has improved our digital strategy extensively and provided the required leverage to place ourselves above other peers in the O&G Industry. We were able to develop quick digital solutions by demonstrating the ROI and gain momentum by aligning the desired resources & budget from leadership."
"The user performance is the most valuable feature."
"Blue Prism offers the whole package for LPR developers. It's a useful tool to automate anything. As an LPR developer, I think the most important feature is that it lets you get anything into blocks of code that you can use anywhere."
"The ease of building automation and the development environment"
"It is secure and supports unattended mode of operations."
"The product itself is quite mature."
"Blue Prism is well known for being used in banking and security organizations. Its security is superior compared to UiPath and other RPA tools."
"The reusability of the solution is excellent. It's a superior feature - far superior to any other tool on the market."
"The most valuable feature is the customizability."
 

Cons

"I would like to have the MetaBot screen name title dynamic instead of static."
"We do not have a precise area that needs improvement, but sometimes while running bots that traverse through different websites, the screen hangs or takes time to fully load."
"Triggers work in the attended mode on Automation Anywhere. I would love it if we could use triggers in the unattended mode too. This way we can use the feature more in our IT sector. E.g., when any service or folder is accessed by unauthorized person, we want to be able to get an immediate trigger, even on "out of office", this would be helpful for my organization."
"It could be improved in terms of the global analysis of all the issues caused by the dependency components. For example, if bots are running on virtual machines on Microsoft Windows 2019, sometimes an issue might come from the virtual machine. Automation Anywhere should work closely with Microsoft or any other editor with which there are some issues occurring and stopping the bots from running properly."
"Reliability and error handling should be improved."
"The Automation Anywhere Control room component features can be improved, as of now it contains too many roles and rules which makes it confusing to use it."
"I would like to see a comment feature that allows you to embed comments/notes into an action sidebar, without having to actually take up a line of code in order to write such a statement."
"One of the things that we did was purchase the solution originally through IBM, as they had an value-added layer on top of it. Once we had another group come on, they purchased additional bots directly from Automation Anywhere, and they wouldn't integrate well. We had to uninstall the solution that we had purchased from IBM and reinstall those bots to move forward."
"The issue is that it is not dynamic or intelligent."
"Blue Prism might consider adding package options to allow users to come onboard in different ways that meet their needs rather than buying in to the whole package."
"There are a few smart services that are not available in Blue Prism. For example, Excel sheets that are converted into a CS sheet have limitations with the number of columns when imported. This could be improved."
"I think that there are some improvements in the product performance that are needed in Blue Prism Cloud...The initial setup of the product needs a lot of time and effort."
"Improvement should be per customer requirements."
"The product’s pricing needs improvement."
"I personally would like the solution to be supporting more languages."
"Blue Prism is slightly difficult for the non-technical user."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Additional costs will be for the machines and the number of machines that you are using. You can deploy virtually as well as on physical machines. In both the situations, you do need to allocate a certain budget for securing the machines and where the software will be installed and running. The machines cannot be used for anything else, because only a certain bot can run at a certain time. You need to be very particular about your scheduling of running the bots, and while the bot is running nobody can use the machine. You cannot have an agent working on a machine and the bot running in the background. It has to be completely dedicated. Then there are the network bandwidth requirements and space requirements, which are additional costs apart from the licensing and software costs. The developer is also going to charge you for their coding time too."
"Pricing is too high for small-scale groups. The Control Room yearly fee is high, making it difficult to break even."
"The ROI is really good. We have saved time and money."
"It saves on the quality of work, because the quality can be bad when somebody's doing it. If a bot does the work, it's faster and comes with good quality. These are two important things along with the cost saving in the long run. That's where the value is."
"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."
"I advise others that even as of right now, the setup cost and licensing cost to automate bots on Automation Anywhere is steep but it is worth the investment!"
"We have seen ROI in terms of cost and time with a couple of our projects."
"Licensing costs range from $50,000 to $200,000."
"Though I don't have many details, I think Blue Prism Cloud is an expensive product compared to the other tools in the market since you need to pay for resources like machines."
"Annual licensing costs were somewhere between $5,000 - $10,000 for the development tool. For the control tower, I think fees were about $50,000 annually."
"The pricing is fine."
"We found the pricing reasonable, and it aligned with our budgetary requirements."
"There are costs for the machine to run the robots."
"The licensing structure is complex and the minimum contract length is three years."
"The default configuration does not include large-scale log injection, but if you require, such integration, it may incur additional costs per gigabyte. I don't have the exact pricing information for log injection, but it is possible that it varies depending on the volume of data. While there may be a basic service included, additional features might come at an extra cost. When working with cloud environments like VMs, calculating costs involves considering factors such as usage duration, network traffic, inbound and outbound data transfer, as well as network access control. The pricing structure for cloud coverage solutions follows a similar pattern, although specific pricing details would need to be obtained separately."
"We pay about $15,000 per quarter in licensing costs. We don't have to pay for any other extra costs. There isn't, for example, an extra cost for technical support. We just pay the licensing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
7%
 

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.
What do you like most about Blue Prism Cloud?
It's easy to use, the interface, the the the the queries is which we use. It's user friendly.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Blue Prism Cloud?
If we utilize Blue Prism's full capabilities, then it is cost-effective. Otherwise, the pricing can seem high. It requires the right processes.
What needs improvement with Blue Prism Cloud?
Decipher, one of their solutions, is a waste of time. Other than that, there's nothing specific I can think of.
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise
Blue Prism Thoughtonomy Virtual Workforce, Blue Prism Virtual Workforce, Thoughtonomy Virtual Workforce
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Cabot Credit Management, Hovis, Utilita
Find out what your peers are saying about Automation Anywhere vs. Blue Prism Cloud and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
816,562 professionals have used our research since 2012.