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Automation Anywhere vs Blue Prism vs UiPath comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category, the mindshare of Automation Anywhere is 11.7%, down from 15.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Blue Prism is 12.7%, up from 11.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of UiPath is 26.4%, up from 25.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
 

Q&A Highlights

reviewer1373997 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 29, 2021
 

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.
Mohamed Salah Baccouche - PeerSpot reviewer
Way more efficient for debugging than other tools but the UI is complicated
The UI is more complicated than other tools. In Power Automate, it doesn't even feel like you are working because the tool does the job for you. But in the solution, there are studio, process, and object interfaces and you have to decode your own objects. The free objects that are predefined are not good compared to other tools. There is still a lot of work to do on the solution's intelligent automation part.
NicolasSandros - PeerSpot reviewer
Has a lot of use cases, great automation capabilities, and helpful support
I'd rate the initial setup eight out of ten. It's pretty easy to implement. We use Azure Virtual Machines to deploy the robots and usually use a lot of the Azure services in conjunction with the robots. The cloud is on UiPath's automation cloud. That's where we have our servers - to manage the robust deployed data on multiple virtual machines. In terms of maintenance, there are always releases and updates, and then you can usually design your own robots to watch over the other robots, which is really interesting. You have the flexibility to make your own monitoring; if it sees something wrong, you can enter a ticket and then dispatch it to the support team to respond to it. My whole developer team is involved in maintenance; however, I have specific support team members. There's 28 developers and seven support team members in that group.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product has improved our organization cost-wise and bank savings in transactions. Everything has been changed for the better."
"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."
"I'd say there are new useful features that will definitely help us as we do more development in the near future."
"The main thing is the simple UI, easy to use commands, and it's very easy to learn compared to other tools in the market."
"AA control room is one central system to manage our tasks. We found it excellent to administrate. It was used for easy scheduling of process/task in Remote desktop. This helped to avoid manual intervention to trigger tasks."
"The marketing automation software provides easy workflow creation and management."
"This solution is easy to use and generates a quick response."
"SAP GUI Integration commands are highly useful while working with SAP applications and facilitate easy use of the software. This feature has been recently incorporated within the software and we have been using it to interface with SAP systems in development as well as production."
"The most valuable features are the exception handling and embedded control room."
"Blue Prism is very good at doing background processing."
"The tool is very technically sound."
"The performance is very good and it is a valuable feature."
"Access to the SQL database allows for extra capabilities."
"There are simple things you can put in place that help you understand workflow and how implementation acts."
"It is a stable solution."
"Blue Prism MAPIEx and the Java Bridge are really great features provided for automating Java-based applications and for allowing mail to send and receive smoothly."
"The most valuable feature is the general automation that UiPath offers, especially in improving data collection which allows for a more comprehensive analysis of information on invoices."
"I like UiPath's framework. It offers a modern design experience, which makes it easy to do different activities."
"It is the most suitable tool for big beginners in RPA. It is simple to manipulate. I found it comfortable because it has ML, AI, and OCR. It is great."
"I love it for the deep artificial intelligence that it has. It has the AI to recognize the processes, analyze all the workflows through user interactions, and discover automation opportunities. It is very intelligent in these aspects."
"The return on investment is really good"
"Implementing AI in our automation has significantly enhanced the accuracy of our operations."
"Valuable features include rapid development and the scale of solution. The most valuable feature would be accuracy: The ability to perform the same job accurately and consistently."
"UiPath Action Center is very valuable."
 

Cons

"Autosuggestion of existing use cases based on the problem statement could use improvement."
"In the version that we have, there are some challenges with the browser-based applications, the cloning of the objects, and the solution's stability."
"I am not technically inclined, and it involves many steps for a process to function properly. It requires a lot of work initially to design and develop a process. I find it somewhat challenging. If you take time to understand it, it's not too difficult, but it seems complicated at the beginning if you're not a technical person."
"In high-availability, we have two Control Rooms acting as a cluster so if one fails the other one will take over. But that's not our environment operationally, and the latest information we have is that they identified another product bug."
"We are still looking into some of its current capabilities, like IT Bot."
"Automation Anywhere Control Room should update to the newer versions with one click, including the newer features. There should be minimum effort required from the IT organization. The major resistance from any organization is from the IT organization because they have a lot of dependencies and will sometimes resist doing changes because they have other activities and applications to manage. Future versions should minimizing their work."
"We tried Citrix six months ago, but the solution that they gave us did not work in our environment."
"Built-in HTML features are lagging in this solution, whereas in UiPath, they are very good."
"They improve more in OCR, to read text more correctly, currently can say OCR in blue prism only works for less cases and is only effective 50%. so mostly OCR's of Blue prism is very less used and other API's or tools are integrated with Blue prism for OCR techniques."
"As a user, I cannot directly work with the bot. On a daily basis, I use and do some work in Microsoft Excel, which cannot be directly taken into Blue Prism. Our company majorly runs on Microsoft Excel. Everybody has Excel sheets as their working sheets. Therefore, we need a kind of automation to be able to do things with this program. This bot is almost like an invisible staff that works between the servers but not with the users. This bot works well with SAP and things like that, but it doesn't work with Excel sheets. It doesn't work with the bots that we have, and I cannot invoke an RPA right now as a user. It has to be done by an administrator who has better control than me. It needs better integration with Microsoft Excel. Its price can be improved. It is expensive for us. It should be cheaper for a market like ours. We are based in India."
"The OCR capability, along with the connectivity with some of the legacy tools, needs to be improved."
"Blue Prism develops its own tools and process automation, but the documentation is unclear and incomplete."
"The recording of the transaction is missing in this solution."
"The activities that we do are a bit difficult to do in Blue Prism as compared to UiPath. UiPath provides create activities and create packages related to AI analytical skills. This is something that Blue Prism doesn't have."
"It isn't very easy or intuitive for our developers to program the bot to make intelligent decisions. A bot, for the lack of a better word, is stupid, and it can only do what we program it to do. It cannot make intelligent decisions. For example, if we are reviewing Uber charges, they could be posting their transactions under different corporation names, even though they are under the same parent company or group. A human can easily understand that it is the name of the same company, and it just has an asterisk or space, but a bot cannot do that. When a bot cannot complete the transaction, it sends out an exception rate, business exception, or system exception for a human to do a manual review. The exception rate has been high because the bots cannot make decisions that we think are very simple, which is understandable because that's how they were programmed. There is potential in utilizing the higher intelligence side of the tool, but it is not easy to code higher intelligent actions. It is a very lengthy process to get the provisioning to ensure that it is kind of doing what it needs to do. Provisioning involves multiple things, and it is quite complicated and not the best experience, but it is not just because of Blue Prism. Blue Prism is easy, but it takes a long time to onboard into our in-house system."
"We've found some challenges with Blue Prism, particularly when interacting with certain applications. The element inspection feature could be improved, especially for more complex applications."
"As far as stability is concerned, I'm not sure what people who have deployments of hundreds or thousands of bots are seeing in terms of stability. We're small. For a small implementation, we've had a few hiccups and a few concerns where I would say, how can we triage more quickly, or how can we understand what we've caused more quickly?"
"UiPath should expand its coding options and reduce its dependency on third-party resources. There should also be more flexible licenses for smaller businesses. It's hard for small companies to estimate the cost of adding users in their final budgets. UiPath could also improve error handling and capture a little more information about the execution of your processes."
"For the moment, I don't see any explicit areas for improvement. However, having UiPath come up with unique features or advancements would be beneficial."
"The development life cycle using Automation Anywhere is shorter. With UiPath, the development life cycle is slightly longer, but it is not a major issue."
"The tool needs to have more documentation and change logs. Minor upgrades break a few things."
"UiPath is pretty easy to use for small—and medium-scale automation. However, maintaining the code becomes a bit more difficult when building large-scale, enterprise-level automation. Areas for improvement include versioning for collaborative projects and reporting features currently lacking."
"I would like a better way to find the little things that aren't simply named."
"There can be technical issues, but it's rarely about a server quitting. They are more like connectivity, platform, and software version issues, but there are no issues with UiPath performance."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I've seen the price vary by whether the client is going to scale and adopt a tool."
"In terms of monetary savings, we automated a bot in three days that has saved us $30,000 in costs."
"I find the license pricing to be competitive and reflective of the pricing models throughout the RPA space, and I believe there is a lot of value in continuing to maintain the free community edition platform."
"Automation Anywhere's pricing is significantly higher than other RPA solutions."
"Licensing for Automation Anywhere (AA) is paid on a yearly basis. Out of all the RPA tools, it has the most value for money, e.g. what you pay is what you get."
"The price for Automation Anywhere is reasonable."
"We have saved customers 400% in terms of time saved by implementing this product."
"Automation Anywhere pricing and licensing are competitive compared to the other automation vendors."
"Due to our financial structure, we need fixed costs. So, a license based on the usage would not be feasible. If we have a license model that is based on tasks per year or something else, it could create a very dynamic range of costs. Due to our public financial input, we have to know what it will cost. So, we have licenses per server. This helps us in planning, and we know exactly when we need additional servers. We can then request additional money for them."
"Our licensing fees are approximately $5,000 USD per year."
"The license for Blue Prism is very straightforward, we only need one license."
"The price of Blue Prism is high compared to others solutions. It would be helpful if they could provide a trial version for new users to try. Other vendors provide a community or trial version. There are not any hidden costs."
"Its pricing is okay. Its price is pretty similar to the price of other tools."
"Its price should be lower."
"In the Philippines, fewer companies are using Blue Prism because of its cost. I don't know the price, but I know that its price is higher than UiPath."
"Its license is costlier than UiPath and AA. They should improve its price. We have a two-year contract with them."
"It costs much less and it does much more than the competitors' solutions."
"I find the licensing structure to be perplexing, and it frequently changes."
"In India, where I am from, UiPath is expensive. But customers in other regions, like Europe or the US, will not find it so expensive."
"A robot license costs $6,000 USD per year, or $10,000 NZD."
"The licensing cost is very high."
"UiPath is expensive."
"I don't know the exact cost, but UiPath is more expensive than Power Automate and Automation Anywhere."
"It is the most user-friendly RPA platform, but it is also the most expensive RPA platform."
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Answers from the Community

reviewer1373997 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
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 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...
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 ‌...
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise
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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
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
Find out what your peers are saying about UiPath, Microsoft, Automation Anywhere and others in Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Updated: November 2024.
824,095 professionals have used our research since 2012.