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Automation Anywhere vs Fortra's Automate comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 4, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Automation Anywhere
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
526
Ranking in other categories
Process Mining (1st)
Fortra's Automate
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 Fortra's Automate is 1.3%, up from 1.0% 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.
Anabel Marco - PeerSpot reviewer
Can automate several processes with only one bot and is easy to implement, administer, and use
We have tried other RPA solutions like UiPath or Automation Anywhere. They are fantastic products but complex, and it's hard to understand everything. It would be best if you had a skilled developer or several. Automate is easy to implement, administer, and use. It's appropriate for us because our cases are simple and easy to automate. We don't need complicated tools with many features; We prefer to get a significant ROI quickly. We can automate several processes with only one bot, so it's much cheaper than other products where you need to buy additional licenses. We need a good value for our automation. The other solutions might be more robust, but Automate is perfect for us because we're not a large enterprise.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Having no restriction for any single programming language is very useful."
"The graphical user interface (GUI) is very useful, since I don't know any coding languages. I have been able to be a developer with Automation Anywhere without knowing the technical background. I am a business user, and not needing the technical knowledge to use the system has been useful for me."
"We are getting massive efficiencies across our back office, internally."
"It integrates with different types of applications, so we can automate our business partners' redundant, repetitive tasks."
"It is easy to code. While you have developers, somebody with a development or workflow mindset can logically build a bot in Automation Anywhere by understanding how to put a process in a workflow. If you have that, then you can logically build a bot in Automation Anywhere. Even a non-IT or business user can just look at the bot language and understand what the bot is doing, and that's the easy part."
"We mostly used the Database commands in order to make the process faster and more secure, rather than using Excel or a CSV for reading the input files."
"We have improved on IQ Bot collectively with the normal Taskbot that we use. How it got started was that we have a lot of scanned documents to input for our solution. So, I used to get a lot of scanned documents, and extracting or reading the data from those has always been a pain area. We always used to bring a manual person in to do it. Once a manual person did that activity, it was brought into Excel where I could run the bot. With the entry of IQ Bot, it now takes care of my scanned documents, which means IQ Bot does the OCR extraction and gives my data to the Automation Anywhere Taskbot. This means no manual intervention and end-to-end bot processing, along with a happy customer at the end of the day. We provide these services to multiple clients, so we have been doing this for all of our clients."
"By implementing the Automation Anywhere robot, we have reduced the FTE count and it was able to process 800 invoices per day with 100% accuracy."
"Compared to other vendors, it's the scheduling tool because a lot of vendors want to charge you extra for their enterprise-level license to have a scheduling tool built in to give you the ability to set up regular schedules to run and do certain data checks."
"The most valuable features for my client are timing and scheduling."
"Fortra's Automate performs the job effectively and has the capability to alert us of any issues."
"We have tried other RPA solutions like UiPath or Automation Anywhere. They are fantastic products but complex, and it's hard to understand everything. It would be best if you had a skilled developer or several. Automate is easy to implement, administer, and use. It's appropriate for us because our cases are simple and easy to automate. We don't need complicated tools with many features; We prefer to get a significant ROI quickly."
"This product is quite easy to install, learn, and use, with our new employees being able to start using it in projects for clients after only two weeks of internal training."
"The interface is simple, user-friendly, and very intuitive."
"I like the interface; it makes managing automation easy. We can set different schedules and templates for each task."
"It's very easy to use. That's a big selling point for it. It has got a drag-and-drop interface, so you can quickly deploy bots."
 

Cons

"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."
"The bot creation process is tedious. The solution has a lot of features, but since you have to drag down a lot of the commands, it can get tedious to use it. You end up having to use the mouse a lot more."
"Setting up Automation Anywhere is a bit complex."
"Although the UI and elements are user-friendly, it is still difficult for business users without experience to understand how to use Automation Anywhere."
"There is a limitation with Automation Anywhere where if you want to build your own packages and deploy them, it is very difficult."
"Verbose logging of bot compiling and deployment from the control room. Events occurring during compiling, pre-processing the bots should be logged in the control room or bot launcher logs."
"Some of the biggest improvements they can make are with the interface. It can be improved in terms of usability or searching for something. For example, icons are hard to find. Typically, you jump into the search box, but being able to go in and find things quickly with the eye could be very valuable."
"The integration is not always seamless. Sometimes, it takes a while to get everything to communicate and be ready to go into production."
"Some companies have asked for voice integration. This is likely part of the roadmap."
"There is room for improvement regarding cloud functionality; there are a few missing features, and the logging could be better, especially air logging. We can go into logging events and create our own task, but it would be nice if this were more detailed."
"The documentation for errors needs improvement as many of the error messages we receive are very vague."
"The intelligent automation feature could be improved. It's interesting because it's simple, but the automation quality isn't always good. It's easy to use, but sometimes you need to make a slight improvement to the automation, and that's not so easy."
"Sometimes when we communicate with the ERP system and there is an issue, we are not always aware of the specifics of Automate and the source of the problem."
"It would be an improvement if Automate had better stability tools, whether by recommending a certain amount of memory because it can be a memory hog at times."
"I would like to see some better web automation, a wizard like the one in the product WinAutomation would be very nice."
"Error messages should be better. For error status, there should be better documentation because a lot of times, error messages that you get are quite vague. For example, you get a message saying that the workflow has run into an unknown status, which is vague. It just tells you that it failed, but you don't know how or why it failed. It makes debugging difficult."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We're paying a monthly subscription fee for the bot and for services. There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fee."
"Whatever investment, licensing, and resource costs together are put in for development and delivery, we are still at an ROI of 250 percent."
"On a yearly basis, our licensing costs are about $80,000. There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"Including the AWS setup and everything per license, it costs us around $10,000 on an annual basis. I believe that is pretty reasonable considering the teams that we have."
"We have established a CoE and we take our bot opportunities based on their ROIs. The best ROI opportunity goes to development first. Our ROI opportunities are compliance, profitable growth, productivity enhancements, productivity gains, number of hours the productivity saved, and resources not available that the work can be done by the bot. However, the single most important criteria that we use to measure ROI is how much time does the bot cut down from an analyst's work, as this has the best ROI. E.g., if an analyst is spending a 100 hours of work that a bot can do in one hour, we calculate the 99 hours saved as ROI."
"The licensing fees are approximately $10,000 USD for between five and ten users."
"The product starts at $10,000 and then it's up to you regarding how much you can consume."
"They all are very competitive today. At the end of the day, it boils down to the negotiations that happen and what type of partner you are."
"I believe the price falls within a reasonable range, which significantly influenced our decision regarding the product. This aspect is crucial for any technological solution, especially in our country where enterprises might be hesitant to invest heavily in something untested or uncertain about its practicality and potential returns."
"Compared to other products, the pricing model for this solution is much more convenient, flexible, and adaptable to the Portuguese reality."
"From a distributor's perspective, one of the biggest selling points of Automate is its price point."
"I like the way this solution is priced because you can buy a license, or you can buy the software outright."
"It comes with a package that costs approximately $20,000 USD per year."
"Once you buy the software, you just pay for the support for backend help."
"While solutions like UiPath and Blue Prism cost around $11,000-$12,000 for each license, this product costs around $7,000 and you can keep it forever."
"I'm only involved in running the product and maintaining the systems, so I can't speak to the cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
5%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

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 HelpSystems AutoMate?
We use it for specific cases, mainly secure file transfers, which are vital for us. And it works for us.
What is your primary use case for HelpSystems AutoMate?
We used the platform primarily for task automation, including transmitting EDR files. Additionally, we've utilized it for repetitive tasks, such as downloading web-based reports using the browser a...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortra Automate?
The starter pack was all we needed and was reasonable. Others were either more expensive or didn't do all that I wanted to do without an addon.
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise
HelpSystems Automate, Automate
 

Learn More

Video not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Aldergrove Financial Group, Preferred Health Professionals, Mindbeam Technologies, First Credit Union in British Columbia, Vestcom International, Prime Liberty Benefits, University of Tampa, CNLBancshares, World Precision Instruments, BJ's Restaurants, Globe Pequot Press, Accudata Technologies, Norton Healthcare, Pacific Toxicology Laboratories
Find out what your peers are saying about Automation Anywhere vs. Fortra's Automate and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,052 professionals have used our research since 2012.