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AutomationEdge vs Blue Prism comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 4, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Fortra's Automate
Sponsored
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
AutomationEdge
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
12th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Blue Prism
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
88
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category, the mindshare of Fortra's Automate is 1.3%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AutomationEdge is 1.0%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Blue Prism is 10.9%, down from 11.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
 

Featured Reviews

Anabel Marco - PeerSpot reviewer
Automates processes efficiently with cost-effective scaling and robust customer support
Web scraping is quite good since it offers a lot of possibilities. Another important feature for me is its compatibility with MBI, the Power that is ISEQUADO Centers. I appreciate the ability to scale and increase the number of bots or studios without additional expense. Automate's non-reliance on additional orchestrators makes it quite cost-effective.
BhargavJotva - PeerSpot reviewer
An RPA tool to automate functions, tasks, and processes that also allows users to do coding from the scratch
The initial setup of AutomationEdge was satisfactory for our company. For deployment for a large process, it will take around two months to develop the process. Else, it can be done in fifteen days. My organization gets to automate the banking processes using the solution. There are different requirements for different departments. Finance departments need something to automate their processes, and the requirements may vary for the information management department. There is a different type of automation requirement if there are some secretive documents that we have to keep on triggering mail.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It gives us a central place to schedule tasks and run them distributed."
"I like the interface; it makes managing automation easy. We can set different schedules and templates for each task."
"The most valuable features for my client are timing and scheduling."
"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."
"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."
"I find it very user-friendly. Our IT department and other departments can seamlessly collaborate without requiring extensive training. As a business department, we particularly value this aspect, as our team doesn't consist of many IT users. However, we couldn't solely rely on a drag-and-drop approach to implement and utilize the solution within our departments."
"We have found the pricing to be very reasonable."
"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 ability to automate our processes with external plug-ins and zero code is the most valuable feature."
"The studio design is fine compared to other similar products. There is nothing extraordinary about it, but at the same time, there are not any negatives."
"The product's most valuable feature is the executor."
"The initial setup was easy and straightforward."
"The support from the vendor is very good."
"The chatbot that they have is most valuable. It is one of the best features because they own it, and they don't need to integrate with other parties to have a chatbot. This is one of the main features. The rest of the features are common to all RPA tools or vendors available in the market."
"It helps us with cost optimization and easy implementation."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten...I rate the technical support of the solution a nine out of ten."
"Its ability to talk to different systems that we have is a valuable feature. We use Pega, which is like a credit card processing system. We also use a Debit Process Manager, which is like the Visa debit application. In the bank, we have credit card and debit card sections, and we need to kind of investigate some of the transactions when customers are complaining about the charges. Blue Prism can log in to a different system to perform the exact actions that the agents are doing. This feature has been very helpful. Its ability to engage with external systems and websites is also very valuable. Each of our RPA projects could go across different systems. We have an in-house banking system. We also use the Visa network, and we have to go to different sites to do a lot of data scraping to ensure the data in our system matches the data in the Visa systems, and we just deal with some of the charges."
"I like the solution’s simplicity in process and objects. The solution has very clear guidelines and demarcation on processes and objects which is not present in other tools. The tool’s architecture is also very simple and clear. The product’s licensing model is also very simple. Other tools do not have such a simple licensing model."
"We have integrated the product with our centralized infra-monitoring tool, which gives us real-time insights into BOT health and also the health of the underlying resources."
"RPA processes are helpful when we need interaction with different applications and close the technical gaps between them. In one of the use cases that we evaluated, there was a single Excel template from a vendor. The Excel file has 7,000 objects, and it included information about the part numbers, prices, and some of the details about each object of the aircraft. This file had to be input to SAP, so a human had to enter these 7,000 objects one by one, which is a pretty mechanical and uninteresting task. The RPA bot was easily able to import this file. Without RPA, this import had to be done by a person who had to do the same task 7,000 times just to import one contract."
"It is a stable solution."
"The most valuable feature is the work queue. This helps the user to create a workflow, and it is a very powerful tool for generating management reports."
"The way you design the flow and configure the activities for the bot is very useful if you are working with any of the BPM or local platforms."
"We found the unassisted bots very useful because they can program a variety of different processes. This is a valuable feature of Blue Prism, especially when compared to other tools on the market."
 

Cons

"The documentation is not that great."
"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."
"They do not encrypt passwords, so this is an issue with HIPAA compliance."
"We really need a free development environment for customers. Building and testing automation on production isn't ideal."
"The vendor is currently working on a solution that allows us to automatically create a process that is based on a document that we receive via email."
"There is a lack of good development for artificial intelligence, such as machine learning."
"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."
"I would like to see some better web automation, a wizard like the one in the product WinAutomation would be very nice."
"With the solution, customizing software can be time-consuming."
"With other automation solutions in the market, we can simulate the process in our notebooks where the solution creates the code for us, but with AutomationEdge we can't do this."
"AutomationEdge's primary issue is its price point, especially compared to other products."
"There are some shortcomings in the product's stability that need improvement."
"In the future, they should have a similar version for the cloud and on-premises, and the installation should be flawless within few minutes."
"It's not an intuitive tool."
"AutomationEdge's ecosystem has shortcomings and needs improvement. When we compare AutomationEdge to other RPA tools in our company, we find that it has a very minor online community."
"The price of the solution could be improved."
"Developing is more time consuming than with other products."
"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."
"Its front end is not very good for things like screen scraping. UiPath and AA are very good for that. Blue Prism's license is costlier than UiPath and AA. They should be improving its price. Its artificial intelligence and cognitive features are not that strong enough. Cognitive automation should be their next area of improvement. The decoding of the bot is a highly painful activity, and this is an area of improvement for Blue Prism. It is tough to find variables and get the code in place. You have to open the whole bonnet of the car to get things in place. Their training should also be improved. UiPath and AA have their learning communities. They provide free of cost basic certification. As a result, you get trained workforce in the market that can directly work on projects, but this is not the case with Blue Prism. It is costly to get the resources trained, which increases the overall cost of getting a resource for Blue Prism. Their tech support can also be improved. Many times, the issues that should have been addressed by L1 have gone to L2."
"A feature that I would like to see in the next release is the ability to easily call on the robots to fulfill part of the process, and be run by the users in the business, where the robot can simply be activated rather than running mass processes from a control room."
"Our primary challenge at present is that we are finding it difficult to get additional business insights into existing processes so that we can identify where we need to improve."
"For developers, they should have some kind of recording feature."
"If that bot is running 24/7, we have to allocate people 24/7, 24 hours a day. The cost of support can be quite high."
"We would like to see intelligent process automation that integrates RPA and machine learning."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is a bit high for a small business like ours, but we manage with Fortra's Automate."
"The pricing is quite reasonable. We can run the process with one bot. The limitation is at the server level because they have some resources, and sometimes that is enough. It isn't too expensive, so you can get a good return off of one, and you can also have a pack of five bots that is quite competitive."
"From a distributor's side, one of the biggest selling points is its price point. Without going into any numbers, compared to UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism, we're significantly cheaper. The main difference is that other competitors usually charge you per process. However, in Automate's case, it's priced per bot. So, a bot can run multiple processes at the same time, but you are only priced for a single bot."
"Compared to other products, the pricing model for this solution is much more convenient, flexible, and adaptable to the Portuguese reality."
"Once you buy the software, you just pay for the support for backend help."
"It comes with a package that costs approximately $20,000 USD per year."
"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."
"It has gone up in price. The price of Fortra's Automate has increased since we first started using it. It does a lot but also costs a lot. It was a lot more affordable before Fortra owned the software."
"The product is available at the lowest price."
"Price-wise, AutomationEdge is pretty affordable, making it not so expensive when you compare this with other tools in the market."
"It is expensive but its value can justify the cost."
"The licensing for this solution should have a more competitive pricing model. The price is in the top five of similar products."
"I give the price of the solution a nine out of ten."
"If you are looking for a budget solution, you can consider AE. It has all the features. Scaling it is way easier because of the cost itself."
"Pricing can be made better. Currently, I think the pricing is based on the market. The pricing also depends on the business partners that offer you the solution."
"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."
"Our customers pay for an annual license."
"Its license is costlier than UiPath and AA. They should improve its price. We have a two-year contract with them."
"To use Blue Prism, there is a need to pay INR 15,000 per customer."
"The tool’s licensing is on a monthly basis."
"Blue Prism is quite costly."
"The pricing is really good for an enterprise-level solution. It's quite scalable and it's quite comparable with the market."
"The solution is not that expensive and a five-year license costs about 20k euros."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
15%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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?
I am a consultant and I am making a lot of processes in human resources, payroll, certifications, trainings, web scra...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortra Automate?
The pricing is quite good compared to its competitors. Competitors are often more expensive than Automate. I would ra...
What do you like most about AutomationEdge?
It helps us with cost optimization and easy implementation.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AutomationEdge?
I rate AutomationEdge's pricing as a six to seven. It is expensive but its value can justify the cost.
What needs improvement with AutomationEdge?
AutomationEdge's primary issue is its price point, especially compared to products from companies like Microsoft that...
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...
 

Also Known As

HelpSystems Automate, Automate
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Smart Dubai Government (SDG)
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 AutomationEdge vs. Blue Prism and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
839,319 professionals have used our research since 2012.