AutomationEdge vs IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) comparison

AutomationEdge and IBM are both solutions in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category. AutomationEdge is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.1, while IBM is ranked #9 with an average rating of 7.8. AutomationEdge holds a 1.0% mindshare in RPA, compared to IBM’s 1.9% mindshare. Additionally, 84% of AutomationEdge users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of IBM users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 4, 2024

IBM RPA and AutomationEdge compete in the RPA market. IBM RPA has the upper hand with its integrated features like ease of use and advanced analytics, while AutomationEdge is favored for its extensive feature set and affordability.

Features: IBM RPA offers an intuitive user interface that minimizes coding, integrates strongly with IBM's AI tools, and provides significant customer insight capabilities through Watson. AutomationEdge supports desktop automation, concurrent processing, and numerous integrations, making it versatile for varied automation needs.

Room for Improvement: IBM RPA needs better integration with AI and non-IBM systems, a simplified deployment process, and enhanced customization. AutomationEdge requires improvement in stability, a broader community support, and more cost-effective pricing models.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM RPA offers flexible deployment across cloud environments with strong technical support and extensive documentation. AutomationEdge supports primarily hybrid and on-premises deployments but needs to address connectivity and stability issues.

Pricing and ROI: IBM RPA's diverse licensing model can be expensive but promises strong ROI within a year. AutomationEdge provides an economical modular pricing appealing to smaller industries, delivering effective ROI through affordable license offerings.

To learn more, read our detailed AutomationEdge vs. IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AutomationEdge vs. IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

January 2025

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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

Mindshare comparison

As of February 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 IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is 1.9%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Featured Reviews

Anabel Marco

Account Director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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.

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BhargavJotva

Associate Manager - Retail Banking Operation at IDFCFIRST

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.

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Karinne Carnevalli De Almeida

Consultant at Universidade Federal Fluminense

User-friendly interface and good stability

I would recommend using IBM RPA. I would advise you to learn about your main processes to automate inside your company. So you can apply it in big and small processes depending on the investment for your company. That is an advantage or not. Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. It has some difficulty in the tool, but it's a very stable and useful tool for automating processes.

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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 licensing of the product is very good. You only need to license it once and then you have it forever."

"I would rate the technical support as a nine out of ten because it is quite fast and courteous."

"The most valuable feature is the drag-and-drop interface, which is very Windows-like."

"The most valuable features of Fortra's Automate include its FTP functionality and file manipulation capabilities."

"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 the ease of use from a programming perspective very valuable."

"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."

"It gives us a central place to schedule tasks and run them distributed."

More Fortra's Automate pros

"We can quickly adapt to our end users."

"It helps us with cost optimization and easy implementation."

"The support from the vendor is very good."

"It is a valuable tool for developing efficient solutions, especially in finance and banking."

"The most valuable feature of AutomationEdge is creating accounts."

"If we want to change your processes, we can code it from scratch, making it a beneficial feature of the product."

"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."

More AutomationEdge pros

"IBM Robotic Process Automation is very easy to use."

"I think simplicity is key. One of the things that we've noticed is how our developers have been able to quickly adopt the platform; but not only the developers or the techy people, also the business."

"I like the integration with Watson and the possibility to have an intelligent reading of all the customers' documents."

"The good stuff about IBM is the fact that it's very easy to use, there are very nice and smart AI tools within the licensing that you don't have to pay any access. Moreover, it's more precise and more secure."

"It's not inclusive, in terms of automation, you can just do it standalone, in its own silo. It's not going to force your existing system or teams, your admin teams, to create new IDs for you or even force them to create new services or APIs for you or expose something from there. They can just keep the way they are doing it right now, but you still automate it."

"IBM Robotic Process Automation has greatly improved the organization by improving the speed of performance, as the speed of the robot is estimated to be 20 times faster than the human being."

"It's integrated with all the other products within the Salesforce ecosystem."

"The solution's ease of use is its most valuable aspect."

More IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) pros

Cons

"They do not encrypt passwords, so this is an issue with HIPAA compliance."

"The workflow for variables could be better. The input and output of task-level variables could be made a little clearer in terms of passing those around from one task to another upon success, etc. Things like that could be a little easier potentially."

"The product also has a limited use case in some respects."

"I believe we need to test various OCR tools that assist in evaluating, let's say, six different customer resyncs. We analyze their spending patterns and documentations, but current OCR support has limitations, requiring highly standardized documents, which isn't always the case. With a more advanced OCR system, we could improve processes related to credit risk management and legal matters. We're exploring how to integrate Fortra's Automate with our CRM platform, taking cues from instances where Salesforce seamlessly merged with Automate. However, we use a different CRM, Insight for New Enterprise, and we're seeking ways to connect the automation process within our CRM. We aim for the automation to continue smoothly, even in instances where traditional automation methods might face hurdles."

"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."

"I would prefer not having to log in to update a ticket; being able to respond via email would be beneficial."

"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."

More Fortra's Automate cons

"It's not an intuitive tool."

"There are some shortcomings in the product's stability that need improvement."

"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."

"The ease of use is the main thing on which they really have to focus. If they want to go against the giants, it should be improved in ease of use, and it should be more user-friendly. It would be helpful because everyone should be empowered irrespective of whether they know how to code or not. They should enhance its user interface and make it more intuitive."

"We cannot use extra modules while working with AutomationEdge. It crashes if we have lots of data to process in Excel."

"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."

"AutomationEdge's primary issue is its price point, especially compared to other products."

"The installation process could improve. It was difficult to complete."

More AutomationEdge cons

"We would like a decreased need for customer support."

"The product must be promoted more."

"Extensibility is the key, especially in terms of the Recorders feature that we have. That should be browser independent. Enhance it because some people have Chrome, some have Internet Explorer, etc. Also, integration with PDFs: Not just the ability to read information from PDFs but the ability to write information from PDFs, make it secure, sign it, etc. Finally, if they can allow a token exchange inside the tool itself, that would help."

"The product's document readers must be improved to capture the data well."

"IBM should provide specific solutions for specific problems, like templates for invoicing processes, or general templates for creating efficient processes."

"Needs better integration with artificial intelligence or with machine-learning."

"There are certain limitations in the solution for screen reading."

"I would like it to do pretty much everything out-of-the-box without any need for any customization. However, that is not the case right now. We absolutely have to do some amount of customization with the solution in order to use it out-of-the-box as-is."

More IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Once you buy the software, you just pay for the support for backend help."

"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."

"From a distributor's perspective, one of the biggest selling points of Automate is its price point."

"Compared to other products, the pricing model for this solution is much more convenient, flexible, and adaptable to the Portuguese reality."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Fortra's Automate pricing and cost advice

"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."

"Price-wise, AutomationEdge is pretty affordable, making it not so expensive when you compare this with other tools in the market."

"I give the price of the solution a nine out of ten."

"The licensing for this solution should have a more competitive pricing model. The price is in the top five of similar products."

"It is expensive but its value can justify the cost."

"The product is available at the lowest price."

"The pricing is reasonable for this solution."

"I rate the pricing ten out of ten. So, the pricing is very good for me."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"The product has a yearly licensing fee."

"There is a free trial for one month, so you can use it to run your payloads or proof of concept. After that, you can pay for the license on a monthly or annual basis."

"IBM RPA is cheaper than other tools."

"The product is reasonably priced compared to other tools."

"The license is paid annually."

More IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

14%

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

15%

Energy/Utilities Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Educational Organization

Government

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.

See all answers

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...

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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...

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What do you like most about AutomationEdge?

It helps us with cost optimization and easy implementation.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with AutomationEdge?

AutomationEdge's primary issue is its price point, especially compared to products from companies like Microsoft that...

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What do you like most about IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

Integrating the tool with SAP, EBS, or other ERPs is easy.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

The product must be promoted more. There are no promotions.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

We're working with different clients from the manufacturing environment. We have implemented end-to-end solutions. We...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Power Automate vs Fortra's Automate

Compared 50% of the time

UiPath vs Fortra's Automate

Compared 38% of the time

Automation Anywhere vs Fortra's Automate

Compared 8% of the time

Blue Prism vs Fortra's Automate

Compared 5% of the time

More Fortra's Automate Competitors

UiPath vs AutomationEdge

Compared 37% of the time

Automation Anywhere vs AutomationEdge

Compared 34% of the time

Microsoft Power Automate vs AutomationEdge

Compared 29% of the time

More AutomationEdge Competitors

Microsoft Power Automate vs IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Compared 54% of the time

Automation Anywhere vs IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Compared 18% of the time

UiPath vs IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Compared 17% of the time

Blue Prism vs IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Compared 8% of the time

Nintex RPA vs IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Compared 3% of the time

More IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fortra's Automate

February 2025

Download Fortra's Automate product report

Buyer's Guide

AutomationEdge

February 2025

Download AutomationEdge product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

February 2025

IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) report

Download IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) product report

Also Known As

HelpSystems Automate, Automate

No data available

IBM RPA

Overview

Fortra's Automate is predominantly used in HR and operational departments for automating reports, file manipulation, and data processing. Key uses include automating repetitive tasks, integrating PDFs and emails, running scripts, processing large data sets, transforming file formats, synchronizing databases, managing job schedules, and transferring files.

Users commend Fortra's Automate for its ease of implementation and user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, which requires minimal technical skills for efficient bot deployment. The software is appreciated for its effective scheduling tools, reliable integration capabilities, and a wide range of functions such as file interaction, secure file transfers, and extensive automation without the need for coding. Businesses achieve significant time savings and simplified processes, bolstered by continuous updates and robust customer support.

What are the key features?

Scheduling Tools: Enables precise control and timing for automation tasks
Integration Capabilities: Seamlessly connects with various systems and software
File Interaction: Comprehensive functions for file manipulation and transfer
Secure Transfers: Ensures data safety during file transfers
User-Friendly: Minimal technical skills needed for deployment and use

What benefits should you look for in reviews?

Ease of Implementation: Fast and simple setup process
Time Savings: Reduces time spent on repetitive tasks
Process Simplification: Streamlines complex workflows
Customer Support: Access to continuous support and updates

In various industries such as healthcare, transportation, and payroll, Fortra's Automate automates workflows like invoice generation, data retrieval, data uploading, and insurance eligibility checks, enhancing efficiency and accuracy for HR and operational tasks.

Fortra

AutomationEdge is an Intelligent Robotic Process Automation product which comes bundled with key essential technologies for automation of front office, middle office, back office and IT operations.
AutomationEdge provides Chatbots, Intelligent Automation bots, AI and Machine Learning capabilities that help clients reduce costs, improve response time, grow business and achieve compliance. AutomationEdge provides ready Bots and development environment to build new Bots.

AutomationEdge

IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology that encompasses the use of smart robots in any process requiring efficiency, consistency and speed, with no risk of mistakes. In a nutshell, RPA simulates a human user working.

Today, it is possible to automate processes through the use of digital robots, or bots, which execute pre-programed, repetitive tasks in a safe and mistake free manner. There are literally thousands of opportunities for Robotic Process Automation to make an impact on your organization today, including: automatic invoice emission, system integration, information reconciliation, report generation, intelligent email management to lead generation, and many others.

IBM

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)

The Hanover Insurance Group

Buyer's Guide

AutomationEdge vs. IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

January 2025

Free Report: AutomationEdge vs. IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Find out what your peers are saying about AutomationEdge vs. IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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