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Blue Prism Cloud vs NICE Robotic Automation 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
7.1
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Blue Prism Cloud
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NICE Robotic Automation
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
24th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category, the mindshare of Fortra's Automate is 1.4%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Blue Prism Cloud is 1.3%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NICE Robotic Automation is 0.7%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
 

Featured Reviews

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.
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.
Harish G V - PeerSpot reviewer
Quicker compared to other bots but not very user-friendly
There is a need for NICE to be more user-friendly. It should be designed in such a way that any developer can easily develop bots. For instance, Power Automate provides a good example of a user-friendly design that NICE can learn from. Moreover, in terms of documentation, there is very little available for NICE, making it challenging to implement the bots. So, documentation should be improved as well. There are a lot of additional features that could be included in NICE. As the NICE Robotic Automation claims, it is a low-code solution, but that is not entirely true. They need to concentrate on the prerequisites and building blocks. There should be more options available internally that are easy to use and well-developed.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I actually quite liked the no-coding functionality."
"It gives us a central place to schedule tasks and run them distributed."
"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 have found the pricing to be very reasonable."
"The product effectively handles all the tasks we require."
"I like the interface; it makes managing automation easy. We can set different schedules and templates for each task."
"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."
"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 feature is the customizability."
"The most valuable feature of a non-programmer is diagrams. Someone from an IT background can find it easier to start automation."
"The ease of building automation and the development environment"
"We used it for process automation."
"One of the most valuable features is automating manual and repetitive business processes, streamlining operations and reducing manual labour."
"It is secure and supports unattended mode of operations."
"The most valuable feature of Blue Prism's Virtual Workforce is that it is quite stable."
"Blue Prism Cloud is an easy to access and user-friendly solution."
"What we've done with the RTI client is that we've brought it into a bit more of a 21st-century feel. Our agents have the ability to move around when they want, click into stuff. They use it according to how their conversations go with the customer."
"NICE is one of the only vendors that does attended and unattended out-of-the-box. Using the unattended processes we've been able to build a "feature library." We break each process down into workable chunks that we can save into a big library. The next time we come to automate a task, we already have chunks of that automation built."
"Through interfaces called Callout (created with HTML code) it is possible to create a strong interactivity with the user. These interfaces can be extremely dynamic in relation to the behavior of a local or remote robotic flow."
"The deployment of NICE Robotic Automation is easy."
"Provides good automation features."
"It is a kind of desktop automation. Its licensing model is a little bit different. It tends to be individual automation specific to a role. It excels at that."
"It is easy to deploy. To do the automation in NICE, you really need to use your programming expertise. There are no inbuilt features in it, and you have to create all the required features, which can be very interesting for a programmer."
 

Cons

"While this solution is continually improving, as it is now, the user interface could use improvement when I compare it to a product like UiPath."
"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."
"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."
"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 product also has a limited use case in some respects."
"The documentation is not that great."
"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."
"They do not encrypt passwords, so this is an issue with HIPAA compliance."
"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."
"The main issue is screen scraping with Blue Prism gives us a big challenge because we need to define which technologies are web-based have been built instead of by itself discovering the technology that it is built on."
"Blue Prism is slightly difficult for the non-technical user."
"It would be useful if some of the information protocols came built within the app instead having to create them."
"The cost is a bit high. Other tools are much cheaper."
"The issue is that it is not dynamic or intelligent."
"It takes a while to get up and running."
"They should improve the user-friendliness and they should change their business model."
"Its connectivity with other applications should be improved. In the version that I was using, it would just stop interacting with the other application. Its graphical interface should also be improved. It should have a user-friendly interface. Sometimes, people find it very difficult to understand. One of the obstacles that I faced while programming was that if I needed any kind of help, there wasn't much content on the internet. It can be very difficult to find a solution for a particular issue."
"There is a need for NICE robotics to be more user-friendly."
"The one thing I'd like to see, and NICE is already heavily investing in it, is improvement in the user interface itself. They call it the Designer and it's what the developers use. It is a bit clunky; that is the polite way to put it. I'd like to see it be a bit more user-friendly, a bit more intuitive, and to move to something a bit more web-based..."
"[During the upgrade] any issues, where it couldn't remotely connect to upgrade, I needed the floor plan so I could go to that PC and have a look at it. Often it was either that the PC was switched off or had a bug or some other application needed to be reset."
"There are a few areas for improvement in the installation phase"
"The solution is not as intuitive as it could be and integrating took a lot of time."
"We haven't found it to be as powerful as some of the other platforms. From a true RPA perspective, it is pretty far behind some of the other solutions. It has emerged as a more desktop automation kind of tool, but it lacks a lot of enterprise features. It is not really a true RPA because of its licensing, which is kind of user-initiated. It would be nice it can be deployed at a more enterprise licensing model versus a user-based model. It didn't have autonomous automation so far, and they have just released this feature. They have kind of hodgepodged a bunch of products together to get there, but it is not as seamless as other solutions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It comes with a package that costs approximately $20,000 USD per year."
"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."
"I like the way this solution is priced because you can buy a license, or you can buy the software outright."
"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."
"Once you buy the software, you just pay for the support for backend help."
"I'm only involved in running the product and maintaining the systems, so I can't speak to the cost."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Pricing can be negotiated in situations where there will be heavy usage."
"Blue Prism comes at a higher price point compared to other solutions on the market."
"We found the pricing reasonable, and it aligned with our budgetary requirements."
"When compared with UiPath, I believe it will be difficult for Blue Prism to maintain its market share."
"The price is very competitive when you are comparing to other providers."
"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."
"As per my understanding, UiPath has a much lesser cost than NICE, but I am not sure."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
15%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Educational Organization
8%
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
7%
 

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?
We used the platform primarily for task automation, including transmitting EDR files. Additionally, we've utilized it...
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 want...
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 req...
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.
What do you like most about NICE Robotic Automation?
Through interfaces called Callout (created with HTML code) it is possible to create a strong interactivity with the u...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NICE Robotic Automation?
In the configuration phase, you need to have a certain degree of knowledge of Windows and Linux environments. That sa...
What needs improvement with NICE Robotic Automation?
There is nothing so relevant to complain about except a few more options in the debug monitor (which is already very ...
 

Also Known As

HelpSystems Automate, Automate
Blue Prism Thoughtonomy Virtual Workforce, Blue Prism Virtual Workforce, Thoughtonomy Virtual Workforce
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
Cabot Credit Management, Hovis, Utilita
HelpLine, Telefonica Spain, Banca Popolare Di Sondrio
Find out what your peers are saying about Blue Prism Cloud vs. NICE Robotic Automation and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.