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Blue Prism vs IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) 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
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
IBM Robotic Process Automat...
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 Blue Prism is 11.3%, down from 11.6% 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 - 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.
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.
Karinne Carnevalli De Almeida - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The solution is continuously adding more integrations to help with workflows and bot and task creation."
"The product effectively handles all the tasks we require."
"Fortra's Automate has effectively replaced the workload of an entire employee, saving us significant time and money."
"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 licensing of the product is very good. You only need to license it once and then you have it forever."
"We are still in the process of rolling it to production and tweaking it (our AD groups are a mess), but the improvements are priceless. Having users ID's created the same way every time without human error is the best part. We don't need to worry about why groups were not added, user rights not set to folders or missing a private folder being created, typos or just even knowing when things are done and logged."
"The ability to connect to websites and pull data is the solution's most valuable feature."
"Blue Prism takes good security measures and is user friendly."
"Blue Prism supports the multi-bot architecture, which is really good. It is also really good at OCR. Blue Prism is integrated with Abbey OCR, and it provides at least 90% right information on period documents. This is something that is really good in Blue Prism. Blue Prism can deal with huge amounts of data. We can track each and every record, and then we can see the data. If you don't have much coding experience, it makes it easy to build automations and deploy them. It is also easy to learn and easy to work with. It has a lot of features, which makes it reliable for any sort of automation."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to do surface automation, allowing interaction with legacy systems where terminal emulation is still in use."
"All of the processes that we've automated have been completed successfully, and the bots are able to process them as expected."
"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."
"It is a stable solution."
"Blue Prism is a mature, stable product with lots of built-in features."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The quality is great! It's very strong and has a very strong platform."
"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."
"We can connect with different database types, and they have included a different package for a terminal connection to, for example, AS400. When it comes to UI development, it's not using the drivers or anything. It's not a selector-based development like UiPath."
"Integrating the tool with SAP, EBS, or other ERPs is easy."
"The solution is scalability."
"IBM Robotic Process Automation is very easy to use."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
 

Cons

"We really need a free development environment for customers. Building and testing automation on production isn't ideal."
"It's possible that they could use a stronger community for seeking guidance and help."
"Fortra's Automate is not as reliable as I would like it to be."
"I would prefer not having to log in to update a ticket; being able to respond via email would be beneficial."
"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."
"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."
"The technical support could be better. We suffer from language barriers, as we are in Argentina."
"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 have been speaking directly with Blue Prism's engagement manager about making the solution more web-based. It's not quite there yet. Currently, the latest version is still under the beta version, so, as a customer, we don't have access to it. They are making it much more web-based, but for now, everything you have to log into requires an enterprise server — It's still more client-based than web-based."
"The solution can be improved by switching off data DB and including a report section."
"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."
"The upgrades could be managed better. I would also like to see more true AI development and machine learning."
"This solution is lacking attended automation, which is the worst thing about this solution."
"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."
"They should add more OCR engines to it."
"There are a lot of things coming up, such as Discovery Bot and Process Discovery. A lot of other aspects are also maturing. We have definitely started using it for our clients, and it is maturing as a solution, but it is all about how you integrate the enterprise with all the automation projects, such as your chatbot, Conversational AI, and robotics. How they are integrated and talk to each other creates a very good business case with all three aspects. The next level should be about integrating it with other automation tools as well. It can have integration with other tools or automation projects, such as your chatbot, Conversational AI, and robotics."
"We would like a decreased need for customer support."
"We can use its inbuilt activities, and it's a complete package, but just like ElectroNeek, a limitation is that we have to depend on its inbuilt activities. We can't include our own activities or we can't introduce other activities."
"The product must be promoted more."
"The product's document readers must be improved to capture the data well."
"I would like to have more flexibility in connecting the platform with third-party systems."
"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."
"We would like more focus on understanding AI and how it can be used to manage exception handling."
"The scalability of the solution can be challenging."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"I'm only involved in running the product and maintaining the systems, so I can't speak to the cost."
"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."
"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."
"From a distributor's perspective, one of the biggest selling points of Automate is its price point."
"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 chose Blue Prism because it is priced well. The pricing was right for me at that moment even though Automation Anywhere is better in other aspects."
"The licensing is approximately $1,100."
"It's an expensive product. For what they are providing in terms of capabilities and features for the price, I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten."
"Its price is sometimes higher."
"The solution is expensive."
"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."
"Blue Prism has a really simple licensing model, where the licenses are not confusing and there are no hidden costs the way there are in UiPath."
"The pricing is really good for an enterprise-level solution. It's quite scalable and it's quite comparable with the market."
"The product has a yearly licensing fee."
"IBM RPA is cheaper than other tools."
"I rate the pricing ten out of ten. So, the pricing is very good for me."
"The pricing is reasonable for this solution."
"The product is reasonably priced compared to other tools."
"IBM licensing is annual and based on Virtual Processor Cores (VPC). This provides flexibility as part of the containerization environment."
"The license is paid annually."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Educational Organization
9%
Government
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...
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...
What do you like most about IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
Integrating the tool with SAP, EBS, or other ERPs is easy.
What needs improvement with IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
The product must be promoted more. There are no promotions.
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...
 

Also Known As

HelpSystems Automate, Automate
No data available
IBM RPA
 

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
Coca-Cola, Walgreens, American Express, Royal Bank of Canada, Pfizer, Shop Direct, O2, Siemens, Ascension Healthcare, Jaguar Land Rover
The Hanover Insurance Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Blue Prism vs. IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,640 professionals have used our research since 2012.