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Blue Prism 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
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
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 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 11.4%, down from 11.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NICE Robotic Automation is 0.6%, 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.
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.
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

"The most valuable feature is the drag-and-drop interface, which is very Windows-like."
"This tool has machine learning and voice recognition and computer vision, which are both quite useful aspects. These aren't available in other tools. It's a good addition to this tool and it gives the solution an edge on the market."
"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."
"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 most valuable features for my client are timing and scheduling."
"The interface is simple, user-friendly, and very intuitive."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is that people with zero coding knowledge can use Blue Prism very well."
"It's quite easy to use and easy to understand the process studio."
"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 works very well for batch processing at the backend. Scalability-wise, it is very robust. It is also stable."
"Blue Prism is very good at doing background processing."
"It is a very stable tool that allows very complex automations."
"Technical support has been responsive when we have needed their assistance."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The deployment of NICE Robotic Automation is easy."
 

Cons

"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."
"We really need a free development environment for customers. Building and testing automation on production isn't ideal."
"Fortra's Automate is not as reliable as I would like it to be."
"Some companies have asked for voice integration. This is likely part of the roadmap."
"I would like to see some better web automation, a wizard like the one in the product WinAutomation would be very nice."
"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."
"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 documentation is not that great."
"As a user, I cannot directly work with the bot. On a daily basis, I use and do some work in Microsoft Excel, which cannot be directly taken into Blue Prism. Our company majorly runs on Microsoft Excel. Everybody has Excel sheets as their working sheets. Therefore, we need a kind of automation to be able to do things with this program. This bot is almost like an invisible staff that works between the servers but not with the users. This bot works well with SAP and things like that, but it doesn't work with Excel sheets. It doesn't work with the bots that we have, and I cannot invoke an RPA right now as a user. It has to be done by an administrator who has better control than me. It needs better integration with Microsoft Excel. Its price can be improved. It is expensive for us. It should be cheaper for a market like ours. We are based in India."
"The recording of the transaction is missing in this solution."
"Occasionally, there may be stability issues where certain nodes begin to behave erratically and produce errors."
"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."
"Blue Prism could be more scalable."
"We had a lot of challenges managing authentication and reusing or using external authentication providers."
"Blue Prism could be compatible with Oracle's suite of ERPs. We have seen some issues related to this. They could do much better with their intelligent document processing solution. They're pretty behind and don't have attended bots."
"The activities that we do are a bit difficult to do in Blue Prism as compared to UiPath. UiPath provides create activities and create packages related to AI analytical skills. This is something that Blue Prism doesn't have."
"[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."
"The solution is not as intuitive as it could be and integrating took a lot of time."
"There are a few areas for improvement in the installation phase"
"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."
"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."
"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..."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It comes with a package that costs approximately $20,000 USD per year."
"I'm only involved in running the product and maintaining the systems, so I can't speak to the cost."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"The licensing fees are low compared to other tools."
"We really don't bear the costs. The cost is borne by the customer. It runs into about $100,000 per year per customer for Blue Prism. We normally budget around $30,000 for the first year for the hardware, setup, and people cost."
"We have a three-year contract that is paid on a yearly basis."
"The pricing is really good for an enterprise-level solution. It's quite scalable and it's quite comparable with the market."
"I give the price of the solution a seven out of ten."
"The price of Blue Prism is high compared to others solutions. It would be helpful if they could provide a trial version for new users to try. Other vendors provide a community or trial version. There are not any hidden costs."
"Blue Prism is pretty steep compared to the others, much more than Automation Anywhere."
"Blue Prism is quite costly."
"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
14%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
 

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 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
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
Coca-Cola, Walgreens, American Express, Royal Bank of Canada, Pfizer, Shop Direct, O2, Siemens, Ascension Healthcare, Jaguar Land Rover
HelpLine, Telefonica Spain, Banca Popolare Di Sondrio
Find out what your peers are saying about Blue Prism vs. NICE Robotic Automation and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.