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Espressive Barista vs Serviceaide ChangeGear comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 3, 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

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
640
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (1st), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (1st), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
Espressive Barista
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (36th), AI-Powered Chatbots (9th), AI-Agents for HR (2nd)
Serviceaide ChangeGear
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (28th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (28th)
 

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at Accenture
Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions
Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.
Jim Lobao - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager for End User Support Services at Five9
Has helped enhance our support ability, reduced our resolution time, and reduced our service desk costs
Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement. We haven't yet found anything that resembles true AI that can learn autonomously without human intervention. However, Barista does help us identify and address some of these areas, allowing my team to step in and create intents and responses to questions. When a user asks a question that Barista doesn't immediately understand, we can recognize the pattern, capture it, and link it to a common intent. This is highly beneficial for acquiring such data, but it's a reactive approach and still requires curation. Natural language processing still has some way to go. One of our challenges is that our internal employees haven't yet adopted a natural way of interacting with Barista. Getting people to be concise and to the point, rather than being verbose as if they were interacting with a human, has been an ongoing challenge. While they may feel comfortable being conversational in Slack, expecting a human-like response, Barista is a different entity. Barista isn't interested in their recent vacation; it just wants to know they're locked out of their account. So, some users may assume Barista understands their intent when they say, "I'm back from vacation and locked out of my account." Barista, however, may interpret this as a request for the holiday schedule. Therefore, we're gradually educating our users to adapt their communication style for better success with Barista. Conversely, we desire Barista to adapt its behavior based on the interaction, the language used, and the way people communicate. I wholeheartedly desire an AI that can continuously learn and adapt to our organization's evolving needs. This is the most challenging aspect, as it involves understanding our organization's terminology, procedures, and toolsets. We've made significant progress in this area. However, from an NLP standpoint, we still face challenges with our nearly 3,000 Slack channel users, each with their unique communication styles. People ask questions in various ways, and sometimes there are misunderstandings. They want to interact with us naturally. However, we still struggle with natural language processing. People don't always realize that the bot is a virtual agent designed to be concise and efficient. Sometimes, less is more. It's been a difficult transition for people to grasp that they're conversing with a virtual agent, not a human. They still expect human-like interactions, such as discussing their weekend or holidays or simply pasting screenshots of errors. However, the bot can't interpret screenshots. If they provide the error code and some context about the application, the bot can better understand the issue. So, the key challenge is bridging the gap between human expectations and the bot's capabilities in terms of natural interaction.
Umair Akhlaque - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Solutions & Services Head at Duroob Technology
A fairly stable solution that’s highly mature, but has a poor user interface
The solution does not align as modern service solutions do. Seamless integration is no available among the processes. Their service management application needs a lot of work. It’s in a really bad state right now. They brought on a new interface that clumped all the processes and features of the solution into one. Still, it’s not really compatible with other solutions. Because of this, its rating has dropped in Gardner. The solution needs to improve its reporting features. The user interface needs a lot of improvements. The product needs to implement a cloud platform solution, which is lacking so far. Their workflow engine is still segregated. It’s not embedded. If you need to do some workflow approvals, you cannot do them directly on the service desk. You have to go into Outlook and do an approval or you have to go in through another screen to handle the approval because the workflow engine they have is a separate product.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has definitely helped automating a lot of processes, but it is very difficult to build resilient bots. It is very difficult to find skilled developers in the market, who actually build resilient bots with appropriate error handling. Maintaining the bots is another challenge as the applications keep changing."
"Automation Anywhere was the simplest solution, and it offered us immediate support."
"The graphical user interface (GUI) is very useful, since I don't know any coding languages."
"Notifications and triggers are especially good."
"The core functionality, the ability to automate these tasks and to interact, both with our own in-house software solutions as well as with our customers' and vendors' solutions and portals, has been incredibly valuable for us."
"IQ Bot is a valuable feature. It processes unstructured data to structured data. It helps me by making tasks less time consuming. It reduces the effort it takes versus manually."
"The RPA automation itself is valuable."
"It is very self-explanatory, making it easy for non-technical users to develop."
"Our department received about a 70% deflection rate, so that was really great."
"I like Expressive Barista's integration with Microsoft Teams."
"This is one of the few tools that live up to the sales reps' hype when it comes to integrating with ServiceNow."
"With respect to its natural language processing capabilities, it recognizes things that you wouldn't think it would recognize. Even in cases where it doesn't, it's pretty easy to go in and make the adjustments that are needed."
"Given Barista's out-of-the-box content for common industry applications, the value is pretty good right from day one."
"Given the out of the box content for common industry applications, we got good value out of the solution right from day one."
"The solution is available to support us instantly as required."
"Our developers have used the Barista Control Center to extend the platform by adding content, and they've found it fairly easy to do and manage"
"Improved the effectiveness of my Service Desk Team and improved the SLA timing."
"The most valuable features for me are scalable architecture, customization potential where the UI, background, and data movement allow you to tailor to the nitty gritty details of what you might need in your environment, and advanced workflow management."
"It provides us with a very easy and flexible UI for CA Nimsoft Service Desk 7."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to easily create service catalogues for our customers, something that we didn't have previously with the other tool we were using, which was SDM."
"It's quite a complete entry into the SaaS ITSM market with a reasonable price point."
"It’s provided self-service and automation, notifications, and reporting, and it’s good on a day-to-day and macro perspective."
"Essential service management solution all in one, like 100- for service request, 200- for change request, 300- for incidents, 400- for problems."
"CA Technologies support is excellent."
 

Cons

"I feel a lack of convenience when I try to scale it."
"The quality and response time of the support, even on Sev-1 tickets, is not satisfactory."
"When we are moving from one version to another version, it's very difficult because most of the features stop working. They should first test everything and then release the new version. For example, there's a system variable known as the Excel Cell Row.... When going from version 11.1 to 11.3, this variable was suddenly not supported, and most of our bots were dependent on that. Everything went down..."
"The first version would double our cost."
"The capability of understanding and extracting documents is not very good."
"There is limited scope for complex decision-making. For instance, a bot can extract invoice details, but it cannot determine if an invoice is fraudulent without AI integration."
"The scalability of Automation Anywhere's cloud version is excellent, but the on-premise version is a waste of time and money."
"For people who don't have technical skills, Automation Anywhere may take time when it comes to browsing or loading time, and sometimes becomes very buggy with unwanted failures."
"Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement."
"Expressive Barista could improve by adding native integration with WhatsApp, one of the top communication channels in South Africa. When we're trying to sell Barista to customers, we have to tell them that the solution doesn't have out-of-the-box support for WhatsApp. We can develop it, but then we need to have a conversation about how much that will cost."
"Although they've done some work on their metrics dashboard, there is some fine-tuning to do for people that just want to go in there at a glance and see their metrics."
"My only comment would be if they wanted to use this as an IT service management tool, maybe they could think about Barista making tickets and having change management and problem management capabilities."
"The knowledge management could definitely be improved."
"I would like to see improvement to the out-of-the-box verbiage, with the questions going to the right place."
"The reports provided by the solution are not customizable."
"There aren't very many things that this product needs improvement on."
"Few probes need improvement in their function and the way they get deployed for monitoring."
"Flexibility to customize."
"This is not appropriate for a small or even a medium-sized business. Too much overhead for a small company."
"The deployment was very difficult to handle. It's an unnecessarily difficult process that requires third-party assistance to do correctly."
"We had a lot of issues with non-Windows servers during implementation."
"Actually this product and its limitations reduced the Service Desk effectiveness compared to the product we were using."
"I think they could update some of the interface. It doesn't look as pretty as some of the other ones."
"Their service management application needs a lot of work."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Automation Anywhere's price is considerably better than UiPath's."
"There are a lot of savings in terms of effort and time as well as costs. Automation Anywhere automates a lot of processes. It allows an organization to save the efforts of a lot people. It saves a lot of time because people can't work a whole day (24/7), but Automation Anywhere bots can."
"I don't deal have cost specifics but I can say it is a tool that provides value for the money."
"We're just starting to renew our license, and we were quoted $115,000 without the IQ Bot. The IQ Bot is another $30,000. This is with very limited pages, as we go through our first projects. The majority of the cost was for ten days of onsite training."
"Our annual licensing costs are about $500,000."
"It is reasonable and affordable. If you consider the tasks that we can get done using this, the pricing is reasonable and affordable."
"We have seen about a 10 percent monetary savings."
"Its price is competitive with all other products in the market."
"The solution is affordable."
"It is expensive. It's not a cheap thing."
"The pricing isn't overly burdensome. It's going to be interesting to see how new models come in with new capabilities but, as it is, as a base system, it's pretty good."
"The price for the licensing is fair."
"User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant value from it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Construction Company
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
Construction Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Religious Institution
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business154
Midsize Enterprise82
Large Enterprise536
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
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Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
No data available
Serviceaide ISM (Intelligent Service Management), Nimsoft Service Desk, CA Cloud Service Management , ChangeGear
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Information Not Available
Oakwood Systems Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Espressive Barista vs. Serviceaide ChangeGear and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.