IBM Datacap vs Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition comparison

IBM and Redwood Software are both solutions in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category. Additionally, 88% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 80% of Redwood Software users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Datacap and Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Datacap vs. Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Datacap vs. Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition

March 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

Automate

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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DeekshithShetty

Software Development Senior Specialist at NTT Data

High-accuracy document processing with easy integration and good image enhancement

The OCR extractions are very good, almost 100% accurate now. The integration with other tools is very easy, with inbuilt actions to configure and directly export to multiple depositories. It is also good at image enhancement, including the removal of lines, which is helpful in processing and automation and ensures very little user intervention, thus saving time.

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Amarjeet Kamble

Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

User-friendly and enables automation in finance, HR, and SDM

There is room for improvement, considering no tools having everything inside it is right. So the room for balancing improvement lies in automation enhancement with respect to the feature areas, considering dealing directly with Excel and reviewing it to do some additional stuff for it in the end system so that reading the right thing, picking up the values, and everything. Right now, you can do it with a little bit of custom scripting in addition to eight. But rather than custom scripting, if we can have a direct feature integrated inside this tool, it will be a major achievement. So, it already has that capability, as you can do custom scripting, and you can go ahead with creating your own. But the direct functions are not available. That's where we are lagging behind. However, importing the values or importing the service can be achieved. So, that is where I can see the room for improvement. In this particular area, the entire system can be improved.

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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

"I like the interface; it makes managing automation easy. We can set different schedules and templates for each task."

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

"Fortra's Automate performs the job effectively and has the capability to alert us of any issues."

"Overall, the whole product is really nice and provides significant benefits."

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

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

"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."

"The solution is continuously adding more integrations to help with workflows and bot and task creation."

More Automate pros

"Both Datacap Studio and Datacap Navigator are great features."

"It helps companies figure out how to use advanced imaging techniques, processes, best practices, and other tools."

"Datacap is good at processing unstructured data. You can build up some nice data flows, and it is simple to configure. The tool adopts a low-code approach, but you can do a lot of coding if you want to customize and automate your flows. Datacap also has the flexibility to integrate."

"It's resiliency. There are multiple ways of identifying what you are looking for. There are multiple export formats."

"The second thing that I like about Datacap is the fingerprint capture which is easy to configure on Datacap. From the form of the document, if a document is redundant in the same department, we can configure the capture based on the form of the documents"

"It is highly extensible, which we found to be most valuable. It is a very extensible solution because it is based on configurable rule sets. We were able to amend and adjust the solution and very easily add custom code and custom components. It does require some programming experience, but we found that not to be an issue. We liked its extensibility."

"The feedback from our clients that this solution has increased their efficiency and their turnaround time on opening any account for end users, thus attracting more customers."

"The OCR extractions are very good, almost 100% accurate now."

More IBM Datacap pros

"Redwood has a great feature where it logs every transaction. So, at any point, we can see every step taken for each transaction. It creates an audit trail of the entire process execution. It is a really good feature. This eliminates the need for extra coding or report generation. The audit report is readily available within the tool itself."

"The out-of-the-box finance modules within the Redwood Finance framework help to speed up the process, versus designing and writing generic BOT code."

"So the best thing is ease of use."

Cons

"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."

"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 currently have three bugs open with them that I don't know if they are addressed in the new release."

"I find that most important features are strong, however, there is a lack of good development for artificial intelligence, such as machine learning."

"I would like to see some better web automation, a wizard like the one in the product WinAutomation would be very nice."

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

"Fortra's Automate is not as reliable as I would like it to be."

"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."

More Automate cons

"When I scan a document in Datacap that has a watermark or the document is a little distorted, the image output is poor. It either becomes completely black, or there is so much distortion that we cannot read the numbers or the addresses mentioned in the POD. When we scan a document, we expect the output to be at least 95 percent accurate."

"I would like to see the product have the ability to process more documents in parallel. Right now, it is a single queue. Therefore, if you want to really test the load and stress test it, having multiple instances and the ability to scale it up would be great."

"I've faced some bugs or issues. They should do deeper testing of the product before releasing it because some of the bugs that I found were a bit simple. I understand that it is a massive product, and some of the functionalities can get overlooked."

"Datacap has performance issues when processing large volumes of documents. We're doing 18,000 pages daily. Scanning takes almost 20-30 minutes, but it normally takes one or two minutes. We informed IBM and opened a ticket for that. They forwarded the issue to developers but didn't give a specific timeline for it to be resolved. Version 8.1 is already at the end of support."

"I give the scalability of the solution a six out of ten."

"I would like to see integration of Watson AI technology into Datacap."

"Its weaknesses are primarily tied to the lack of available resources and expertise in the market to effectively support and provide solutions and services to each customer for seamless implementation. Expertise in this specific product is rare throughout the market. One key reason is the product's limited downloads. Additionally, archiving solutions are often perceived as complex and challenging, dissuading many companies from venturing into this domain. Consequently, partners who specialize in archiving solutions are always seeking straightforward, uncomplicated options that are easy to manage and meet customer expectations."

"What could be improved in IBM Datacap from a technical perspective is having everything together all in one place, rather than having several different interfaces. The addition of cloud-based OCR technology would also make this solution better. There's also room for improvement for their technical support."

More IBM Datacap cons

"The room for balancing improvement lies in automation enhancement with respect to the feature areas, considering dealing directly with Excel and reviewing it to do some additional stuff for it in the end system so that reading the right thing, picking up the values, and everything."

"Mapping the process steps to an existing R2R process quickly would be a definite step forward."

"would like to see AI integration for automation in future releases. Post-automation, I envision a generative AI model. If I could ask the bot questions like the number of invoices or their current status, it should be able to provide answers directly."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"It comes with a package that costs approximately $20,000 USD per year."

"The cost is a bit high for a small business like ours, but we manage with Fortra's Automate."

"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."

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

"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."

More Automate pricing and cost advice

"It varies, and it depends on the client's requirements and negotiations. Nowadays, Datacap is also included in the IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation."

"Pricing needs to stay competitive."

"It is an expensive solution."

"We were using the User Value Unit licensing, which means we get charged per active user of the system, and if I'm not mistaken, we also had it for the rule runner service. They had a PVU license model, which is a processor value unit. For each process that we have in our system, we pay a certain amount of money. We found the pricing to be quite steep. It was really an expensive solution in comparison to Kofax, which had a different licensing model and was actually cheaper overall because they charge per page and not per user and per process."

"IBM could offer more competitive pricing. This would allow them to attain more users. Some of our clients are considering moving to a different solution called Encapture which is similar but offers more competitive pricing."

"If you want IBM Datacap on cloud, which is a service run by IBM, the price can be quite expensive, but if you want to just purchase the licenses and own those yourself, then the price is very competitive."

"This solution offers seamless integration with other enterprise products, which is my area of responsibility, focusing on government sector projects. Larger enterprise projects don't pose problems. It might be suitable for small businesses as well."

"This solution is the most expensive in the market."

More IBM Datacap pricing and cost advice

"The licensing was purely based on the number of transactions being processed in production."

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847,625 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

15%

Government

13%

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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 IBM Datacap?

The installation of the solution is very simple.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Datacap?

This solution is the most expensive in the market.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Datacap?

When a client's requirement is not available in Datacap, out-of-the-box actions should be simpler to implement and no...

See all answers

What do you like most about Redwood Business Process Automation - Finance Edition?

Redwood has a great feature where it logs every transaction. So, at any point, we can see every step taken for each t...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Redwood Business Process Automation - Finance Edition?

The pricing is very client-specific. It's not a one-size-fits-all price. They don't have a single price for everyone....

See all answers

What needs improvement with Redwood Business Process Automation - Finance Edition?

Everything seems to be working well. However, I see value in integrating AI for automation. So, I would like to see A...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 42% of the time

UiPath vs Automate

Compared 38% of the time

Automation Anywhere vs Automate

Compared 8% of the time

VisualCron vs Automate

Compared 6% of the time

Blue Prism vs Automate

Compared 6% of the time

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ABBYY Vantage vs IBM Datacap

Compared 32% of the time

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Compared 19% of the time

Microsoft Power Automate vs IBM Datacap

Compared 16% of the time

Tungsten TotalAgility vs IBM Datacap

Compared 12% of the time

OpenText Intelligent Capture vs IBM Datacap

Compared 8% of the time

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BlackLine vs Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition

Compared 75% of the time

UiPath vs Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition

Compared 25% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Automate

April 2025

Download Automate product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Datacap

April 2025

Download IBM Datacap product report

Buyer's Guide

Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition

March 2025

Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition report

Download Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition product report

Also Known As

HelpSystems Automate, Automate

Datacap

Redwood Business Process Automation - Finance Edition, Redwood Robotics, Redwood Finance Automation

Overview

Automate offers a user-friendly solution with a drag-and-drop interface for efficient task automation and integration with major platforms like SAP and Azure, making it ideal for quick deployment with minimal coding and training.

Automate provides powerful features for businesses seeking efficient automation, offering compatibility with databases, email integration, and cloud platforms. Its simple interface supports both beginners and experienced users, simplifying tasks like invoice processing, HR automation, and data transformation. Cost-effective pricing and flexible licensing enhance its appeal while integration capabilities and scheduling tools ensure smooth workflow automation.

What are Automate's Key Features?

Drag-and-Drop Interface: Simplifies automation with intuitive design.
Integration Capabilities: Connects with platforms like SAP and Azure for seamless data flow.
Database and FTP Triggers: Enhances automation potential through direct data interaction.
Efficient Scheduling: Automates tasks with precise timing and control.
Web Scraping: Automates data extraction for quick analysis and reporting.

What Benefits and ROI Should Users Expect?

Rapid Deployment: Minimizes coding efforts for quick implementation.
Cost-Effectiveness: Offers flexible pricing models to suit budget constraints.
Operational Efficiency: Reduces manual workloads and enhances productivity.
Comprehensive Integration: Facilitates improved data management across systems.
Scalability: Adapts to growing business needs with ease.

In industries such as healthcare, banking, and logistics, Automate is used for tasks like invoice payment automation, data transformation, and task automation. This leads to streamlined processes and reduced manual workload, illustrating its value in enhancing operational efficiency through diversified workflows.

Fortra

IBM Datacap helps you streamline the capture, recognition and classification of business documents and extract important information. Datacap supports multiple-channel capture by processing paper documents on scanners, mobile devices, multi-function peripherals and fax. It uses natural language processing, text analytics and machine learning technologies, like those in IBM Watson, to automatically identify, classify and extract content from unstructured or variable documents. The software can reduce labor and paper costs, deliver meaningful information and support faster decision making.

IBM

The volume of repetitive, manual tasks across finance is overwhelming – every day or at the end of every month, quarter or year. Redwood’s finance automation reduces that unnecessary and time-consuming manual effort. We know because our customers tell us that our finance automation solution helps them achieve a much higher degree of back-office process automation compared with alternatives.

Redwood Software

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

Turkcell, PowerSouth Energy Cooperative, Central Nacional Unimed, Conqord Oil

ArcelorMittal, Alliant Energy, Allianz, Arla, Bacardi, CPS Energy, DSM, Faurecia, Genetech, Jabil, Jumbo,

Buyer's Guide

IBM Datacap vs. Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition

March 2025

Free Report: IBM Datacap vs. Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Datacap vs. Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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See our IBM Datacap vs. Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition report.

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