IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vs Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition comparison

IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vs. Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition

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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

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category, the mindshare of Automate is 1.5%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is 2.5%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition is 0.3%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

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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Karinne Carnevalli De Almeida

Consultant at Universidade Federal Fluminense

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.

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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

"The best feature of Automate is its ease of use, which is a major selling point."

"The most valuable features of Fortra's Automate include its FTP functionality and file manipulation capabilities."

"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."

"Fortra's Automate has effectively replaced the workload of an entire employee, saving us significant time and money."

"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."

"I actually quite liked the no-coding functionality."

"The product effectively handles all the tasks we require."

"We have found the pricing to be very reasonable."

More Automate pros

"IBM Robotic Process Automation is very easy to use."

"The initial setup is very easy."

"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."

"The solution is very user-friendly."

"I think simplicity is key. One of the things that we've noticed is how our developers have been able to quickly adopt the platform; but not only the developers or the techy people, also the business."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to automate mundane tasks. This improves efficiency, reliability, etc. You can form critical operations which can be highly automated."

"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."

"The quality is great! It's very strong and has a very strong platform."

More IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) 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

"I would like the updates to be easier to deploy. Integration with Amazon S3 is somewhat lacking."

"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."

"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 technical support could be better. We suffer from language barriers, as we are in Argentina."

"It's possible that they could use a stronger community for seeking guidance and help."

"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."

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

"The OCR for Hebrew text needs to be improved."

More Automate cons

"IBM should provide specific solutions for specific problems, like templates for invoicing processes, or general templates for creating efficient processes."

"The time it takes for approvals, and risk analysis could be faster."

"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."

"Needs better integration with artificial intelligence or with machine-learning."

"There are certain limitations in the solution for screen reading."

"One of the things I would definitely like to see is more of the machine-learning and cognitive capabilities. For example, now that we're starting to automate more and more tasks, there are some things that still require us to go back and modify the robots when we need to. But if we had more of the machine-learning integrated into it, I believe it would be easier to maintain, so that we wouldn't have to go back and adjust every time."

"The scalability of the solution can be challenging."

"We would like more focus on understanding AI and how it can be used to manage exception handling."

More IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) cons

"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."

"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."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I'm only involved in running the product and maintaining the systems, so I can't speak to the cost."

"Compared to other products, the pricing model for this solution is much more convenient, flexible, and adaptable to the Portuguese reality."

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

"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."

"I like the way this solution is priced because you can buy a license, or you can buy the software outright."

"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."

"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."

More Automate pricing and cost advice

"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."

"The product has a yearly licensing fee."

"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."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"I rate the pricing ten out of ten. So, the pricing is very good for me."

"IBM RPA is cheaper than other tools."

"The pricing is reasonable for this solution."

More IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) pricing and cost advice

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

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844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

16%

Educational Organization

Government

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Energy/Utilities 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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

Microsoft Power Automate vs Automate

Comparisons

Compared 43% of the time

UiPath vs Automate

Compared 38% of the time

Automation Anywhere vs Automate

Compared 8% of the time

Blue Prism vs Automate

Compared 6% of the time

VisualCron vs Automate

Compared 5% of the time

More Automate Competitors

Microsoft Power Automate vs IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Compared 68% of the time

Automation Anywhere vs IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Compared 12% of the time

UiPath vs IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Compared 12% of the time

Blue Prism vs IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Compared 6% of the time

Nintex RPA vs IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Compared 3% of the time

More IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Competitors

BlackLine vs Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition

Compared 75% of the time

UiPath vs Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition

Compared 25% of the time

More Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition Competitors

Product Reports

Automate

Download Automate product report

IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Download IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) product report

IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) report

Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition

Download Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition product report

Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition report

Also Known As

HelpSystems Automate, Automate

IBM RPA

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 Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology that encompasses the use of smart robots in any process requiring efficiency, consistency and speed, with no risk of mistakes. In a nutshell, RPA simulates a human user working.

Today, it is possible to automate processes through the use of digital robots, or bots, which execute pre-programed, repetitive tasks in a safe and mistake free manner. There are literally thousands of opportunities for Robotic Process Automation to make an impact on your organization today, including: automatic invoice emission, system integration, information reconciliation, report generation, intelligent email management to lead generation, and many others.

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

The Hanover Insurance Group

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

IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vs. Redwood Software - Finance Automation Edition