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NICE Robotic Automation vs VisualCron comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

NICE Robotic Automation
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
23rd
Average Rating
7.6
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VisualCron
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
20th
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Managed File Transfer (MFT) (15th), Workload Automation (17th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category, the mindshare of NICE Robotic Automation is 0.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VisualCron is 0.7%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
 

Featured Reviews

Harish G V - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 9, 2023
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.
Sourav-Dutta - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 26, 2023
It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process
We use VisualCron for all our automation needs, like connecting to FileZilla, calling APIs, generating PGP keys, creating encryption files with the PGP key login to Azure, etc. It can automatically log in to SQL Server and execute SQL script jobs in bulk. We had 2,000-3,000 users at my previous…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Provides good automation features."
"The deployment of NICE Robotic Automation is easy."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 I found most beneficial from VisualCron is that you can directly connect it with different databases, user accounts, and credentials. You can run queries from one machine to another using the credentials, unlike PowerShell, that's run by the machine itself. With VisualCron, you can directly ask other machines and run requests through user credentials. Suppose you have an AWS or Azure environment. In that case, you can maintain the connection between on-premises and cloud-based machines, which is the type of setup in the organization I'm working for. You can directly call some of the services via VisualCron on your local on-premises machine, and I found that an excellent feature of the tool."
"It has improved our organization with more automation within the business departments and less administration and development in the IT department. Usually, as the IT department, we are the bottleneck for many requirements within the business. With this tool, the business departments are able to perform many task themselves."
"The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%."
"It helped us reduce manual steps."
"We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works."
"The ability to clone jobs to shorten the time it takes to implement a process has been invaluable, but its flexibility also gives us the ability to create a job that can handle a multifaceted process with a complex workflow."
"I love VisualCron because we previously spent a lot of time writing Power switches to connect to SQL Server. VisualCron makes it easier to execute services or connect to FileZilla by only adding the credentials to the master credentials stored in the solution."
"What I like about VisualCron is that like its name, it's a very visual tool. In my previous company, there were a lot of scripts for all kinds of services, and through VisualCron, you get to group all flows and get a nice visual overview. VisualCron also has an alerting feature, so you receive alerts from it. VisualCron makes everything clearer and easier to maintain. Every other solution that I was looking for almost always needed a programmer, but with VisualCron, you can do what you need to do without programming skills, so this is another valuable feature of the tool."
 

Cons

"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."
"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..."
"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."
"There are a few areas for improvement in the installation phase"
"[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."
"There is a need for NICE robotics to be more user-friendly."
"The solution is not as intuitive as it could be and integrating took a lot of time."
"VisualCron seems to operate like an efficient machine when it comes to improvements and enhancements and new features. I always appreciate the quick response I get when bringing up an issue or coming up with suggestions. I've mentioned before that it would be great to see a move away from SQLCE and XML configuration files."
"VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve."
"VisualCron is software, and you will experience performance degradation when you scale up. VisualCron takes too much memory or CPU power. We have to increase the hardware resources of a specific server or system."
"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."
"The error timeout and info could be better. When making web request calls, it will time out sometimes and we won't get any useful info out of the error response."
"The only problem I face when I use the tool is that it doesn't contain much documentation or it doesn't have many video tutorials on its features."
"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."
"An area for improvement in VisualCron is its cluttered interface. It isn't always easy to find all functionalities, so what VisualCron needs is a user interface expert who can improve the interface. There's a learning curve in terms of finding what you need from the interface of VisualCron. The technical support for VisualCron also needs improvement in terms of response time. Currently, there's no live support or hotline you can call to get quick answers, so this is what I'd like to see in the next version of VisualCron. A less cluttered and more streamlined interface, where you don't need to hunt for some of the features, is also what I'd like to see in the next VisualCron update."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As per my understanding, UiPath has a much lesser cost than NICE, but I am not sure."
"The price is a bit high."
"VisualCron is correctly priced because it wasn't very cheap, and it wasn't overly expensive, so the price for it was set correctly. When my previous company bought VisualCron, it was €800 per server per year. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing for VisualCron a five because it was just right. The tool was affordable, and it has one of the most competitive pricing in the market."
"ROI is 95 percent."
"We are fine with a rather cheap setup. Licensing with VisualCron is fair. You have a simple one-year licence in different sizes. There isn't a licensing jungle with hundreds of options and opt-ins."
"ROI is one month."
"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Energy/Utilities Company
7%
Educational Organization
7%
Computer Software Company
26%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Healthcare Company
8%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 user. These interfaces can be extremely dynamic in relation to the behavior of a ...
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 said, the wizards and manuals are of good quality. For the price, I would say that...
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 powerful and useful right now). There are a few areas for improvement in the ins...
What do you like most about VisualCron?
The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%.
What needs improvement with VisualCron?
The documentation is a bit weak. The tool must provide a better set of documentation.
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

HelpLine, Telefonica Spain, Banca Popolare Di Sondrio
7 Eleven, ABB Sécheron SA, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Amazon Europe Core, Apple, Assa Abloy, Aston Martin, Banco Santander, BMW (Australia)
Find out what your peers are saying about NICE Robotic Automation vs. VisualCron and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,763 professionals have used our research since 2012.