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UiPath vs VisualCron 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
7.2
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
UiPath
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
1st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
817
Ranking in other categories
Agentic Automation (1st)
VisualCron
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
20th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Managed File Transfer (MFT) (15th), Workload Automation (16th)
 

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 UiPath is 24.5%, down from 26.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VisualCron is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
 

Featured Reviews

Anabel Marco - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Navinkumar Sadasivam. - PeerSpot reviewer
Reduces the cost of digital transformation and helps our client reduce their on-premises footprint
Building automation using UiPath is easy and in most cases can be done with a single click. There is no need to write coding. We can insert and delete columns or remove duplicate frames easily. We have already implemented a couple of solutions, one of which is a maintenance automation database. The users of the database want to send emails with attached files and other artifacts, and previously this was done manually. Each day, up to 300-500 items were manually processed by 50-60 people who would navigate to a separate application, search for the file, upload it, and send the email. This was a tedious task and accuracy and reliability were questionable, requiring manual verification. This process was repeated monthly for around 10,000-12,000 items, taking around 25-30 days to complete. We automated this process and provided a high-level solution initially, which was later built, bought, and deployed. The bot we created is capable of processing 900-950 items per day, meaning that all 10,000 items can be processed within eight to ten days. This reduces the processing time by one-third and the cost from 100 to around 12 months, as we only need three to four rotational shifts to monitor the bot. Sometimes the bot may disconnect or encounter issues beyond our control, but we address these promptly to reinstate the process. This is the work we are doing in our organization. End-to-end automation is a crucial aspect of completing tasks within the specified time frame. Clients do not want to wait for extended periods, such as a month or two, and prefer to see progress at least one-third or one-fourth of the way through. This ensures that clients are not preoccupied with a single task and can focus on improving their business while also increasing accuracy. UiPath aims to provide clients with a high return on investment from both the software build and business development perspectives. This is achieved by delivering effective solutions that meet clients' needs. We are satisfied with UiPath's community. Occasionally, we encounter some queries or doubts, such as whether we should use a particular feature or MAC code, or whether we can use a certain file. While we cannot always rely on direct support for such minor issues, we found that the UiPath community can be a helpful resource. We search for similar issues that other users may have faced and posted about, and we often find solutions to our questions in a timely manner. Overall, we find the UiPath community to be effective and useful. UiPath has helped our client reduce their on-premises footprint. This decision is purely based on the client's interests and has nothing to do with our personal or company interests. Generally, clients prefer cloud integration as they want their systems to be up and running 99.9 percent of the time. However, sometimes they may opt for on-premises solutions based on the CDRT of a particular application, which refers to the sensitivity of the data involved. We have some limited automation that deals with sensitive information, such as credit-related automation, which the client cannot access. In such cases, clients may prefer an on-premises solution, but overall, cloud integration is becoming more important. With the implementation of AI, we can utilize UiPath for automation, which is more dependable. UiPath reduces the cost of digital transformation. Our clients are highly satisfied with the nearly 99 percent reduction in human error achieved through the use of UiPath. This includes both individual and team errors. However, during the development phase, some human input was necessary to create rules for the bot to follow. Any potential issues were identified and resolved during testing by our IT and testing teams. Overall, our clients are pleased with the system's reliability and performance.
Sourav-Dutta - PeerSpot reviewer
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

"The ability to connect to websites and pull data is the solution's most valuable feature."
"The most valuable features of Fortra's Automate include its FTP functionality and file manipulation capabilities."
"Fortra's Automate has effectively replaced the workload of an entire employee, saving us significant time and money."
"We are still in the process of rolling it to production and tweaking it (our AD groups are a mess), but the improvements are priceless. Having users ID's created the same way every time without human error is the best part. We don't need to worry about why groups were not added, user rights not set to folders or missing a private folder being created, typos or just even knowing when things are done and logged."
"Fortra's Automate performs the job effectively and has the capability to alert us of any issues."
"The product effectively handles all the tasks we require."
"I like the interface; it makes managing automation easy. We can set different schedules and templates for each task."
"The pricing is excellent. I would give them perfect marks in that regard."
"The automation and speed of the platform are the most valuable features of UiPath."
"UiPath allows people to do more value-added work. I found that we were able to take a person well versed in access programming and convert them to be an RPA developer with relative ease."
"We were able to automate a lot of data entry into our financial system. We've automated spreadsheet manipulation in the area of financial management."
"This solution is intuitive, user-friendly, and has a specific framework that allows for quick robot deployment."
"The most valuable features are probably the autopilot or copilot AI feature and insights."
"There is a good support network. Their response time is good. They will find a solution within two days."
"The most valuable feature of UiPath is if you set a form and there's an interaction with the user, it's easy and fast to build than the other RPA tools. Additionally, it is simple to use the connectors."
"Screen scraping credentials of whatever features that it has. The robot can log into the system, scrape the data, and enter the data into the system. This eliminates a lot of the manual work that the team had to do, which has improved the performance. Our teams used to do a lot of data entry, and this repetitive work has been reduced. The same resource can now work on some high-end work."
"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."
"'ve only had a few cases where I've had to request support in the past 12 years of use, but the support response time and resolution were was extremely quick."
"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."
"It helped us reduce manual steps."
"We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works."
"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 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."
"VisualCron is a very powerful program to automate different steps in your business processes. We use it to automate replacing files and inform departments about the replacement."
 

Cons

"I would like to see some better web automation, a wizard like the one in the product WinAutomation would be very nice."
"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 product also has a limited use case in some respects."
"We really need a free development environment for customers. Building and testing automation on production isn't ideal."
"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."
"I believe we need to test various OCR tools that assist in evaluating, let's say, six different customer resyncs. We analyze their spending patterns and documentations, but current OCR support has limitations, requiring highly standardized documents, which isn't always the case. With a more advanced OCR system, we could improve processes related to credit risk management and legal matters. We're exploring how to integrate Fortra's Automate with our CRM platform, taking cues from instances where Salesforce seamlessly merged with Automate. However, we use a different CRM, Insight for New Enterprise, and we're seeking ways to connect the automation process within our CRM. We aim for the automation to continue smoothly, even in instances where traditional automation methods might face hurdles."
"I would like the updates to be easier to deploy. Integration with Amazon S3 is somewhat lacking."
"The OCR for Hebrew text needs to be improved."
"The only concern is it's a bit tough to understand the first time, and you have to invest in the technical improvement of your team in general."
"We have mixed reviews for the technical support and depending on the topic, they will answer faster or slower, more personalized or not."
"Some of the areas around the administration aspect of UiPath, which is what I have been mostly working with over the past few years, can be better. From an organizational standpoint, some of the guidance there could use some work in terms of helping COEs know how to grow and how to take control of their organizations as they spread."
"UiPath has made some of the Activities less user-friendly as time goes on. Some things that were previously configured through the Properties panel have been moved to a separate activity card. It was easier when everything was in one place and faster. Sometimes, UiPath tries to make it more accessible for people who aren't tech-savvy, but it complicates things for tech-oriented users like me."
"There are two editions of UiPath. One is the free Community version and the other is the paid Enterprise version. I have used both. The feature updates in the Enterprise version are very regular and the support is quite fast. That's not replicated in the Community version."
"They should add chatbots functionality for Microsoft Teams and not only for Slack."
"Better support for databases should be included. For example, interacting with SQL Server and SQL Developer would be beneficial features."
"We don't use the UiPath Apps feature yet. I did a PoC on it and it looks like a wonderful product. But when we are using Action Center with Apps, the Action Center stage is built in Orchestrator, but the same field is not built in the Apps... UiPath Apps should be stepped up in terms of its functionality and integration with other UiPath products."
"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."
"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."
"The documentation is a bit weak."
"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."
"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."
"There are some conditions in the mail trigger, but you can only use them as an "AND" condition, not as an "OR" condition. This is an improvement that could be useful. For example, some people put "invoice" in the subject and others put "invoice" in the body. If I want to make a trigger for everybody whose sending invoices, I have to make two jobs for this now."
"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The cost is a bit high for a small business like ours, but we manage with Fortra's Automate."
"I'm only involved in running the product and maintaining the systems, so I can't speak to the cost."
"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 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."
"Compared to other products, the pricing model for this solution is much more convenient, flexible, and adaptable to the Portuguese reality."
"From a distributor's perspective, one of the biggest selling points of Automate is its price point."
"Licensing should be reduced and price should be cut down a bit."
"I'm not sure about licensing and pricing, but the pricing for their certification is a little bit more. Previously, we could do it for no price."
"We have a cost model for operating expense savings. It is usually about $100,000 to $125,000 and takes us six weeks to develop and implement. That's development, testing, and implementation. We do code reviews on everything. That does not include all the documentation, assessment, etc."
"The price and setup costs need to be supported by a strong business case."
"We only use the technical support when we were renewing our license. The process could be easier, as there are a lot of steps."
"The licensing system is something that needs to be improved."
"The licensing fees are billed annually."
"There is some initial sticker shock from a lot of people regarding cost, until you show them what the actual benefit is. Initially, people are just going, "Why?" So, the retort for that is, "Look how much you will save, time, and budget-wise with one bot. If one bot costs X, this is how much it will save you over one year. This alleviates the "Oh my gosh" face, when it's 1200 dollars for a bot."
"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
"ROI is one month."
"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."
"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."
"The price is a bit high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
27%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Insurance Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

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...
Best RPA tools for IBM iSeries
I can only speak to UiPath since that is the only RPA solution that I have used. I know that there are specific packa...
RPA that Bots can run without centralized control?
Yes, Attended Bots which can run without centralized control Module. RPA Tools like Automation Anywhere, uiPath ,Pow...
How do I choose between UiPath and Microsoft Power Automate?
Microsoft‌ ‌Power‌ ‌Automate‌ ‌is‌ ‌intuitive‌ ‌and‌ ‌easy‌ ‌to‌ ‌integrate‌ ‌and‌ ‌use.‌ ‌I‌ ‌like‌ ‌that‌ ‌there‌ ‌...
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.
 

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
1. Accenture 2. Deloitte 3. PwC 4. IBM 5. Capgemini 6. KPMG 7. Ernst & Young 8. Infosys 9. Cognizant 10. Wipro 11. Tata Consultancy Services 12. HCL Technologies 13. Genpact 14. Tech Mahindra 15. DXC Technology 16. Atos 17. NTT Data 18. CGI 19. L&T Infotech 20. Hexaware Technologies 21. Mindtree 22. Mphasis 23. Virtusa 24. Syntel 25. Zensar Technologies 26. WNS Global Services 27. Hexaware Technologies 28. Larsen & Toubro Infotech 29. Persistent Systems 30. QuEST Global 31. Sonata Software 32. Zensar Technologies
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 UiPath vs. VisualCron and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,640 professionals have used our research since 2012.