Fortra's Automate Reviews

We are a solution provider and this is one of the RPA products that we have evaluated for our clients. We do have experience with it because one of our clients has been using it. However, this is not the right tool for our clients and I would not be comfortable bringing it up.

It is used for very rudimentary stored-procedure automation. Basically, it is for running scripts.

The most valuable features for my client are timing and scheduling. They are not using it to its full potential, so this is what is most important for them.

There are many things that need to be improved.

The security needs to be improved. They do not encrypt passwords, so this is an issue with HIPAA compliance.

They don't have an auto-recording capability, which means that you have to program everything.

The impression that we had and the feedback that we received is that the interface is confusing and there are too many things that you have to do. It can be a very intimidating UI for a lot of people. They have drag-and-drop features, but they are not all that great. The interface needs to be streamlined and if they want broader adoption in a company then they need to do a better job at taking the technology out of it.

Unlike many of the larger competitors, they do not have a Community Edition where you can deploy it and test it out. You might be able to run it for a month or a couple of weeks, but that is not enough. I think that this is something they could improve on.

My client has been using HelpSystems AutoMate for more than a year.

Scaling this product can be very complicated and confusing.

We only have a single client using it.

We had Professional Services included and from a service perspective, I think that they are good. However, they are definitely focused on the smaller scale, technical RPA work, rather than the holistic, large-business process market.

I would say that the support is fine and the knowledge is there, but they have a very technical skillset.

The licensing fees are comparable with the other products in the market. It comes with a package that costs approximately $20,000 USD per year.

HelpSystems Automate is a niche player in the RPA market and not very well known.

One key difference is that more mature tools will have an auto-record feature, where you can press a button and it will record what you're doing. The security is also better in other products.

Competing products have better drag-and-drop capabilities.

One of my clients recently implemented UiPath, rather than this product.

HelpSystems is a smaller company, so they are able to give their customers a lot of attention. I would say that on a small scale, this is a good low-code alternative. On the other hand, if you are looking for something more mature then it is not the right company.

I would rate this solution a four out of ten.

Adaptive Growth is a reseller for HelpSystems' AutoMate Robotic Process Automation software system. Our primary target markets are manufacturing and distribution companies. We also feel that nursing homes and trucking companies are markets that RPA will provide tremendous benefits in operational cost reductions. HelpSystem's PDF and email integration into business software workflows is a great benefit for most any company. 

As a reseller of HelpSystems' AutoMate RPA the product will grow our business because of the dramatic operational cost reductions it offers to our customers. Especially when a buyer of AutoMate can grow their business without the associated cost of hiring new employees--a tremendous benefit of RPA. 

Companies that take the time to learn and understand AutoMate RPA will want to invest in the product for the benefits it offers, the operational cost reductions it provides and its quick ROI.

The most valuable feature is the drag-and-drop interface, which is very Windows-like.

Technical support and marketing support is terrific.

The documentation is online and it's very good.

The integration is excellent. For example, it will integrate with SAP very easily. It's  API 

(application programming interface) is easy to use when and where where required.

Adaptive Growth finds that AutoMate satisfies the workflow and repetitive business processes of most any company we would address. The product's improvement will come mostly from its users which has been the case. 

Adaptive Growth has been working with HelpSystems AutoMate for about nine months.

This is a very stable product.

AutoMates scalability will satisfy most any company's growth requirements.

Technical support is terrific.

We worked with company a company that sold and implemented UiPath and AGI had a trial version of Kofax RPA

The initial setup is straightforward and very easy. A user company just needs to follow the the implementation steps. 

Adaptive Growth implemented AutoMate without outside help. 

Customers of AutoMate will realize their ROI within 90 to 120 days from their go-live date. However, that is dependent on the business requirements for a specific project's workflow is properly defined and documented so it meets that workflows business expectations,

We especially like the way AutoMate is priced. Our customers can license it or pay a one-time purchase price dependent on the number of users. 

We were looking at UiPath and Kofax, and we chose HelpSystems and AutoMate because the product is so Windows like and easy to use.

Our advice for any company who is implementing RPA including AutoMate is to make sure that the requirements for a specific process are clearly defined and documented.

Overall, we find that this is a good product and it's easy to learn and implement. A buyer of Automate RTA never has to become dependent on an RPA implementation company or a consulting firm and its associated costs. 

That said, the principals at AGI have been in the software industry for 35 plus years selling and implementing software systems that address critical business requirements and expectations, we know that a software project will fail when those expectations are not met. 

We would rate this solution a eight out of ten.

Our use case for this solution is in the HR department. We are a company that has external consultants that perform services for other companies, and each employee has to give us reports describing their hours each month. Based on these reports, we charge the customer accordingly.

We have PDF files that are scanned and sent to us by phone. These are from our employees on the customer's site, and our human resources personnel review them afterward. The reports are compared with our in-house system, the files are reviewed, and the hours are approved. Once this is complete, an invoice is sent to the customer.

Prior to using AutoMate, our process of collecting reports from employees was manual.

The most valuable feature is the ease of use. The interface is simple, user-friendly, and very intuitive. We have a software development group and we expected to have to do some programming, but we didn't have to. Everything was already built-in, within the system.

This solution is very efficient. It took us only four hours to develop our bot that automates the process, and two people were involved in the development.

It would be nice to have an EBI connector for AutoMate.

The OCR for Hebrew text needs to be improved. The recognition of Hebrew characters is not the strongest part of AutoMate.

I have been using HelpSystems AutoMate for about six months.

We have only implemented the process in the HR department, which has approximately 400 employees. Our intention is to implement it for other uses, as well.

I contacted technical support when we had an issue with a PDF file. They responded very quickly, within six or seven hours. After speaking with them, they provided us with a solution to the problem within two hours.

We also use UiPath, although this is for other departments in the company. For the HR department, everything was done manually.

I think that the main purpose of this tool is the automation of internal processes. This is unlike their competitors, who deal mainly with business processes. If this were a customer service application, for example, then I would probably use a different product.

The initial setup was easy. One person is required for deployment and maintenance.

Our in-house team handled the deployment.

We save more than 200 person-hours per month.

Everything that I used was already built into the system, so we did not have to pay any costs beyond the standard licensing fees.

There are third-party applications that integrate with AutoMate, although we did not have a need to use any of them.

Overall, this is a pretty nice product and I really recommend it because it is very easy to use. We also save a lot of money, just with one bot.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use this solution in order to automate manual processes in our operations. 

This tool has machine learning and voice recognition and computer vision, which are both quite useful aspects. These aren't available in other tools. It's a good addition to this tool and it gives the solution an edge on the market.  

The initial setup is easy. The deployment doesn't take too long.

Technical support is helpful. We use them a lot and they are quite responsive. 

The stability of the studio client could be improved upon. Currently, sometimes it slows down and occasionally it will force the program to close completely - which is unexpected. 

The interface could be more user-friendly and easier to navigate.

It would be helpful if the solution was available in the cloud as well as opposed to just being available on-premises. On-premises infrastructure offers limited scalability.

We started using the solution about two years ago now, and therefore that is the amount of experience I have with it. 

We aren't completely satisfied with the stability The system can slow down and the program occasionally crashes and closes. 

As the solution is on-premises, the scalability is limited. 

Just last month, we bought a new license, and therefore we do have plans to continue to use the product.

We have about 30 people currently using the product.

We use technical support a lot and we find them to be quite helpful and responsive. We are very satisfied with their level of service. 

We found the initial setup to be easy. It's not overly complex or difficult. It's straightforward for the most part.

The deployment is pretty fast. It takes about two hours to deploy the solution.

We are just a customer and an end-users.

I would recommend the solution. It's one of those solutions that are helpful in terms of reaching our goals and we've mostly been quite satisfied with its capabilities. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We are a service provider and we use this solution to automate processes for our clients. Our customers are in a variety of businesses including banking, insurance, energy, and healthcare. There are lots of use cases, especially in the insurance and banking industries, but we are expanding into other industries as well.

An example use case for our clients is the automation of invoice payments.

This product is quite easy to install, learn, and use, with our new employees being able to start using it in projects for clients after only two weeks of internal training.

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

Key automation features: email, FTP/SFTP, OCR, ODBC, terminal emulation. 

Main benefits: Full Client-Server Architecture, Multi-Machine Execution, Centralized Management Interface, Graphical Workflows, Intuitive Task Development & Debugging.

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. Specifically, the Automate Enterprise interface needs improvement. 

When you are promoting packages within the environment, it is easy to extract an import, but it would be better to have it all in the same console. As it is now, you have to extract the package separately. The environments should be able to communicate; you push the button, click on deploy, and it goes straight to the production environment.

Increasing the integration with other databases would be an improvement.

Sometimes my team reports situations where there are some unexpected errors from the tool. For example, if a Java error is reported then it doesn't mean anything at all to the end-user. This is an area that may also have room for improvement, although, at perhaps two or three times in a project, this does not happen often.

In my opinion, so far, the scalability seems to be good. However, I would not say that the scenarios I have seen are very difficult.

We have seven or eight clients using this solution, and only one or two have more than fifteen or twenty processes that have been automated. Having this number of processes with three to four robots, running twenty-four hours per day, is not a difficult test.

The roles of the people using this product vary depending on the client. In the Portuguese market, it is common to have one department that manages the robots for the entire organization. Normally, this is not the IT department. I know of only a few cases where robots are spread across different departments. Usually, a dedicated team or four to five people will manage, evaluate reports, corrects errors, and implement new requests.

So far, I am really happy with the technical support. The delay is between one and two days.

In all of our requests so far, we have had a response in one day's time. Sometimes the response is not final, but then they put us in contact with somebody who has the right knowledge, so it is good.

At my previous company, I worked with UiPath and Blue Prism. My experience with UiPath is between two and three years, and I worked with Blue Prism for a long time as well.

My reason for switching was one of personal opinion. In my previous company, we always used one of the big four. In my current company, I wanted to approach things a bit differently. I believe that there are many players in the market that also have good tools, and are more competitive. All of these tools are growing together, and we ultimately settled on this solution.

The initial setup is quite easy for us, although this is in part because we have been working with the partner for a long time. We have lots of direct connections for support, so if we have a problem that is a show-stopper, or something urgent, then we have a direct channel that bypasses the usual help desk.

We handle the integration of the solution from beginning to end.

The pricing model is the biggest advantage of this solution, and it is opening a lot of doors.

This solution is quite easy to install and to manage for most processes between environments. Everything related to usability and automation is really quite close to the leading candidates, and using this product has been a good experience.

My advice to others who are implementing this solution is to start small. This is something that we always tell our clients. Rather than look at the larger responsibilities, start small to test and to gain confidence from several areas within the organization. Once you have three, four, five, or even ten processes automated, start looking at everything that is related to governance. At the same time, do not be afraid to start, even if you don't have everything planned from the beginning.

I would rate this solution an nine out of ten.

It's difficult to say which feature is the most valuable as there are so many, each a must-have for any automation system. A great feature that you seldom see in these kind of systems is the ability to use a database as trigger to launch a task. This is something I asked for a few years ago and that was added.

We use AutoMate to interface different systems with each other, as an EDI tool, as an FTP tool, to automate AD reporting.

I would like to see some better web automation, a wizard like the one in the product WinAutomation would be very nice. Showing the global variables of a workflow in a task when you select it, which variable some result should be stored in. Now, you can't see the global variables but have to type them, which works but isn't ideal.

About eight years I think.

In some older versions there were some instabilities, but the latest version (v.11) seems very stable.

No, you can scale very easily by adding agent licenses and deploying these agents on different computers. You can see these agents as small runtimes of the actual BPA server. This way you can deploy the workflows across the agents and spread the load between the different computers. You can also add development licenses to allow more concurrent developers connecting to the AutoMate console.

We didn't actually deploy the solution. It was basically testing the product. It was just some simple testing we were doing. We've tried downloading reports from the new RP system, using RPA, and doing some manual uploading from some PDF files into our ERP. It was just used for some super simple operations to try it out and get a feel for it.

I actually quite liked the no-coding functionality. You don't have to be too technical or be a coding expert to utilize the solution. 

The platform was fairly user-friendly in terms of designing the bot. I was able to make it do what I needed it to do.

It's difficult for me to answer as I'm not really an expert on HelpSystems and I don't know it well enough to really give great feedback just yet. I'm not really that comfortable critiquing the platform. I'm sure there are some of those issues there. 

It's possible that they could use a stronger community for seeking guidance and help. For example, I know with Automation Anywhere or UiPath, there are strong community areas where I can ask questions and search for information. I don't know if that exists for HelpSystems. I find, for example, it's helpful, if I'm using UiPath, to go onto some of the community pages and I have found answers to my questions fairly easily. I don't know if that's something that exists with HelpSystems. 

The user interface could use a bit of an improvement.

I've only been working with the solution for a short period. I've only used it a little bit for about a month or two, however, I don't have great experience in RPA's.

The solution was quite stable. We didn't have to deal with bugs or glitches. It didn't crash or freeze. We found it to be reliable for the most part.

We were only using the free version and not the paid option. However, that said, I did find it to be fairly flexible. It could scale if you needed it to.

We haven't really used the solution for too long at this point. There aren't too many people using it in our organization.

I haven't really had much experience with technical support, as I haven't used the product that much or for that long. I wouldn't be able to critique their level of service.

I tried to download and use Micro Focus. However, it was too complicated for my skill level and I gave up before I really got too far into the process.

The installation of HelpSystems was not difficult at all. I'm not technically strong, however, I could do it myself without too many problems. It's pretty straightforward, even for non-technical users.

I don't remember how long the deployment took, to be honest. It was one of the easier installations I've dealt with on the platform. When I've looked at other platforms, I've found that some of their rivals were very difficult to install for a person with my lack of experience. For example, Micro Focus was one I tried to download and install and I gave up due to the fact that it was just too complicated. I can compare this experience to Micro Focus where I just found I wasted a lot of time and got very poor feedback. I found HelpSystems refreshingly easy to install. 

I handled the implementation myself.

I was not using a paid version. I was using a free version. We didn't have to pay for any licensing.

We're evaluating RPA at the moment, and therefore we haven't made any payments yet, or we haven't made any purchases to commence operations. We are looking at that, however, we haven't started anything officially. I have a good idea of the pricing of the HelpSystems and UiPath solutions. We're comfortable with what it would cost if we decide to continue with either option.

I've been looking at UiPath for a couple of months, however, I don't have a great amount of knowledge in the topic and I'm not an expert in the area.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using.

So far, from my limited experience, I would recommend the solution to other organizations.

However, based on my limited understanding of the product, as I haven't used it for too long just yet, I would rate it at a seven out of ten.