UiPath Reviews

I use the solution with different customers. Sometimes it's used for financial organizations, or for accounting or ecommerce. It can be used for mortgages, or loan processing for example. 

We use the automation a lot. 

It's very good at document understanding. Training machines and utilizing machine learning models is very easy compared to other models. 

The product offers easy integration with APIs. 

It helps with email automation and PDF automation.

It is easy to build automation using UiPath in comparison to, for example, Blue Prism or Power Automate. 

We use it to implement end-to-end automation. Internal automation is rather important to me. It's something the customer needs. There are multiple processes that are automated and involve API integration as well as document understanding. At the final stage, we'd need reporting as well. 

The user community of UiPath is very good. We have access to partner portals and learning portals. The forums are also very good. They have a good support system. If we get stuck, we get extremely helpful answers. In the community, there will be videos about new features coming out and will show the use cases. They show their plans in advance, which is very helpful.

I've used the UiPath Academy classes. There are lots of courses and I have an advanced certificate. The biggest benefit is having some training rather than going into the product and trying to learn it by trial and error. You can either get basic knowledge or do a deep dive. It gives you options to go as deep as you want.

We use AI functionality in our automation program. We use machine learning models, for example. Document understanding uses AI as well. It helps us automate complex and difficult processes. If I have to create complex logic or do some new API integrations, with the help of AI, it's easier. We can automate more processes overall. As you train the machine learning model, and do the right test cases in the right way, it begins to work really well.

It has helped to speed up digital transformation.  

The solution has helped us reduce human error. It's helped prevent us from fixing errors and reworking things. It also helps remove people from mundane tasks. It's helped people save time. How much time is saved depends on the process. Sometimes some human intervention is still required, however, it can typically save three and a half to four hours. 

The cost can be a barrier. Power Automate from Microsoft, for example, comes at a lower cost. 

The automation hub and the architecture around test cases could be improved. They should offer more videos that would help us implement various scenarios. We'd like to see information about use cases specific to different industries. If there are use cases that have worked at different companies, we'd like to be able to see them to learn from what others have done to help us grow our business as well.

I've been working with the solution for the past seven years. 

The solution is very stable and good. 

The solution is quite scalable. It's no problem. With architecture on the cloud and the fact they support VMs and Azure, there's no issue with scaling. 

I used to contact support a lot. I don't do it so much anymore. 95% of the time they are very good. There have been times when we have faced roadblocks, however. 

Positive

I've used Blue Prism in the past and I am exploring Power Automate as well. Power Automate is expanding quite a bit. It's very good. The UI isn't quite up to the mark. It still has limited features, however, it is easy to use and the price is good. Blue Prism is still a very complicated tool.

I've been involved in the initial setup. I've created things in the development and test environment and then moved them to production. The process could be improved a bit. It would be nice if there was a button you could click to replicate across environments. 

We have senior developers that can handle the setup and integration process.

As consultants, we do not need to handle any maintenance tasks. 

We handled the initial setup ourselves. 

The pricing can be a barrier. For most clients, it is pricey compared to other solutions. However, it offers great features. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

If a company has a lot of use cases where automation features are required, they should try UiPath. However, it depends on the company's requirements. 

My current retail organization uses UiPath for finance-related activities like invoice generation. We also use the solution for pulling documents from any stored devices for customers. We save customer files like licenses, invoices, and other tax-related documents in the box. If customers want to use such files for any purpose, we need to extract them from the box environment. A bot will check for that particular customer-specific file, download it, and save it in client-shared locations.

Transactional details regarding whether a customer has delayed an EMI or paid the EMI on time will be updated in the system. A bot we defined using UiPath will do it around the clock without any human effort.

The most valuable feature of UiPath is the complete queue system-based framework because it is robust for all clients. If something goes wrong, we can define how many retries we can do for a particular request. In the next attempt, it can be achieved in a proper way.

The end users can expect the results without any manual intervention. This framework is very user-friendly, convenient for the developers or system integrators, and satisfies the client compared to other frameworks.

I would like to see more clarity in the solution's AI functionality. I have not completely implemented AI for our client. I'm trying to understand the areas in which AI will be more usable for my client.

The OCR is the only area where I expect a little flexibility and improvement. If you try to extract scanned documents or photos using any native or Google OCR, you won't get 100% accuracy.

I have been using UiPath for more than five years.

UiPath is a stable solution.

UiPath is a scalable solution. UiPath is deployed in one location with around 5,000 end users using the solution.

I also have more than four years of experience with the Blue Prism tool.

The only major difference between UiPath and Blue Prism is that UiPath is deployed in the cloud, and now Blue Prism is trying to be deployed in the cloud. Other than that, I did not observe any differences between the two solutions. Both are good products in the market, and customers are happy with both solutions.

UiPath's initial setup is easy.

Around two people are needed for the solution's deployment and maintenance.

Our customers have seen a return on investment with UiPath and are happy with the licenses, pricing, etc. They haven't raised any concerns so far, and they're increasing the licenses based on the processes we are deploying.

I'm a system integrator and one of the lead developers of UiPath for the end customers.

I use UiPath in the banking and retail industry.

UiPath is deployed on the Oracle cloud.

I would recommend UiPath to other users. The users need to configure the environment in a better way. If an organization wants to utilize only four or six bots, it needs to plan ahead and consider how big it plans to grow in the next five years. Planning in advance would clarify how the organization needs to configure the environment and what challenges it needs to handle. That's a better way to start using UiPath as an RPA tool.

Even before the deployment, we gave an estimation to the end clients regarding what to expect after deploying the solution. We told them about the things they will be very comfortable with and the time interval they will take to know things. They are comfortable and 100% satisfied with the solution.

Overall, I rate UiPath a nine out of ten.

It depends on the task that is assigned to me, but mainly, I'm using it for PDF automation and Java API-related automation. It is being used for extractions of PDFs and automation of the APIs to get a better and more rapid response.

UiPath helps a lot in everything related to automation. We have lots of tasks, and we need to get accurate results. Our experience of automating using UiPath has been good. It is easy to get good information or good output from the data.

Its AI capabilities are very helpful for automating more processes. If we want to extract something, we can easily use it. Its AI capabilities make it easy to automate a process and get accurate results.

It works well with all languages, such as Python, Java, C++, etc. It also works with APIs. It is helpful to understand the APIs to extract the data. 

It enables us to implement end-to-end automation. 

It has improved productivity and reliability and saved a lot of time. It has also reduced human error. It has reduced human error by 30% to 50%, and it has freed up employee time by 40% to 60% depending on the task or use case of an employee.

It has reduced our on-premises footprint a little bit.

It is a very easy and stable product. 

It saves a lot of time. It increases our productivity, and it also helps with project reliability and scalability.

The courses available on UiPath Academy are helpful if we want to go deep into the UiPath scripts or tools. UiPath Academy is also helpful when we want to learn something new that is available in the new versions or improve our skills and knowledge.

The user interface needs a little bit of improvement in terms of performance. Sometimes, it slows down, but it depends on the OS that you have. If you are running it on Microsoft Windows, it is slower than on macOS or Linux.

I've been using UiPath for the last two to three years.

It is very stable. I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of reliability. The tool is very secure. If a user wants to run it on a Mac, it works flawlessly.

It is very scalable. I would rate it a 10 out of 10 for scalability.

We are using it for multiple departments. We have IT consultancy and IT services, as well as product teams. In my company, there are about 5K people. Some of them are end-users, some are developers, some are admins, and some are testers.

For any issues, we can take the help of the UiPath customer support and the UiPath community.

When we have some issues with the deployment tasks and automation tasks, customer support helps a lot, and they always try to resolve issues in a short time. Their technical support is incredible. They are always ready to help with customer queries and they try to resolve them within hours, not days. Sometimes, they resolve them within 30 minutes, but it also depends on the issue or priority. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

This is the first tool that I have been using for the last two to three years.

It depends on the project size. If the project is complex, it takes time. In my opinion, it is straightforward if you know how to use it. If you don't know how to use this tool, it is very difficult. On average, it takes half an hour to one hour.

In terms of maintenance, it requires some maintenance, which is taken care of by the admin side. They have to make sure that it is up to date.

It is very cost-effective, and it gives an ROI. It saves a lot of time as well as money. It helps to build client relationships and improve customer feedback. There is a 20% to 30% saving on costs. It has saved $5,000 to $6,000 per year.

The time savings depend on the task and the size of the process. We can save 10% to 50%.

Its price is moderate. It is neither very expensive nor very cheap. Everything is good in terms of pricing.

I would recommend it to every developer or software engineer who wants to work on the automation review task. 

Overall, I would rate UiPath a 10 out of 10.

I'm using it for PDF automation.

It helps us save 60 to 70 percent of the time we used to take and provides accurate results. 

It also helps with increasing productivity. Now that work is automated, it has eliminated any manual work within these processes and reduced human error.

It also provides end-to-end automation, which is very important for getting results very quickly and saving time. We can use that saved time for other productive work. 

UiPath also helps us in reducing digital costs.

It provides various services such as PDF automation and AI capabilities that help in creating accurate results. We are using the AI for chatbot integrations and handling customer interactions. It helps eliminate manual work.

The email automations are also very valuable.

It also provides a user-friendly interface so that anyone can use it. 

Sometimes it takes time to provide results.

I have been using UiPath for almost a year.

It's very stable and provides accurate results for our organization.

It's very scalable, as more than 250 users in our organization use this tool, and we have not faced any issues with it.

The customer support is very good and resolves our queries immediately. It has been very good for us.

Positive

This is the first automation tool we have used.

It requires IT support.

It's saving employee time, which helps with ROI, but the cost is higher. But the results it provides are enough for the tool to give us ROI.

It's costly compared to other tools in the market. Other than that, it is very good.

As I noted, sometimes it takes time to get the results, but it depends upon the query or task I'm using it for. Other than this, it's very good and I'm happy with this tool. It works well for me and I would recommend that others use it.

We were looking for robotic process automation and we have been trying the UiPath Community Edition. We mainly need to automate day-to-day activities related to wireless connections, such as our WiFi device registration process. We currently have three to four employees currently doing this process and it is really time-consuming. We want a bot to do these repetitive procedures.

We will be doing the same procedure for server-side configurations as well for repetitive Windows-based processes. We are looking to save most of the system admin headaches.

We have three system admins and had three to four data entry people. These people uploaded our WiFi registration information daily for the university. After this implementation, we saw a drastic change in the time this process takes. People were taking five to eight hours to do everything, but now, the task hardly takes one hour or less for a bot to do. We don't need dynamic data entry operators anymore because the robots are easily handling all the dynamic data, updating it to the server in minutes.

End-to-end automation also means a lot to us as an educational organization that is concerned about security. We prefer to have fewer people involved on the operations side. By using bots we can reduce the number of people handling sensitive data. With the implementation of the bot, it now takes only one person, the UiPath administrator, for these tasks to get done. He is the only one required. He just needs to review the activities. We have been able to considerably reduce our staff costs.

Also, RPA software does not need a break. It can operate 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. In most cases, a single RPA robot can replace two to five full-time workers. Robots can do the same amount of work in less time.

It's really a cost-effective solution. There are minimal operating costs and we can make more efficient use of IT resources. In that way, we are saving a considerable amount of our yearly budget. We can spend much more money on other productivity items, rather than giving tedious tasks to employees. Overall, UiPath has reduced our costs by about 40 percent.

Another important aspect is that it is highly secure. There is absolutely no risk of information leakage from one component to another, because each only performs a single task. Access is strictly monitored, making it highly secure.

We have been on the path of digital transformation for the last three or four years. We have purchased many new technologies to move forward. UiPath has significantly reduced the cost of this process. We don't require further hardware to automate something. It is completely a software-based solution. Even with Community Edition, we are able to use all the features of the product. The limitation is the bot count. We can only use three or four robots. Still, it is the best solution.

In addition, we were prone to many human errors and this resulted in complex issues with our clients. Regarding our WiFi infrastructure, we faced hundreds of issues daily with misconfigurations. With the UiPath implementation, these errors have been reduced considerably because everything is automated. We need much less human intervention. Errors are now negligible.

The option to record processes is the most important feature of UiPath. We can use it to record every action automatically and it is then converted to a workflow. This workflow defines the complete set of processes so that we can automate every requirement.

A related feature that is one of the highlights is the AI. We have used many other scraping solutions, but none of them was effective. UiPath, however, can easily scrape data from webpages and applications and it works flawlessly with any program including .NET, PDF, legacy, and SAP.

UiPath has three components, UiPath Studio, the robots, and UiPath Orchestrator. UiPath Orchestrator is a web-based application for deploying, monitoring, and scheduling bots. With Orchestrator we can manage everything regarding the bots. We can customize the actions, but there are also templates. For example, one of the templates enables you to upload to OneDrive from Excel sheets. We just add the parameters and the automations are done.

We have used a few of the UiPath Academy courses, basic classes, because we use the Community Edition. When we move to the more advanced version of UiPath we'll be doing more of the classes. The Academy is very user-friendly. We don't require any further lectures or other sources for learning. A user can watch these videos and start operating the next day. All the actions and features, everything, is clearly demonstrated in the videos. It has proved to be very informative for us.

We have used it with Windows and it has been perfect. But recently, we tried it with Linux and we faced some issues regarding this automation. The auto-recording didn't happen as much as in other operating systems. They need to add more user-friendly automation and templates for that. They don't have many templates for other operating systems.

I have been using UiPath for six months.

It is extremely stable. We can actually trust the bots more than humans because it is completely error-free.

We currently have the Community Edition but we are moving to the other version so that we can deploy more bots. As a testing phase, we have limited it to only the IT department of the university. We have about 25 users of UiPath in that department.

The Community Edition is not that scalable, but the Enterprise Edition is completely scalable.

We haven't had to contact them for technical help.

This is the first automation tool we are using.

The initial setup was very simple. It only required a few clicks. After the implementation, to configure it, we required more advanced help and guidance.

It doesn't require attention for maintenance or updates. The updates work flawlessly.

We have no other product with this much return on investment. We are able to save money and time. No other product guarantees saving both at the same time. Sometimes you need to compromise on money to save more time. But in the case of UiPath, we definitely save on both. 

And UiPath has features that can enhance our server team. They can actually move into becoming UiPath administrators after getting used to this product. So the return on investment is huge in terms of time, cost, and exposure.

The Community Edition is free for everyone and you get all the features, but there is a limitation on the number of bots. The Enterprise Edition is a bit costly for the advanced features.

We did not look at any other tools. We were not even planning on going for UiPath, but a friend, a peer from a different organization, suggested that I check into it. We became very interested in it after testing it.

I would recommend UiPath for IT-related implementations because it can save a huge amount of time. Whether you are a small business or a large enterprise, all kinds of companies can use it for automation. It reduces costs and helps with efficiency. If you are considering any other AI-based solutions, I would still prefer the UiPath Community Edition. It has a large set of features and is free. If you like it and it suits your organization, you can then go for the paid version.

We're in the supply chain industry and we use UiPath for automations for purchasing and selling and to make people's lives easier within the organization. We have 20,000 users in our organization. 

We do not currently use the AI functionality in our automation program but we have in the past. I've found Document Understanding in the AI Center valuable. In the past, the action center was slow compared to some competitors in the IDP sphere, which can be detrimental if you're dealing with millions of documents but this has since been improved.

We use unattended robot processes almost exclusively and this includes approximately 130 to 140 processes. We do have plans to increase this usage and create more core automations. Certain automations have a shelf life and need to be retired at a certain point. A lot of times we're working with systems that are eventually going to be replaced. The reason why we use UiPath over strictly APIs or something programmatic is that we don't have access to something programmatic. 

UiPath has improved our organization in the sense that it has reduced our manual hours by 200,000 hours per year. This is substantial especially given the size of the COE. We don't necessarily realize these benefits from a head count decrease perspective but we definitely realize it from a time-saving perspective. 

The automations that UiPath provide free up our team members for tasks and projects that they have always wanted to do but have not had time for. There has been a shift to more meaningful work and doing work that hasn't been done before.

The Orchestration feature has been valuable as well as Studio because it makes it easier for people to develop who don't necessarily have a coding background. The UI automation when using UiPath is the best in the field, as far as RPA goes.

UiPath will introduce new features and it appears as though there is an unspoken rule that what they have released is not where it needs to be, but it'll be there eventually. To improve this solution, there could be increased transparency over licensing and consistency regarding what it costs for on-prem and what it costs for the cloud. This would make it more enticing for people to switch from one to another. 

We have also experienced some difficulty with updates and making sure that everything runs consistently. Many times, new releases are not communicated and then are released. This is included in documentation but this documentation is not always stored in the same place. Having some clarity or upgrade assistance to highlight what we need to look out for would help a great deal. 

We have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution but stability is dependent on your configuration. If you configure your robots in such a way that every VDI that runs or every virtual machine that's able to run a bot has a backup, then it will be stable.

UiPath's support is quite good. Whenever I've submitted a ticket, I have gotten relatively good responses within a couple of days. If you say that something is urgent and critical, they do get back to you sooner. Sometimes you get stuck between L1 and L2 support, which can be frustrating. 

I would rate the support for this solution an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The complexity of the setup depends on what you're trying to deploy. If you're deploying only the orchestrator and setting up robots, it is pretty straightforward. If 10 is difficult and one is easy, I would rate the setup a three or four. 

The certificates needed to set up the orchestrator can be confusing and frustrating during setup. For the most part, what you need to do is straightforward. When it comes to installations that require a Linux virtual machine, Docker configuration, or Kubernetes, the setup is more complex. It is more complex to set up an on-premises configuration compared to a cloud configuration.

From what I've seen, organizations will have vastly different numbers as to how hours correspond to dollars. Our return on investment has been good, even from a conservative perspective.

The way that the licensing is structured is confusing for some because there is different licensing if you're on the cloud versus if you're on-prem. There are unattended licenses and then there are non-production licenses and people get confused by that.

There's a level of buy-in that's required that makes it difficult for people to get started. For example, "If we do this, we need to get this whole package" as opposed to, "Let's get a couple of licenses and see how it works for us." There's the community for these questions but if you want to do an on-premise installation, you can't really use the community in the same way to get clarity.

As far as strictly RPA and UI-based automation solutions are concerned, UiPath really shines over its competition. The most similar comparisons would be Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, and I don't think that they have the same level of ease when learning how to use their solutions. Not as many users in the market know how to use those solutions and they don't have the same level of orchestration which makes them more difficult to manage compared to UiPath. 

The UiPath's user community, in terms of the value that you gain by being a part of it, is hit or miss. A lot of times there aren't responses to the high-level questions. There are a lot of responses to people who are just learning how to use it, but for more complex questions, there are no experts to field responses. It is possible to find these answers but they are not necessarily contained on UiPath's platforms. That being said, I did find the user community and academy very useful when I first started using this solution.  

I have done 16 courses from the academy and continue to review what is released to see if it would add value to me to stay up to date with the latest features. The academy provides the ability for more people to learn UiPath and learn RPA and this makes it easier to hire new team members as they can easily gain the necessary skillsets. They still do have to learn on the job to some extent, but there's a basic skillset that's pretty well established and there are certifications that are associated with that. 

I would advise others considering UiPath to start with some use cases in mind. I don't necessarily think that you're going to get value out of evaluating the solution if you don't have at least a few things to get you started. I would advise having someone with a technical skillset to assist in this regard. 

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. 

We use it for everything. We use it for very simple things, such as moving data around in Excel, and bigger things that include using more advanced technologies, APIs, and some of the newer stuff that UiPath has had, such as Action Center, etc.

We have not yet used its AI functionality in our automation program, but we plan to do that in the coming months.

The company is growing so fast, and we've been able to use automation to keep up with that pace. We've started rolling out to individual citizen developers. We're trying to change the whole company in terms of the way people work by using this technology.

The way they stay on top of Orchestrator is really helpful because that has been the platform that controls everything. The dedication to that is pretty helpful. Every time there's a new release, it seems there are more and more features. It's also not hard to learn.

When it comes to the UiPath Community, everybody is helpful. If you don't know how to do something or you want to learn about something, it's pretty easy to connect with other people or talk to people at UiPath to get that knowledge or learn how to do something. You can also just point somebody to UiPath Academy. They go from knowing nothing to being pretty good with things pretty quickly.

One improvement that could be made is in terms of keeping the documentation updated. Some of the online documentation is outdated. Because things are always changing, it is understandable that information becomes outdated pretty quickly, but sometimes, when you want to go use something, deploy something, or troubleshoot something, the documentation says, "Do this," but what it says to do no longer exists.

I have been using UiPath for a little over four years.

Its stability has been really good, especially lately. It has always been relatively stable, but as they've added things, it still seems to be pretty stable.

Its scalability is pretty good. Orchestrator is able to handle whatever you're throwing into it. If you need to add a bunch of processes or jobs, it's pretty easy to do. The only thing that would slow that down is if you need new servers or something from IT. So, from the UiPath side, it's pretty easy, but there are other variables.

They're pretty helpful. If you submit a ticket, somebody reaches out to you pretty fast, but usually, I'm able to just reach out to our account managers and get help within a few minutes. I'd give them high remarks. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

UiPath was pretty involved with it. So, it was pretty straightforward. We're about to move to UiPath Cloud though, and our account managers are pretty involved in that, but it has been pretty turnkey and straightforward.

Our implementation strategy was to get a platform that works and start building things. I'm not sure of the overall strategy. Some of the decisions were made before I got here.

We worked pretty closely with UiPath. They've been great and pretty helpful. 

We have definitely seen an ROI. I don't know any of the specific metrics per se, but I know the values out there. We're just getting hammered with use cases everywhere. We did something literally last week that took us three days to deploy, and it saved a team 100 hours of work.

I came to the company as they were just starting to use UiPath. I don't think they evaluated other options.

My advice to others evaluating the solution would be to compare what UiPath is doing to all its competitors, and none of the competitors would scratch the surface of what the offerings are.

I'd give it a 10 out of 10. I liked UiPath so much that I went to get a job strictly in RPA. That wasn't directly UiPath, but before I started where I am now, I was working with UiPath just a little bit, and then I was like, "I want to pursue that for long."

We're a consultancy and I am the strategic architect. I have implemented the product at 25 different client locations spanning multiple industries. Their RPA requirements range from pretty standard, bread-and-butter workflows that navigate an application and follow some business rules, to more sophisticated ones that are integrating Document Understanding and a little bit of chatbot.

I have deployed it on multiple application stacks, including out-of-the-box SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and some specialty, third-party products like DNA, Encompass, LendingQB, and others.

We have helped companies reshape their resources. That's a part of the benefits. They want to put automation in place because they want to change their headcount and not have to do those rote, mundane business processes.

We have been able to show enhancements in resourcing. A very good example is that we built a process for a client who had to spend three or four days a month doing a really lousy process involving 3,000 payment transactions, every month. The robot is able to execute that workflow in a half day, so we freed up two and a half to three and a half days where he does not have to do it. To him, this was a huge lifesaver.

It has also reduced human error, for sure. That's a positive selling point. When we build workflows for our customers we include business reports and audit logs. We typically add a status flag for a record so that every record that is transacted has traceability through the audit log. We also have a status report, and that shows how many records the workflow executed, how many were successful, and how many failed. We see a range where between 65 and 90 percent of the records go straight through. That means all the business rules were met and the process was completed for those records. That shows that they're identifying a much smaller subset of errors and that they can rely on the robot to successfully complete the end-to-end transaction. And whatever is leftover requires human touch.

That changes the dynamic in operations. They don't have to concentrate on every single record, but only somewhere between 10 and 35 percent of all records may have to be handled manually. It shows them which ones had errors, the ones that did not meet the business rules, and they know which ones to concentrate on. That's a feedback loop that helps them decide if they need to add a business rule or change a business rule to get to a higher percentage of throughput.

In terms of employee time, I have documented situations where clients might have had 10 people working on half a dozen business processes. We've implemented IPA—intelligent process automation—and then they only need three or four people, so they can redeploy those other folks to other places. It saves them money because they don't have the FTE costs they had before for those processes.

From a development point of view, the Studio tool as the basis of componentized architecture has been a really critical part. You get out-of-the-box, componentized architecture to jumpstart or accelerate development and that's a very key feature. 

When talking about deployment, you have a very robust infrastructure to manage your automations, the robots, and how they can be configured, deployed, executed, monitored, and maintained. 

When it comes to process discovery, it has excellent front-end tools and capabilities vis-à-vis Task Capture and Automation Hub. 

And at the back end, the notion of botting sites to monitor and manage your robotic infrastructure and reporting on it is pretty great. These are all pretty good tools.

The ease of use is because of the UI's capabilities. The fact that it has a .NET Framework, from a developer's point of view, makes it a very easy product to jumpstart into. But what is key is the ability to do really fine development activities. You really can get to a nuanced level of development for complicated and robust workflows. The tools are definitely well constructed to allow you that kind of flexibility. 

A really good example would be if you are doing something with OCR to read a PDF. You can vary the OCR engines and test them out to determine which OCR engine will give you the best results. That's pretty good because you do get into situations where one engine may work better than another.

We can also implement end-to-end automation and that is critically important. We always strive for what I call "straight-through" processing, where we're trying to handle all the use cases based on business rules. We're not always successful, but that's not a bad thing. If we can take 60 percent of your processes and automate them with straight-through processing, where everything works, your exceptions are a much smaller work set. That has had a significant impact on clients. For one of my clients, where we have worked very hard, they have better than 90 percent "throughput," meaning that 90 percent of their transactions go completely through the automated workflows. The client has been incredibly pleased with that.

We also use the UiPath Academy all the time, in two ways. Internally, we avail ourselves of all the courses. It's especially important to understand new updates and releases. It's a great place to go to understand what those new features are. That is of real value. 

But the Academy is also a good starting point when I want my engineers to be certified. They can jumpstart that process by going to the Academy and making sure they know how the product works. They follow through on that program and complete the training. Once they finish that, we try to get a project or two under their belts, and then have them take the certification exams.

One of the chief problems in all of our implementations is "application sensitivity." If an automation involves a webpage or Outlook, every item on that screen—the menu bar, the actual document, an attachment, a field—has a selector so that workflow can work correctly. UiPath does a very good job, whether for legacy systems or newer systems, of using selectors so that you can build applications that have discrete functionality. 

But what happens when a selector breaks? That means that something has changed in the application. This is especially true with SaaS or third-party applications. They make one change to a field and the selector breaks and that means it has to be touched and fixed. 

UiPath could do a better job of enveloping selectors to make them less fragile. There are techniques that can be used to achieve that, even without a system-related improvement, but they are not out-of-the-box. That is the one area that is the biggest pain point. It happens all the time.

They should reduce selector sensitivity and improve remediation when one does break. 

I don't know how they would do it, but if the change that caused the break were a relatively minor thing, they should somehow have it automatically recalibrated. I'm sure it's a tough problem, but clients complain to me about that all the time. I have to explain to them, "Well, the application changed." They'll say, "Well, we're looking at it, we don't see anything." It's often true that you can't see it, but the selector underneath broke and that means something was done but, visually, an end user would not see it if it was a minor change. So I'd like UiPath to find a way to "desensitize" selectors.

I have been using UiPath for four years.

It is very stable. There are no questions about that.

There are absolutely no issues with scalability. We're using this with multiple clients.

The new robot polling is very helpful. We are using it effectively for clients and that technical capability is a great enhancement. The modern folder profile gets us there as well. 

We're very pleased with the cloud-enabled product sets. I push that with as many clients as I can because it's the easiest to implement. On the cloud side, there were issues at one point with their licensing management, but that has finally been smoothed out and that makes life easier. If you want to add another product, as long as it gets licensed, boom, it's there. I don't have to think about it. Overall, the scalability is great.

The environments that we work in are client-driven, but they can have multiple locations and geographies. We have a couple of clients where the implementation is in the US but it is supporting Europe. And we now have a client that needs to be supported in South America. We are cloud-enabled for them and the product works great. And while it has nothing to do with UiPath, there are some latency issues over the network, so we may have to rethink how we deploy in different hemispheres. But we know that UiPath tech can support that.

We will lean on their technical support when we have exhausted our capabilities. Most of our issues have been in the Document Understanding sphere, especially in custom model development, although sometimes there have been issues with it in out-of-the-box systems. For all of my IPA projects that include Document Understanding, I try to convince the customer to buy Premium Support, because regular support could take two to three days to finally get to the right answer. With Premium Support, I'll get it in a day or a day and a half, and that can make a big difference.

I rate their support at seven out of 10 because the initial triaging takes the longest time, and that's one of the greatest concerns for me. If you have regular support, as part of the triage process they will tell you to look at frequently asked questions, but of course, we've already done that. Overall, the FAQs are one of the weak points in the fabric of available resources. We're putting in a support ticket because we haven't found what we need. That level of support is very generic and you really have to knock hard on their door hard and say, "We've done that already. We haven't found our answer. We need to talk to an engineer." Level-one support is usually too junior, but when we get to the next level, we finally start to get better answers. Level two is good, but level one and that triaging can be painful.

We rely on the partner network, and UiPath has been an excellent partner. We do use the community as a reference point, but we don't get a lot of value from using the FAQs.

On the flip side, I have used the Community editions of all the products. That's a big plus, especially when a client doesn't want to put any money into it upfront because they're very nervous. We use the Community edition to prove the point. In that respect, the Community edition and the forums do become helpful.

Neutral

I started with Automation Anywhere in a previous job. I like both products. Both it and UiPath are excellent. Going with UiPath really had nothing to do with a problem with Automation Anywhere. When I came to my current company, they had already decided to go with UiPath. They had done a few projects with UiPath and that set the tone going forward.

As a consultant in a global practice, I do have a couple of Automation Anywhere projects going on. I also have a project that is using Power Automate. 

Our preferred IPA solution is UiPath, but clients drive that decision. I had one client who said, out of the gate, "No. We're using Automation Anywhere. No questions asked." And I said, "Alright. It's a good product." 

But as a company, we lean toward UiPath as a starting point and they've been an excellent partner, and I say that wholeheartedly.

Deploying the solution is straightforward. It involves a low level of complexity and less effort.

I have a separate DevOps team that actually does the build-out of the environment. They're separate from the developer team. DevOps does the implementation. They'll talk to the client's IT department directly and work on all the details of setting up the infrastructure and they'll get it ready for us. Then the developers take over.

We do lean on UiPath support in some niche issues areas, but for the most part, my engineers are pretty well qualified.

In terms of the solution's AI functionality, such as Document Understanding and chatbots, we no longer advertise ourselves as doing RPA. We advertise ourselves as an IPA shop—intelligent process automation. The focal point of that is Document Understanding and the DRUID AI Chatbot capabilities. We're getting an awful lot of Document Understanding projects and we use our sandbox to pump our clients' data into the Document Understanding frameworks and intelligent form factors to prove that the solution works. We really want to go for the bigger ticket items that require Document Understanding.

When dealing with Document Understanding, we are introducing a new capability to the client. We train them on how to use the tool. That is a definite change in the client's skill sets and it does pay for itself in the long run. There is a delicate balance. The investment cost is always the tricky part, but once clients start seeing their data coming through automatically, the light bulb comes on.

Since UiPath became a publicly traded company, the flexibility and variability on pricing have really gone down a lot. It's tougher to get a better deal out of them. I'm not saying it can't happen, but as a publicly traded company, they're not the same company that they were when they were private and first growing. It's understandable. They have stockholders to answer to.

The top vendors are

1. UiPath
2. Automation Anywhere
3. Blue Prism (which we don't do a lot of work in)
4. Power Automate, only because it's Microsoft.

I encourage people to look at the review and evaluation sites to help them start getting an idea of what is available. Then I say, "Here is some actual work we've done with UiPath. This is our actual experience. Check the marketplace data that's out there," because there's a lot of information they can avail themselves of. That way, they can be satisfied that what our company is recommending is valid.

I may point out some of the key questions for them to look into. If they're trying to scale, what are the business problems they're trying to solve? If they're thinking about a Document Understanding requirement, they should compare what's going out there with other intelligent document processing capabilities and take it from there.

As a partner, what has been helpful is that UiPath offers a not-for-resale (NFR) license. These are fully loaded licenses and ours is cloud-enabled. We're using them for PoCs very effectively. There is a lot of great value in them. I have a couple of projects now where we've asked clients to send us their sample data, their documents. We have our sandbox ready and I have one or two developers knock that process out with a turnaround of one or two days. We can bring it back to the client and say, "Here's your data and this is what we were able to do with it." That is very effective.

I really appreciate the way the product has been architected. It's a robust product set. We have built custom models with the UiPath toolset. We've had several use cases where we had to do so because there was no out-of-the-box solution, and the tools are great.

The AI functionality has enabled us to automate more processes overall. They are the more difficult projects to do because Document Understanding is not a pure, out-of-the-box solution. There is work involved in it but we've been successful at it. Once we get the models well-trained, the client starts to really see real value. They're seeing the straight-through processing that they're trying to achieve.

The client I mentioned earlier, the one with the 90 percent "throughput," is an example. That automation is the result of custom models. We worked hard on that and we were very successful. The client has been very happy.

Overall, the way I would rate UiPath depends on the support level I have to use. If it's Standard Support, it's a five or six out of 10. If I have Premium Support, it's a seven or eight.