UiPath Reviews

My use cases are as a QA engineer. I mainly test automations that have already been built. I'm not part of the development side. We started small and some of the business processes we have used it for include onboarding, document processing, and payer processing. Our company is involved with healthcare and we're trying to grow the help we can give our healthcare workers.

We've gone through a lot of leadership and backend changes recently. UiPath has enabled us to provide quick turnarounds, as opposed to having to do full-stack development to do end-to-end automation. It's given us quick ROI with quick wins.

In terms of using automation for a good cause, we are primarily a primary-care-physician company. We are helping less fortunate elderly people. We provide a lot of insurance benefits, so our work is mainly helping healthcare to be less expensive. Automation is allowing us to go through hyper-growth. It gives us the opportunity to get more seniors into our centers and have that affordable, great health service that we provide.

So far, we've only focused on UiPath Studio and the Orchestrator piece. It's been great and we are looking to expand it to the digital assistant platform soon.

The UiPath community has been great. There are a lot of great mentorships, a lot of forums, and a lot of people who are very interested in growing the community. It's been very nice to work with them. Anybody who is in UiPath has been an amazing partner for us.

We have also used UiPath's Academy courses and we have two members who are now UiPath Certified. It's a very easy training course to follow. It's low code and comes with a lot of resources and a lot of forum assistance. It enables people to learn without feeling the pressure of having to figure it out on their own.

My company has been involved with UiPath for over three years. I switched to the team that is using it about a year and a half ago.

As the platform grows, it's becoming a one-stop solution, but it also becomes difficult to integrate with your pre-existing IT solutions. It kind of lives in its own little bubble. Within that bubble, it has been self-sufficient and very reliable. We don't have issues with the bubble. It's a matter of integrating it with the rest of what we already use and are accustomed to.

We have it on-premises, but we know that we can grow our servers, and the Orchestrator has been amazing. So scalability is not an issue for us yet. But if we get into more hyper-growth, we might have to move onto the cloud. We've seen a lot of support for that, so I don't think there's going to be a concern.

I haven't had to reach out to their technical support or work with them. But during the research that I needed to do, looking at the forums was great. The website, the documentation, and the forums have been super easy to use.

Positive

We already have positive ROI. We're in hyper-growth and management wants to see hyper-growth ROI as well. It's meeting that expectation now.

We mainly look at how many hours it takes to do a manual process, and how many transactions there are in that process. If it's something that is going to require us to continually hire people to do it, so that we can keep growing, it becomes one of our main targets for automation.

An area for improvement comes down to licensing. We need to sell UiPath to our company first and the biggest hurdle is: How do we convince the company that this is going to add more value? We see a lot of potential for adding more technology to what we do, but it comes with the price of adding new licenses and seeing if that's going to add value to the company.

If we could have more of a trial period, since we're already licensed with Studio, and go through a trial period for key applications to see if they can benefit us, that would be helpful.

The pricing is more of a topic for our C-level and there is a little bit of pushback on the pricing. I think the pricing is fair, based on the ROI that we have already provided with some quick wins. But when it comes to moving into the other applications, that's where there is some pushback. That's where the concern comes in.

Definitely look at it, not just as a tool but as a change to your company. Your company has to be willing to adopt automation and not just for solving one problem. It needs to be, "We want to fix business solutions overall."

It's a 10 out of 10 because of how easy it is to adapt and grow into it. The challenge is due to the fact that I am at a low level in the QA world. Pitching it to the C-level has been the only kind of pushback I've had. But personally, my own experience working with the application is that it has been one of my favorite technologies to work with so far.

It's widely used across the bank. Some are dealing with regulatory issues, for example, taking documents out of one system, moving them into another. Others are opening new accounts for clients. Some are doing payment transactions and that involves looking at emails that come in and determining what type of document that is so it gets routed and processed correctly. We've touched every line of business within the bank.

The solution has improved our organization, specifically around all the operational aspects of the bot. Once we deploy them through the orchestrator we use insights to see how the bots are performing, what errors are referring to, and just the general health insights would be the biggest lift that we've gotten out of the solution. Building the automation is a little bit easier and quicker on the platform than where we were before.

The RPA is the most valuable aspect of the solution.

We are really getting into using AI Center and we use Insights.

The solution saved costs for our organization. That said, I can't quantify it.

UiPath has reduced human error.

In the initial automation that we're doing, we're migrating the ones that have run on another platform. Therefore, we already know how valuable they are to the bank. Sometime in 2022, we'll really be getting into new opportunities.

UiPath has freed up employee time. In my specific job, I’m responsible for the running of the platform, making sure it's up and available. The other teams actually take care of the delivery and are more in tune with the business side and can speak more to the freeing of time in quantitative terms. I’m a degree away from that. I'm aware of what's going on over there, however, I don't track it so closely.

We’ve used the UiPath Academy courses. The Academy is a really good platform to start training on. It really gets you into the platform and allows you to start exploring other things. Generally, they're really good courses.

The number of courses and the variety of the topics all seem to touch on whatever aspect you're looking to do with the platform.

With all the different tools that they have in their arsenal, sometimes it's hard to know how we can get the most out of them. We see it as a kid going into a candy store. There are all sorts of choices. However, we don't necessarily understand, you would take this, but not that? You seem to need to mix and match certain things. We don't necessarily understand that. We need them to be more clear in saying, for example, "if you want to do process mining, great, however, these are its strengths and these are its limitations." If we know the pros and cons, then we can make a decision about what we need to adjust in terms of how we go after new opportunities. Basically, we are seeking better guidance on how to use the suite of the products together.

I've been using the solution for a year. 

The solution is very stable. 

The scalability is good. 

We have a team collectively between developers and product owners and general users, so the users are comprised of roughly 100 different people. At different points, our in-orchestrator has 30 or so developers across several teams. In general, in terms of human people using it, it's likely 80 to 100 users or somewhere in there.

We are looking to increase the usage.

Technical support is okay. They have some gaps that they need to close. I know some of their folks from firsthand experience aren't necessarily used to using the new modern folders. Therefore, when we get on the phone and say "Hey, we're having this problem". The support staff will say "Oh, well you're a modern folder set up. I mostly work with classic." That doesn't matter from my perspective. I still need help.

We used to use Blue Prism. Blue Prism only does RPA. Our goal was to consolidate, to have one platform for automation as a long-term solution for the bank. We went through a selection process and UiPath came out on top.

I wasn't directly part of the setup team, however, from the outside looking in, it seems it was a little more involved than we had initially thought.

Some of it may have been internal. Bank processes and having to have so many different people involved to install a server and configure it on the network and all that could have added difficulty.

The deployment was probably close to three or four months. We have four environments. Over the course of about three months, all four environments eventually got stood up. The first took the longest. We noted what went right and wrong and went from there. 

We probably have seen an ROI, based on the initial cost to stand it up. That pricing structure is increasing now from the initial offering, however, overall, we're probably seeing some benefit out of it.

The pricing is pretty fair for the size per the number of licenses. It's my understanding that part of that was influenced by the fact that they won their business from one of their competitors, Blue Prism. That probably helped.

We looked at Automation Anywhere. They had recently upgraded from their desktop to a web-based client. In the meantime, they dropped functions in the conversion and when I used it on the desktop, I noticed that there were certain functions that they didn't bring over onto the web version yet, which kind of surprised me. As far as just overall usability, integration with other technologies, whether it's Python or writing .net custom code, UiPath just kind of seamlessly works within the platform.

We are not yet utilizing AI.

I'd advise potential new users to do the due diligence and don't expect that UiPath is going to always outline the best ways to use it. A company just has to understand there's a lot there and try to be as specific in what they want to do. 

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the solution at a nine.

We're in the financial services industry, so we target the operations. We use it in finance but we're also going after our wealth management group, capital markets group, and fixed income capital markets group.

In one year we've done 17 automations in about 3,500 hours. We're just getting started. 

We use mostly unattended automation, but we do have both.

It's still early for us so we're selecting specific areas and items to automate based on areas that we believe will provide strategic importance for us.

We're now going to start expanding that and going after some of the larger jobs that we want to try to tackle, now that we've got some experience under our belt.

We have saved costs in terms of employee hours saved. There are definitely going to be costs associated with that. Some of those are pretty high net worth individuals that UiPath is doing tasks that they just didn't need to do.

It's definitely saving time for employees. One of our most successful automations frees them up from doing an entire task. Their quality of life has had a big improvement. It also happens to save a lot of hours. It saves a little over 2,000 hours annually.

We are still learning how to build automations but I'm a fan of the RA framework. We use StudioX to help with citizen developers to help fill our pipeline. The tools are pretty good and evolving.

The ability to bridge various applications that users are using is the most valuable feature. If we have a process that's entered in multiple locations, we can send a robot to do one of those processes on behalf of the person. We've had good success there.

Everybody on the team goes through Academy courses and continues to go back there for continuing education. Citizen developers are directed in that location as well. So we try to get them to complete StudioX. We like its ability to extend the life and the usability of some applications that by themselves can be a little cumbersome to use. I would like to make those apps and those experiences better for the user. And actually do more with them by extending parts through APIs that are passed to other applications.

We're looking to start to modify the meat of the process and then tag on pieces to the beginning and ends. 

Insights is a little clumsy. StudioX is a great start but needs more functionality. They should bring the document understanding into StudioX and make it go a little bit further. There's a pretty clear point at which you really need to switch over to Studio, but in the case of some of our citizen developers, they'd like to stay in StudioX. They just need more features. 

We have been using UiPath for a year. 

It's been very stable. The only problem we had were some digital certificates and those aren't UiPath's fault. It's partly our fault and how we manage them. One of those got in the way and shut some stuff down. It's not really the UiPath platform. That really hasn't gone down on us at all. It was the certificates. 

We're only at 17 automations now. We have a lot of headroom in the bots that we currently own and the licensing that we have. We're getting ready to put the necessary pieces in place so that we can scale it up.

The technical advisor is very good. 

Positive

 We have plenty of solutions that fall in the surrounding area, like various CTL things, automated software, and the types of things that are primarily used by IT.

We had a strategic partner help us with the setup because we knew nothing about it. They helped set up our COE and the basic frameworks that we were going to be using within IT. I came in about four or five months into the project as an analyst so I wasn't there when they did it. 

The strategic partner we used was very good.  They got us up and running and got our initial test trial into play.

The setup process was not straightforward. They purposely gave them some things that were a bit of a challenge. 

We are happy with what we got as a result.

The first deployment took quite a while. If you're considering standing up a whole COE in all those environments, they did that fairly quickly. I believe it was in about three months. It has then continued to evolve from there. That was the learning experience. If you look at our development, that first automation, there's a long flat line. Then it started to ramp up pretty significantly in the back half of the year.

Pricing is working for what we have right now. We set up two Orchestrator environments and we're unable to use our single license of the analytics on both. That's a bit of a problem. We'd like to see a dev environment for us that is free of licensing. It's development versus production. Charge us for production, don't charge us for dev. That's about the only complaint I would have.

Don't be afraid to jump in. Get the IT department involved early, get the security department at the table. As long as you have top-down management that's there to mandate and make sure everybody does what they should be doing, the proper sponsorship, and the proper buy-in from the people that have to execute.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. 

We have automated tasks within our organization and are automating our marketing applications. Internally, we have automated in-person and webinar event creation for Microsoft. Whenever there is a request for creating an event that is covered on, for example, either on Jira or the Dynamics 365 application, the task makes an API and pulls data from both sources. It then creates an event on Marketo. It runs totally unattended. We have actually saved the build time that was previously around 45 minutes and we have reduced it to just four minutes.

Previously, we had a build time of around 45 minutes just to process one request. This was kind of a disaster because even in 45 minutes of build time, and this is the average build time, people were making mistakes. When these errors happened, the company had to actually pay money to the client. For example, if a company has an event at 3:00 PM on September 1st, and due to time zone issues, someone manually wrote \ 4:00 PM then people would arrive at 4:00 PM, whereas the event had started at 3:00 PM. Mistakes like that could become a very, very big issue.

Using UiPath, we were able to reduce these kinds of errors. We were also able to reduce the time by more than 90%, just by deploying the bot that could do API calls in order to complete a specific point of data gathering.

For the portion that we automated, the errors that were happening were reduced to 0% and the efficiency was up to 90%.

We've found the usability of Studio very easy. It's simple to understand everything. It's very simple to just start developing within UiPath. 

The Orchestrator is fantastic in terms of usability as all you have to do is just need to deploy your bot there. It gives you several options of how to schedule it, how to monitor it, and it also gives you the dashboard that allows you to see the performance of your bot.

I really like the fact that we have a cloud model, where we can actually go ahead and use their cloud to run our bot. That is a very good kind of feature. 

I really like AI fabric and the documented understanding model, as that actually allows us to do a couple of very complex POCs. They went very well and right now, those prefaces are currently in the pipeline. Hopefully, they will get started with them next month.

The ease of building automation using UiPath is very easy. When it comes to comparing it against other tools, UiPath might be the easiest one. It's totally subjective, of course. That said, there are scenarios where automating certain kinds of scenarios with UiPath is not that easy. Overall, it's pretty good at automating all kinds of stuff.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. End-to-end coverage is very important. While working with clients like Microsoft and Google, we have to actually go ahead and make sure that you're actually providing all of these kinds of services. With services such as documentation you also need to be on top of the latest market trends. UiPath actually provides us with not only the ability to handle all of this but to also document all of these kinds of things. That is available, either as a part of some other products or is embedded within the Studio itself as a part of an extension. That is something that I really like as that actually reduces the time that I invest in the creation of the documents. That, and the client actually requires all of these documents before even we can go ahead with the contract, makes having them on hand so important. 

The Automation cloud has helped decrease time to value. Earlier, the deployment of an on-prem Orchestrator took around two to three days for proper configuration and for making sure that there's a disaster recovery mechanism. Automation cloud has everything built already within it, which makes things faster and easier. This reduces the amount of time that is required by us to deliver. Within our area of work, within marketing, time is everything. Once you have taken on the project, the client expects you to deliver it as soon as possible. The requirements that you're getting from the client are very, very time-sensitive. If you're essentially not delivering it on time, that is going to be an issue. Automation Cloud actually helps us to do that without thinking about other things. It actually goes ahead and does a couple of things for us that we don't have to worry about, such as deploying the Orchestrator on the cloud, making sure that everything is properly set up, and making sure that the disaster recovery option is there. These kinds of things actually save us days of time for installation, if not days of debugging time. 

It's very important for our company to scale up automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure. There are a couple of projects that we have where we don't really care about the infrastructure. If it is handled by UiPath, it's absolutely fine. However, for example, in the case of some of our elite clients, what happens is that they actually need to know the details and how data is being propagated amongst different servers. If we're not controlling the environment, if we're not handling the entire knowledge, we won't be able to give them the same thing and the project might go away just because of this fact. Therefore, I'm not saying it's not very important. It's actually very, very important. That's why we use both services that are provided by UiPath - both on-prem and cloud. That said, if we have projects where we don't need to worry about it, it's nice to have the option not to.

UiPath has helped us minimize our on-premise footprint. Their customer service has actually helped us reduce that. UiPath was released in 2015. There are experts on this particular thing in the market, and most of those experts are found via UiPath only. When help is provided by UiPath themselves, that can actually resolve the issue in a matter of hours rather than days.

We use attended automation. We usually use attended automation within the HR department. Basically, we're using it for onboarding, for monthly salary management. It's great for automating some of the basic SAP projects as these are the places where we require human interaction, either to handle the credential part or to provide some inputs. This actually helps bring confidence into the process and also phases out the work of a particular human. Automation has integrated with some human day-to-day jobs so well that now when employees come in, the primary thing that they have to do is just to trigger the bot and start providing input. Work that they used to do for the first half of the day, is completed in the first hour of the day. That's the kind of benefit that is being provided by attended automation.

There is good AI functionality and we use it for some proof of concept projects. That said, we haven't yet used it for more complex or involved automation or processes just yet. We have one project in the pipeline that we have to start working on this month. 

We use UiPath Apps. We use UiPath Apps as a form. Essentially, we have created UiPath Apps in such a way that helps HR people to onboard individuals. For example, whenever someone has to get onboarded, they have to actually provide some details in terms of who they are, their previous company, and some other basic details. Also, HR will need to provide some extra details, in terms of who will be the individual's manager, et cetera. Finally, IT has to assign some kind of role. What we have actually done, is we have created an app where a user or a new individual has to actually provide all the information. Then, HR just needs to select the particular role. Everything is pre-configured. We automatically assign specific roles. In terms of IT, we can now automatically assign specific resources such as laptops, monitors, or headsets to that particular person. Since everything is automated, within a couple of minutes of registration the person receives his new ID password and details. Instead of waiting for an entire day, it happens in just a matter of one or two minutes.

UiPath Apps has increased the number of automation we can create while reducing the time it takes to create them. Earlier, we used to create automation, in terms of forms. Those automations were types of attended automation. A person had to have specific access to that particular computer before doing this kind of work. In this scenario, the issue we had was that every time it was not possible to handle manual steps if we were onboarding ten people at a time. Everyone had to wait for their turn and that was not very efficient. What we have done is we have actually deployed UiPath Apps whose links can actually get loaded onto an individual's mobile. One just needs to open it on their mobile and get started. That's it. Everything executes parallelly. We have also made our system scalable so that multiple VMs can learn the process at the same time.

UiPath speeds up and reduces the cost of digital transformation. Doing so does not require expensive or complex application upgrades or IT support.

We have found that UiPath has reduced human error. We were getting some human errors related to time zone issues and some of the other issues such as daylight savings. There were several other issues related to accidental typing or of people not focusing properly, even after several integrations. That's part of the reason we went ahead and automated processes. Obviously, a bot only follows what you have programmed it, what you have programmed within it. The errors are literally reduced to zero within that specific section.

UiPath has freed up employee time. We have actually retrained the freed-up employees into UiPath to act as support engineers. As a rough guess, I would say that we have saved around 120 hours a week just by deploying UiPath.

The additional time enabled employees to focus on more essential work. For people who were actually acting as build personnel, we have re-deployed them as a person who actually interacts directly with clients or who does QA work. This is a higher position that comes with a higher salary as well. There have been promotions simply due to implementing UiPath.

Employees are pretty happy. Initially, everyone was scared that they might lose their jobs. However, but adopting UiPath methods and retraining people, some are even getting promoted and we find that they are actually encouraging automation processes so that new work can come in and the remaining people could also get on better.

The product has reduced the cost of our automation operations. In terms of marketing operations, for example, it has reduced the cost. Along with the help of similar investments, we need fewer people and more bots currently. That's definitely a big thing for us. We had a cost reduction of approximately 20% in our operations. This is just a ballpark. That said, overall, UiPath has saved our organization a lot of costs. I cannot speak to exact savings, as that requires business knowledge, which I do not have complete access to. 

The AI Center area could definitely improve. The StudioX model could also improve just a little bit so that the introduction of variables is better and would make it possible to pass on a similar kind of data in between multiple activities. This is a very simple concept, however, this kind of feature is not available within UiPath. 

From the business perspective, a little bit more insight on the dashboard that is currently available in Orchestrator would be ideal. I agree with UiPath having a dedicated tool for insights, however, right now, it's a paid tool. 

If I can get a little bit more data and a little bit more customization on Orchestrator, that would be really great.

I've been using UiPath for three years and eight months. I've used it for the same amount of time the company has used it.

The product is quite stable now. There are certainly some places where UiPath has to work, specifically in terms of actual stability, where there are still some unknown errors that are coming in. 

In terms of Orchestrator, I have noticed there are some places where there are glitches. Things are not very clear at first as everything is changing quite quickly, I'll say that. Even in the enterprise version, everyone wants to be on the very latest version. However, there is a drastic change between the versions themselves.

For example, 2019, 2020, and 2021 versions, all three are drastically different amongst themselves. This kind of change is definitely good for the provider in that they are doing something better. However, as a consumer, I don't really want to go ahead and go through an entire learning curve all over again along with handling my current job of handling all the work, just so that I can cope up with what changes the product team has made. It should not be necessary to go through this level of adjustment for each and every release. At this point, I have been through three to four migrations and in each migration, I have gone through some kind of a learning curve.

Automation Cloud actually helps us to rapidly scale up. We don't have to invest time now in configuring Orchestrator, or the cloud version of UiPath. All we have to do is we just need to basically request for a particular package and, maybe, either with the help of a package or with the help of the UiPath team, it is pre-configured for us. That way, we just need to utilize it. Therefore, scaling is simple.

The scalability is great. It has actually allowed us to schedule the bots or maintain the bots in multiple VMs without having any worries about how to utilize licenses, or how to actually go ahead and deploy the bots manually or install the bots manually on certain VMs. Everything is automated within the UiPath environment.

If we talk about attended users, right now, we have more than 10 people using attended bots. Their roles are essentially from the recruitment team, from HR. Some of the marketing staff are also using it in analyst positions. 

We definitely plan to increase usage and we're using UiPath pretty extensively. We have a couple of projects in the pipeline and currently, we're also working on some of the more complex projects within the team.

All the projects are having a specific date of delivery. Everything is running parallel as we also follow an Agile method. In this Agile method, if something is stuck, it will eventually impact the date of delivery. And we really don't want that. UiPath actually helps us a lot by providing 24-hour support and it helps us in setting a lot of the items we need to use. They do it quite easily and quickly.

On the scale of one to ten, it's definitely a ten. Whenever I have a doubt, they are always there. They even offer to get on a call with them and actually go ahead and resolve the issue themselves, if they know how to do it. 

Many times, there have been scenarios where the issue was unique to us. They actually presented us with some debugging steps that we can do on our end. Most of the time, those debugging steps actually helped us to resolve the issue. When none of these options work, they were very keen to figure out how they could actually improve the experience and what could be implemented by the developers within those specific parts of the product in order to resolve the issue. We have given them feedback in the past and in a couple of future versions, we were able to see those ideas implemented.

We were using AutoHotkey before this product, as well as Selenium. However, after implementing UiPath, we have not used anything along with it.

The initial setup was straightforward. The installation of the Studio was quite straightforward. We just had to go through all the legal terms and everything. Once we went through those, we just had to install it. The same thing is true for Orchestrator as the on-prem installation of Orchestrator is pretty straightforward. You just have to get the setup, link it with the skilled server, and then install it. 

Apart from that, the configuration within Orchestrator was very simple as there is only one file that allows us to log on to everything. It made it pretty obvious.

The deployment took somewhere around two days for the entire setup. 

In terms of the implementation strategy, firstly, we decided to set up all the databases and all the dashboard-related services such as Power BI. We decided to do this first due to the fact that the dashboards and databases are the base of any application. 

We decided to implement it first in Azure. On the same day, we decided to get the cloud version of the Orchestrator as well. It was quite easy in terms of Azure. There's a three-way plugin that is available there. We just had to install that on the specific VM and we were done. Finally, on the second day, we went ahead and installed all of the Studio. Once Orchestrator is up, we could install Studios and link them to Orchestrator in order to get the license. That was our strategy and our approach.

We essentially have one dedicated resource for maintaining all the deployments and to watch if anything goes wrong. We have three dedicated resources for maintaining all the bots that are currently running as well. We don't need a big team to maintain everything. 

In one of our projects, we actually used Azure Cloud for the deployment of Orchestrator and the deployment of packages. The experience is quite good. Azure provides the DevOps side of our service that allows us to set up the pipeline and automatically deploy any kind of project to the Orchestrator as soon as it is committed.

While the company has likely been looking at ROI, I don't directly deal with those details.

A couple of our clients cannot actually go ahead with the initial investment of Orchestrator as it costs quite a lot. The thing is that we don't need that much of a license in order to automate our processes. Having a free version of a cloud or having a cheaper version of Orchestrator has actually helped a lot.

Automation Cloud helps decrease UiPath's total cost of ownership. However, overall, if we talk about scalability, once the number of licenses that I need increases, ultimately, Automation Cloud might be a bit expensive. It depends upon the version you're using. Yet, since the license cost is increasing, what happens is if you go ahead and buy more than five licenses, then essentially you would have been in better shape if you would've actually bought the paid version of Automation Cloud and installed it on-prem. That would've been a cheaper option. It's subjective. Our scenario is just that we need two unattended licenses to do the job.

Some of the clients do consider the initial investment of UiPath to be expensive. It's seen as expensive specifically from the cost of getting a licensing for an on-premises setup. For some projects, UiPath can be overkill. However, it is the best software a company can invest in for automation purposes. 

I cannot speak to the exact cost, as I don't handle licensing directly.

It's paid per year. We get licenses not directly from UiPath. Rather, we get them from a vendor.

There are additional costs as well. For example, the cost of an SQL server is one. We are definitely using the Azure product suite as well. We had to actually invest quite a lot in SQL Server in terms of database management, just to make sure that everything gets logged properly and that the Orchestrator is functioning properly. 

We switched to UiPath after we compared multiple tools. We looked at certain parameters such as the ability to automate marketing tools, the ability to automate quickly, and how user-friendly it was. Out of all these three parameters, UiPath stood on top.

We looked at Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and PEGA.

I specifically have been using the community version of UiPath. The company has been using the enterprise version.

We do use the Automation Cloud offering.

We do not use the SaaS version of the solution. 

I'd advise users to give it a try. I started my career in UiPath and since then I've been loving it. I became a UiPath MVP as I really enjoy working with the product so much.

That automation does not need to be very complex, so you don't need very complex tools to automate any software. Tools like UiPath can do most of your job.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I am a UiPath developer and my role in the company is as an automation developer specialist. I'm working mainly in UiPath Studio, not Studio X, and I also work with Orchestrator. We are using attended automation.

We are automating the processes in our company, for example, in the finance department. One of the ones that are now automated is invoice coding determination, which no longer involves humans. At this time, 80% of our processes are completed by robots. The remaining 20% is approved by humans but I think that this will improve later. 

With respect to the ease of building automations using UiPath, from my experience, when you have a basic knowledge of programming, it is really easy for you to start your journey with the UiPath environment. You can do it without this knowledge but then, you will just need to spend a little more time learning the details.

I really like working in UiPath because the programming allows me to do whatever I want. I can declare any type of variable, I can check the locals, and I can add breakpoints whenever I need to check the states. For me, it's a very professional platform.

I really like that they offer the possibility to work with it from two sides. It can be operated from the full-programming side, as well as from the standpoint where you don't need this knowledge.

UiPath has helped to minimize our on-premises footprint, although I cannot estimate by how much because I am not responsible for that aspect.

UiPath has helped to reduce the cost of our digital transformation because it really speeds up the processes. When we compare the time it takes for a human, with perhaps a one-hour task, and it only takes 30 minutes for the robot to do it, we can see the savings. You just multiply this by the salary and we also see the reduction in cost.

UiPath has definitely reduced the number of issues arising from human error. We can confirm this with 100% certainty because we have compared it to when humans were completing processes on their own. I estimate that the error rate has been reduced by approximately 60%.

In my previous company, we managed to save about 20 FTE after our UiPath implementation. It was about two years of work. Thanks to the ease of access, as well as the fact that our employees did not require programming knowledge, we were able to show it to normal employees and explain the automation. After this, they were not afraid that they will be replaced by robots and instead, understand that they are co-working with them.

The most important part of Studio is the debugging feature. It gives you the ability to watch local variables, as well as highlight elements as it is moving through the process. The results of actions are displayed and indicate whether particular actions are performed successfully or not.

Outside of the company, I am using UiPath's AI functionality and it very much speeds up processes and improves accuracy for reading data. For example, the OCR is much better than Microsoft's solution. With UiPath, I was able to read handwriting samples but with Microsoft, I was unable to do it.

The AI functionality has allowed me to automate more processes in my own projects. It adds flexibility and improves process speed. I don't have to think about boundaries when I decide how to approach a project. 

It lacks something crucial, which is a map of the variables and arguments. When we are using a lot of variables and arguments, sometimes, we get lost. UiPath should create a map that connects different files and shows the connections between them. For example, from file A, we have variable B, and file C contains variable D. However, they are actually the same variable, but it's connected by argument and we don't know it. It is something that we have to remember explicitly. In this case, it would be really helpful for me, as a developer, to have this picture of the net. It would show me what is where and how it's connected to everything.

For the on-premises solution, if we ignore any problems that may occur with the infrastructure, such as the network, then stability is very good and the platform works well.

In my experience with cloud-based deployment, I haven't faced any problems with stability.

Scaling UiPath is really easy. When you get to the point where you have to think about scalability, you use the UiPath Installer to extend the Orchestrator by another node. There is an option for it and you don't have to know much about the network to do it on your own.

I am part of a four-person development team that is working primarily with Studio. We have approximately ten processes at the moment, and it is difficult to estimate how many employees are affected by the automation. 

The technical support is very professional and they work quickly. Usually, we are able to get responses in about two hours. Sometimes, it takes one day, but I have not faced a situation that took longer than two days.

The help from their site is also very professional, and well-described.

Overall, it is really easy to resolve errors.

Prior to UiPath, I used Selenium WebDriver. The problem with this product is that you have to know the Python programming language. You have to know everything inside Python, and there is a lot more typing. In UiPath, you have some clicking, and there is some decent orienting stuff, which you don't have to define. You already have some pieces of code that you can use, and this is a really nice feature.

I have also used Kryon RPA and the problem is that it's based on the OCR. This is something that I would never accept with an RPA tool unless the OCR is fully working. Right now, OCR is not a perfect technology and it causes many issues. UiPath allows us to use selectors, so we are able to track the exact area of the display in the program that we want to access.

The initial setup is quite easy, although we faced a few issues. With the help of the UiPath service desk, we were able to quickly fix our problems. The deployment was completed in a few hours on one machine. This included checking everything to make sure that it was working fine.

We followed the documentation provided by UiPath, as well as their guidelines.

At this time, we are using the on-premises version. In the next few months, we plan to move to the cloud environment, so we are currently planning the transition.

In my previous company, I was responsible for moving to the new version of the UiPath, with the Apollo interface in the Orchestrator. Where I am now, this was already done. So, yeah. I was responsible for this transition. Right now, in this company where I'm working currently, the UiPath setup was already done but I helped with the optimization.

With respect to upgrades, once we knew what had to be done, it took about one hour to complete. Otherwise, there is no maintenance required.

I have calculated ROI for our project and it seems that we will reach our ROI point in approximately two years, which is quite good.

Price-wise, it is not the cheapest one on the market, but it provides the fastest automation and the best training that I have ever seen for RPA, through the UiPath Academy. It's really easy to set up a new developer in this environment. Everything considered, the pricing is very good.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We are currently evaluating Kryon RPA.

My advice for anyone who is implementing UiPath is to always check the documentation before you try to look for answers on the forum. Another good point is that when you have a problem, there are plenty of people in the UiPath community that can help you in a few minutes. This is the perfect solution, in this case.

From the maintenance side, you have to remember to increase your database with the scaling up of the automation because it can really slow down your process.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using UiPath is to always create a backup copy of Orchestrator before you update it. This was a very big lesson for us because we had an issue with the installation. It is also really important to back up the related databases.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use all three of the UiPath components which include: Studio, Roboyo, and Orchestrator. There are a bunch of use cases that we explored for the POC (Proof of Concept) to be sure the product fits with our expectations for automation. For example, one use case is reconciliation processes for insurance group retirement and LOB (Law on Occupational Benefits) plans. We built it, tested it, and now that is one of the primary things we use the product for.

This solution has improved the way our organization functions in several ways. It has helped to eliminate human errors. It already saves 20 hours per month for reconciliation and LOB. It helped clients schedule their transactions before the end of the month. All of that automates tasks and makes financial processing faster in the insurance industry. That works out great for us.

The most valuable features provide solutions for when I am using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology. It easily integrates with Google OCR, Microsoft OCR, and ABBYY OCR. We are using that integration feature to incorporate OCR mostly for reading scans. To interact with Google OCR, Microsoft OCR, or ABBYY OCR, you don't need to implement a separate component but you can just — in a blink of an eye — integrate those peripheral solutions into the UiPath Studio and use them in your automated processes.

If we can integrate other features that are not part of UiPath, it makes it far more useful in automation. In this case, UiPath is not building out an actual OCR component but they are just giving you an option to incorporate the other OCRs. That is very valuable.

In the next release of the solution, I would like to see the ability to grant permission to users at the job level. Some jobs or processes may need to belong to only one person. Right now, I believe we don't have that feature in UiPath and we can't assign a job to a user. We can give permissions on a tenant level, or we can give permissions on the environment level, but not at the job or process level. 

I would like to see the ability in UiPath to be able to assign each job or each process to a particular user and give that user some specific access and privilege. For example, maybe they should only be able to run or stop a particular job or a particular process, but they can not do anything else. That makes a lot of sense because all users may not need to see all the processes in Orchestrator in one instance or have access to administrative features. The same goes for a tenant or even in an environment. If UiPath can make that happen at the user-level or process-level for a robot, that helps a lot to enable customized bots.

On a scale from one to five where five is the best and one the worst, I would rate the stability of the UiPath platform at a four-out-of-five. The stability is a four instead of a five because the stability is not completely dependent on only UiPath. Underlying obligations play a part too. Sometimes when I am writing applications, I'm not up on how to handle every exception. That is not possible because a developer does not know all the scenarios an application can become involved with. In that scenario, the product can lag. But, otherwise, it is really a very good solution that is dependable and stable.

Approximately five people in our organization are involved in our automation program working in the CoE (Center of Excellence). There are four developers and there are 200 users including business users. So, you can say there are around 250 people currently involved in this. I don't think scalability is an issue.

We did have the opportunity to use UiPath Academy RPA training. On a scale from one to five where five is the most beneficial, I would rate the training as a four-out-of-five. It is good for basic understanding. We have usually had UiPath foundation training for all of our developers. Really, I think you can say that we have not put fully utilized it.

Other parts of technical support we have only used very minimally. For example, we have not used premium support or licensed support levels. Sometimes we called customer support on tickets to integrate with mainframe obligations the first time or some more involved issues. But that type of situation was unusual. We have barely used the customer support because most of the information is available in Academy, in the portals, or the user forums. A few times when we left a ticket, it was not even necessary for us to get back to technical support because we resolved the issue on our own.

We knew that we had an opportunity to invest in a new solution when we heard about RPA three years back. UiPath and WorkFusion came to us at the same time and saying, "We have a solution to improve your work processes."

We spent some time evaluating which tool was right for us by doing a study inside our organization to determine how much manual work could be automated. With some analysis, we found out that there is a huge opportunity for implementing this type of RPA solution in AXA (global insurance, not an acronym) as it is a large organization with a lot of repeated processes.

Because there was a lot of manual work, people in our organization had to work for more hours at times to properly complete a job. Sometimes they had to stay overnight and work additional hours on weekends to complete processing on time. To avoid that we requested that operations consider our proposal for automation.

We showed operations where we could automate repeatable and mundane tasks. The response was very positive and they realized we need to implement these solutions to help us to buy some time for employees to properly do their work and reduce labor intensity.

Our previous solution was either no solution at all except for manual labor or some experience we had with one tool called OpenSpan. OpenSpan did not have a proper management console and was difficult to use so it mostly remained unimplemented. When we introduced the potential solution for seriously pursuing RPA to reducing the workload, that is when we started looking at UiPath.

The set up for the product is straightforward. It is seamless. In fact, you just need to know the server where it will reside. There is material available in UiPath guides and the UiPath forum where you can just follow along step-by-step and install your Orchestrator. So it is very straightforward. 

From the time we purchased the UiPath license until we had our first robot in production is not exactly clear. We had developed a POC, which was ready to be put into production and then we bought a license. After we bought the license, we just put it into production and it had already been built.

We did the entire implementation ourselves with some contact with UiPath.

We are not yet really realizing a return on investment as our deployment continues to be in progress. How much money we have saved is what we are hoping to eventually count in the ROI. In terms of the calculations that we started last year, we asked that the KPI (Key Performance Indicator) points look at time-saving and not really the dollar saving. The time saving you can say approximately 20 hours per month, which we have achieved consistently up until now. We have achieved something but we are expecting that to grow a lot.

The solution has also helped to eliminate human errors. I cannot say exactly what that percentage is —  say even 20% or something like that. There are a couple of instances before we automated the reconciliation process last month — before we actually put the bot into production — where people were getting the wrong details by mistake. I would say we have reduced the human error because those situations are being handled by the bot and they will not be repeated now. 

We license the product on a yearly basis and it costs us around $80,000. We are a very large organization. We have unattended bots and there is a pricing structure surrounding that but I'm not involved in the licensing terms.

What made us choose UiPath to automate our processes was evaluating the capabilities of competition and deciding on the best solution for us. We compared UiPath, WorkFusion and other products — and even other types of tools — in terms of infrastructure, setup, how easily it could be scaled, etcetera. UiPath stood out a little as it had the capability to invoke virtual machines automatically without any human intervention. A lot of other tools didn't have that capability at that point. But the time we had to come down to a decision, UiPath had features that were not available in any of the other tools. With other research into the company and product, we saw that UiPath listened to the customers' needs and was often upgrading. Now all the competition has seen them as the leader and they have tried to incorporate features UiPath had already deployed.

That initial difference we saw between UiPath and the other tools we compared was the reason we took this direction. We believed UiPath and we decided that this was our theater for RPA. Now, if we see some enhancements that need to be made in the product, we just communicate to UiPath and we know they will look at the idea and maybe implement it. UiPath has the capability of adding features immediately. They are releasing around 10 or more versions in a year with important new features. 

We do use a virtual environment such as Citrix when it is appropriate and that works out pretty well. The obvious advantage is there is no dependency on a physical machine being available and they are available 24/7 from anywhere. I am actually comfortable developing anything and everything in Citrix via virtual machines.

On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is very easy, I would rate the ease-of-use of the platform as a five. Ease of use is one other thing that I like a lot about UiPath.

Going a step further, on a scale from one to ten, I would rate this product overall as a ten compared to other RPA solutions. In comparison to its nearest competitor — Blue Prism — UiPath is way ahead in terms of providing features, giving customer support, ease of use, ease of access to our personal history, and surely in the development of robots.

Everybody can understand easily what exactly the product is doing and can become familiar with it quickly. With other competitors, there is a huge infrastructure to set up. Some of the products make it so each bot needs a control room. Those products are not centralized, which makes them more confusing to use.

People have to manage on their own how they are going to build all their RPA management solutions. When you are using UiPath, you just get Orchestrator instead of multiple robots and control panels, then you just scale whenever you want.

I definitely recommend UiPath for simplicity and ease-of-use. If somebody was getting an RPA solution, the advice I would give them is to definitely go for it. Setting up RPAs eliminates human error in tasks and lightens workloads for menial jobs. This lets people focus on more innovative work and it can lead to further integration. What I would think is the natural path for UiPath is that it can integrate the AI in the future. Right now, people think that this is already cognitive or AI integrated, but there is a very long way to go in the future for it to become truly like artificial intelligence.

So, what I am saying is I would take it as a first step towards the AI. I would definitely recommend people use it so that in future when AI comes in, you can just grab an AI solution from UiPath and improve your implementations further.

We are using Studio, Orchestrator, and mostly the unattended bots.

Our primary use for this solution is to give time back to the employees.

We do not run our automations in a virtual environment.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a five. It's drag-and-drop, and all of the activities are there.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a four. All of this information there is self-explanatory and it works. 

From the point where we started using the demo version, it was a couple of months until our first robot was ready.

This solution has probably helped to eliminate human errors.

I can definitely say that this solution has saved the organization time. With all of the processes together, we have saved one full-time equivalent person. 

The most valuable feature of this solution is the unattended automation.

This solution is easy to use and it saves you time.

In future releases, we would like to see more drag-and-drop, and more out of the box AI.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a four. We had some issues where we needed to get in contact with the support, and sometimes, UiPath crashes on our servers.

We have about eight people in our automation group.

Most of the time, the technical support for this solution is very good.

One one occasion, it was not very good. We had a problem with a new version. When we updated to 18.2, the robots stopped working after some time. We had a lot of emails that included session logs. I made it quite clear that it was really important because we were in the beginning phase and the robots had to run. In the end, I fixed the problem by downloading the next version, 18.3. When we asked whether the problem was version-specific, they never got back to us, which isn't very good.

We did not use another RPA solution before this one.

From the external consultants, we got the idea that RPA has the possibility to save us time and money, so we decided to do it.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward. Orchestrator is easy to understand. You can connect the virtual machines to it and then run the robots.

In the beginning, we used a consultant from Roboyou to assist us with the process. Our experience with them was good.

We recognize ROI in terms of performance benefits as soon as a process is automated and an employee can do something else that is more meaningful. It is not a benefit listed on a spreadsheet, but the employees are happier.

Our licensing fees for this solution are €68,000 (approximately $75,000 USD) yearly.

Two years ago, we evaluated Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, in addition to UiPath. UiPath was the best overall solution then, and it still is now. It has a big community, and you can download the demo versions to start testing immediately.

This solution saves us time in all areas. We don't keep track of exactly what we have saved in terms of time, but we can say that we have more customer experience. If somebody has a mundane task and wants it automated then we do it.

My solution for anybody researching RPA solutions is to try UiPath. When you want to start, it is easy to register and get going.

This is a good solution and it saves us time, but there is always a path for improvement.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use UiPath across departments, including HR, IT, procurement, and the supply chain. One use case is hiring and other simple HR-related tasks. We also automate complex processes, like using Document Understanding and machine learning to extract vendor contract information and input it into our procurement system. 

Many applications don't have built-in APIs, and some repetitive processes require a lot of staff to perform. We try to identify those processes and automate them. At the end of the day, it's about how quickly a particular process can be implemented, what kind of ROI we can realize, and the speed of completing the process. 

These processes take forever if you're doing it manually. For example, let's take something as simple as hiring. Evaluating a candidate probably takes 30 to 45 minutes to complete all the steps, and large organizations are constantly hiring. Another challenge is the number of staff you have. By automating using robots, you can reduce the number of people you need to hire and complete the work much faster. It also helps resolve turnover. You can run the automation 24/7, and robots don't take vacations, so things happen faster. 

Another benefit is SLA compliance. We have SLAs to meet for data, and we need to complete some tasks within 48 or 72 hours. Automation helps us meet those targets by completing jobs faster. UiPath frees staff to work on other tasks. Just one process that we use for hiring has easily freed two or three people. Now, they're doing tasks that require human intelligence and knowledge. 

Any solution, such as Power Automate, can do traditional RPA functions, but UiPath's Document Understanding sets it apart. The document understanding feature can handle a significant amount of handwritten notes and efficiently extract information. While there is a human-in-the-loop component for validation, it is still faster than manually extracting information.

My biggest problem is that UiPath is growing so fast and adding integration with so many different products that it's hard to keep up. The COEs at various companies and our developers aren't able to keep pace with what's happening. It's a good problem to have. I'm not complaining, but there are so many features and little time for developers to learn and implement them. 

If you need something new like a CICD pipeline or somebody for a test suite or to work with Document Understanding, you can't use our existing staff because they don't have the skills. Now, I need to go out and hire more people. I need to reduce the company's size to save money but also spend more to hire. 

I have used UiPath for about seven years.

We have not encountered any stability issues with UiPath. The cloud-based deployment has been stable, and we have not experienced any unexpected robot shutdowns. Issues tend to arise from other SaaS applications rather than UiPath.

UiPath has been able to scale effectively as our organization grows. Scaling with UiPath has been easy and efficient.

The customer service has always been good. However, it takes longer to reach support now than it did four to five years ago, this can be attributed to their increased customer base.

Positive

At my current organization, we didn't use a different solution before UiPath. However, I have previous experience with Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup was straightforward. Despite using a partner, we managed most of the work in-house due to my previous experience with UiPath.

We worked with a partner for the implementation. Although the partner helped, we managed most of the work ourselves to tailor the solution to our needs.

When you start a program, it takes a while to reach the point where you achieve an ROI. Still, if you're not seeing an ROI with UiPath by the second year, you're doing it wrong. We are doing that right now. 

We've found a lot of processes working across different teams and departments. We spoke to the leads of various COEs and found processes that would realize the highest ROI or SLA compliance. A department might have only one or two procurement processes, but they are sizeable. Automating those will help you achieve an ROI faster.

UiPath isn't cheap, but it's priced competitively with other automation solutions, and it offers more resources.

I was not part of the organization during the evaluation phase, but I know they chose UiPath because it was easier to set up with comparable costs to other solutions, more resources available, and robust training material for basic RPA functions. It's easier to train people to perform basic RPA functions.

I rate UiPath nine out of 10.