UiPath Reviews

UiPath fills the gaps; it's a type of bridge between daily tasks and end-users. For example, on a daily basis, a user may need to prepare and send a report on time. There are many tasks like that on a daily basis that are boring if you are doing them continuously. UiPath can act smartly, eliminate human involvement, and capture everything.

If you have a meeting but also want to prepare a report, a robot can do it on your behalf and do so with zero errors. Whatever we program it to do is what it will do. It reduces human error by more than 90 percent.

And talking about digital transformation, I have worked with a lot of the taxation forms in the APAC region, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and these forms are a bit tricky and a challenge. The new digital product they brought in is very nice and is able to crack them and capture all the necessary data from those forms. It's pretty cool, using the AI.

UiPath also reduces the time people spend on tasks. I'm working with a client whose only KPI is the time things take, and the dashboard is showing automation is saving 90 percent of human time with UiPath.

Some organizations have an exact ditto—a mirror environment set up between their production and UAT environments. But a few organizations are not like this. Their UATs slightly deviate from the production environment. In this scenario, we have what we call PAT, production acceptance testing, before things are moved to production. UiPath overcomes the challenges of that. It enables you to easily update any changes between these environments. That will not take much time for the developer. Selectors play a major, vital role in automation, and if a selector is changed from one environment to another, it is not that hard to update it. It's very easy, actually, meaning you can do it in less time.

It's a no-code platform. You don't need to have in-depth coding knowledge, which means people can adopt it and move forward with it. It's very convenient to use. If you are interested in learning new things, UiPath is an open platform that you can play around with however you want. And there are a lot of roles, not only as a developer but other roles as well.

Also, if an organization has more than 50 processes and you want to monitor them at the end of the day, there is a very good dashboard called Orchestrator. It will show you a report on process status, success or failure. If it failed, it will show you the exact reason. It's good to have this kind of dashboard in your life.

For financial payments, for example, at the end of the day, humans are smarter than a robot. Only humans know the scenarios that decide whether we can make a payment or not. So humans fill this gap at a certain point in time. UiPath has introduced a product called Action Center. With this product, a robot will process all the payments, and then it will ask permission through Action Center for whether it can proceed or not. If they press OK or approve something, the robot will continue. Otherwise, it will not. It's end-to-end automation.

When we recruit any new employees, we first suggest that they sign in to the UiPath Academy and go through the courses. One of the good things I like about it is that they keep updating it. Whenever there are new features, they are immediately reflected in the Academy. It gives you detailed information, both text and video. And at the end of the module, they check your knowledge, what you have learned from it. They also have certifications, such as UiPath for developers, associates, and business analysts. They want to encourage the community to use the Academy. I recently received my UiPath certification, which is a bit harder than other certifications. You have to have in-depth knowledge to get it. Overall, the Academy is good.

I have gone through all the new AI features. They say the robot is able to smartly create the body of an email based on your content. I have already done some testing on that, and it worked fine. It's pretty cool.

Whenever they release a new version, there are some bugs. They should strengthen their testing team to avoid these errors and not release the product to the market with bugs. They do release patches, but they should take their time. Their target is to release a new update quarterly. I would suggest they take an extra 15 days to do proper testing and then release. As a developer, I see a lot of Activities have bugs.

I have been using UiPath for almost six years.

The stability is an eight out of 10.

The scalability is a nine out of 10.

Their technical support is very fast. I have created a few tickets for license-related bugs, and they have replied fast. Their support is good.

Positive

Deployment takes three to four days, generally. They will say it takes hours, but every organization is different in terms of its IT security policies, et cetera. It takes some time.

There isn't any separate maintenance required for the solutions. A robot will just keep on working. All you need is a good backup system.

ROI may differ from company to company. Some think about human resources, and some think about money. But I have seen ROI in all these ways. It saves you a lot of time and money as well. If you have an employee that was responsible for a process, they can now spend that time on other tasks.

There are a lot of automation tools in the market, such as Power Automate, but UiPath is number one right now. Initially, we started with it for automation purposes, but they have released many other products as well. Day by day, it's getting bigger.

I have worked with other tools as well, but in a complex situation, such as HR-related processes, where there are mathematical calculations, it's those calculations that are a challenge for users as well as developers. But UiPath will come up with a very good way to do a lot of arithmetical calculations. That makes it very easy to finish a complex process. With other tools, it may take some time. As a developer, UiPath is easier.

There are a lot of pros and cons when you're comparing one product to another. One important difference is robot speed. Power Automate works much faster than UiPath. When I develop, I can see a difference in the time it takes. This is something for UiPath to think about. And the pricing, of course. People say the robot license for UiPath is costly. Power Automate provides a very cheap rate, like $50 per month. UiPath is an annual subscription, but with Power Automate you can pay monthly as well. UiPath doesn't have that option.

If you have a very simple task, you can achieve it very quickly with UiPath. But complex tasks can also be achieved very easily. If you have good developers and they have the knowledge, they can easily crack more difficult tasks. I have worked on a lot of calculation-type tasks, Excel-based complex applications. We do well with this solution.

My advice is to go ahead and install it. As long as you're ready to invest in the product, it will give you better results. But go with the option of a proper project management team as well as developers. With that kind of team, you will see value for your money. The product is good, but you should have the proper people.

I find the solution easier to use than other platforms and it's a user-friendly way to automate.

I work with Excel files, and I find it helps make it easier to work with the files.

The ease of building automation is okay. I just use the community version, however, I have found it's much better than others. Their community version is more user-friendly than many options. I really appreciate the useability of document processing. I mostly use the solution for document processing and invoice comparisons. It's simple. 

I've used the user community and have been in touch with one person who was very helpful. They've helped guide me. I've gotten positive responses and good answers. It's helped me learn how to do comparisons between two Excel files, for example. 

I've enrolled in UiPath Academy courses. I've also enrolled in Coursera courses. I'm still in the learning process. They have good tutorials.

I've used some of the AI processes. It is very efficient to use the AI functionality. We've gotten very good responses and results so far. We have found the responses we're getting are good. It helps with creating more efficiencies. 

It has helped speed up digital transformation. 

UiPath has helped to reduce human error. We're able to build effective automation. We're creating software boards where the bot will do what we say and pull what we are trying to pull.

The solution does help us save time.

I'm still learning the solution; it has yet to help me save money.

I'm not sure how UiPath is at data scanning. I need to look into this further.

They need to work on security.

I have used the solution for about one month.

I haven't faced any stability difficulties, at least on the community version. 

I've never contacted technical support.

I've used Power Automate and ElectroNeek. I found there were a lot of issues with ElectroNeek and Power Automate. For example, they are not good with ChatGPT or data scraping. They are also not as user-friendly.

The solution was very easy to set up.

The implementation took only ten to 15 minutes. It was my first attempt to set it up. Aside from an internet issue, I had no problems. 

I handled the initial setup myself. 

I don't have any insights into the pricing of the solution. I'm using the community version. If I like it, I will buy the paid version.

I'm an RPA developer who started working with the solution. I recently worked with Power Automate. I'm familiar with the UiPath community version. I'm not extremely familiar with UiPath as I haven't used it for very long.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten - at least, for the community version. 

In the past, we have used UiPath to automate repetitive manual processes for companies in the finance and banking sectors, but healthcare is our current focus. This industry involves processing tons of data from patients, customers, and doctors, so it's a huge field. 

Previously, I developed bots for compliance at financial companies. I've also created processes for reading PDFs, sending emails, Excel automation, logging, and exception handling. We have also contracted with insurance companies that need to pull data from emails into their main enterprise application.

The healthcare companies cannot provide us with direct access to their systems for security reasons. We are currently accessing their network through a middleware system so it doesn't compromise their security. UiPath doesn't work on that third machine and cannot retrieve the values as it should. If we scrape data from the web, it will get to the HTML that is behind the site. 

When we are accessing the third PC, we cannot get to it because it is a desktop machine. We are using the completed version activity, which is working mainly on the image image-based activity. This capability is available in UiPath, but I don't think Power Automate or Automation Anywhere can do this. It helps because we don't need to do any coding. 

UiPath tends to be deployed on the cloud, so clients can minimize their on-premise footprint. We deploy on-premise and cloud-based UiPath depending on what our clients want. For some companies, uploading data to the Orchestrator on the cloud is potentially a security concern that hasn't been resolved by the UiPath developers. Power Automate has an advantage in that regard. 

Our employees use the company's credentials to get training from the UiPath Academy and obtain certifications. I have a personal account on UiPath Academy, but it has some license issues. The academy is helpful because UiPath is implementing new features every three months or so. It's all about the documentation. We can learn about new features and do more. With more knowledge, we can develop something bigger.

UiPath reduces costs by eliminating human labor. Let's use an insurance company as an example. Let's say they have employees who are responsible for reading emails. Every day, they receive information via email from the customers, and their job is to retrieve the details and enter them into the main database. The average insurance company receives 400-500 emails daily. These people will spend the whole day completing the task of manually transferring data to their main application. 

We have a bot in pre-production that can handle 1,100 emails daily for the company. It has a significant impact on the efficiency of the operation because the bot can input the details into the database quickly and without any errors. The employees who were responsible for this work are now monitoring it and also learning about UiPath at the same time. It is a great tool for increasing productivity, thereby proportionally increasing the company's profits.

The first company I worked with had 20 employees in their compliance department working on some PDFs. The company had to send emails to around 6 million customers. We deployed the bots, and five bots could do the work of 10 employees. The company kept the other 10 employees but reassigned them to monitor the bots and fix errors. They also learned to develop their own bots. They could cut 10 positions and save money while improving productivity. Those employees weren't working as fast as the bots and cost more money.

The solution also greatly reduces human error. In the financial compliance use case, they were dealing with upwards of a million rows. That was labor-intensive work, and no human could complete the task in under three days manually. Sometimes, we would have some errors in which the values were reversed by accident because humans make mistakes when they are tired. In this kind of work, we're working with digital amounts and currencies, and we are applying mathematical formulas to the amounts, like credit, debit, or some business calculations. 

UiPath doesn't have large hardware or software requirements. We only need one physical PC on the client's premises. That computer requires some minimum specifications, such as a 1 terabyte hard drive and an i5 processor. We need that computer hardware and a license for the client. 

If the client doesn't want to purchase an enterprise license, UiPath offers a community version. There are no restrictions on the features, but it can only run one bot at a time. The enterprise version can run multiple bots. If our client only needs one process, we can provide them with the community version and deploy it on their PC. 

UiPath can free up employees to work on more important things. One of my colleagues was doing some tedious work manually, but once the bot was in place, he only needed to click one button to run UiPath, which extracts all the data and updates the Excel spreadsheet in 10 or 15 minutes. Previously, he spent up to six hours preparing the data before he could complete the other tasks. The important work was being delayed every time. It increases productivity, which benefits the company. 

UiPath's most valuable features are its UI automation activities like scraping and manipulating data. We need to scrape the data before we can manipulate it or save it in another application. I think that part is very valuable and important.

Having worked with other tools like Microsoft Power Automate and Automation Anywhere, I find UiPath to be the most user-friendly because it provides all the actions on the side, and we can just drag and drop them. It's a simple interface that we can easily understand. Automation Anywhere has a more complex interface. UiPath is straightforward enough that our junior employees can easily pick it up. 

UiPath's ability to offer end-to-end automation is critical. We typically provide our clients with a simple demo of what UiPath can do. After that, they provide us with details about their end-to-end processes, which we use to determine what can be implemented through UiPath.

For our healthcare client, the initial assignment was to scrape the data from the website and put it into Excel. Later, they decided that they wanted the data in another application, so it could be stored in the main database. We constructed an end-to-end process for maintaining a million records in their primary database.

I also like the UiPath Community forum. I go there when I get stuck with anything. When I run into an error, it's easy to find the answer. The community is highly active. If I post a question, I can usually get a response from community members in an hour or two. 

I have tried a bot that uses UiPath's AI capabilities, but I didn't develop it. It's a portal for patients to make appointments and check into reception at the hospital. We implemented ChatGPT on an Android device, so customers can ask questions and get information. 

We also developed a bot that can derive the same types of data from PDFs with different structures and formats. For example, let's say the patient's name is on the first row on one form, but on the third row on another. We can configure a bot to extract the name regardless of where it is. We can train our ML module by telling it when the data is wrong and running it again. Now, it's mostly accurate.

I would like UiPath to improve its screenshot feature. It should have the option not to take screenshots unless the user specifically allows it. Sometimes, it is a security issue for companies that do not want to share screenshots of the main application. Another thing I want to see is a standalone mobile application that we can run anywhere. I would like more cross-platform application support.

UiPath can get unwieldy if the process becomes too big and complex. I had one client based in Saudi Arabia that had an application with 1,500 pages. Once the bot we were developing got much bigger, the application started having stability issues. It performs well in typical cases, but once we exceed that average, the application starts to crash or behave abnormally. 

I have used UiPath for four years.

Overall, UiPath is stable for most processes, but Power Automate is better at handling large, complex projects.

I have worked with Microsoft Power Automate and Automation Anywhere. The primary advantage of UiPath is that it's more accessible than the other solutions. You can learn UiPath without any knowledge of programming or computer science. It takes only about a month to learn the tool, even if you have no skills. For example, if you're a blogger and you want to automate posting to the website, you can do that through UiPath, so it is beneficial for personal use and commercial use. 

The other advantage is cost savings. UiPath saves organizations some money, and it's more accurate than Power Automate or Automation Anywhere. Automation Anywhere is my third choice. Power Automate comes in second place because It was developed by Microsoft, and most enterprise companies have a Microsoft subscription. If their license includes Power Automate, they prefer to use that instead of buying a separate subscription for UiPath. 

Many companies are switching to Power Automate because of this bundled licensing. The UiPath enterprise subscription is somewhat expensive. Microsoft can provide the same functionality, and it integrates with tools like Excel and Outlook. Companies can get all those tools within the same license, so that's an advantage Power Automate offers over UiPath.

Another advantage of UiPath is that you can also work with image-based processes. If we cannot get any selectors or access the HTML code behind the application, we can use image-based processes. This feature isn't available in Automation Anywhere. UiPath has the AI center, and Microsoft also implements AI in Power Automate processes.  However, Automation Anywhere cannot use AI in their product.

My current company is smaller, so I'm responsible for multiple tasks. I am the requirement gatherer, developer, and deployer. At my previous company, they had a business analyst who talked to the client and made an inventory of their requirements that he provided to us. Then, my only task was to develop the bot. It was the other team's duty to deploy the bot on the client's physical machine. 

The process involves three steps. We need to connect UiPath and provide the logs. Our client can access the Orchestrator to see logs of what the bot is doing online. He doesn't need to physically access the machine. There is also middleware called the UiPath Assistant that we use to connect UiPath to the Orchestrator. 

The number of staff needed for deployment depends on the complexity of the processes. If it is a single process, we don't need a deployment person or team. The developers can deploy the bots. My company has five developers, so everyone is developing their own bots and handing them over to the deployment team. For every five developers, we have two deployers. If the five developers are developing automated bots daily, we need only two deployers to deploy them on the machine. Also, if we want to have a backup version, we can deploy it on GitHub to make the repository and organize everything.

The maintenance aspect can sometimes be difficult. Exceptional cases can arise during the process. When we initiate some processes, we need to monitor them for about 30 days. We don't monitor some processes because we're not seeing any errors or exceptions. We have to monitor other bots, stop them as needed, handle the exception, and run them again. After 30 days, the bot should be mature enough to handle the exceptions without intervention. 

UiPath offers an excellent return. For example, a recent client in Pakistan was scraping data from a website with 349 products. His job was to scrape the title, price, and variants and place the data in an Excel spreadsheet. He was working all week alone, so I proposed UiPath. I told him UiPath has a function called "Extract Data Table" that can scrape all the details of the products and just dump it into Excel in five or ten minutes. He was impressed, and I developed the bot in front of him. 

Now, he's running my bot and dumping all the results in his Excel sheet. He's also working on other projects, and his routine has become very stable. He has more time to spend with his family. It has surely made an impact and yielded a positive ROI.

I don't know the exact cost, but UiPath is more expensive than Power Automate and Automation Anywhere. 

I rate UiPath seven out of 10. Learning a little JavaScript coding is helpful because there are some scenarios in which UiPath doesn't help you. In some cases, you may need to write a little code to perform some actions or call some functions. I would also take advantage of the UiPath Academy so you can stay up to date on the latest news and features. 

UiPath is an end-to-end automation tool that helps businesses accelerate their processes by providing solutions for automating routine activities. These solutions enable faster and more efficient business exchanges.

UiPath offers a user-friendly automation building process utilizing a drag-and-drop workflow feature for UI automation. Additionally, the platform includes recording capabilities and a playback feature to ensure accuracy. Advanced scraping options are also available for more complex tasks.

We utilize UiPath to automate processes that relate to good causes. Our approach involves creating a playbook task and subsequently automating the process. After that, the IT department assists us in collecting and interpreting data from various applications in the UA portion.

UiPath's automation capability is important because it saves us a lot of time. There are two sides to consider: the client side and the server side. On the client side, the UI allows developers or data users to communicate directly with the system. This can be done using tools such as RobotStudio or data browsers. Essentially, these operations can be seen as back-end tasks. On the server side, tasks and workloads generated by the user are stored in SQL databases.

UiPath has minimized our on-prem footprint.

The UiPath Academy courses are beneficial. 

The AI functionality in UiPath helps us save time by streamlining our workflows within the studios. Additionally, it enhances our automation capabilities, speeds up order processing, and enables us to make better decisions, ultimately reducing the risk of errors.

The automation has saved us between 70 and 80 percent of our processing costs.

UiPath has freed up employee time and increased productivity.

The screen recording feature is valuable.

The data team support that provides the UI and the chat services has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for six months.

The solution is stable.

UiPath is highly scalable.

The technical support is good.

Positive

Before, I used Blue Prism, but now at my new organization, we use UiPath. Unlike Blue Prism, which only specializes in back-end applications, UiPath works with both front-end and back-end applications.

I give the solution a ten out of ten.

I'm using it for the automation of various tasks. It depends on the tasks the users define. If we have a task that results in human error, or if we want a positive output in a small amount of time, or if we are working on huge amounts of data, we use UiPath.

It helps a lot in eliminating human error, by up to 50 percent for us, and in providing stability compared to other tools. It provides high performance and makes it easier to get positive output from automation.

If you have a huge data set and you want to upgrade results, the AI capabilities in UiPath reduce human errors and give a positive result in a small amount of time.

It also helps speed up digital transformation and has freed up some employees' time by as much as 70 to 80 percent.

We are using the PDF functions for scraping. Also, security-wise, it is very easy.

The ease of building automations is a 10 out of 10. It automates our tasks faster and gives us positive and accurate results. The UI is easy to use and does not require much training. A new user can use it.

Also, the UiPath user community is very good. If you have any questions, you can ask the community and a developer will help you as soon as possible. It has been a great experience for me.

I did one of the UiPath Academy courses last year to improve my skills in automation. It helps a lot. I would recommend the Academy to everyone who is new to the tool. Take a course and you will learn a lot. It helps improve your skills, enhance your knowledge, and know about new features.

In terms of performance, sometimes it slows down when the internet connectivity is poor. They need to optimize it a little.

I have been using UiPath for the last two and a half years, approximately.

The stability is very good. It's a 10 out of 10 for reliability.

It's very scalable.

I have used Microsoft Power Automate, but UiPath is far better. UiPath is easier to use, easy to implement, and cheaper than Microsoft.

The setup is not very complex and not very easy. Overall, it's moderately straightforward. Every new user needs a little training but can use it after some time.

The amount of time it takes depends on the size of the project. Sometimes we can deploy in a few minutes and sometimes it takes up to two hours. The number of people involved also depends on the project. Sometimes, one person can deploy it and sometimes a team is required.

Implementation is done in-house.

It provides accurate results and great ROI. That's why we are using this tool for the end-to-end automation of tasks.

It is cheaper than Microsoft Power Automate and saves us between 50 and 70 percent on costs. UiPath's pricing is moderate and something everyone can afford.

We didn't evaluate any other options because UiPath offers every feature that is valuable and useful in automation.

Between the great ROI, speed, and AI capabilities, everything about it is positive for me.

We have done a lot of things with UiPath for different customers. I have done Java application automation and PDF automations. We use it for all kinds of automation. For example, for one client, we're working on invoice processing, supply-chain automation, and their technical services.

Going with automation is really helpful for our customers, saving them time which they can use for other processes.

For example, I'm working for a customer that has 16 different processes to deal with. For every customer, they had to spend at least three days a month to process everything. The bot is processing everything in three hours and our customer doesn't need to monitor it. They are saving many hours for every customer every month. Automation is saving them around 2,000 hours per year.

UiPath is helping us to implement end-to-end automation in many cases and in many ways. We have implemented a lot of ERP automation and we are now working on SAP auto-creation for supply chain and invoice posting, processing, and payment clearance.

It is also helping our clients to speed up digital transformation a lot. They're coming to us with more processes.

The feature that I like the most is the Document Understanding for extracting information from PDFs. I also really like the human-in-the-loop concept.

The main disadvantage that I have identified in the Document Understanding is in table extraction. If the table size is large and goes to the next page, we are unable to extract it with Document Understanding. I hear that there is a solution for that but I have to find it.

There are other extraction features that Document Understanding doesn't have and clients go for ABBYY Vantage or Google document AI and it becomes expensive for them because they have to purchase a UiPath license and the other solution's license.

With the competition in the market, they have to improve. They can't settle and say, "We are at the top." They have to improve invoice processing, that is the most important thing, and that's where Document Understanding comes in. We need to get to the point where a customer does not look at any other OCR engines. They have to improve Document Understanding for invoice processing.

I have been using UiPath for the last three and a half years.

It is a stable product.

UiPath support is very good. I don't think we have raised a technical support question, only deployment support. My experience with the UiPath team is that they have been really helpful. They have connected with me within a short time and have done a lot for me. I irritated them a lot, but they still did a lot for me.

Positive

The setup of UiPath is easy. Two months back, we did a server migration where we not only migrated the unattended and attended bots, but the whole Orchestrator setup. We moved everything and we did it within seven days. We had some queries and raised a couple of tickets, and the guys connected with us even after 12:00 AM and 1:00 AM. They stayed with us and helped us complete it. The server migration itself was easy for us, with three years of development experience, even though we had never done anything regarding server migration.

The initial setup itself takes about two hours. In the last three months, we have done that for a number of customers. Depending on one's experience the setup can be done by one person. I do it myself.

Deployment of bots is easier than that. You set up an attended bot and publish it to Orchestrator and it will work. It is very easy. Even if you Google it, you can easily find information on it.

For me, with three years' experience, it's very easy. For a newcomer, like someone with only three months' experience, it will be a little harder because he will need to do some research but everything is available on Google. And even if he doesn't find what he needs there, he can raise a request and the guys will be very helpful. They'll connect with him within eight hours and they'll fix it.

The ROI depends on the complexity of the process that a client identifies for automation. The license costs around $10,000 per year, although I'm not very sure about that number. People are buying the license but they're not completely automating everything. They have to identify where they're struggling and give that to a bot. They need to use unattended bots on a 24-hour basis. When they utilize it all 24 hours, it is helpful. If they're going for only one or two bots, the return on investment will definitely be less.

In India, where I am from, UiPath is expensive. But customers in other regions, like Europe or the US, will not find it so expensive.

Every time we have a proposal call with a client regarding UiPath, most of our Indian customers are not okay with the cost. They can't afford it. They want alternatives, but they still often end up with UiPath because of the efficiency.

I haven't used any other solution, but I have explored Power Automate. I also opened Automation Anywhere and attended one class for it and I decided I'm not going to go to Automation Anywhere. You can't compare anything with UiPath. UiPath is the top.

It is the customers who have to identify the things that they can automate. We have to promote our tools and RPA capabilities and when they understand these things they can come back to us and use us for what they need. Most customers don't know what automation and an RPA automation bot are. But when I do my first bot and show a demo, they understand: "Oh, this is how it works." And then they come up with more processes for us to work on.

Regarding UiPath Academy courses, I have done some but I haven't had a chance to do the paid certification course because I'm continually working on projects. I did a couple of basic RPA developer courses and then the SAP, Document Understanding, and Action Center courses. I haven't had a chance to explore the new features there.

To use UiPath there are no coding requirements, like knowledge of Python, but you need to have good problem-solving skills. You need to understand loops, flowcharts, and how to develop conditional actions.

Our use cases are a lot of both data scraping and data reconciliation. We tend to find that we're going into web portals, we're going into spaces that require a user interface, and extracting some kind of information or data from those places. Then, we transform them. Sometimes it's just as simple as saving it as a different type of data. Still, it can sometimes be rather complex to combine that data with SQL queries to enhance it, or even just clean up and remove extraneous data that our users don't need.

We touch on other areas, such as averting risk by double-checking things or replacing manual transcription. We find that due to the size of our team, we're relatively small, and the biggest bang for our buck tends to be in the data reconciliation and gathering.

We have about 40 bots in production right now, which is pretty good for a small team. We're only really two developers right now. We're able to get pretty good value out of those bots. They're running probably about 50% of the time, which is pretty good since, as a financial organization, we're really seeing peak hours in the early morning and late evening as we're getting in all of the morning data and closing out for the day. We have a pretty good amount of utilization when we're busiest.

It is easy to build automation. For building them, we find that there are two categories. There are some that are quite simple and some that are quite quick, and then there are some that require some additional thought, some additional background knowledge, and some additional expertise. One of the things that we like about UiPath is it really does have a lot of pretty solid integrations. They can really get us what we need relatively quickly, but we still find that there's a level of expertise required to make sure that everything matches the way we expected it to, whether that's formatting or the data types. We need a little bit of expertise to fit them all together. However, the pieces of the puzzle are all there. It's just a matter of finding where they go.

We use a lot of unattended robots. We're almost entirely unattended right now. We find that those are the best early bang for our buck. We were able to completely replace a manual step from beginning to end. That's where we focused our efforts. 

We're interested in expanding into attended; however, we're still looking for the best way to find the more business user level, or the champions who need some knowledge of RPA to be able to utilize it properly yet also have the flexibility to be doing their normal day job and their normal day-to-day tasks without it interfering.

We have about 40 automations in production. Those are business related. That said, we are also starting to add a few more now. Probably on the order of five at the moment. We're hoping to continue to expand it in what we refer to as maintenance processes, things that allow us to automatically restart our own jobs when certain restart error conditions are met, and things that allow us to monitor the health of processes and make sure that there aren't missed exceptions over the course of our day-to-day. Therefore, we have about 45 total, with 40 business related, and then we're slowly growing this number that allows us to better and more efficiently perform our automation functions.

Those five robots are dedicated to maintenance handling exceptions and things like that. One of the things they do, for example, is scraping the logs and they'll look for keywords in our logs. The obvious one is exception or error; when they see those, they'll flag them and bring them to our attention. 

We're currently working on expanding that functionality so they can be a little bit better about proactively helping us. We're currently testing the use of the API calls within those monitoring jobs to restart ones that hopefully, just a simple restart will fix. For example, a slow or broken web portal that otherwise wouldn't be an issue.

That's a big time-saver. Our bottleneck as a small team has been how we support them as we get more and more processes into automation. We decided that the best way to help ourselves is to automate some of these support and repair tasks. We see that as being a big boon going forward to us.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility it offers. It really can integrate with just about anything you need it to. It has places where it is preferable to be used; however, in a pinch, you really can finagle whatever kind of circumstances you need out of it. We found that a lot of the time, it's not the perfect tool for the job, yet, thanks to the speed and agility with which you can apply it, even if it's not going to be a solution for 12 months, for six months it might be exactly what you need to get somewhat over the hump.

The user community has honestly been really impressive to me. The UiPath forums are genuinely a spectacular resource. It's really rare to come across an error, issue, or challenge that hasn't been at least discussed to some extent on the forums. That has been a great value add for us. Even if something is eventually going to be technically possible, you can frequently at least get an idea of how difficult it will be to implement it by seeing how much people have talked about how hard or easy it is. It really gives you some flexibility to quickly assess how doable it is, and then make a decision to move forward with it or drop it.

I used UiPath Academy several years ago now, in 2019. I know it's pretty different now. My team members have also used it. The courses are very valuable. There's a lot of great knowledge in them. 

One of the improvements that could be made is the support interface. I've talked to one of the product experts today about how they could better show when there are issues with a particular job. Right now, we tend to find that everything just looks okay unless we really go out of our way to highlight issues. What we would really love is for there to be a way to flag in Orchestrator exactly which jobs had warnings, exactly which jobs had business exceptions, exactly which jobs had exceptions that were handled, and which ones had unhandled exceptions. Right now, we are forced into this success or failure state. The lack of granularity makes it very difficult for us to quickly and easily find where we need to address issues.

There is no out-of-the-box way to configure granularly. This is where our maintenance processes are starting to come in. They're trying to fill those gaps, yet realistically, it would really be better to just have those visuals right there in Orchestrator without us having to rely on making our own API calls and checking for special criteria outside of what UiPath would be able to detect on its own since we're setting it within the code itself.

The UiPath Academy courses are disorganized. We have trouble identifying exactly what we want people to learn from within the list of courses, and since they've changed so much, it's sometimes hard for me to know what my coworkers are learning versus what I learned. I don't know where either my gaps or their gaps are. I don't know if I need to assign extra training or if maybe I need to go back and take a newly added training. That can be difficult for us.

I've been using UiPath for about four years now.

The stability has been good. I don't have any complaints generally about the stability. There aren't any particular issues I could name that would cause me to have a negative opinion, which I would say is probably about as good of praise as that perspective as you can get. 

We are not using the cloud. I know that the scalability is a lot better with the cloud features. We are an on-prem using preassigned VMs. We really love the ability to bring them on and off as needed. However, I will say that I know there's a whole universe of adaptability out there that, unfortunately, I am not allowed to partake in.

I have worked with technical support a little bit. I would say they are decent to good. They have been timely responses. Still, they are not always as detailed or helpful as I would like.

Neutral

I did work on Blue Prism for about two years.

It's been a few years now, so I can't speak to the current state of Blue Prism. That said, one of the ways I really struggled with it, was it just did not have the connectivity that UiPath has out of the box. A lot of applications we use regularly, such as PDFs and Excel documents, just did not work intuitively. I remember specifically having to write the code to handle passworded PDF documents manually. And so, that lack of integration in things that you typically use in every single process was a real frustration with Blue Prism.

That was one of the first things I noticed about UiPath is they handled those integrations much more smoothly. There are many more of them, and they are much more ready. The other thing that I would really give UiPath credit for is they are much quicker to iterate and build out new helpful features. Blue Prism was frustratingly slow to fix these problems once identified. You would face the problem and be forced to solve it with your own code since you couldn't rely on Blue Prism to get a solution to you in a good amount of time, unfortunately.

I'm not involved in the infrastructure deployment.

In terms of robot deployment, it's relatively straightforward. UiPath offers good tools to allow us to do it. My company, in particular, needs to streamline our ticketing system and our release process a little bit. Our particular process makes the best use of the tools available due to internal limitations, which we're planning on working on. For example, we currently do not integrate with Git, and that's something we need to fix.

My understanding is that we have seen a return on the investment. From my perspective, we just need to continue to highlight the value add and make sure that people are aware of what we're able to do to further expand the automation. There's a lot of untapped potential there.

I don't get too much into the licensing and costs in my role, so I can't really speak to them.

We do not really use AI/ML capabilities. We're a smaller group; we just don't have the resources to learn and utilize those tools the way we could. We're in the process of moving over to some better workflow management and BPM-style tools. We're trying to build one in-house. That will allow us to take advantage of some of those machine learning and data integration features, and then once those are fleshed out, and our business teams can continue to get onboarded into the BPM workflow, we'll be able to start utilizing those tools more heavily.

My advice to others would be to go through some of the UiPath Academy pieces of training to see if any topics are covering issues they are facing. They generally do a good job of showing you how to tackle those problems. Do a proof of concept and validation of it. UiPath is a tool. It's very good at some things, yet it's not very good at everything. Like any other tool out there, it's an excellent product if you find that UiPath is the right tool for your job. That said, you don't want to shoehorn it into something that really could be done better elsewhere.

I'd rate the product a nine out of ten. UiPath does a great job of iterating on its product, adding new features, and combating the negative sides. I've really been impressed by how quickly they do that. Every time I have a criticism, I find out that somewhere in the pipeline is a new solution coming to help me with it. That said, they're not always perfect when they come out. Sometimes we don't adopt them until after they've been iterated upon a couple of times, yet, just the fact that they listen and build these solutions is really helpful.

I'm the lead robotics engineer in my organization, and we are involved in marketing and research for new technologies such as mobile phones and laptops. We are an organization with 219 employees and started using UiPath for laptop marketing and advertisement for our customers.

Our clients have different requirements and strategies, and we build software robots tailored to their needs. A customer can send an email with attached PPTs, Excel sheets, PDFs, and images, and the bot can extract all the data and express it in the required format. This is uploaded as an article onto our website, and on our platform, so the marketing, advertising, and technology solutions specs are taken care of without any human intervention or involvement. We designed 39 robots for the same number of clients.

Our second use case is for invoicing; customers share checks for payments with us via email, and we have bots to extract that data and input it into our SAP ERP system, which is fantastic. The RPA automates billing on the financial side of our organization. 

We use the solution across 17 locations with servers managed centrally from our main office, connected using the UiPath Orchestrator. We have 19 licenses but only use 17 currently. We don't have more than seven end users as this is purely a tool for internal use; our customers don't have access.

UiPath's OCR enables data processing of handwriting, which in turn allows us to automate elements of the billing process from incoming customer checks, which is a fantastic feature for us.

Document Understanding is an excellent feature; it's very easy to use and provides the required data in a structured format.

The solution has excellent integration with third-party tools. 

We use ServiceNow, which is connected to UiPath, and they have fantastic integration. Therefore, we have calculated our time savings to be approximately 91,000 hours in the current year. Automation is a critical time-saving solution for us. 

The UiPath Academy courses could be improved, there are many courses, and some are more useful than others. I would also like to see improvements in course categorization to make it easier for newcomers to learn the solution.

Customer support could also be improved; they are very knowledgeable and helpful but hard to reach, and there are delays in getting to them.

We encountered some difficulties on the OCR side, and I requested new features and capabilities to address these. This may be an oversight on my part, but I would say some aspects of the OCR data extraction process can be improved. OCR and screen scraping are the only data extraction methods which isn't good for redundancy. I want more options in this regard, so this is another area with room for improvement.

We have been using the solution for nearly three years. 

The solution is stable; we didn't have any downtime outside of updating our environment. 

The solution is very scalable, and many managed packages are available to make that easier, as well as the drag-and-drop functionality.

We plan to increase our usage and are in touch with the UiPath sales team to discuss purchasing new licenses. We have around 60 new customers and need to upscale the solution to accommodate them.

The customer support team's expertise is impressive; they're very expert. However, raising a ticket is complex, and there can be significant delays, which isn't ideal when waiting for a fix. There is no clear route to contact UiPath, and this information isn't shared with new customers. If you know how to get in contact with them, then they are very knowledgeable and quick to help, but establishing that contact is difficult.

There was one occasion when I submitted a ticket and discovered it had been sent to their sales department after a couple of days, but I required technical support. There have been a few issues like this, but once you contact them, the support is fantastic.

Positive

I previously used Automation Anywhere for over three years at a position in a manufacturing organization. When I came to my current job, it was my choice to go with UiPath, and I chose it because it's more affordable and has better integration with third-party solutions such as Service Now, Office 365, and Check. Another consideration is OCR, as Automation Anywhere can't extract data from handwriting to my knowledge. UiPath has excellent capabilities, is efficient, and is more user-friendly than Automation Anywhere.

The setup was somewhat complex, as it was a new product for us, and we didn't have a clear deployment plan. The challenges weren't on UiPath's side; they were on our side. We had to build some infrastructure to support our on-premises deployment, and UiPath provided helpful instruction to assist.

Overall, the deployment took approximately three weeks and involved nine staff in total; my director, myself as robotics lead, two consultants, a developer, two members of the infrastructure team, and two staff from UiPath's side.

They could be better at sharing the appropriate setup information with the customer, as it was difficult for us to follow the steps outlined in the provided documentation. We had to get help from the technical support team, who are experts; they did what took us over a week in two days. If a good course were available in the UiPath Academy, that could have saved us that time. I must say that the UiPath technical support team was a great help during the setup. They provided substantial practical information and were central to our planning and implementation strategy.

Every solution requires some maintenance. As our deployment is on-premises, upgrades to our environment necessitate some downtime, usually one and a half to two days. One day to integrate the UiPath guidelines on updating the solution, and another day to upgrade the environment.

Our OpEx and CapEx costs have been reduced by around $38,000. Before using an RPA solution, we had 17 employees responsible for data entry and uploading. Now, we have robots doing these tasks, resulting in considerable savings. I would say our ROI is significant.

We find the yearly licensing cost affordable, and the UiPath pricing team is very accommodating to us. They allowed us to pay in installments during the integration phase. The friendly pricing is one of the main reasons we chose the solution.

We purchase 17 to 19 licenses and typically use 14 of them. They offer free extras like attendant reports, the Action Center, and Document Understanding APIs. The pricing and licensing are exceptional.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

When using Document Understanding with PDFs, if the document is over 16 pages, then the UiPath API must be used, which is available from the orchestrator. The API is both important and easy to use.

Our HR department is looking to hire an additional 17 employees to assist in managing our customers. We receive substantial data every hour from our 30 customers, which require reports. 

I highly recommend researching the solution and contacting UiPath for support with a proof of concept before any implementation. Having a plan and an idea of how to build the infrastructure is essential. UiPath is one of the best solutions available, but I would advise customers to follow the steps very closely during implementation.