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Sumesh Gansar - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Marketing Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 10
Easy to use menus, provides folder organization capabilities using a centralized tenant, improves robustness of our processes
Pros and Cons
  • "The UiPath Academy was pretty helpful for us in the initial stages."
  • "The product could be made a little less glitchy. Specifically, when too many users are working at the same time, it hangs a little bit here and there."

What is our primary use case?

My primary use case with UiPath is to automate workflows for processes in web-based applications, such as email and Excel automation. We also use it as a task or workflow management tool, capable of assigning tasks, checking on the status of tasks, and more.

Another thing that I have been doing with UiPath is replacing repetitive tasks performed within the organization. Automating such tasks makes the related process smoother and faster. 

We are using the UiPath automation cloud offering, which is a SaaS solution. One advantage to this type of environment is that we can get updates instantly. If it were an on-premises or hybrid model then the setup and maintenance take time, but this isn't the case with a SaaS model. This instant setup is what we needed because it made for a smooth transition from manual processes to automation. 

How has it helped my organization?

With respect to building automations, UiPath is a pretty straightforward platform. The major reason that we choose to implement UiPath is the interface that it provides, which boosts the usefulness of the entire platform. If we need assistance then there are many knowledge base documents available. There is also in-app help, which makes it very easy to understand and start using it.

I was able to learn how to use it within a week, which shows how easy it is. For example, it does not require a lot of coding. It's more of a drag-and-drop interface, making it easier to develop programs and automate processes.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, and it has completely replaced the manual processes that we were using. This includes analyzing the process and implementing automation to collect the data. Data fetching is done using the robots that we create.

Since implementing UiPath, we have experienced better retention of our users. This is because we have been able to make our process much smoother, as well as quicker. Consequently, we have been able to deliver at a much faster pace. This has enhanced the customer experience and in turn, has improved customer satisfaction. Overall, we have seen an increase of about 30% in terms of user retention. This has translated to increasing revenue.

With respect to automating our processes, automation has reduced our manual efforts by more than 70%. This means that we are able to concentrate more on other aspects of our business. The business is growing because we are able to do things like work on our website, customer engagement, and customer relations.

UiPath has taken care of most of the backend work for us, which is a good bonus. It has reduced our investment in manpower by about 50% and decreased our overall output time by more than 70%.

Automation has definitely reduced the rate of human error when compared to our previous, manual processes. At this point, there is minimal to zero human error. I estimate that approximately one hundred percent of human error has been eliminated.

Implementing this product definitely helps speed the process of digital transformation, and reduces its cost as well. One of the goals of our organization is to completely digitize. We want to optimize everything so that employees can focus more on the customer relationship aspect, building more value for our brand. UiPath has definitely helped in improving the overall process.

Our digital transformation did not require any external support for third-party application software. It's an in-built process and we did not need anything extra.

What is most valuable?

The specific feature I like is folder organization, and it is in the Orchestrator tenant. This is very useful because it keeps all of my folders and data in a centralized tenant.

The menu options are easily accessible in the Orchestrator tenant, which is something that I like very much.

The UiPath Academy was pretty helpful for us in the initial stages. We were able to learn more about the software and what is there. They also provide courses and certifications, which assist with learning and getting employees up to speed.

It took only a week for me to completely get a handle on the software. Taking the initial training and certification courses is a hassle-free process. It is not difficult to induct somebody and have them start using the product.

The courses that they offer provide hands-on experience, and I think that it's a good initiative that they are taking on by doing so. It helps to ease the learning curve and allowed us to learn more about the world of automation.

UiPath has a user community that is very knowledgeable and friendly. Our peers in the UiPath community are able to dumb down responses to a beginner's level of experience, regardless of what queries we have put forth. Whatever we have wanted to do with RPA, they have been able to help. We now have a good level of comfort in terms of interacting with our peers in the community.

We have experience with other communities and have found that the discussions are generally at a higher level, which may be too difficult for a new person that is just starting out with the product.

Generally speaking, I like the features that I am using and I could not really say where improvement is needed in that respect.

What needs improvement?

The product could be made a little less glitchy. Specifically, when too many users are working at the same time, it hangs a little bit here and there.

In a future release, I would like to see drag-and-drop functionality in the robot creation process within Orchestrator. As of now, it is not available there. It would be helpful because from there, it is easy to create a process flow. Instead of switching between multiple menus and multiple tabs, we can do it from the Orchestrator or the main menu.

Buyer's Guide
UiPath
January 2025
Learn what your peers think about UiPath. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
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For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using UiPath for approximately a year and a half.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. Sometimes, when the load is high or there are many users working at the same time, or when I'm working on different parts at the same time, it lags a little bit. There is a slight drop in performance.

Otherwise, it's very stable and secure software.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Using the automation cloud offering has meant that scaling up automations has been very smooth for us. We started out with between 40 and 50 users working on this particular tool, and now it's between 150 and 170 users.

There are two levels of roles; admin roles and user roles. The admin role is able to assign and approve tasks, using the task management module. Regular users are able to perform all of the other functions.

It is definitely a scalable solution, being cloud-based and SaaS. It is also very customizable. Customizability is the unique selling point (USP) for this particular product, given the number of customizations that are available and the number of features that can be added.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support staff is brilliant. They are very knowledgeable and very quick when it comes to addressing our queries. They don't ask us to wait for long when we have a problem, and we normally have a resolution within hours.

There is also a community forum that helps us to deal with problems ourselves, without the dependence on the technical support team.

I would rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not use another RPA solution prior to UiPath. Before this, we were doing everything manually.

How was the initial setup?

I was not involved in the initial setup and deployment.

What about the implementation team?

As we opted to implement the cloud-based model, the maintenance on our part is minimal. We just have to update the software from time to time. The amount of maintenance that we perform is not only easy but saves a lot of time for our IT team.

The team of people for maintenance consists of six or seven junior IT staff. They perform the updates and nothing more.

What was our ROI?

Using the automation cloud offering has helped to decrease our time to value. An example of where we saw the benefits of this solution was with an Excel automation that we created. This process involves an Excel worksheet that contains between 20,000 and 30,000 records. We had to manually search for particular records, and the process to approximately a week to complete. Now, with UiPath, the same process is completed within a couple of minutes. 

Once we signed up with UiPath, we instantly saw growth in our entire business. It was a win-win situation. 

The additional time has enabled our employees to focus on higher-value work, such as R&D, customer engagement, and improving our brand. It also has an effect on employees' satisfaction, specifically, mine.

A lot of time spent doing repetitive and redundant work is something that was irritating me a lot. Now that the automation is in place, I just have to set up the workflow. It has definitely increased my overall morale and satisfaction. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

One of the downsides to UiPath is the cost of the enterprise version. It is a little bit on the higher side.

UiPath's cloud offering is a centralized, all-in-one platform. It saves money because you don't have to invest as much in other software, and it's cheaper than some solutions because you don't have to maintain the platform or the database. However, because it's not cheap, the overall cost reduction is not drastic at first. Taking a holistic view, it does because overall, it will reduce costs.

There is also a Community Edition that can be used free of charge. This is an option for users that find the price to be high. One main differentiating factor with the Community Edition is the number of updates. There are fewer in the Community Edition.

Also, the support offered for the Community Edition is not as quick. People will not have a great user experience. However, it is important to remember that in terms of cost, the Enterprise Edition is a little bit pricey for small and medium-scale enterprises. 

What other advice do I have?

About a month ago, we started using the AI functionality of the software to design robots and processes. At this point, we are looking to use AI for our internal applications.

One example is that we are working on security-related automation that triggers an alert when somebody inserts or removes an external hard disk from a system. Taking advantage of the AI capabilities has helped us to maintain a much safer work environment, in terms of data security.

The AI functionality has definitely enabled us to automate more processes. A lot of manual work and redundant work has been reduced. Also, the number of errors that we had occurring during our manual processes has been greatly reduced.

This solution has definitely helped to free up employee time. Tasks that used to take approximately a week, now take just 30 or 40 minutes. This is a lot of time saved, which allows us to concentrate more on other aspects of the business. For example, improved customer engagement has resulted in gathering more leads. Also, we have more time for R&D.

I estimate that we are saving approximately five hours per day, so 20 hours per week, per employee. In addition to the areas that we have more time to concentrate on, it has helped improve the value of our brand overall.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing this product is that it's a must. This is the go-to software that I would recommend for anybody looking to automate their business in a smooth and efficient manner.

Cost, of course, is something that has to be considered but if they can afford this solution then they should implement it. It has a wide variety of features and functionalities, which are market fit and market ready. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Other
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
RPA Tech Lead at Tata Consultancy
Real User
Helps reduce human error, and saves us time and costs
Pros and Cons
  • "Document Understanding and Action Center have added significant value to UiPath, especially for the IDP process."
  • "If we could get a repository of at least a few of the layouts for the GUI or AI Center, where we would only need to make minor changes, that would be helpful."

What is our primary use case?

I have worked with most of the UiPath use cases. From 2017 to now, I have delivered more than 400 bots. I have worked in healthcare, energy, shipping, and other industries.

When it comes to manual processes, especially IDP and the combination of IDP and automation, the journey has been a bit difficult and challenging, but it has been worth it. Most other automation is straightforward. We take input from multiple platforms, put it into another platform, and so on. But with IDP, we have to read the document, validate the data, and then integrate it with the automation tool in UiPath.

I started integrating IDP and automation before UiPath Document Understanding and the Action Center were available. What I used to do was automate the process and then create a layout in ABBYY. I would then integrate the ABBYY layout into UiPath, evaluate the data, and then automate the rest. I did this in 2018 and 2019.

Now that we have our own Document Understanding and Action Center platform, I don't have to rely on any third-party tools for IDP. The combination of automation and IDP within a single platform has made a big impact on many businesses. It has helped them to reduce their annual efforts in data entry, reading documents, and correcting small errors in data extraction and copy-pasting.

I have seen the best results when IDP is combined with automation. It has reduced manual efforts by at least 80 percent. Automation is always helpful, but the combination of IDP and automation is even more effective.

In one example, we were able to deploy more than 700 bots for a single organization in the manufacturing industry. They had around 25 servers just to run the bots, but now they are running multiple bots on a single server. They are saving millions of dollars per month by using UiPath.

Overall, I think the combination of IDP and automation is a huge game-changer for businesses. It is helping them to save time, money, and resources.

How has it helped my organization?

Most of the elements we have right now as activities with this do not require us to work with the norm of 100 lines of code or anything like that. It is just drag and drop, so anyone can use UiPath from scratch and be approved within a couple of months. The platform itself is very easy to learn and use. I don't think there were any challenges at any point with respect to this.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. We have many back-end processes that run without any manual intervention. We simply schedule the bots, and they run flawlessly. We also have a bot that generates reports for us. As a result, we have had end-to-end automation in place for almost a year now. We are very pleased with how it is working, and we believe it is a valuable feature.

The UiPath User Community is great. I am proud to be a part of the community, where I have earned the Community Moderator badge, the Bylaw badge, and the MM VPA badge. I have witnessed the incredible journey of the community, from a group of people who didn't know each other to a community that meets in person at least once a month. The quality of the answers in the forum is amazing. I have seen a few companies create internal competitions to see who can answer the most questions in the forums and receive prizes. These small gestures from the community make a big impact. I would say that the community has played a major role in the growth and deployment of UiPath. UiPath has never failed to surprise and value the community members. The company has never disappointed us, and it continues to support our efforts.

When we join the UiPath Community and become an MVP, we gain direct access to the company's product engineers. We can provide our feedback and reviews for every product and release, and we also have beta access to all products when we are eligible as an MVP. Every review, opinion, and idea that we provide to the product managers is taken seriously and reviewed. If it is valid, the product managers implement it. I think this is the best thing about being a part of the UiPath team, both as a team member and as an individual. I really like the core UiPath team very much.

We have UiPath both on-premises and in the cloud. I think we were able to make significant savings when we upgraded to the cloud, especially in terms of infrastructure costs, deployment, and upgrades. The dynamic nature of cloud computing has helped us to reduce costs and save time.

We often use the UiPath Academy courses. I believe that 80 to 90 percent of my team uses the Academy, and it is the main platform where we have learned to use UiPath. I recommend that everyone take the Academy courses. For anyone who wants to learn UiPath, the Academy is the best place because it has everything we need to know.

UiPath accelerates our digital transformation and reduces costs. We did not need to upgrade to expensive or complex applications to accelerate our digital transformation.

UiPath has reduced up to 70 percent of the human errors.

UiPath has helped free up staff time. We have citizen developers from UiPath who are using UiPath Studio X to save almost 70 percent of their daily time on email automation. Especially when it comes to process mining, they don't have to do the same update task; the processing is ready, and everything is ready to be given to the developers. Even the developers are saving time when using the RA framework for SAP or ERP applications, such as by creating and using libraries of common screens, selectors, and steps. This saves them at least 50 percent of their time, so they can focus more on research and development and new features.

What is most valuable?

Document Understanding and Action Center have added significant value to UiPath, especially for the IDP process.

What needs improvement?

There are a few businesses that are failing to generate their ROI. I think that's where UiPath needs to educate businesses so that they can choose the right product for them, whether that's the entire automation solution suite or just the individual products that they need. I think that educating businesses about this will help them a lot and make it easier for them to succeed.

When integrating with third-party tools, UiPath gives us the freedom to write our own code and integrate it. However, if we could get a repository of at least a few of the layouts for the GUI or AI Center, where we would only need to make minor changes, that would be helpful. For example, the files have a template that extracts all the information. I would just like to change a few things, but I don't want all of that. I know we can just hide it, but that won't help because processing the whole document extraction will still take the same amount of time. If we could get those codes in any of the repositories where we could make small changes to the existing code and then import them into our processes, that would be helpful. We do have all the code. We do have all the activities, but none of them are accessible or modifiable. We have to use them as is, or we have to create our own. Those are the only two options we have. If we could get the codes in the report that we want, and then we could make the changes and use them in our own code, I think that would help us more.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using UiPath for seven years. I started my journey in December 2016 and we started delivering projects to clients in 2017. I have been impressed with the evaluation of the UiPath products from 2017 to 2023. The features that we have been receiving in recent years are very good.

When I started as an automation engineer in 2017, people at companies like Sony and other networks and large companies were scared to share their processes and credentials due to security concerns. I have seen this challenge firsthand. However, now, companies of all sizes, including national banks, are looking at automation.

I have seen an incredible journey from 2017 to 2023. I am happy to have been a part of it.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

UiPath is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

UiPath is scalable. We are able to upgrade anything.

How are customer service and support?

Whenever we have a challenge or similar issue, in rare cases, such as when there are multiple questions assigned to a support ticket, there may be a slight delay in technical support responding.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The initial deployment is straightforward.

The deployment time depends on the complexity of the project, ranging from six weeks to four months. For a very simple UiPath automation project with multiple applications, we can complete the development, UAT, and deployment within six weeks. However, if the project involves IDP, validation, and other complex features, it may take three to four months to complete.

The number of people required for deployment depends on the complexity. I always suggest having proper planning. I would not let any of the junior developers deploy to production at any time. I would always have two different teams. This is my preference. Instead of having junior developers deploy to production with only one person, even if they are capable of doing it, I would suggest not giving access to everyone to deploy to production. Instead, they should reach out to the production support team, and the production support team should do a code review before the deployment. Once the code is reviewed, the production support team can publish the package to production.

What was our ROI?

I have seen organizations that have been able to generate an ROI of almost 100 percent, as well as organizations that have struggled to generate even a 10 percent ROI. Some companies are very good at knowing what licenses they have bought and how to use them, but I have also seen companies that have a whole suite of automation tools that they are not using, including process mining and test suites. They are still paying for all of these tools, but they are struggling to generate an ROI.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The main complaint I receive about UiPath is the pricing. Many people purchase the entire suite, which can be expensive, even though they don't need all of the features. The pricing is also somewhat opaque for businesses of all sizes. Unless a company is a UiPath partner, it is difficult to customize the solution to pay only for the features that are needed.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate UiPath eight out of ten. We have experienced some automation processes that did not turn out as expected, especially with legacy applications, which can be challenging.

I have not seen any challenges with UiPath upgrades, but there are a few things to keep in mind. Consider a client with an on-premise deployment. The developers have returned their code, which is very old. After two or three years, the client is finally upgrading. During this time, a few activities may have changed drastically or been removed from UiPath because they have been merged into other activities. In these cases, we need to do some maintenance to ensure that the upgrade is successful. We need to check that everything is ready and that the upgrade looks good. This may take some time, but it is the only maintenance that is required.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
UiPath
January 2025
Learn what your peers think about UiPath. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
831,997 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Muhammad Shaf Mairaj - PeerSpot reviewer
Robotic Process Automation Consultant at Powersoft19
Consultant
Top 20
It's handy for tasks like scraping and manipulating data
Pros and Cons
  • "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."
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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. 

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used UiPath for four years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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. 

What was our ROI?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

What other advice do I have?

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. 

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
Akhil Addanki - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at university of southern california
Real User
Top 5
Automation significantly speeds up billing processes and saves costs
Pros and Cons
  • "Just this year, we probably saved 45 million dollars, and the next year, it will be upwards of 80 million."
  • "With UiPath, one needs the UiPath Assistant installed on every machine, which is unrealistic as many people use the same machine in the hospital."

What is our primary use case?

Currently, we do not have any AI use cases. I work for a healthcare system. Our main use case is using UiPath to replicate what medical coders do. We input codes from certain medical systems into another, and it automates our billing cycle. This allows us to input the codes directly into the insurance billing cycle, speeding up our payment process.

How has it helped my organization?

Our hospital does not get paid if we are slow to get the codes to the payers. By automating this process with UiPath, we wanted to speed up the process of getting paid by the insurance companies. It has been amazing. Just this year, we probably saved 45 million dollars, and the next year, it will be upwards of 80 million.

What is most valuable?

In health care in America, many processes are still paper-based. Document processing is valuable as it allows doctors to have documents processed in advance, making it easier to access and ask questions. Additionally, UiPath has freed up staff time significantly, to the point where some staff had to be laid off. Our use of automation sped up the process of getting paid from insurance companies, saving us substantial amounts of money.

What needs improvement?

We're looking to add AI, specifically generative AI, but it's a matter of our organization implementing it. With autopilot features like Microsoft's Copilot or ChatGPT, users can start chatting immediately. However, with UiPath, one needs the UiPath Assistant installed on every machine, which is unrealistic as many people use the same machine in the hospital.

For how long have I used the solution?

My enterprise has been using UiPath since 2021. My team inherited it in 2023, so it has been about 11 years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution just went live yesterday, so I don't have feedback on its stability yet.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is scalable. We previously had an older solution, and UiPath helped us revamp and upgrade our systems, making them more scalable.

How are customer service and support?

The customer support from UiPath is amazing. We are part of the hypercare, and I would rate it as a nine out of ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We use Power Automate a lot and still incorporate it alongside UiPath. Some hospital systems require us to be all on-premises, so we use both UiPath and Power Automate to get our systems working as needed.

What about the implementation team?

Some automations were built in-house by our team of developers. We also worked with an external partner and UiPath to implement some other solutions.

What was our ROI?

We have seen a 100% return on investment. The process is night and day when compared to paying employees over time for the same work.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It is more expensive than other automation services, but I don't deal with the financial details much.

What other advice do I have?

As automation software, I would rate UiPath a ten out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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PeerSpot user
Sushruth Ramesh - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Audit Associate at a government with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Provides good value for money, saves a lot of time, and allows non-technical people to easily build applications
Pros and Cons
  • "There is a feature called Build a New App in UiPath. I found that to be very good. It makes our job much easier to know how to build applications. There is also the Studio module. I am from a non-technical background. So, for me, designing and creating applications was very tough initially, but with the Studio module and the activity tab that they have, it's easy. Most of it is just drag and drop. I found that very valuable."
  • "There are some selector issues when it comes to web automation and desktop automation. There is a robot selector. When we feed the data, it tries to fetch the UI elements from that particular data, but that's not happening 100%. That could have some improvements."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use case with UiPath is to create automation software for the HR and the accounting department. Some of the automations that we do are automated attendance tracking, billable hours calculation, work hours calculation, expense reimbursements, et cetera. We have also completely automated our sales processes, such as contract building, invoice creation, etc. We do all this through UiPath automation. Earlier, all this was done manually, and it consumed a lot of time for us, but now, with automation, it's super-quick and efficient.

We are using a public cloud model. We host it on AWS.

How has it helped my organization?

It helps us to do end-to-end automation. The accounts and the HR department have a lot of employees to manage and a lot of queries come up. Previously, most of the tasks that we had to do were very time-consuming. For example, just attendance tracking and expense management consumed two days of the entire week, but after the end-to-end automation with UiPath, we hardly spend four to five hours per week on the same tasks. That definitely helped us.

Time-saving is the main benefit that we have got. The Build a New App feature helps us create our applications in a very quick and efficient manner. We can also share them with multiple stakeholders, which has saved us a lot of time. We used to spend two days per week on a manual task, but now, it's just four or five hours a week. A lot of time has been saved, and efficiency-wise, by introducing automation, very less errors are happening. That's one of the biggest bonuses of using UiPath.

It has definitely reduced human errors. With the end-to-end automation that we are doing, in addition to a lot of time savings, efficiency has been improved in terms of the number of manual errors. It has reduced about 95% of the errors. There are still minor hiccups here and there, but that's expected. With fewer manual errors, we are able to do things in a much quicker and more reliable fashion. Earlier, unnecessary time was being wasted on this, but now, we are completely dependent on automation. Automation and robots take care of everything for us. We just need to oversee things. That has made our life much easier.

We use the platform on the cloud. It has definitely reduced the on-premise footprint. One benefit of having a cloud product is that we need to do very little maintenance from our side. We just need to do the regular updates and install the patches that they give. It's on the cloud, so it's very easy. We just have to keep our application updated. It's very useful, and it saves a lot of time. With an on-premise model, a lot of maintenance is required.

It definitely speeds up digital transformation. We deal with a lot of employees or internal customers, and with automation, we are able to design applications that are very user-friendly. They are able to give us the data we need in a much quicker fashion. It has definitely been on the positive side for us.

For this digital transformation, we did not require any third-party or costly applications. Everything was there in UiPath itself. We just needed to subscribe to UiPath. It's a one-stop solution.

It has freed up a lot of employee time. The tasks that previously required two days per week now require just five hours per week. It has saved us that much time.

It has definitely saved costs for our organization. With the saved time, we are able to concentrate on different aspects of our work, and we are able to clear up most of our pending tasks. So, the efficiency has improved, which has been good for our business. Around 30% of our overall expenditure has been reduced because we are able to put in that much more work.

What is most valuable?

There is a feature called Build a New App in UiPath. I found that to be very good. It makes our job much easier to know how to build applications. There is also the Studio module. I am from a non-technical background. So, for me, designing and creating applications was very tough initially, but with the Studio module and the activity tab that they have, it's easy. Most of it is just drag and drop. I found that very valuable.

It's straightforward to build automations. The UiPath Studio has a lot of in-built templates to choose from. Most of the functionality is just drag and drop, and it can't get easier than this. It's really straightforward.

UiPath's user community is very active and very useful. The answers to most of my queries are already in the community. It's very user-friendly, and we can also clarify our doubts and have conversations with the UiPath community.

UiPath's academic courses on academy.uipath.com are also very useful. In case you have any doubts or you want to do any certifications, you can just log in. It's free of cost. You can just log in there and do your certification. You'll learn a lot. Both UiPath Academy and the UiPath Community are very good.

I'm from a non-technical background. For me, getting my head around designing and understanding RPA processes was very tough. UiPath Academy basically dumbed it down to my level. It has made it very easy for me to know and understand RPA. I have started designing and developing applications with UiPath. So, even a person from a non-technical background, like me, can produce reliable and very useful applications with UiPath.

What needs improvement?

The reports could be improved. They could be much more in-depth. 

There are some selector issues when it comes to web automation and desktop automation. There is a robot selector. When we feed the data, it tries to fetch the UI elements from that particular data, but that's not happening 100%. That could have some improvements. Apart from that, everything else is fine. I have not faced any other major hiccups or issues with UiPath.

In terms of additional features, some integration and API connector services need to be added, especially with the CRM software. Currently, they have a limited set of API connector services. They could increase that for the CRM software.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using UiPath for nine months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

UiPath is a very stable application. We haven't faced any hiccups or any major downtimes. Being a cloud platform, it's very good. The only thing that we need to take care of is our internet and our system. Apart from that, I haven't faced any downtime issues or performance issues with UiPath. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's scalable. It definitely has all the capabilities for scaling up, but for our department, we most probably aren't going to scale it up because we currently have a sufficient number of users. We have been able to extract the best out of UiPath from the current usage, but it definitely has all the features to scale.

Currently, in our organization, it's deployed across multiple departments. There are 15 departments in our organization, and eight of those departments use UiPath. In our department, seven of us use this application. We have seven user logins for UiPath, but I am not sure about the number of users in other departments. The majority of users are non-technical staff and developers. There is a 50:50 ratio.

How are customer service and support?

I have been in touch with their technical support, but my involvement is very less. They are very friendly, and they are very knowledgeable. They could solve most of the queries within 24 hours, and for most of the queries, they also had help documents that they shared with us so that we could learn, and the next time it happens, we are able to resolve it ourselves. So far, their support has been very good. I would rate them a 10 out of 10. I don't have any complaints so far.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not explicitly use any other product for RPA. 

How was the initial setup?

I was not involved in its deployment.

What about the implementation team?

We got some training from UiPath's third-party team on how to go about using the software because we didn't have any clue. For initial installation and deployment, we did not require anyone else. We did it ourselves. We just required some training on how to go about using the software.

In terms of maintenance, it requires minimal maintenance. It's a complete cloud product, and its maintenance involves downloading the latest release or updating to the latest release. That's it. We just have one person who takes care of all of these aspects. We don't have an extensive team to take care of the maintenance of the product. It's very easy for us to do maintenance. One thing that we like very much about UiPath is that it requires very little maintenance.

What was our ROI?

We have definitely seen a return on investments on UiPath. Basically, a lot of time was saved for us. We were able to concentrate on other aspects of our work. Tasks that previously required two days now just require four to five hours. There are about 30% cost savings with UiPath. 

The return on investment is quicker with UiPath. Earlier, the output that we wanted from a task took around 15 days, but now, it just takes around a week. That's the return on investment that we are getting from UiPath.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It's fairly priced. It's not too costly, and it's also not too cheap. When you bundle it with the UiPath Academy courses and the great community that they have, it is worth the price. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did try out Automation Anywhere. We did a trial of that software, but that was not reliable for us. We didn't like the performance that it offered. That's why we went for UiPath, and we have been using UiPath since.

What other advice do I have?

Non-technical people have this misconception that automation is only for people with a coding or development background. I would definitely suggest trying UiPath because it breaks that barrier. Anybody with a little bit of computer knowledge will be able to design simple-level applications.

You can try the community version of UiPath. It's a free version of UiPath. If you are interested, I would also recommend trying out the UiPath Academy courses that are being offered by UiPath.

I would rate UiPath a 9 out of 10. If they can bring the integrations and the API services, it would make the product the best in the market. All other aspects are very good.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
reviewer1642377 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior RPA Developer at a marketing services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Reduces costs, frees up employees, and makes building automations easy
Pros and Cons
  • "We had a cost reduction of approximately 20% in our operations."
  • "If I can get a little bit more data and a little bit more customization on Orchestrator, that would be really great."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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%.

What is most valuable?

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. 

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and technical support?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

How was the initial setup?

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. 

What about the implementation team?

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.

What was our ROI?

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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Colton Phillips - PeerSpot reviewer
Automation Developer at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
Helps us tackle larger workloads and engage employees to become citizen developers
Pros and Cons
  • "Within UiPath Cloud itself, UiPath Insights has been excellent. Insights is one of the newer features we were excited about because we built custom reports, captured all that data in one place, and leveraged it in different areas. That was a challenge for us and created a support burden. We're automation developers, not report developers. When leadership wanted a new metric or anything, figuring it out was always a pain."
  • "UiPath needs work on the governance side. For example, they released Studio Web this year and have started work on its governance, but it initially lacked control from an administration standpoint. You could not lock down third-party libraries or other applications and integrations it had built in."

What is our primary use case?

We started using AI in Document Understanding by leveraging it against our models for different documents from our customers, primarily in the finance space. We have also used AI to train models for land management documents, helping them learn as we receive new document types. 

Recently, we've used it to analyze documents and articles online to understand sentiment toward our company. We analyze and summarize things people say in articles or posts elsewhere, which allows us to collect industry trend data. We are considering using Clipboard AI for smaller, ad-hoc data processing tasks because it can sometimes be more effective than Document Understanding.

How has it helped my organization?

We get a lot of projects that are on relatively short notice for the workload that comes with them. Historically, we would rely on leveraged services or contractors to do that work manually, which is costly. You can save tons of money by automating data entry, transcription, etc. Nowadays, as we get busier and busier, the work seems to bog people down more and more with tasks. UiPath gives them opportunities to free themselves up and focus on themselves.

We initially focused on time savings and how we could free people up more. We achieved that over time, but it took a while to get there in the first few years. We came in with some use cases that we later learned were not great fits for automation. We learned through trial and error and got better at identifying better use cases for automation. We've succeeded, and it's worked out for the better. 

But aside from saving people time, we also wanted to ensure that we brought in new technology to leverage some of those processes. UiPath forces you to look at the process from a high level and take a step back. You might have had the same person doing the same process for 10 years or more without thinking about how you can use new technologies to eliminate the process or make it more efficient. UiPath forces you to look at the process as a whole and the systems it's tied to. When you step back and look at it, especially with new people coming in, they start offering suggestions, like "Wait. You've been sending this email every time? That's something we can automate now. Oh, you've been trying to pull this information from a document and copy and paste it? That's something we can automate, too." 

If it's not automation, it's something else. We can look at other tools and applications our company brought in. There's usually some other solution they can use, automation or not. The natural way to work with it is by lining out a process and laying out all the steps on a workflow diagram. It allows you to rethink your process as you're doing it. 

Instead of just following step-by-step documentation or the way you've done it all the time, it gives you a chance to see it from a new perspective, and that's just part of working with the tool. As you build that out in UiPath using task capture or anything else, you will see that naturally and start thinking about ways to handle it better.  

Automation has freed up employees for other tasks. That's something that they like about it. The other thing it's done is build some excitement about IT and solutions in general. They're always looking at the new function that's coming out. They want to see what else we can do for them. Automation isn't always the answer, but we can get them to engage and talk to us during office hours to attempt to solve their problem with UiPath. We can also learn more about what they do. 

We're getting closer to our customers, talking more about their work, and they're feeling a closer bond with us. They're feeling like they trust us more in IT and are starting to see what other tools we have. Maybe automation wasn't the right fit, but we will always find better opportunities by building a report that sends an automatic email and an application for them in low-code software. UiPath has helped create a much better and fluid engagement process for us and our customers. 

Since it's a low-code tool that's easier for them to approach and understand, they're also more involved in the design process. The learning curve is shorter. When Studio first came out, it wasn't as user-friendly as they had hoped, but StudioX came out in 2020 and was approachable for most of our users. That's what our citizen developers use most of the time now. We have far more citizen developers with StudioX than unattended developers with Studio.

What is most valuable?

Within UiPath Cloud itself, UiPath Insights has been excellent. Insights is one of the newer features we were excited about because we built custom reports, captured all that data in one place, and leveraged it in different areas. That was a challenge for us and created a support burden. We're automation developers, not report developers. When leadership wanted a new metric or anything, figuring it out was always a pain. 

Insights has built-in mechanisms for tracking time savings, usage reports, and the overall health of your automation program. Having that functionality built in by default is critical. I click it and tell it the report that I want to generate. It'll build it for me automatically, and I can share it with people who need it. It has made a huge difference for people administrating the platform and reporting success to leadership over time. 

What needs improvement?

UiPath needs work on the governance side. For example, they released Studio Web this year and have started work on its governance, but it initially lacked control from an administration standpoint. You could not lock down third-party libraries or other applications and integrations it had built in.

For example, people could use a Google account, but we might have concerns about that from a security standpoint. Cybersecurity is taking a more significant place in IT, and we're mindful of that. Having explicit governance over what our users can do inside those technologies is essential. We hope to see that more over the next few years. We've given a lot of that feedback as customers to UiPath, and they've been working hard to get that into the pipeline and implement those changes.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using UiPath for about six years now.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

UiPath can grow with us, especially since they developed a cloud environment. When we started, we had to make many changes in Orchestrator and other areas as we scaled up. We scaled up fast and automated dozens of automations in the first few years. 

However, we found that the default setup for the UiPath Orchestrator in 2018 didn't have all the features we needed to administer it to our customers. We had to build custom solutions in-house, but they've released many new features in UiPath Cloud that simplify management. 

How are customer service and support?

I rate UiPath 10 out of 10. The executive support team and customer success team have been great. All of them play a role, and they're super knowledgeable. If they can't solve your problem, they know who can and connect you with them quickly. We've leveraged them extensively and will use them more over the next couple of years as we finish our cloud implementation. 

There are still many features we don't use, and we constantly go to them for guidance and help on how to use them best and what they've done with other customers. They provide tons of great insight and have a solid network. 

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We didn't have a low-code automation platform. We developed most of our automations using PowerShell. We didn't have citizen developers, but most business users would use Power Automate. Back then, it was known as Flow on the Power Platform. 

Our corporate leadership decided to bring in UiPath. It wasn't an IT decision.  They wanted something they could start using for their daily tasks. They didn't think we had something that could automate things well, and PowerShell is limited from a scripting and API standpoint. They wanted to automate things in SAP, and the APIs and other things are locked down in a custom shop like ours. We can't integrate with our environment in any way we want, so we need something that can interact through the interface. UiPath does that. It can click and type everything through the interface. 

The leadership started the process. IT got involved and supported it. Since then, we've helped it grow throughout the company. It's not just finance anymore. 

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was complex because UiPath didn't have many pipelines built in. We had to build custom pipelines for the technology we use. It was TFS at the time, and now we use Azure DevOps. I helped with the VDI setup. For unattended automations, you must have a platform or system they can run on. We had looked at doing HDRs—high-density robots—that UiPath. 

Due to applications such as SAP, it couldn't run on a server-side setup. It had to be on a desktop, so we used a VDI for every bot we created, and I helped create the user policies for our accounts and device policies for each VDI. I also set up all the installations and the presets. I helped set up a framework for that over the first year, from 2018 to 2019. We smoothed out the process from there. That was something we had to do on our side. It will be unique for a customer depending on their environment.

What about the implementation team?

We used a partner during the initial setup.

What was our ROI?

The leadership is pleased with the outcomes. With Insights, we can show them how much time we're saving with each process.  We document savings in hours rather than monetary terms.

What other advice do I have?

I rate UiPath 10 out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Ebin-Abraham - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer at Baker Hughes
Real User
Top 10
We receive frequent updates, a reduction in human errors, and end-to-end -automation
Pros and Cons
  • "UiPath stands out for its robust SAP integration capabilities and a growing library of connectors that simplify connecting to various applications."
  • "Currently, UiPath doesn't provide automatic notifications for known bugs in new releases."

What is our primary use case?

Our team manages RPA licensing, including evaluating other tools besides UiPath. We consider factors like upcoming automation reports and license renewal costs when deciding between UiPath, Power Automate, or other options. By comparing features and licensing expenses, we make informed choices about which RPA tool best suits our needs.

UiPath handles our invoice processing and a variety of ERP tasks, including automating processes in SAP and Oracle. We also leverage it for some portal interactions and other invoice-related functionalities.

We use the UiPath orchestrator platform.

How has it helped my organization?

We recently migrated to UiPath's cloud-based Orchestrator, and the benefits have been tremendous. We receive frequent updates without any maintenance on our end thanks to UiPath managing everything. This ensures no downtime and access to all the latest features, which UiPath releases regularly throughout the year in response to user feedback. Additionally, our investment in premium support, including a dedicated Partner Account Manager and UiPath Advantage benefits, provides us with immediate assistance whenever needed.

Although UiPath is not as user-friendly as Microsoft Power Automate, it boasts a wider range of features. UiPath does require some coding knowledge for developers due to its drag-and-drop interface, but it provides a strong framework that simplifies development. Projects can often be completed within one to two months thanks to this ease of use, and the platform itself is constantly being improved.

UiPath offers end-to-end automation, replacing the need for multiple tools. It supports DLC and provides sample documents and maintenance guidance. Additionally, UiPath's built-in flowcharts eliminate the need for Visio, reducing costs. Furthermore, integration with Azure and pre-built templates minimizes the need for PowerShell scripting, streamlining the development process. Overall, UiPath simplifies automation by offering a comprehensive and user-friendly platform.

The UiPath User Community is a fantastic resource, offering a one-stop shop for all our UiPath inquiries where we can find answers and connect with other users.

UiPath has been a game-changer for us. Productivity has soared, security has been significantly bolstered, and the new features are proving incredibly versatile. We've even been able to reduce outsourcing by implementing UiPath automation, which have greatly simplified our monitoring processes.

Its ability to minimize on-premises infrastructure aligns perfectly with the current trend of companies prioritizing digitization to reduce their physical footprint. In other words, UiPath is a key tool for achieving this modern business goal.

Our vendors initially struggled to adapt to the cloud-based platform after migrating from on-premise software. To bridge this knowledge gap, we directed them to the UiPath Academy courses, which proved to be a valuable resource. However, the extensive course library made navigating and finding the most relevant content challenging. Fortunately, UiPath's supportive team provided us with the necessary links, allowing our team to get up to speed quickly.

It has helped speed up our digital transformation.

UiPath has significantly reduced human error in our finance department. Previously, manual processes resulted in numerous errors that often went unnoticed until the quarter's end. Now, automation minimizes errors and frees the finance team to handle any remaining manual tasks with greater ease.

UiPath has helped free up around 30 percent of our staff time and has significantly reduced our costs, and the KPI data we're maintaining confirms these substantial savings.

What is most valuable?

UiPath stands out for its robust SAP integration capabilities and a growing library of connectors that simplify connecting to various applications. Document Understanding has also seen significant improvement, making data extraction more accurate. Additionally, UiPath offers valuable process insights, providing a clear picture of automation utilization across machines, and giving us a powerful tool to optimize our workflows.

What needs improvement?

UiPath's cost can be prohibitive, and the sheer number of licensing options they offer makes it difficult to choose the right one, creating a confusing selection process.

Currently, UiPath doesn't provide automatic notifications for known bugs in new releases. This means we're left to discover and report them ourselves. Ideally, I'd like to receive updates on these known issues from UiPath to streamline the automation process.

UiPath implementing a feature like Microsoft's CoPilot would significantly enhance our development experience by offering assistance in building automation.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using UiPath for six years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

UiPath is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

UiPath is easy to scale up.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support is amazing. They are available at any time.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We also have a signed license agreement with Microsoft because of UiPath's high cost.

UiPath offers a pre-built framework that tailors to our specific needs, along with a powerful orchestrator for centralized control. While Microsoft's automation platform is still evolving and lacks features like UiPath's orchestrator, it excels in native integrations with Microsoft products like Outlook and SharePoint. However, for SAP integrations, UiPath provides exclusive activities that are crucial for automating tasks within our system.

How was the initial setup?

In 2018 when I first deployed UiPath I found it to be complex but now that I have more experience, the deployment is straightforward.

Our team created three AWS accounts, designating one of them. We then set up, launched, and deployed the orchestration tool on the first account. After performing a POC and gaining leadership approval, we spun up two additional accounts for QA with UiPath's ongoing support throughout the year. Finally, we deployed additional machines and established a Cloud Operating Validation environment.

In-house we required eight people for the deployment.

What about the implementation team?

We initially developed the proof of concept ourselves, but after launching into production, we leveraged the expertise of multiple vendors to ensure successful implementation.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

UiPath is expensive compared to other RPA tools.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate UiPath eight out of ten.

We currently have around 130 active bots, though, in the past few years, we decommissioned a larger force of 300. We also boast a user base of over 80.

The maintenance is handled by UiPath.

For a successful RPA implementation, establish a strong framework and conduct a thorough analysis to guarantee the stability of your bots. In the long term, a well-run COE is invaluable. Additionally, explore the range of tools available to enhance your RPA capabilities.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Other
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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Buyer's Guide
Download our free UiPath Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: January 2025
Buyer's Guide
Download our free UiPath Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.