UiPath Reviews

My company's major use case for UiPath is to create automations for web and desktop applications. For example, we use it to automatically download content from another page or PDF. It's creating automatic programs to help us download data from the website or application.

For our organization, it has made our work a lot easier. Before UiPath, the tasks that we are automating were done manually and they were very time-consuming. Things were inefficient and many errors and bugs popped up. With the automation that UiPath has provided, the time required for those tasks has dropped significantly. A task that required four or five hours is down to 15 or 20 minutes, with zero or a minimal number of errors. That is one of the major impacts that UiPath has had. It has improved our overall efficiency.

The time we have saved can be invested in other aspects of our business, like lead generation or preparing the website. UiPath automation has saved us a solid amount of time.

Within a week of deployment, we were able to see results.

Another feature is the ease of creating programs with UiPath. Other RPA solutions are not that easy to use. Any person who is a beginner using this platform can learn it very easily. The deployment time and implementation time are greatly reduced when it comes to training our employees on this software. We are able to do our work much more quickly and efficiently with UiPath.

One thing that I personally like very much is the drag-and-drop capability in UiPath. I don't have a coding background. One of the major selling points of the solution is that it requires very minimal coding to create a program. It's very easy to drag and drop to create the required fields from the tool. That is one of the key and interesting features. The entire user interface and user experience is enhanced because of low-code and no-code abilities.

Other similar software solutions that involve coding take a lot of time because once you start coding there are errors that pop up. With the drag-and-drop feature there is nothing like that. It's instant. When you drag and drop you can see an immediate preview of what the output will look like. Work that would take two to three hours is done in 10 to 15 minutes, so that much amount of time is saved when creating a workflow.

Another feature is the Activities menu. It's a type of log system in which I am able to check what activities have happened. It keeps me updated.

The things that I use in UiPath are very comfortable for me and I find it very useful. I'm pretty satisfied with the current feature list. I don't think anything else is required.

There are two editions of UiPath. One is the free Community version and the other is the paid Enterprise version. I have used both. The feature updates in the Enterprise version are very regular and the support is quite fast. That's not replicated in the Community version. They could bring both versions to an equal level so that people who are just starting, with limited staff and a minimal budget, can use the entire feature list of UiPath in the Community version. 

Apart from that, in terms of the features and the simplicity of the product, it's on par with all the other top solutions out there.

I've been using UiPath for 15 or 16 months.

They do monthly product updates and, after an update, the system doesn't lag or crash. It's pretty stable for the updates that they provide. 

Until now, I haven't faced any bug, software, or performance issue with UiPath. It has been a smooth ride and I hope it continues like that.

I believe it is a scalable solution.

In our organization, it is deployed across multiple departments. Different departments use UiPath for different purposes. In our department there are 12 end-users of UiPath, but I'm not sure how many users there are in the other departments.

I don't think, in the near future, we plan to increase the number of users because, for our bandwidth, these people are using it concurrently. But when our business grows beyond a particular limit, obviously, the number of users will increase, but that won't be for another six or seven months.

For the Enterprise solution, the technical support is a 10 out of 10, but for the Community edition it's a six out of 10. It's not that quick with the Community edition. They respond after 48 hours when you raise an inquiry, but with the Enterprise edition, it's instant.

Positive

We didn't use a different solution. We took a manual approach before.

I wasn't part of the deployment, but since it's mostly a cloud-based product, I don't think maintenance is required. All the updates are over the air.

We have definitely seen a return on investment by using UiPath. We have saved a lot of time with it and that has ultimately resulted in our employees focusing their time on other important aspects of growing the business.

The main reason we went ahead with UiPath was the pricing. As I mentioned, they have a free version as well as the paid version. And the pricing of the paid version was not that high. It's low- to mid-level pricing. They maintain the pricing to cater to small and medium-level companies.

Aside from the standard licensing fee, there was an additional training fee but that was optional only. UiPath has its Academy where we could attend courses on how to use the software, but if you want additional training, you have to pay extra. We did that and took some additional training on UiPath to feel confident.

I don't use the machine learning and AI capabilities in UiPath because they require a little bit of coding, which I'm not very familiar with.

But one thing that I have personally taken out of my experience with the solutions is that people with less coding knowledge or with no coding background should definitely consider using UiPath. It reduces a lot of the dependencies needed to produce automations. In the past, people like me who are not from a coding background, had to be dependent on others, and a lot of manual work was required. But with UiPath, I get to do it myself. I'm not depending on anyone else. That way, there is no time constraint for me. That is the major piece of advice that I would give to people without a coding background: You have complete control and can get things done in your own time. It is much more efficient and simple.

Try the Community version as soon as possible and get used to the entire workflow of the product and then make a decision. It is pretty easy to understand the entire workflow. Play around with it and you will fall in love with the package.

All the features are very good. It's a cool application to use and it's one of the best out there in the marketplace.

We use it mainly for automating customer management processes and to speed up team collaboration. We use many different kinds of software, ranging from cloud services to legacy. We need our team to work between those applications and sometimes data has to be actioned. We were doing those processes manually and, as we grew our business, we realized robotic processes could intervene. We heard of UiPath, we tried it, and we were able to automate our process of working with the legacy system and other software.

We have a mix of attended and unattended processes. We are able to run some of our processes end-to-end, but some processes need moderation. We need someone to attend those processes to complete them.

Our invoicing system is a very old system but we cannot replace it right now. At the same time, we also have the latest cloud application for data analytics and manipulation. It is not possible for the legacy system to export data from that system. We use UiPath to extract and copy data from that old system and use it in our new system.

We have been able to automate the contracts portion of our business processes. Automating has saved us a lot of hours and given our team more freedom to be more creative and more productive. Overall, it has improved our business efficiency. It has increased our production capability. It has helped our business a lot.

It has saved our employees nearly 35 percent of their time so that they can work on other tasks. They have that much more time.

Attended automation is mostly used in our QA department and by certain parts of our marketing department. They include moderation by our supervisors and that has helped a lot. We are able to work efficiently with those processes.

We have been able to transform 25 percent of our processes to automation. That has created a lot of efficiency in our business. It has transformed our business to become more productive. That transformation did not require the purchase of expensive upgrades or IT support. We did not require any other software licenses.

And we have definitely seen cost savings because we are more efficient and we have more time to do more things. 

We have also been able to provide more reliable services because we have eliminated most of the human error that we used to have. Almost 90 percent of our errors have been eliminated.

It's quite easy to build Automations. They have plenty of resources. Furthermore, they have this new AI feature for process mining and task mining. It can record our manual processes and then it can suggest automations for them. Because of that feature, it's also relatively easy to implement UiPath for automation.

Some processes are very complex and very long, and sometimes it is very hard for a human to implement them manually. AI has enabled us to automatically solve those processes that would not have been doable by a human. It has given more meaningful information to our business and services.

When we have difficulty knowing what features are most applicable and how to apply features to particular processes, or how to solve specific problems regarding automation, we find answers thanks to a lot of the senior people in the UiPath community. They are really supportive when we are implementing automation in our business. 

Some of our employees also use MacBook devices for their daily work, mostly for high-graphic projects. UiPath doesn't have a complex set of features for OS X systems. If they could add more complex features for MacBooks, that would be good.

Also, it is quite slow sometimes when running very heavy and complex processes. It would help if they could improve their base speed.

I have been using UiPath for a little over two years now.

So far it has been very stable.

The support is good, very active and reliable. No problems so far.

Positive

We have been using UiPath for two years. When we see our financial results for the last five years, we have not seen that much increase in our business because there are other factors involved.

But we were able to automate our processes and be more productive in those last two years. We have many applications and projects going on. I think we will also see a financial increase in a couple of more years.

The pricing is transparent, and the best part is that they have the Community version, so there isn't anything to hide. You can try the cloud version. They offer plenty of time, two months, for a trial. There are other pricing models that are good. We have not used all of their services, but we have UiPath Studio and that has good, fair pricing.

We were considering Automation Anywhere and software from IBM, but we found that UiPath fits our needs better.

It was really fast and easy to get started with the UiPath. They had a Community version that I could just sign up for, download, and start using. There were plenty of resources online, on YouTube, to learn and implement it. Also, the community was active. The other RPA software was not like that. You had to phone, request a demo, and the way they worked was quite hard. We found it very flexible to use UIPath.

We are using UiPath as our RPA solution for finance, supply chain, revenue cycle, HR, and IT. At the moment, we're using it mainly for unattended automations of big jobs.

In the healthcare field, where systems often don't talk to each other, UiPath helps data to be shared between systems. My colleagues have been talking about that and there has been an improvement. That's important because it helps us to keep in line with one another.

Also, security and compliance are a big deal in our organization, especially because we are in healthcare, and we keep it as secure as possible. UiPath assists us with that in terms of credentialing and separation of duties. We don't take security lightly.

The tenant concept, where you can have everyone working in their own space, is valuable.

We're just starting to implement UiPath on a larger scale. We've been using it for about nine months maybe, so we're new to it.

We really have not had a lot of hiccups or anything that's been difficult. The stability has been good. On a scale of one to 10, I would give it an eight right now and that's only because we haven't really tested the boundaries.

The scalability is good. It's easy to do. It will get pushed a little bit more as we get more mature with the product, but so far so good.

We had a different solution prior to UiPath, and what we've really liked so far with UiPath is the way that they interact with us in terms of customer support and satisfaction. They're very in tune with what we need. They have a lot of experience in the RPA world.

Our TAM is Micah de Boer and our sales engineer is Mick Taylor. Our account manager, Garet Wright, has been outstanding.

Positive

We previously used Automation Anywhere. One of the reasons we switched was that it didn't seem to be as mature as UiPath. Another was that it does not have a citizen developer program or even the concept of a citizen developer. In addition, it didn't seem to be as stable. We had a lot of issues with the system going offline or having problems. And when it came to customer service, they were not responsive to our needs. It would take days for them to get back to us on questions or issues that we submitted.

Right now we are an on-prem model, but we are switching to a SaaS-based model in the cloud.

From what I have heard from my team, the deployment of UiPath has been much easier than the deployment of Automation Anywhere. It is much more straightforward, clearer, and easier.

The team that supports the platform is a team of just two people. Both are senior analyst programmers and they are responsible for the deployment and the infrastructure set up of everything related to the UiPath product. We have two other individuals on my team who are the RPA developers, the ones writing the bots.

The deployment has been pretty lightweight so far in comparison to what we had to deal with when we used Automation Anywhere.

We did it ourselves.

It's returning hours back to employees so that they can do more tasks that involve thinking, and not have to do so much mundane, repetitive work. That gives us a good return on investment because something that might have taken an individual an hour to do can be done by a robot in five minutes. It's definitely freeing up some actual work time for people.

We've saved the equivalent of five or six FTEs, and that's in the short amount of time that we've been using UiPath.

It has also improved our employees' joy at work because they aren't having to do some of the mundane activities that they had to do in the past.

Licensing allocations are easy. We also have the ability to have a robot license be fully utilized, meaning it can do more than one thing. If it's idle, we're able to use that robot for some other automation, rather than having a one-to-one relationship between automations and robots.

We just moved to their Enterprise licensing model and it seems fair at this point. It will be interesting to see where we are over the next three years and if we're able to show a return on that hefty investment.

One area that is challenging for me is tracking licenses. It would help to have a license dashboard so that we would know how many licenses have been allocated, who they're allocated to, and when they were last used. Right now, to gather that information, I have to go to four different screens in UiPath and then consolidate all that. A licensing module that we could look at from administrative and management perspectives, would be awesome. That's the main thing I have been hearing from my staff.

When we first chose our initial vendor, Automation Anywhere, we had done an RFP process and had gone through pilots. It was close in terms of which was number one and which was number two. When we discovered that Automation Anywhere wasn't meeting our needs, we contacted other folks who had used Automation Anywhere and had switched to UiPath and asked them for feedback and what their experience had been. We did some benchmarking with others around us to see what they were doing.

Comparing UiPath to what we had before, it has been a cakewalk. Be sure that you work with your leadership and with your IT areas to pick the best deployment solution for your company.

We haven't had an opportunity to use all the features and functions, but in terms of the robustness of the product and the communication we've received from our teams at UiPath, we've had an outstanding experience with them, and we really look forward to keeping that going in the future as we build out this program.

We are using UiPath for automation processes in an insurance company in the finance department.

The most valuable feature of UiPath is if you set a form and there's an interaction with the user, it's easy and fast to build than the other RPA tools. Additionally, it is simple to use the connectors.

In UiPath they should improve the input and outputs of processes. I found it very complicated.

In a future release of UiPath, they could improve the OCR engine to make it better. All the RPA tools use some OCR engine, while UiPath's is the best but it is hard to configure and set up for your projects.

I have been using UiPath for approximately six months.

The stability of UiPath is highly stable.

We have approximately four people using this solution in my organization.

I have not used the support from UiPath.

We previously used Blue Prism.

UiPath gives a return on investment, it does what it is supposed to do.

UiPath is an expensive solution but it is worth the money. You have a lot of features. 

The licenses need to be improved because when you have to use UiPath on another system, you have to set up the processes manually, and you are not able to change the process the time if you configure a process running at the system. You have to stop it and then run to the other system. It's not too easy to configure it according to the system. If you have a large deployment, for example, 10 to 20 bots, it's hard to configure.

UiPath has a lot of free training and a lot of free processes ready to go. You have to see the best practices in order to receive the best way of development. It is important to see the best practices guide.

I rate UiPath a nine out of ten.

UiPath is great because it's highly stable, it's fast to develop, and easy to configure. However, there are some improvements to be made.

We are handling millions of users' data that comes in via raw formats, like PDFs, invoices, hard copies, et cetera, and we have to capture that data into our applications so that it can be transformed into usable data for the users. We use UiPath to develop bots to analyze and capture the information in the required format, and to automatically upload and enter the data into Excel.

It is a very highly efficient and time-saving solution for us because processing millions of records on a monthly or even a daily basis would take too much time. It also saves our organization human effort and cost. When we had to do these processes manually, we had to hire 10 to 12 resources just to enter the records from the invoices and PDFs into Excel and other tools. Those 10 to 12 people were a cost for our organization, on the order of 20,000 to 25,000 Indian rupees per month. On the other hand, the solution is a one-time cost for the organization, unless any customization is required.

The solution's Automation Cloud has helped to decrease time-to-value. Our day-to-day manual tasks have been automated and we are gradually deploying solutions for our help desk and our customer services.

Attended automation has helped to scale RPA benefits in our organization. We have been able to automate two departments, marketing and sales, and that has improved our efficiency by 42 percent.

And using UiPath to automate processes has reduced human error by 92 percent. We still have to do the other 8 percent manually. Sometimes a PIN or a zipcode is not understood by the bots.

The bots and OCR functionality for reading documents are the most valuable and helpful features within UiPath. You can create bots on your own after doing some formal training with UiPath people and consultants. You can create and develop workflows for your own purposes—for capturing, entering, and exporting data—and then deploy the bots accordingly.

OCR is important because if we were using human effort to read and capture the data, it would take so much time.

In addition, UiPath handles the infrastructure, maintenance, and updates as a managed service, and that means we don't have to take care of those things. All future updates and enhancements are managed by them. We don't have to worry about the infrastructure resources—compute and network, et cetera—that are required for our applications and use cases to run.

Another nice feature is that UiPath notifies us when a process has been completed, as well as if there are any flags or issues related to it.

I have been using UiPath for more than two years.

We are looking at UiPath's AI functionality. It is in the pipeline although there are additional costs for that subscription. Gradually, we have seen that there have been some issues with the automations, miscommunications or misguided invoices, coming into our databases. We need to capture and manipulate that kind of data with the help of UiPath's AI. We are hoping that within two or three months we will be able to introduce that.

If there are any flags or issues related to a process, we can easily communicate with their customer services and support. Their staff in these areas, and the consulting, are fabulous. They provide resolutions on time.

Positive

The whole setup process was fine. It took one or two months to complete the deployment.

Our deployment plan was to work with the vendor, and not with third-party consultants.

We have done about 35 to 40 percent of the UiPath Academy courses, but we learned the rest from the training documentation and the user manuals. The UiPath Academy is a great place to learn at any time, from anywhere, at your convenience. You can learn about the UiPath products and services, tools, and workflows. And the training documentation is wonderful. It is written in a very easy-to-understand language that a non-technical person can follow. During the pandemic situation, in 2020 and 2021, we encouraged our employees to learn from the Academy courses because at that moment some of the courses were absolutely free. They learned a lot from them.

We are also part of the UiPath community. When you are part of a community like that, you empower other customers and prospective buyers by providing meaningful information to them about how UiPath works and how it can be valuable. And by sharing our ideas, our outcomes and benefits, in the community, we help spread knowledge to other users.

Our ROI is positive. It has saved time and human effort.

The cost is better than that of other solutions in the market, like Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism.

Still, I would like to see them improve the pricing for small and mid-sized organizations. If you are working in a large corporation, adoption is not a challenge. But if you're working in a small or mid-sized company, there are financial constraints. UiPath has to introduce flexible plans and pricing so that smaller companies can also use the solution. In some cases, if you compare the overall cost of the solution and the cost of human effort, the human effort is cheaper.

We evaluated Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism.

The factors you have to consider when looking at solutions are the 

• flexibility of the vendor
• cost
• overall training and support—do they offer 24/7 customer service and do they interact with users via telephone, email, SMS, et cetera
• flexibility of the solution itself and how complex it is. 

Those are the factors that led us to go with UiPath.

I would highly recommend this solution to prospective buyers. If you are looking to fully automate manual tasks and save your organization time and cost, go with this solution.

We've used it to automate most of our processes. Our organization is completely technology-driven and we have been able to automate a lot of our processes with UiPath. The main thing that we are using it for is document creation with multiple fields and approval processes.

We're using it to automate daily tasks, using small bots for multiple processes. In the long-run, they're actually connected together. A lot of people have left our organization in the past couple of years and, instead of hiring new employees, we actually try to build a bot for whatever the work those employees were doing.

By not replacing employees who have left, we have been able to achieve our aim of running a lean company. We are able to save a lot of money on HR costs as well as on the costs of hiring new employees.

In addition, our document-processing time has been reduced for every customer that we are catering to, and that has resulted in great ROI as well as customer satisfaction.

We have compared the performance of humans with the bots who replaced them as they left the organization. The humans were making a lot of errors compared to the bots. The bots are not perfect and they do make their share of errors, but they are quite different from human errors. Everything is logic-based, and everything happens with triggers, so the possibility of an error is minimalistic when something is being handled by a bot. That is especially true for a bot that is created with UiPath because it's so mature. Overall, there are hardly any errors that come out of the bots made with UiPath.

Another benefit comes from the UiPath Academy courses. It saves us on training costs because we don't have to develop the content for training new employees. We're not product experts when it comes to UiPath and the Academy delivers training in a fashion that is easy to understand. There's a lot of support provided with the training courses as well. Not only does the Academy help in terms of training-development costs, but it has minimized the duration of training for each employee who starts to use UiPath. The results are great savings for the organization, both monetary, through automation, and non-monetary when it comes to training.

The AI and machine learning that are built into these bots really help us to make bots at a mature level where they're able to track with real-world customers. They also help with employee engagement and business productivity and take them to a whole new level. Obviously, we cannot develop such technology from scratch. We used built-in processes and automations in the past, but once we found, first when we were using Automation Anywhere, and now while using UiPath, this type of technology, it really took over the technology suite that our organization had been using previously and replaced it completely. UiPath is a complete suite that can handle most of our needs by itself.

Document creation is one of the most important features for us. As a healthcare company, we have a lot of documents with complex fields. For example, if a treatment is booked by a customer in another country, a lot of paperwork has to be completed. That paperwork first goes to the healthcare provider and, once accepted there, it comes to the company to be approved by the management. Then it goes back to the customer.

In addition, the process has been integrated into mobile apps. That way, a senior manager gets a request on the mobile app and to approve the transaction they just have to press the "Accept" button and everything else happens on its own. All of that happens in a matter of seconds.

Also, the UiPath Academy courses are very user-friendly and enable us to achieve a lot more. Those courses have taught us a lot, especially for our new automation employees. Once the basic courses are completed by any new employee, we actually recommend that they complete the certifications that are available via UiPath, and some of them are actually free of cost. Only after completing certification do we allow them to work on the floor. We have found the Academy content to be really amazing in terms of design as well as its functionality. We have made use of all of the courses there are.

The UiPath community has grown quite a bit, but it's still not on par with the kind of support that you would find with Automation Anywhere. That is still missing because UiPath is a relatively new entrant in the market. The community support is growing, but that is definitely one of the areas that can be improved.

Also, sometimes there are failures in the cloud during migration. Say you're migrating it from one instance to another instance. There are failures and there's not much support for such cases in the UiPath documentation. While it is a rare instance that we need to migrate, whenever we do have to migrate, we generally face some issues. I feel that there are bugs in that area.

We've been using UiPath for about three years.

The platform is really stable. There's never been a point when it's been unstable or has had runtime issues. There have been really minute server crashes, unexpectedly. But I don't think that is due to the platform. It is more due to the server environment and the hosting environment not being configured properly. There are no problems whatsoever in terms of the stability as well as the performance of the product.

The product is very scalable. It is meant for scalability. It is specifically meant for a situation where there are a lot of tasks that have to be completed by and it automates everything. Even if large volumes of data and tasks have to be completed with lightning speed, that is exactly where UiPath fits in. It does the job beautifully. That is the reason it was able to replace the whole technology suite that we were using, a suite that consisted of different products.

The technical support has been great. The only issue that we've had is that there aren't enough specialized support people who can help with the server issues. Configuring Google Cloud Platform with UiPath can be challenging. There were some errors that we were not able to figure out on our own. There are two support teams that we could reach out to, either the server support or the UiPath support. Sometimes both of them were confused about what was causing the issue. And sometimes, it takes more than the anticipated time to resolve the issue. But overall, UiPath provides great support.

Positive

At first, we were using a completely in-house technology system. After that, we used Automation Anywhere for a couple of years. But once we started using UiPath, we were able to replace that completely.

The initial setup was fairly easy. We've been using the Google Cloud Platform to host the entire automation platform and there isn't much documentation for deploying it on GCP. There are a lot of settings and configurations that are location-specific and that relate to the load and the number of bots that you are going to make with UiPath. There are a lot of things that come into the picture and the documentation is not up to the mark.

To sum it up, it is a little difficult, but not impossible to deploy it initially.

It only takes a few days but it depends on the complexity of the kinds of bots that you plan to run with the platform. Certain bots could take time. For that situation, there are consulting services. Also, there are certain bots that are already there as a template and you can customize them. But if there are processes that require a custom bot to be built from scratch, that could definitely take time. That could take from months to a year if it's a very complex bot and you're creating it with an in-house team.

Our implementation strategy was to take one step at a time. We had designed a complete project deployment roadmap, in which we had certain milestones that we planned to achieve within a few months. There were then more milestones that we planned to reach within a year. We did have to take on some consulting services from UiPath partners for the customized bots, but that resulted in the development costs being reduced, as it went a lot faster than it would have gone without the consulting support. It has gone pretty smoothly.

Apart from the consultants for the customized bots, the initial deployment was completely handled by our in-house team. There was a fair bit of documentation provided with the system itself and we found it sufficient to take care of the initial deployment.

The ROI has been really excellent. We're able to save a lot of costs that were previously paid for subscriptions to multiple suites of software. We were able to save all of that and invest it into one product, UiPath, as well as into development of the bots.

The ROI has been very positive for us. The main issue is that there is an initial investment that you have to make. Once you do that, the ROI keeps on growing year-on-year. For us, it has only been three years. If we compare our costs and ROI over a longer period, I'm sure we'll see a lot better ROI.

The costs are related to infrastructure and development and, of course, at a later stage, include monitoring and maintenance. If you compare all of that over a longer period of time, you'll see savings of anywhere between two and 15 times compared to an equivalent system, over a period of about five to seven years.

Another area with room for improvement is the pricing. Initially, the pricing was a lot more affordable. Now, it seems a bit excessive.

Get an estimate of the cost from UiPath sales representatives. Don't just include the UiPath cost, but also the consulting costs that you might have to pay, and the number of licenses that you might need as an organization. The third thing to consider is the development cost of the bots. All of that has to be considered well in advance.

I don't think there is anything that UiPath bots aren't able to do. But be aware that the budget could become excessive by using UiPath because there are so many different costs that come into the picture. You could require trained employees, people who have previous experience with UiPath, to develop bots that are a custom fit for your organization.

Cost would be one of the things that I would recommend that other organizations consider in advance to see if it suits their budgets. They should also consider whether they have the resources that can deploy and design bots that are able to automate the tasks and the processes that they want to automate.

Apart from UiPath, we also used Automation Anywhere. The reason we use UiPath far more than Automation Anywhere is because we have been using it for some time and we have some resources who are quite well-trained on it. It suits us pretty well. It has automated most of our processes and really kept our system moving. Whatever issues we have had with the product have been very well resolved by the customer support team in a very timely manner, and that is another reason we prefer UiPath over Automation Anywhere.

You need to have resources who are trained in UiPath. You could take the initiative of training employees, but you need some senior resources who have prior experience with UiPath who can be project managers and guide the development and analyst teams on how to reach the goals that the organization is trying to achieve.

UiPath was a fairly new product when we started using it. They were giving a 60-day free trial and were also providing free certifications for that initial period. That is how we started with it. Over the years, we've seen that the UiPath community has grown quite a bit. From being a new entry in the automation market, it has grown into a very mature product and it has now taken over as the main system that our company is using. We rely on technology to support our backend processes and we need a system that is very reliable in terms of delivery. UiPath has turned out to be a system that works out very well for us. The UiPath community really helps whenever there are bugs or glitches that our company is facing. You can reach out to the community where there are very senior developers as well as analysts and you can get a lot of help there, apart from the customer support.

It runs in its own private cloud in the Google Cloud Platform. We have some projects that are run on UiPath that are given to independent contractors to work on. We give a contractor a license for the system and they have to install UiPath on their computer and complete whatever work they have to complete on that. But for our internal organization and employees, we have a private cloud over which UiPath is running.

The biggest lesson would be to just take one step at a time. Make use of the partner support at the beginning. Initially, we tried to build everything ourselves and that cost a lot more than it would have if we had used consultants. There are companies that provide consulting support and there are companies that will actually build your bots exactly to your requirements. That way, you can just deploy them from day one. They also provide maintenance and support for the bots they have developed for you.

We primarily use the solution for operations processes in our corporate investment bank. For example, screen scraping, querying from databases, or any transactional processes. Those are what we're really looking at the most.

The orchestrator is very valuable for us. The ability to have processes, especially transactional processes, be fed into and triggered from there is excellent. I really like the ease of use that allows not just typical developers to use the Studio version, but also StudioX, which allows citizen developers with little to no coding background to be able to automate their own process. Studio limits a lot of the coding you would generally do in Visual Basic and offers a pretty easy use case for people who want to get into development, who might not have that background.

I’d rate the ease of automating within UiPath at an eight or a nine out of ten. Maybe even a perfect ten. They make it very simple. It's a really good platform and for everything I've used it for so far, I can't think of how I would do this X, Y, or Z differently. I really like it.

In terms of our adoption of it, we just started using it this year. We haven't had a large volume of bots delivered and put into production, however, with what we're using, we have a lot of proof of account sets and use cases that are getting pushed along that are going to save the company time in man-hours.

It's going to save the company a lot of potential risks in terms of manual error. It's also something that can be used to automate processes that are very heavily related to compliance procedures as well, where you don't want as much manual touch for the same reason and you don't want to risk, even if it doesn't take that much time for a person. With automation, you remove the risk of somebody making an error.

We don’t have a crazy amount of metrics. We're really in the process of adopting it into the organization. I'd say within the next year, we're really going to be seeing a very large adoption of it.

We have seen direct savings in costs. Every project we deliver in time save has an associated cost reduction to it. If you're saving, for example, four hours a day on a manual process, you're saving that money. You’re also saving on anything that's related to risk. I don't have any hard numbers on the amount of time that's been saved, however, it’s been positive.

Our teams have used the UiPaths Academy courses. It’s helped make the process of getting employees up to speed with UiPath very straightforward. It's one of the better learning platforms I've seen. Between them and Alteryx, they both have very good learning platforms.

What's really important is that you don't need to wait for instructor-led training, which is infrequent. We have it sometimes, still, even when we’re having it a few times a year it gets expensive. The online training, which covers most of the same material, is a really good way for people who don't want to wait for the instructor-led training and want to immediately get their own feet wet.

The Academy is very comprehensive. It's well structured and training is easy to follow. I've used other tools that have been much harder to follow online. This one I really like.

The biggest values that we’ve seen From UiPath Academy are ease of use and ease of scalability. The solutions you make based on the infrastructure that's built around it can be made to be very scalable. There's so much that depends on other terms, such as the data that we have on our own processes, that it's going to be the yes or no, whether or not a process we build can be scalable automation for other teams. As long as we get the data and the processes lined up in the right way, we can make very scalable processes, which is good as that's more cost savings for fewer bots and that's really like what we want to see.

There are some external dependencies. When we have APIs available, UiPath does have that option that we can hook into APIs. That's really where I'd like to be down the line, more like hooking into APIs, data warehouses, so that you don't have to worry too much about the screen scraping functionality, even though that's a great big part of what it does.

I would really like the ability to bring OCR connectors into StudioX, if possible. Right now we're only using OCR and Studio as that's where the plugins are available. I don't know enough about the back end of what makes this feasible versus not feasible. However, at the moment, with StudioX, you can only really read and digitize PDFs. If they can bring in the OCR connectors, they'd allow citizen developers to be able to read in a larger breadth of documents that they would generally need Studio to do.

I've been using the solution for about ten months. 

The product is as stable as it can be for the processes we use to expand on that. We do a lot of screen scraping and web scraping a lot. I want to move away from this in the future. However, the stability of those bots is going to ultimately be reliant on how that webpage looks.

We're looking at very specific parts of the website, such as the HTML tags. If those stay stable and we build our identifiers on those sites to be relatively dynamic, the process will be fine. 

We do plan to increase usage.

The idea is to train up more citizen developers. We need to strike a balance between getting the tool out to the citizen developers and making sure that they're following the governance procedures as well. There's also a little bit of risk of it due to the fact that you give people licenses to build and then they can build something on their desktop. They can just, without going through the proper governance, run it. Therefore, you need to make sure things go through the correct governance. That's why we're trying to make sure we have a very good system in place so that when we grow and are training system developers, everything they do goes through the correct controls and governance process.

We're planning to keep building the users over time. We really want to start looking in the next year from more of a top-down perspective, across larger organizational issues where we can make more scalable bots rather than strictly or mostly automating one-offs. We're looking for where there's more commonality across different businesses that do similar processes, and maybe access similar data sources.

I'm not sure exactly how many people are using it across the organization currently. My guess would be at this point there are 75 to 100 users. However, I could be completely wrong. I'm just guessing, as I don't know all the citizen developers, and who in the operation's teams are using it.

I have not used technical support, however, some people who work for me on my team have. I manage a small team of developers. They have worked with UiPath consultants who are on contracts with our COE. They've been extremely helpful with working out some kinks that they've come across in their projects. 

I haven't used blueprints on my Automation Anywhere. We used to use Automation Anywhere and we are moving off it in favor of UiPath, though I never used those other tools myself. I use ALteryx and it has some RPA abilities, although I use it much more for just basic data transformation workflows. I have coded RPA bots and Python before. What I like, with UiPath, is it's still a tool that's based on code - Visual Basic, VB.NET. However, the coding is really for the most part restricted to your data manipulation, working with variables. The control flow that you normally would need to code in Visual Basic is all drag and drop. I really like that versus straight coding. It still gives you that flexibility of a lot of development environments, however, you can have that drag and drop canvas that allows you to really not need to program as much of that control flow. 

We moved towards UiPath as it's cheaper per bot and it enables more of a citizen development model as well. Automation Anywhere bots were only developed by our COE at the time and UiPath COE's going to use them also, however, they're allowing users in operations to use both Studio (if they have the taste for it) and StudioX. It gives a lot more citizen development capabilities for more advanced functions and automation-type stuff, whereas previously, you would normally need somebody on your team who happens to know BBA to do it. 

In the past, if you have someone from the team who knows BBA and makes something, and they leave and their code breaks, you're screwed. However, if you have a StudioX bot, if it breaks, it's going to be much easier to look into the issue and fix it. It's also supported by our C0E's tech infrastructure. Those are the main driving points for shifting off as well.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I've interacted with UiPath only as a user. I was one of the first users, however, I had nothing to do with deploying the tech infrastructure and developing the governance and controls. I'm just a developer.

We have seen a return on investment. Every project we've delivered that has some sort of time savings to it has had an intrinsic ROI. I don't know the total ROI across the organization, however. I work in one specific part of the company and it's been adopted in a few places. I don't know the total ROI that's been delivered yet.

It's my understanding that it's delivered close to a full headcount so far, in terms of productivity of capacity. There are approximately eight hours a day of time-saving for every workday of the year. That's where we are right now, as we've really just begun adopting it. We're not really deployed into production, and the larger-scale projects aren't in place yet. So far, the projects have been smaller tactical builds that we've been using and it's been delivering up around eight hours of time saving a day. 

I don't know the pricing enough to really comment on it. I know we're getting a better deal in automation than what we had with Automation Anywhere bots, at least per bot deployment. However, I don't know what the licensing costs are.

We do not yet use the Uipath apps feature or their AI functionality in our automation processes. That said, with AI, we're bringing it in and we're definitely planning to use it in the future.

I'd advise new users to make sure you have the controls and governance structures, first and foremost, and you want to make sure those controls are going to be in place and understood before you start deploying licenses to users. I make sure that everything is going to be done and compliant with the audit. As somebody who works in financial services, which is a very heavily regulated industry, that's something that really needs to be kept in mind. You don't want to develop what are essentially just user tools that are not going through the proper controls and treat it like a lightweight software development lifecycle project. You need to make sure those controls are in place, and yet, don't do it too much to the point where it's going to deter the users. At the end of the day, we're not making software, however, we still need to strike that balance.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. Nothing is perfect. I know you UiPath wants to improve the stuff that has not been perfected. I'm not going to say it is a ten out of ten, even though I'm struggling to think of what I don't like. Something that would be very helpful for UiPath is to go back to try to build OCR in StudioX. That would be ideal. Also, being able to implement different types of loops in the Studio would be great. Right now, you can only do a four-loop in a repeating loop. If we could implement wall loops, that would be nice. 

My experience in using UiPath, in general, is in developing traditional bots, assisted bots. There are the typical mundane applications that we're trying to remove in order to add value to customers. 

The solution is used for extracting information from documents and consolidating data, maybe from various Excel sheets. I've used applications, such as PDF, Tableau, and a number of different entities as well. It varies.

I haven't really followed up so much in-depth, however, I know that a lot of the end-users that I've worked with and talked to, that have removed some of the processes, think it’s great. I've got many more strategic types of tasks to do. The one thing users look forward to when they come to work is when something’s been removed from their plate, one piece at a time.

Collectively, I find the UiPath features really complement each other. If you have one tool or another resource available, you're really able to get it into a solution.

They've implemented their stuff very well, considering how fast they've come up with new tools. Usually, it’s a messy situation, however, with UiPath, I've not found that to be the case. It's pretty impressive, the rate at which new tools are released and how well they're thought out, and how usable they are.

From an employee morale perspective, the company is getting positive feedback.

We’ve seen some reduction in human errors and time savings. Depending on what it is, your time savings could be two to three to ten times more in terms of time saved. It’s easy, too. Error reduction is absolutely almost down to nothing.

In terms of cost savings, some of this was done pretty casually, so the numbers are maybe not official. We’ve got 20 data samples, and we're timing it exactly. However, when it comes to time savings, there's always been a very significant amount.

When it comes to ease of use, some of the tools they're providing are in discovery or task capture. You can go out and send this off to somebody and it's pretty self-explanatory in a half hour. Prior to that, people might be using different steps with built-in Windows pieces, which is horrible for capturing automation. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Therefore, adding in this ability to annotate the screenshots with ease, that alone in the development process helps significantly. I'm really liking the discovery tools that complement the product.

All these discovery tools are making building automation easier, from an analyst perspective. It removes the wheat from the chaff and narrows things down, and you begin to see what you need. By clicking on different elements, you can see where they can annotate. It saves a lot of back and forth and time. Not only does the subject matter expert not have to spend time away from their work, you're also not going back and forth and trying to clarify items any longer. It makes things more compact and it’s easier to get to the end goal.

I completely trained on my own as a developer with the UiPath Academy. I was able to do it for free. It's the only onboarding I received. I had nobody else to go to, except for the videos and the forums.

The greatest value of UiPath Academy is that it is free. Now, it’s completely about motivation, and not cost-prohibitive. You just need to be motivated to learn and you can jump in. You don’t have to spend something like $800 and have maybe a company sponsoring you to get started.

People, in their careers, can become relevant again. If they are in a dying industry or disrupted industry, they can get into something that's growing rapidly. If you have a computer, and a decent internet connection, you can have a new career in a fairly short amount of time.

The forum's a great place, however, for a new person, it was better some years ago. It's grown too fast, and it's not that nimble. Previously, if you asked questions, the response time was quicker.

Since I've learned UiPath, there's so many more people rushing and getting into it. With the demand for RPA jobs, the ratio of expertise to novices is very, very low. Before you had a small community and you had a lot of experts and just a few new people trickling in at a time. The influx of new people, it's just growing factor by factor. Where previously there was one person that only had a few questions to answer, now maybe that ratio is now 20 or 30 people. You're not going to get the answers that you need as fast. Luckily, the quality of the Academy is so good, if you look around, you can eventually figure things out.

The issue is that, with so many people, a lot of questions are getting asked before anyone even looks to see if an answer is already there. It tends to make it harder to find relevant, real questions that need to be answered. There are people who are not doing the due diligence and looking at the tags and spending a little extra time before throwing the question out. It makes that part hard to manage.

With people that have already been up-skilled, or already been skilled in the past, UiPath needs to find a way to send some sort of notification to them when items update or change. They need to send out a message to experienced developers to say: “Hey, look at this and push it out."

If you're not going to the Academy and looking for something new, there needs to be some sort of way to say: “Hey, you've been certified. You haven't been in this course. You should look at these things.” I started looking at the Academy and found new elements. When I mentioned something, like, "What's that?" the new guys were aware due to the fact that it was in the Academy from when they started and was not there when I finished.

Basically, just having some sort of mechanism for spreading awareness to existing developers, or pushing something out to them, maybe even through the interface, would be helpful. Whether it’s a little highlight or a little icon to alert users to “hey, here’s something new, something pushed out.” And it’s not just something where you have to go in and read some boring five or six pages of notes, to know that this thing is there. It needs to be visual.

I started using UiPath, which started with training, in the fourth quarter of 2018.

It's a very stable product. I haven't had any issues. If I found or thought something was unstable or something, it usually ended up being me, or an operator error.

I've seen UiPath scaled. Personally, I haven't had issues one way or the other, however, I've heard good things. That said, I can't speak too much on it from the perspective of personal experience.

I have had some interaction. They had a pretty good SLA, in terms of response time. Of course, that has nothing to do with actual solution time. That said, what I remember with everything was that nothing stood out. Usually, you remember some anger or something. I didn't have anything like that.

I'm certified in Automation Anywhere as well. Right now, Automation Anywhere always has two products out, in the sense of getting ready to move into their A360 with the newer product. They're just trying to get that product to maturity. Right now, we have different deployments. Automation Anywhere is cloud-native. 

While they're both RPA, they each have I think a different niche, depending on what the customer needs. 

As a developer, the learning curve in version 11, the prior version, had an easier learning curve compared to UiPath. Automation Anywhere has an edge, in terms of ease of learning for business users and citizen developers.

360 has made the learning curve harder. It's going to add more features, more flexibility. And with that comes a learning curve. Still, the learning curve might be a little easier. 

My deployment experience was not just through UiPath. If anything, I'm pretty agnostic to any platform. I was an analyst, and I was involved with, in general, putting items into production, and going back and forth with developers, and seeing if there were any issues or problems.

I've talked to other developers, and I haven't heard of any particular issues or problems, with UiPath, or anything that was more than just human error or an oversight.

If you're smart about it, you understand what your needs are, you can get an ROI out of it without having to go get the full-blown solution. You don't want to drop $20,000 on an orchestrator unnecessarily. You can ease into it, into adoption, without dropping a lot of money. Maybe some attendant bots, and an unattended locally on a large scale, in a small area.

If you do that and start easy, you'll get a return on investment. Eventually, when we start scaling, we'll pay for the orchestrator. You'll need that when you start getting a lot of bots, and it becomes like herding cats. It gets crazy. That's what you need an orchestrator for. While you can avoid a cost at a certain point, you're probably getting diminishing returns, and then it's going to be more costly to manage something all over the place. It's best to start small and then add on. 

We haven’t been using an orchestrator. It’s a bit like having your hands tied behind your back, as you're not using some of the features that are available with that. However, it still provides these workarounds. You are able to still do some really robust work. It's been great.

We are using, more or less, the more recent versions of the solution.

Before starting with UiPath, a company needs an understanding of the culture at their company. You need to ask if your employees are resistant to change. Certain companies where people are entrenched in their ways, or scared of bots taking their job will be worried. A company needs to lean in and give them an understanding of expectations and pay attention to them before starting. Just pushing it might throw people off.

The personalities of people are the biggest factor. I used to come from a lean Six Sigma background. When companies bring in these Six Sigma programs, it's the same thing - resistance. People say “oh, you're the job cutter.”

People throw that out as automation, and I say, "Hey, people have been automating since steam engines. It's been consistent. It's just the face has changed a little bit. It finally hopped back onto computers. However, automation has been nonstop." 

You just have to realign and adjust yourself. You can’t be resistant to change. Change could be a good thing. Not all things are, however, workers need to be rational and think about it. If your company doesn't move faster, adapt quicker, then your company's going to go away, and everyone will be gone. It’s competitive. That's sports. That's business.

Overall, from what I've used, and what I've touched, and some of the things I've seen without actually putting my hands on it, I'd give UiPath a nine out of ten.

I'm just not the type to give out tens so freely. I haven't gone deep and wide enough to touch everything. From what I've seen before, if you span that out overall, I'd probably put them up in the nine range, personally.