UiPath Reviews

I work at a large retailer and we use UiPath to support the HR and e-commerce departments. For example, we can automate the management of HR tasks, such as scheduling training courses for associates. We have around 500 bots running in production.

UiPath helped us realize some cost savings by eliminating several FTEs. 
UiPath freed up our employees to work on other things. Instead of doing repetitive tasks, they can learn new skills or work on more exciting jobs. When we automate, we don't lay off employees. They're shifted to other projects once a robot takes over their process.

I set up the entire automation team in 2017. The UiPath Academy courses have been useful for training our staff. I have completed almost all of the certifications.

It's challenging if you don't have knowledge bases or community forums. When UiPath first launched, we had to Google everything, and it was hard to find accurate information. UiPath Academy has enabled me to grow professionally. I started as a developer and later became a technical lead. Now I'm in an architect role. 

A robust user community is essential for any solution. The community updates us about new features in the latest release notes. We can ask the community about how to deal with common problems and always get a quick response. Users can create custom solutions and upload them to the marketplace. 

I like the UiPath Orchestrator. The Marketplace is also helpful because there are pre-built automations we can use. One of our processes is used to manage annual charitable donations.

We use UiPath for end-to-end automation but only for about half of our processes. We've also integrated the solution with other tools. 

I have used UiPath for eight years. 

I rate UiPath support six out of 10. It's primarily an email-based model. Sometimes we have questions, and it takes days for them to respond and sort our issue out. 

Neutral

My firm uses two or three tools, but most of our bots in production use UiPath. 

I was present for the initial deployment, and I have been involved with the upgrades. Everything went smoothly. 

We relied on the UiPath team during the initial phases, but we've developed in-house expertise since then. I did the last upgrade for the UiPath Studio, Orchestrator, etc.

The licensing model could be improved. UiPath charges more if you increase the number of components. It should be included within the premium licensing. We have 100 percent end-to-end automation for some of our processes. However, we're limited by the licensing from fully automating all of them. We can't use all the features. 

I rate UiPath eight out of 10. 

We provide a lot of financial services. Its use cases are specifically in banking. There is a lot of Excel transformation where we are moving data from Excel into in-house applications. That's probably about 80% use of it.

We are using UiPath to automate processes that deal with a good cause. We run a lot of charity work, and there is a bit of work going on there to automate the operational aspects of running these charitable causes and things like that.

We have not yet used its AI functionality in our automation program, but we would love to.

We started with nothing. We now have about 150 attended automations going with another 80 attended robots effectively. So, we've had quite a growth in automation capabilities in terms of its impact on the organization.

The ease of use of Studio is valuable. In terms of features, Excel Application Scope, web automation suite of products, and screen scraping are the features I use the most.

Excel Application Scope allows you to use Excel pretty easily and graph data from there, and then you can transform it within Studio and make any changes you need to do. You can then either write it back to another Excel file, or you can read the table within Studio and write it directly to a web-based application.

We have used screen scraping a lot. If you have a web application inside Chrome, you can go to Chrome, and it can grab all the data from there. You can put it into a data table in Studio, make any changes or transformations needed, and then write it back to whatever application you want it to go to.

We gain a huge value from the user community. I'm always running into problems, and I have been going to the UiPath forums to get answers to my questions. Usually, if I have a question, someone else would have already asked it, and I can get great info and insight from there. So, the community is a very important part of the development experience.

We have used UiPath Academy courses. We recommend our citizen developers to use UiPath Academy. I've used it on and off for things I don't quite understand, and people also use it to get RPA certified with UiPath. It's another great value service that UiPath offers. There is the ease of use of videos and the breadth of knowledge. There is also the applicability of the examples to everyday problems. I definitely know people who've been able to automate processes that are more complex with the help of UiPath Academy.

Our challenge with UiPath is getting the infrastructure assets up to speed, particularly on the Orchestrator side. However, I just now came from a demo for UiPath Web, and it seems to be to enable serverless robots, which would definitely be a lower barrier to entry. 

Our pain point is just on the infrastructure side and getting the assets coming up to speed. It's a big bank problem. We have a very large IT organization, which is not always aligned with the needs of teams like ours.

I've used UiPath for about two and a half years.

The product is great. It's very stable. It's reliable. We trust it with a lot of different and very important automations. If UiPath wasn't stable, it would introduce quite significant operational risks to the firm.

Its scalability is good. It could be better, but that goes back to my pain point on our struggles with infrastructure. That has been challenging. If we could get a better handle on our infrastructure, then scalability would be a bit higher, but overall, it's a very scalable product.

I would evaluate them very highly. I work with their technical support every time our technical account managers can't get something done. They're very confident and well-versed in what they do, and they always find a solution to our problem.

Positive

The only RPA tool I've ever worked with is UiPath. Some people used Blue Prism at work, but I never used Blue Prism. They're not using Blue Prism anymore. They switched because of better capabilities. UiPath is just a better tool all around. 

I wasn't in the decision-making process, but I know they tried to do a proof of concept. The Blue Prism team was supposed to do automation of some sort, and the UiPath team was also supposed to do it. The UiPath team did it in six hours and the Blue Prism team didn't do it in two weeks. The ease of use of the Studio product really drives home UiPath's capabilities.

It was complex, but it was straightforward with the help of account managers. We have two technical account managers with UiPath who are very resourceful and well-suited to working with us and helping us accomplish what we need to do.

Our implementation strategy was a citizen development framework. It involved getting the Orchestrator set up and then empowering people within the firm to start automating their various roles or tasks. We still have the citizen development framework, but we're also moving to unattended automations from our RPA developers.

We did it on our own with the help of our account managers.

I don't have any metrics yet, but we're at breakeven in terms of ROI. That's just in terms of monetary figures. In terms of general error reduction and things like that, we have seen quite an ROI.

Its pricing seems reasonable. I know we've been able to get a good amount of value in a few years. Our breakeven was only in year two. So, we're approaching breakeven in our licensing program. It's not a cheap product by any means, but the value that can be returned on an ROI basis is quite high.

To those evaluating such solutions, I would advise taking a good look at the capabilities of the solutions. The strength of UiPath is its capabilities in a number of key areas, whereas some specialized players in the industry might be really good at one specific thing. For scalability, you want to have a wider operating area that something like UiPath can accomplish, rather than a more specialized player.

I would rate it a 9 out of 10. It's a fantastic tool that does what you need it to do. It's great for automating a wide variety of things. Ease of use is there in the various products. Any concerns I would have about having a lower barrier entry seem to be acknowledged by the product managers in the demo that I just now had with UiPath Web. So, in that regard, it's a very accessible and functional product.

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 were with the Air Force and had really a lot of different use cases including finance, credit card transactions, flight authorizations for training missions, et cetera. There are a few hundred use cases.

UiPath has improved the way our company functions. For our customers, for the Air Force, they've seen a lot of enthusiasm around the ability to develop their way out of mundane work. For those individuals, it's been a good cultural improvement. That's really been the biggest thing for them.

The developers like the studio interface better than other RPA providers that they've used in the past and find it easy to use and can provide a lot of impact.

The ease of building automation using UiPath has been great. We actually have done them with airmen, with people that are in the Air Force. We've done training and workshops such as one-week workshops with about 250 airmen. Most of them, 80% to 90%, have built bots that work in production with basically little to no training. They can do a lot without any development experience whatsoever going into the solution.

The solution has saved costs for our customers. Overall, it's tens of millions of dollars there for a potential return. They're still working on scaling that out. However, bots that have currently been built could be spread out across the entire Air Force, which is 650,000 employees, and would have about $30 million worth of potential benefit.

UiPath has reduced human error. With one particular use case, we did with flight authorizations, they had to compare your names off of a PDF to a 40,000-row spreadsheet. That not only saves time, it also reduces that error dramatically as the bot can go and find the row in the spreadsheet and then match it exactly as opposed to somebody looking for it manually.

It has saved time for our customers, equally likely $30 million in potential savings and allowing for a shift to higher-order work.

We’ve used UiPath Academy courses. We actually have a new employee training right now using UiPath Academy, and we recommend it to our customers as well. It's fantastic due to the fact that we're not spending very much time onboarding new employees. We're letting them go do the academy and then help them in assisting where needed. That's a huge benefit for us as we can continue to do our job rather than focusing on onboarding. Users can also self-lead, and new developers can go and utilize it without a lot of interaction from others or a lot of help from others.

The functionality where you can quickly convert your code from Studio X to Studio is really nice.

The StudioX interface is too different from Studio. We have a lot of people and we'll go in and start people with StudioX and they have trouble mapping to StudioX from Studio.

I've been using the solution for 18 months.

The stability has been very good. We've had no issues with stability at all.

I haven't seen any issues surrounding scaling. We're looking at one of the larger implementations of UiPath that exists right now. We were looking at a 250,000-user solution, however, we haven't done it yet. Therefore, it's hard to really comment on that.

In terms of technical support, our people have used it, and I haven't heard any complaints, although I have not used it directly.

We did previously use Blue Prism and Robocorp.

I prefer UiPath due to the sales support for this specific Air Force opportunity. We started with Blue Prism. We switched over to UiPath due to the fact that they were getting some traction inside the air force, and then we got really tightly in the line with UiPath. For me, it's not as much a software bake-off to determine which software is better or worse. It's really the attraction the customer has, and UiPath is the market leader. That support is really what's driven us to UiPath.

UiPath has a good attendance solution, which helps to ease the adoption. Our developers' feedback is that the user interface and development methodology are better in UiPath. That's why they don't want to go back to the others.

I am usually involved in the initial setup of UiPath. Our initial setup is really unique due to the fact that we're installing it in a government cloud. That is fairly complex, however, that’s very specific to that use case. Therefore, there are lots of challenges with that, however, that's more of a government problem than UiPath.

On average, for us, the setup takes a long time. It's taken us months as we have to get through these approval processes and things like that. In terms of the actual setup itself, it’s pretty fast and takes maybe half a day.

In terms of pricing, UiPath is fine. It is what it is, and I don't find it unreasonable.

Our situation is really unique due to the fact that we're trying to sell an enterprise license agreement through the Air Force. It's a pretty unique licensing situation.

It's my understanding that we are using the 2020.10 version.

We are just using the studio and the automation. Due to the fact that it's the Air Force, we're really focused on just the pure RPA piece of UiPath.

Our clients do not use AI functionality from UiPath right now.

I'd advise anyone considering the solution to go fast. What we see a lot is a lot of go fast and plan for scalability from the beginning. There's a ton of potential out there, however, we see people getting bogged down in a lot of different things instead of really just automating and developing automation as quickly as possible.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. Any software product is really difficult to be a ten, to be perfect. An eight is probably as high as I would go for any software product. It does a really good job and it's easy to use and scalable. I've had no complaints about any of it.

We use attended and unattended bots, Orchestrator, and Studio for development.

We're seeing increasing adoption of Studio because more people see how easy and straightforward it is to use a lot of the features. It helps that UiPath training is free. Our entire team, including our salespeople, have gone through the training. It's free and it makes a big difference. For the salespeople, they're able to talk more intelligently about RPA.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five, for sure. In fact, I have taken a lot of ideas from their training to educate my customers about RPA. When it comes to RPA, a lot of it is education because some of them don't know exactly how automation can be done. I've told UiPath that I use their training in my presentation, and it is great.

We are working with a technology company called Rammer, Rammer.ai. What the Rammer software does is listen to conversations to learn the details of what is being discussed. A third-party system is used to transcribe the conversation into text, then Rammer will learn the details without much training. It knows the topics, it understands what is talked about the most, talked about the least, how much we are adhering to the script if it's a call center use case, or if it is a simple meeting use case then it knows who is assigned what tasks, it recognizes the follow-ups, and it knows the summary of the discussion. All of this is summarized in a nice, consumable manner. So now, when a bot knows all of this information, it goes into Orchestrator, logs all these activities that are picked up by unattended bots downstream, and they trigger all those processes back. So it's a massive consumption of all of those heavy use cases.

We have not yet run automations in a virtual environment, although we do have customers who are asking for it. We are not sure if we will need UiPath's help for this yet because we haven't tried it.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate it a five. Really, it depends on how clearly we understand the requirements. So a lot of times we are able to find process gaps, which wasn't the case earlier before we started thinking about automation in this manner. I would say the ease of use is actually dependent on some of those factors as well.

Usually, starting is the biggest challenge for most people, and I think this is because it is in a trial environment and there is a lack of documentation, with multiple people doing one part of a small subset of a task. There are these challenges and then if none of them are documented, you need to figure out the process flow. From person one, where does it go? This can change when people can do multiple things.

It becomes a very complex web to understand and navigate through. We need to understand the task and how it should be performed. For developing the robot, it's very important to have the clarity upfront, otherwise, we cannot code them. That is the biggest challenge, I feel.

From the point that a UiPath license is purchased until the first bot is ready is almost immediate. This is because we usually start with a PoC on a small scale, just to see if automation with this approach makes sense. By the end of the PoC, we'll normally know exactly how many bots are needed. Sometimes it is on us, more than the customer when we cannot estimate every process that is outside of the departments and division that we work with because we just work at finance. For example, we can't just estimate what marketing would use, and so on. That will sometimes delay things.

The attended and unattended classification and simplicity are great, and it's easy to explain to people. Right off the bat, the task performing the lowest granular entity is very clearly defined, which is something that I like.

I really like that I am able to tell the story, using Orchestrator, how humans work, how bots work, and how humans and bots work together. Orchestrator really tells a lot more than just being a simple task manager.

In future releases of this solution, I would like to see more packaged solutions.

We would like to see intelligence built into the core. Specifically, we would like to see the recognition of human to human conversations. That intelligence would be great because we have some very important use cases in that space that we are seeing. Our focus is moving closer to one hundred percent in that space, as all of our new work is related to conversations.

UiPath should offer an on-demand cloud-type model where you can get bots for five minutes, ten minutes, an hour, or whatever duration you need.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a five.

We don't see many failures, and this is partly because of our approach. We start by creating something called a heat map, which I learned in some of the training from UiPath. The training clearly explains how to handle errors. It includes which process to automate fully and which processes should be automated partially, with a human in the loop.

We start with the right approach. We understand the process and we have the heat mapping that gives us full clarity of where the exception flows are and how to handle them. So when you do that, it becomes second nature to handle those exceptions. We are pretty comfortable, and we are applying the best practices, which adds to the stability. 

Talking about our own people, we have roughly sixty-five who are either developers or architects. For our customers, the number is growing all the time. The requests for training and setting up workshops for them comes to us every week, basically from different customers. We don't know the extent of automation beyond the people we work with because there are other vendors like us who are also there, so we don't have the exact number but what is refreshing to see is that even VP level or senior-level employees are interested in learning. They ask us if we can hold a workshop for their entire team, whether they're doing the development of bots or not. Hopefully, that will increase the numbers, but right now I don't have an estimate on the total number of customers. I only know on our side.

We have tremendous support from UiPath. We can say that from our perspective, we are very fortunate to be in the Pacific Northwest and that team is one of the best. It doesn't matter if we are big or small, they help everyone. So every time we have an issue or a challenge, whether it's engineering, presales, architecture, or development, we get all the support.

Our customers usually don't know much about RPA, so one of our jobs is to educate them on it to get them interested. Gradually when they understand, it moves forward.

In the majority of cases, the initial setup of this solution is simple to medium in terms of complexity. We are finding very few complex scenarios at the moment.

I think the overall architecture is simple. It is very clear and very straightforward. UiPath's product team is doing a great job in is creating a lot of very out of the box integrations and analytics, and that always helps. That is good, but I think if people are not trained yet and they think that it's easy, drag-and-drop, and simplistic, those folks struggle a lot.

We've seen that people think "Oh yeah, it's just some scripts and drag and drop so we can do this easily" and that misconception exists. We don't treat it as an easy scenario, so we gave it all the respect that proper Python code, a data science problem, or a highly complex situation deserves. When you approach it that way, it's at best at a medium complexity.

In general, we treat it right in the middle. It's not that straightforward, but the architecture is simple enough that the development complexity is medium. That's the simple and medium combination.

When it comes to ROI, for some scenarios it's immediate on the day you go to production. Doing the math, if it is automating thirty hours of work in a week, it is going to be the moment you turn on the switch.

Sometimes when the expectation is set at a different level, the KPIs are different. It may be that the customer is looking to have an "X million" dollar cost saving. It just depends on how you're defining the KPIs. So in those scenarios, obviously it'll build up to that saving.

A lot of people talk about the total cost of ownership as being a real saving or real value for products. So there are just all these different layers of complexity in that. I mean in theory it is immediate at the moment you turn on the switch, but then you need to consider the bigger picture, and it's not a straight answer. It'll be different.

The most important tip that I would share with respect to the licensing is that you should not think of a bot as being able to do only one thing. You should always consider the downtime and utilize the bots properly. That's the way you can have exponential ROI from just that one simple investment.

Even though these bots don't really cost much, you still want to say there are resources like a dedicated machine that is there, there are electricity and all kinds of resources that also go into it. So the overall cost, we should look at that. If a bot is doing ten hours' worth of work in five minutes, there are twenty-three-plus hours work that the bot can actually do. So, think of orchestration.

Some of our customers have tried different solutions. There are some customers who have even tried a lot of competing products and they're not satisfied. They have a very low expectation from what automation should or could do. So for us, that's even harder in terms of educating them.

People who don't know anything about this kind of automation, sometimes it's a little bit simpler to just run them through an hour or two of our workshop, but people who already know about it may have set their mind in a certain manner. Sometimes for those customers, the customers with experience in other solutions, are usually a little bit more difficult to convince. They have doubts that have come about because of whatever they've been using, and they don't fully understand the capabilities because UiPath does things very differently from others.

So on both ends, education is a challenge.

We are very excited about the new things that have been announced recently. There is the integration with AI, with AI fabric. There is Studio X, which has pre-built APIs with Microsoft Office and all the other Salesforce integrations that they've come up with. These are very exciting because that will increase adoption even more. People already understand unattended and attended automation, and now with Studio X being available so easily, and with analytics being part of its fabric, it's going in the right direction.

We have a very nice step-by-step flowchart that explains how to approach or what processes to automate first of all, and what are the chances of change or variations and all of that. While we are developing this, we at least are following the best practices from all the training that we received to ensure that we have taken that int consideration and we have not picked the process that is hard to automate, or which should not be automated. Then, it's more of a system change or any transformation that the customer should do first and then do automation. Basically, we should not do automation for the sake of it.

At my company, we don't work with any other RPAs. When it comes to customers choosing this solution, it should depend on the use case. If there is a strategic advance that they need to get and they need to really think of analytics and intelligent automation, UiPath makes a very compelling case. I think that it is important to choose your solution wisely and do it based on your use cases.

From a cost perspective, there is a big difference between the attended and unattended bots. One is twenty-five percent the cost of the other, which is a massive difference. Our customers use both, and we like this a lot because the way we utilize attended and unattended bots are the right way to do it. If you need to do multitasking and handle a lot of tasks, the choices vary.

Specifically from a pricing point of view, I think it is justified. When I first heard the price, and obviously I didn't ask about the duration or subscription levels, I thought it was a monthly price. Hearing that, I thought that it was cheap. Later, I was told that it was an annual fee. So for me, I understand that my customers can afford this price, and I am happy with that.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

I am a software developer and I am a full-time RPA developer for my company. We create automation for internal purposes as well as for our clients.

I have implemented 15 to 16 processes end-to-end that cover use cases including Excel, front-end web-based applications, backend Windows applications, and sometimes Citrix. I have also done some Adobe Flash Player automation.

The REFramework (Enhanced Robotic Enterprise Framework) is what we use for most of our use cases.

We are using Studio for development on-premises and we use Orchestrator in the cloud.

UiPath has helped to improve our organization in several ways. Prior to UiPath, the company was using legacy methods of automation. These were time-consuming and required that more code be written. With the ease of use and speed at which automations can be developed using UiPath, the company is bringing on new clients and therefore, more business.

UiPath and the automations that we create help us to better utilize our resources. For example, a manual task that used to take between seven and eight days can be completed in one or two days with automation.

This product is bringing new clients to the business and nowadays, all of our clients require something to be done in the domain of robotic process automation. 

With respect to ease of use and building automations, UiPath is very good. I would rate them at least a four out of five in that regard, especially when compared to other products on the market. The ease of building automations makes them quick to create and it can be accomplished by people in the business sector.

UiPath enables and helps us to create end-to-end automations, and it divides all of the subtasks up in a good way. For example, monitoring processes is different from developing code, and each of these is separated such that they are independent, but we can link them together for the benefit of the process. This is important because I am a complete process developer, so having all of the different subtasks available in one tool allows me to best develop automation for our clients.

This solution has helped to decrease our time to value, which is something that is evident when you look at the automation we were doing previously. Our technologies included Python, VBScript, and other ways. These approaches took more time to develop and are a little bit more complex. With the help of this tool, it takes less time to build the same automation. It allows us to focus on building the logic and algorithms, without having to deep-dive into things like syntax. By allowing us to focus on the business logic for each process, it leads to significant time savings.

We use the attended automation feature and it helps us when it comes to tasks that require interaction between user and application, such as the necessity to enter credentials. It is quite helpful, in particular for BPM processes, and this is something that is important to us. The typical case is when somebody is doing repetitive work as part of their task. In other words, they are working on one task, and the bot is working beside them but needs the occasional input from the user. In these processes, the bot is doing 80% of the work and the user is doing the remaining 20%.

We use the AI functionality because it makes it feasible to automate processes that are quite complex. For example, Document Understanding and NLP from the UiPath Cloud are things that we use. 

The AI features enhance UiPath's capabilities and allow us to automate more processes overall. Previously, when we were doing a specific task, we may not have been able to fully automate it. With the help of AI, we can do more.

In previous iterations of our bots, before the AI features were used, we were not able to get all of the information that we needed from PDF files. This is specific to certain use cases, to present an example. The AI functionality generally gives us more data, whether from document understanding, computer vision, or otherwise.

UiPath has helped to reduce human error because the bot is doing everything and eliminates the opportunity for people to make mistakes in the process. UiPath has had a positive impact in this regard, although we have had successes with other similar tools as well.

UiPath and automation have helped to free up employee time and nowadays, they are more creative because of it. With many of their tasks automated, they have time to work on things that are more creative and have a higher value.

For example, for a task that used to take an employee 10 hours, they are now spending between three and four hours on it. In the remaining six hours, they can be more productive and work on more important tasks. This not only helps the employee but adds value to the company as well.

The selectors work to help automate at the front-end or backend of applications, and they are quite useful. If you use selectors correctly then the automation can be done in a systematic way. For example, selectors can be used for clicking tabs in an application, and what we do is create an algorithm with the correct logic to go with them.

UiPath has good recording features that help to create automations.

We use the REFramework as a template, which divides things such as the opening of applications, applying the business logic, using the queues, and closing applications. As part of this framework, UiPath provides a systematic architecture to us. We just have to understand and work with it by applying our business logic and coordinating effectively to create end-to-end automations.

I would like to see more AI-related features added. Improvements could be made to the models so that they are more compatible with data science and machine learning.

Better support for databases should be included. For example, interacting with SQL Server and SQL Developer would be beneficial features.

I have been working with UiPath for more than three years. The company started using it before that.

Stability is something that UiPath is working on. The new versions have added more stability and important features like test suites and the workflow analyzer. Adding features and improving stability is a continuous process.

In my previous company, which is a large MNC, there were between 700 and 800 people working regularly with UiPath. In my current company, we have between 400 and 500 people working with RPA using UiPath. As we continue to take on more clients, we will expand our usage.

There are a variety of roles for the people that work with UiPath. Some are developers, whereas others are set up or support teams. Our company is very heavily focused on this domain.

The number of people required for deployment and maintenance depends on the size of the process. A larger and more complex process requires a larger support team to maintain it. For example, a simple process can be deployed and maintained with a two-person team, whereas four people are required for a medium-sized process, and a six-person team would be used to handle a complex process.

I would rate the technical support between seven and eight out of ten.

In general, we express whatever concerns we have and then within a few days, we get updates from them. However, sometimes we have to elaborate a lot before we receive an answer. The documents and repository that they use for analyzing and improving our processes could be organized in a more systematic fashion.

We were using a variety of legacy tools that were more time-consuming and needed code development to a greater degree. These included things like Python code and Visual Basic scripting. There are still other tools that are being used, in addition to UiPath.

Prior to UiPath, approximately 80% of our costs were spent on developing automations. With the benefits that come with UiPath, the RPA costs are now only 45%. As the costs have decreased and the volume of automations increased, it improves company profit.

I have worked with Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, and I find that UiPath is easier to use. However, to capture more market share, UiPath has to continue expanding its machine learning and AI features.

Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism are still being used for some processes in the company. We have switched away from them in some cases, opting instead for UiPath, because in general, it is easier to implement automation tasks using UiPath.

We have a setup and deployment team in-house that is responsible for implementation. They take care of the deployment for our clients and bring things into their production environment. 

The team does their best to keep updated on what UiPath features are available and what the current version is. If updates are pending then they will be aware of them.

The company is experiencing quite a good return on its investment in UiPath.

I began learning UiPath with the Community version, which is available free of charge.

Before choosing UiPath for any particular job, the company examines the process to see how complex it is. Based on the time that it will take to implement it, as well as the number of resources, whether in UiPath, Blue Prism, or something else, the decision is made. Different tools are used for different processes based on these assessments.

I started my UiPath journey using the Community Edition, version 2018.4. After I spent some time learning UiPath personally, I began using it full-time in my company.

We have several different teams that use UiPath in different ways. First, we have the developers, who do the coding and create the bots. Then, we have the testing team, who ensure that the bots perform correctly. Next, we have the deployment team and after that, there is the support team.

My advice for anybody who is implementing UiPath is that they need developers who are good with logic. They should come from a coding background with experience in logic, algorithms, have some knowledge of C#, and have some knowledge of HTML tags.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using UiPath is that technology can be made more efficient by using these tools.

UiPath has all of the features that are required to make automation successful. It is currently just ahead of other similar tools on the market and if they continue to add features then it could be the market leader.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use UiPath to automate business processes such as certain types of reporting that have to be repeated on a month-to-month basis. Another example is invoicing processes, which can be automated. Generally, it applies to different business cases for enterprise automation.

An example of how UiPath has improved the organization stems from a cyberattack in 2018. We already had an RPA team and during that cyber attack, all of our systems went down. Our SAP provider cut our access to it, leaving us with a limited number of users. It was not a big enough team to deliver on to our clients all of the orders that were being received.

What we did with UiPath in that crisis scenario in a couple of weeks was that we created a process for order automation. We already had a proof of concept, and we were able to scale it quickly. It was not perfect but rather, done in an emergency situation.

With that couple of users and limited access to SAP, a couple of robot users were capable of working 24 hours, seven days a week, and we started to process all of the orders that were coming from the rest of the company. This is probably something that you could not have done with more classical solutions.

This was, of course, an emergency order automation and it was a topic that we were already working with. Prior to this, it was already a benefit for the company, but the fact that we had this flexibility showcases how powerful this tool is, or what its potential is.

Having the cloud-based version allows us to be at the latest version of UiPath Orchestrator and different products without having to take care of the upgrade process.

UiPath's portal for enabling business users to trigger and monitor jobs is a big deal for me because it's something that we have been trying to do for a long time. We have been asking for it. With the previous solution, which was the orchestration platform alone, it was not a good approach because the business users would have a lot of information on their hands and you have to either split your licenses so that they could not access everything, or create your own web portals for them to access specific parts.

The fact that they now have an intermediate portal where they see only their processes, which they can monitor for themselves without getting too much information that is not relevant for them, is a big deal. Something as simple as triggering your own process, which in the past would require dedicating a full license to, can now be done through the portal. It might be a task like checking emails for customers or creating your own application with their API. It's a huge increment in quality.

The portal can also be used for administrators and although we have the Action Center, we don't use it that often. From the point of view of administrators, I can say that the recent improvements make our life much easier. It also enables us to think of more complex setups. In the past, I would never allow certain configurations because they would either be a security risk or it would just create more problems than solutions. Now with the current interface, especially with what they will be adding in the future in terms of more governance from the platform, they just enable you to do more complex things. It allows you to go a little bit beyond what the normal scope would be.

That applies to the platform as well as the orchestrator in the new modern setup. They have the option to split within the same tenant and different companies, or different company departments. Also, the fact that you can dynamically allocate the licenses so that you don't have to worry or have to split them, brings us to another level.

It offers more granular and role-based access control and management. We now have more complex scenarios that in the past we would not even consider because it would be a problem if someone were able to see something that they should not see.

The fact that this is a SaaS solution is important to us and it is clear to me that they want to push a SaaS solution, more than the on-premises deployment. It means that we have the latest version without having to upgrade the systems. We always have the latest version of the studio, for example, and there's no disruption to our services. Furthermore, we are able to follow all of the previews that they come out with. We can try all of their new products, which is something that in the past, we would not have been able to do. It would have required, for example, upgrading our system twice a year. Certainly, we wouldn't be able to do it at the speed we can now.

Being able to minimize our on-premises deployment is really important. It was almost a given for us because we lost some of our interfaces during the cyberattack. From that point on, the company has had a clear policy of cloud and SaaS as a priority. The fact that we have the opportunity to access all of our services without any requirements from our side suits us very well.

The vendor continues to add services to the portal and we are connected through their insider program. This is something that we are really happy with.

It is helpful for us that new services being added to the portal are all managed from the same place because it simplifies our work, makes it cohesive, and makes sense from a philosophical point of view. Definitely, if they had it on different platforms, it would take away from the ease of management. The fact that they have it in a single place makes everything a little bit more interconnected. What they are doing seems to make sense and for me, it is good because we only have to take care of one single platform. This also speeds up our processes, which is a plus.

On the topic of security, especially coming from a cyber attack, having SOC 2 certification is important because it is a requirement for us. We probably would have tried to find an intermediate or an agreement, but the fact that UiPath is now SOC 2 certified means that we have complied with requirements.

The licensing system is something that needs to be improved. I think that if they are trying to push for a SaaS solution, with respect to the way they license their individual products. The robot licenses and the Studio licenses should be something closer to a pay-per-use, rather than a year-to-year license. Right now, the licensing model and the pricing are the only stoppers for us, in terms of escalating our use. The bottom line is that the licensing system is not as modern as the tool that we're trying to implement.

We have been using the UiPath Automation Cloud since January 2020, and prior to that, we had an on-premises solution from UiPath.

Four to six months ago, this was not the most stable solution. We had a lot of issues, especially during the summer and early autumn. The system would fail, or would not be accessible, or we had lost some of our logs.

Right now, the tool is working and is much more stable. It shows that they have put an effort into making it more robust.

With respect to scalability, the licensing system is the limitation.

The platform itself is scalable, although not infinitely, but to a couple of orders of magnitude of what we have now. However, you still have to go through the procurement processes, which always makes it a little bit more limiting. Ultimately, it means that we cannot utilize the full power of what this tool offers in escalation.

Currently, we have five people who are working on UiPath. There are three developers, I am the technical lead, and we have a manager that operates as a product owner for the projects. The three developers are also responsible for maintenance. We also have a business analyst who works through the documentation and is the point of contact for some of our business.

We have other non-official roles, who are people that know and use the tool or perform business analyst functions, but there are only five people in dedicated roles.

At this point, we are using the tool to the full extent of what our licenses allow us to do. We could scale it to be much bigger but in the current situation, I don't think that we will do so. We negotiated the last contract to be a five-year deal and I hope we can move beyond that, but for now, there's no plan to a scale.

We have mixed reviews for the technical support and depending on the topic, they will answer faster or slower, more personalized or not.

They have a ticketing system and the webpage is normally broken, depending on the browser. The response time may vary from topic to topic, so I don't have a consistent impression of the support system. They do answer our questions, but it is not always within the proper time or with the solution that we were hoping for.

What we are using now is the same thing as the previous product from UiPath, without the cost of having to host it yourself.

I have some experience with other products, but not at the professional level. My impression is that with UiPath, you can get started more quickly when compared to other RPA products. Also, the licensing costs are not as high.

Migrating from our on-premises solution to the cloud was not a typical case because we lost our on-premises deployment during the cyberattack. We had at least a few months without the Orchestration solution. When it comes to execution runtimes, where we run our processes, we used the same machines.

Basically, we had to set things up from scratch on the cloud. The process was pretty straightforward, and the fact that we didn't have to set up the Orchestration tool saved us from a lot of the complexity in the setup process. Normally, this is the complex part, including setting it up with the databases. We just had to connect our runtime with the Orchestration platform, which made it much easier.

With respect to the setup costs, the cloud setup balanced out because you don't pay for the orchestration platform, but you pay a little more for the individual licenses. 

Having this product has reduced the amount of maintenance work related to our automation operations because it is a managed solution. The fact that we don't have to host it ourselves is very important.

With respect to maintenance costs, we are a relatively small project, so I wouldn't say that we had a huge overhead. It would certainly be higher if we tried to do what we are doing now, which is being at the latest version all of the time. To do that, we would have needed somebody in a role who was taking care of it. As it is now, from a development or project management point of view, we can take care of these things without needing an architect involved all of the time.

We chose Automation Cloud because it was, at that point, the most flexible option.

UiPath is known for a certain number of products, and the role of our team is to use all of them. On the topic of the UiPath Cloud, the new products that they have come out with, like the possibility to create your own applications for your internal customers, or host certain data services from the same platform, were things that were not available in the past. These capabilities are useful. In general, all of their products are pretty important for us.

For UiPath as a company, we like the availability that they have and the fact that we can try and test all of their products beforehand, without paying. For a relatively small project such as ours, or even for a big company, it's pretty useful to be able to access this type of information and not be burdened with extra budget requirements.

This is a product that I recommend because the starting point is completely free. That's one of the great points of UiPath. My advice is that when it comes to scaling the project, it's really important to clearly set up goals and expectations. Otherwise, there will be an eternal loop of PoCs and non-viable products.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I'm working for one project where we're trying to automate processes for a logistics company, specifically in their back-office accounting processes.

We're using Studio, Orchestrator and the bots. In other words, we're using the whole platform.

When we were implementing it, we were empowering people. In this company, everybody has their own work and they were really in their own area. Then we started this project and they got empowered to change the way they were working. UiPath is so open that everybody can take part in it.

That was one thing that changed right away. Another thing was the way they think about processes and where there are possibilities to automate has really changed. Before, they never thought about automating all these processes but we told them there is a possibility. Now, when they're having strategy meetings, they have dedicated time slots where they're just talking about processes that could be automated. The whole mindset is changing now.

We have a virtual environment that we use.

We haven't touched the processes where there would be human errors that much. We started with the really basic ones that are so easy that people don't make errors there. We will get to the more complex processes, but we haven't yet.

The solution has definitely saved time.

Orchestrator lets you start a credential stair, so you can get the credentials in a safe way. Before this, they were afraid that credentials would be stored somewhere and people could see them. I think it's really important for our customers that you can do that in Orchestrator. The scheduling feature is also valuable of course.

In terms of ease of use, I would rate this solution as four out of five. I think it's very easy, but our customers are sometimes not so technical. When they come from the business side, it's somehow hard for them to understand.

I would give the RPA Academy training program five out of five. Without it, I don't think I could have started implementing this solution. I did the developer program just for a general understanding of how everything works: how Orchestrator works and how it all works together. For me, it was really important to do the training then. It was very good, so I really liked it.

It's really hard for me to get all the machine learning and AI parts. I think maybe that's going to get a little bit easier for me to understand how to really use it in the company. I don't really know what to do with it at the moment. I think that is something that could be improved.

I tested the live sessions and we saw some parts of StudioX. There were some things that were so easy there. I think it would be good if they would put it also in Studio, for example. The carts they have are in color. We try to get people in the company, even if they're not technical, to implement the bots or processes by themselves. I think some parts they changed in StudioX could be really helpful in Studio skills.

I would rate their stability as three to four out of five, but I would say that's probably because we don't know how to use it best. That is why we sometimes have issues that something's not working.

We are a consultancy firm but the customer that we are working with has about five people in the core team that are working with this solution.

Both customer support and technical support are very good. I think the chief from my customer and the UiPath technical team had many phone calls because the virtual machine didn't work at first. They were in contact and I think two days later it was working.

I can only speak for my client, who is undergoing a huge digital transformation. They're a small German company and they just know if they don't change something other companies will get ahead. In Germany, there are many family-owned firms and the owner just saw the need to change. We told them about RPA and they got very excited. We showed them the first pilot bot and they were set.

We chose UiPath, for the same reasons you can read on the internet. If you look at the Gartner and Forrester reports, I think they all say UiPath. Also, it's just so easy to get started. You just download the community edition and you're starting. Then you do the Academy and you actually know how to do it. It's very easy and very fast. All the statistics say it's the best.

In terms of the setup, because we were using the community edition first, and then we licensed it afterward, we had the first bot running in about a month.

We have seen ROI and performance benefits. We are still at the beginning but we can definitely see it. I think we could see after about a week that we had processes that the company didn't have to do anymore and so they had more time. 

So far, our first customer started with just Orchestrator and an unattended bot, along with a couple of studio licenses. I don't know the cost. Maybe $25,000 for the year.

I would definitely say it's worth the money.

We did a little research obviously. We looked at Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, but that's it. We didn't really look too deep. We just saw UiPath and said, "Okay, I think that's a fit for us." And then we went for it.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten because of what I see from the stage we're in now. There are things that can improve and they are all working on improvement. I still think that at its current state, it's really beneficial for a lot of companies.

I would recommend UiPath. I like the company and I like their products.