UiPath Reviews

Data scraping. I use UiPath for extracting Twitter and TripAdvisor reviews from hashtag and comments. Then, I analyse the positive and negative data to a table using Python script which uses natural language understanding.

Earlier, we used to extract data using a Python script which uses Beautiful Soup library. Now, we can easily scrape data using a simple tool. It's not only just scraping data, but our non-coder or non-programmer staff is also very happy with this tool. 

This tool covers all segments of people in the industry. Our software engineering intern was also able to perform and design a sequence which could extract review tables from TripAdvisor.

I love the ease and smoothness of the tool. The company has its own academy in which you can learn from fundamentals to advanced level. Each time you complete a level, they praise you with a certificate so that you keep being motivated. Personally, I have half completed level three. The tool can be accessed easily either when you want to schedule a task on VM or on your own computer. Generally, I do data scraping and automation tasks, for example, I scrape the Twitter data using hashtags. I scrape +ve and -ve tweets to an Excel file up to some pages and then analyze the text into +ve and -ve tweets using natural language text understanding.

The first thing I dislike is it is not available in a Linux environment. I prefer to work on Ubuntu and would have liked if it is available for Linux systems. Secondly, There is very limited content on ReFramework on UiPath Academy. Assignments cannot be done just by reading the text. There must be a demo for ReFramework projects.

Suppose you have to work on open source development or Open Source project for a networking community. It requires to have a Bash. You cannot do that in windows. If you are running a script on daily basis for checking malware or something like that on your home networks using Linux (with the support of a GUI tool), you could automate it using UiPath if you had a Linux version of the UiPath RPA.

Secondly, when you learn for certification from the academy you have to pass level 3 in between. Which requires a good hands-on with re-framework.The academy lacks practice material for the same.

A user receives data from an Excel file and then enters the data in the internal website/tool to calculate the price. So we automize this process using UiPath.

First, it reduces the typo mistakes; we are certainly sure that the data entered into the system are correct. Secondly, it saves a lot of time. Users don't need to type in data anymore and spend their time analyzing the process. Thirdly, our colleagues don't need to do much of the "monkey work" — typing. They just spend time controlling the results of the bots.

The training platform of UiPath is very good. It helps the business user without prior experience in programming to automize the process by themselves. This is a good approach because they are the ones with a great overview of the process and know how to control the quality of the results as well as foresee what the potential issues could be.

Also, it can work on everything. UiPath is like a VBA for Excel but can work on all applications (MS Office, SAP, web browser, etc.). So the potential for automation is nearly limitless.

• Compatibility with old systems and Java Script-based websites could be improved: During my project, I sometimes encounter issues when Uipath runs too fast while our old internal website (which was written in Java Script, I believe) is running slowly and we need to handle this type of error. Besides, some function of Uipath "Select item from list" does not work with our website (not compatible).
• More practical projects to be included in the training of UiPath Academy would help the business users to get used to executing the real projects (e.g. technical issues: why do we have to write the script this way, what errors usually occurred? and also project management - setting up timeline for the project, etc.)

This solution is used widely in different areas: from accounting to product order processes. 
I solve different business problems, like processing orders, collecting information, etc. There are many benefits: It's easy to use, exception handling is easy to handle, and flowcharts can be implemented directly.

UiPath has improved our organization by its ease of use, practical solutions to complex problems, and flexible working environment.

I found flowcharts most useful in UiPath. It is the best feature in UiPath, and you can easily create even complicated workflows with just a couple of clicks and dropping built-in activities without coding. You can also implement a state machine; which is also a great feature. Passing through states makes it much easier to design the main part of your process.

What I really don't like is some bugs in UiPath appearing from nowhere. In the new version, I see most of them, like when you are trying to change your variable name, it gives a very long error, etc. But still, there is one area not fixed: importing Outlook templates. 

I had an issue with implementing ".oft" files reading with "Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook" library. It was a real disaster; I couldn't define anything. I spent quite a lot of time implementing it, and I reached the conclusion that it is very close to impossible to use. They should direct activity for outlook messages and "oft" files. Except for that, UiPath is a great tool for automation. Also, debugging is not very convenient. It is hard to debug with UiPath if you are running a very big process.

Most of the times, my clients use UiPath to automate really repetitive tasks. There are some complex scenarios that we have been seeing, but they are just trying to simplify their way of work through RPA.

Our clients see a quick return of the investment from time, performance, and scope on whatever their task is. This adds value for them.

• The fast development and deployment is what I like about the solution. 
• There is a lot of support from the community. 
• The product is really stable.
• It is easy to use.
• It integrates naturally with environments in most scenarios, which is good from an implementation standpoint.

I would like to see more integration with solutions, like SAP, especially because the biggest companies have a lot of SAP implementations going on. If they would have more packages to support native SAP activities or perform connectivity to some of those SAP clients in transaction codes, it would be awesome.

It is stable.

It integrates with Orchestrator and allows for faster deployment on multiple levels (small to large companies), which is good for scalability. Though, it does depends on the client's infrastructure. 

Take a look into joining the community and most of the forums. They have good recommendations of things that have happened in the past.

The UiPath Academy RPA training is straightforward. We use it for new people joining teams and for training. It's user-friendly, and if you don't have an IT background, it gives you good, explanatory ways to learn the solution and how to deploy it.

Clients usually through PoCs to determine if they need a new solution. They will define a use case that will make sense and add value to their operations. Based on that, they will ask for a PoC. We will work with UiPath directly to define that POC, most of the time, and showcase their flexibility and capabilities.

The initial setup is straightforward. There is a lot of guidance in the configuration and actual setup. It feels like installing Windows. It's simple compared to other solutions which tend to be a bit more complex. I think they are doing a good job.

For deployment and maintenance, small companies use two to three people to do the task. Bigger companies will have a huge team supporting the solutions, which might take up to 25 people to support a 1000 person organization. Organizations usually need developers, an architect of infrastructure, testers, quality personnel, etc.

Traditionally, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism are the biggest things competing against UiPath. Those are usually what most of the clients lean towards, if they see a cheaper licensing option.

Most of the time, clients choose UiPath because it's easier to deploy and learn within their teams. That's what truly makes sense for them.

The most important criteria for clients when selecting a vendor is usually licensing, but also:

• Flexibility
• Scalability
• Ease of use

These three criteria help a lot when positioning UiPath.

Give it a try, especially for new people joining the RPA community. If you don't try it, you will never learn how to actually do it. That is the good thing about UiPath; it is simple and easy to learn.

It has exceeded my expectations:

• I have used other RPA tools in the past. The user interface is simple and allows people to learn from it faster than other applications. 
• It is stable when you create the bot in the first instance. 
• Its error handling process is easier to create.

To increase the efficiency in jobs that people do not like to do.

It takes a very manual, key punch-oriented job and automates it, so the user can do more intelligent work.

It has exceeded my expectations. It took a job which would take a user up to 30 minutes and decreased the time without their interaction to three minutes.

• It is reasonably easy to use.
• The FTE payback benefit.

We would like the RPA app that we developed to fall back to one of our APIs and Visual Studio and have that take off. However, I was talking with one of the guys at the conference, and he says, "It'll do that." 

We don't have a large installation, so I can't really measure this.

We use the online forum to ask questions and review user's questions. It's helpful half the time. We don't have in-house experts. My team has just been learning it for the past three to four months, and they are still hitting a wall in certain areas that they have to dig out of. I am at the UiPath conference looking for any advanced training offerings. 

It was straightforward. It was more building the initial app. I'm a developer on .NET, so it was just getting the experience with UiPath. The biggest challenge was just understanding the small, little 'gotchas' going into certain properties, what was required to make the control work. Overall, we prefer it because of the easy user interface and the open community, where you can get a lot of responses from others.

We have had an app running since July and it has been fine. The company change their websites, so we had to go in and fix the app, because the user changed their site. It wasn't because the app broke or had a bug in it, but the user changed their site, so we had to modify it.

We have two developers inventing and developing.

We're still measuring it, because these were more test apps to get to know the system, so the benefits aren't as large as we can see coming from other development.

It does what we designed it to do. It has worked flawlessly, except when somebody changes the actual website that we are reading.

I would start small. As someone in the conference said, "Don't expect in two weeks you're going to have miracles."

In the beginning, put the time and investment into it and do it right. Once you have one victory, then that's where you start looking to train people in the company on what the benefits are, so you could get ideas flowing in their minds. Stress you are trying to automate the boring, mundane, painful jobs that they wait until the end of the month to do because they don't like doing them. Stress what you are trying to automate, and show that you will automate their whole job.

We are accountants and consultants and there are many mundane processes in auditing. Using RPA to automate not only allows us to be more precise, but we can also audit a larger population of material. We get accuracy and speed, and those are our main goals.

We have been able to do our work in a more timely fashion, more accurately, and it opens up other paths of customer use cases which will enable us to expand our business as well. 

In terms of performance benefits, I would rate it a nine out of ten.

• The OCR capabilities, to take somewhat structured data and put them into more structured data so that we can do our analysis.
• Screen scraping.
• The overall process of integrating it with other applications that we use in our analysis.
• It has also exceeded our expectations in the fact that it's a lot quicker to implement than we thought it would be.

It's easy to use but I think it will be a lot easier as it continues to develop. Right now, we do need some development capabilities, to understand certain computer languages, to put in the bots. They're on the right roadmap to make this even easier to engage so that anyone, even people without programming language experience, will be able to use it.

I would like them to continue to build and make Studio easier to use for non-technical people.

Looking at it as a marketplace, I think it's very stable.

We have used their customer support. It has been good for us, although it hasn't been perfect because they're growing so fast that there are a lot of new employees coming on board. That's a challenge to manage for any company. Certainly, the online tools, the Academy training, allow for a nice implementation. It's more an issue when it comes to getting in touch with someone, where we need something customized and we have questions.

I have used UiPath RPA Academy training. It's been great. I think it is developing as well. They continue to add training, change and modify some of it, which is great. You can feel that it is evolving.

With most of our clients, generally, it's humans who are doing manual, mundane tasks - what I refer to as the "low-hanging fruit" side of it. They see right away, when we take their current process that they're doing, how the automation can handle it and be more accurate than what the human employee is doing right now.

The important criteria for our clients in selecting an RPA solution are price, that is always one, but also accuracy and security are factors they're most interested in.

I was involved in the initial set up of UiPath in my company. On a relative basis, it's straightforward. There are certainly some complexities to it, but it is definitely less complex than I expected it to be.

Our clients have seen considerable ROI from using UiPath. Once our customers get their heads around it, and then we implement it, they see the benefits of using it straight away.

Scalability is there. There are so many use cases, certainly for our company. There are many opportunities. We're essentially automating what I would consider to be the low-hanging fruit, and there are so many things to build on top of that, as we get that foundation.

UiPath absolutely is capable of scaling.

Usually, it's Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere.

One of the main reasons that clients go with UiPath is the Academy, where they can get free training, where they can send their internal people to get the training. Having access to it and learning about it is a big hurdle a lot of times. Having access to the learning is a great thing.

I think it's the best RPA solution that I've looked at and I would suggest that you take a hard look. It's easy to start working with it. You can get it stood up pretty quickly and you're going to reap benefits right away.

This is a fast-growing industry, so staying on top of, and executing, plans is important. So far, from what I've heard regarding the roadmap, UiPath is certainly on their way to doing that.

Right now, we're in an interesting spot where a discussion point is how much our customer will own of what we sell to them. We're developing bots right now. The infrastructure, in our use case, typically, is owned by the customer. For us, it's about educating our customers on what we can help them with in terms of infrastructure: We can run it ourselves or they can own it. A lot of our customers want to own that infrastructure.

I think of all of the things it can do - the integration with different applications, solving what are important problems, and saving many labor hours for those who are using it  - and they are the main reasons I rate it a nine out of ten. The only reason it's not a ten is it's not totally done by someone that doesn't know technology and programing. I think they'll get there but you still need some skill sets in your organization.

I have used UiPath for multiple use cases, such as data entry processes or extracting information from emails to certain applications. I have also used it for financial processes like invoicing and analytics, and there are IT applications like user onboarding. 

We can implement processes quickly with UiPath. It doesn't take us long to fix issues and develop a new process. It has enabled us to reduce our on-premise resources by automating around 30 to 40 percent of processes. We cut costs through digital transformation and managing model processes. 

UiPath freed up the time of some of our data staff. Some processes that would normally require three or four hours can be completed in under an hour. We can also utilize UiPath to get some tasks done on the weekends or after hours.

UiPath is user-friendly, so new users find it easy to understand. The processes are accurate. We see very few errors once they are implemented. The processes are reusable. We can create multiple components that we can use repeatedly and combine them with other processes. It's flexible. 

We used UiPath Academy when we were learning the tool, but we haven't used it that much since. It takes time to do the courses. I finished the initial tutorials in one or two days, but some courses can take an entire day. They last much longer than I need. 

UiPath allows end-to-end automation. We work with stakeholders to learn about their requirements, and UiPath has a thousand automation tools that can capture many kinds of processes.

It isn't clear how to use UiPath to implement some use cases like chatbots, so we need to spend a lot of time searching for documentation on the web. To discover how to do these automations, you need to read and figure things out through trial and error. 

I have used UiPath for a year.

I rate UiPath support an eight out of ten. There's some room for improvement. UiPath support should be more accessible. We should be able to connect to support faster and resolve the issues sooner. When we open a ticket, we would prefer to get a call instead of an email. A priority issue is easier to resolve over the phone, so that would be preferable. 

Positive

The UiPath license is costly. It would be helpful if we could get a bulk discount or any reduction, so we could use UiPath on a much larger scale. 

I rate UiPath a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for our clients. 

One interesting use case we've seen is that the product team leveraged UiPath to expose an API for their customers to then fulfill a service request.

It was part of their deal that, for them to sign this large contract with one of their clients, they needed this functionality. The product team has a huge backlog, and it wasn't going to make it based on everything else they had to deliver, so they actually leveraged UiPath to expose this and give them a service they just didn't have before.

When comparing it to, for example, Blue Prism, one of the key value points is, other than the full platform in general, the ability to trigger automation on demand. Basically, when the work gets loaded into the queue, the work can then be started without having to run things on a schedule.

The solution has improved the way an organization functions. For example, in general, in the context of RPAs, it's really about the focus of picking those tasks out of people's daily efforts so they can spend more time with the customers. What you get off the back of that is dollar for dollar savings. You invest in this tool, and you get back dollars by hours, however, beyond that, there are these peripheral benefits that you get that are a little harder to measure. You’ve got to have good guys out there to capture this.

In terms of endpoint satisfaction, customer satisfaction, you have to look at it within the business and their measurements before and after you've done something to actually see what is happening and attribute it to what you've done with UiPath.

We haven't done anything that hasn't saved money yet.

At the beginning of a journey, we were looking to get maybe 1X our money back in that first year. We try to get that at least. Depending on the size of the organization and complexity, it’s possible. As you go into year two, year three, you're almost looking at a multiplier reflecting that year. For example, a four-year-old program might get a company around 4X, if not more, in return. Of course, that also depends on how far you've implemented this product. You need to put money in to get money out, in a sense.

If you've got a pipeline of X and you only have three developers, you can only chew through that pipeline at a certain current rate. You want to look at the value and say, "Well, what if we doubled our staff?"

I have a calculator that shows, for example, if you have $10 million of savings sitting on the table through 20 things in the pipeline. If I put one developer on that, it will take me three years to go through that and build that out. At the end of that $10 million of value, imagine if instead, you had everything all automated on day one. That's a total max value, and you would get somewhere around 23% to 30% of that value returned.

If you double that or if you put a staff of three developers on that same pipeline, you finish earlier and you get about 75% of the total value. If you go to four developers or five, you get closer to 83%. Now, if you put 20 developers on there, you're only going to increment it to 95%, however, then you’ve just increased your total cost as you have to try managing 25 at the same time. The main idea being, based upon your pipeline and the size of your team, you can potentially increase your total return value within a fixed time.

The ease of the use of creating the building automation is actually improving year over year. For example, there are some training programs for UiPath, and it generally takes about a week to get through it. That’s on UiPath Academy.

If you actually use it with modern design, modern objects, and all the new things that have been released recently, you actually save time on training. If that shaves 20% of your training, you can also shave 20% off of your building capability or the requirements. BY using UiPath Academy, you save time on your projects.

It's fairly easy to learn, as a solution. However, it’s not that easy where you're just going to throw non-developers into it. Your first three days of UiPath training are actually doing .net. That's the one thing the market puts out there incorrectly is that your operations team can just jump on this. You still need a developer mentality as you're still dealing with exceptions and things that aren't the way humans think.

That said, in terms of usability, it's highly useful.

UiPath Academy helps streamline and keeps employees up to speed in the solution.

The biggest value of the Academy is that it's free. That's a major piece. It's fairly well organized, and they put things into channels based upon what your role is within your RPA program or your business, and that helps you stay focused in terms of what you need to learn.

The solution needs resource locking. This kind of leads toward scaling which is one challenge. It's not major. However, it is when you have multiple bots running the same process and they need to access the same piece of information to read and write. There's not a strong capability to manage the lock and have the capability to say "I have ownership of this file. No one else can touch it" and then release it, allowing the next one to pick it up. That's a key differentiator that I see between them and Blue Prism. That one feature is lacking.

The studio design is a little different. If you go from one tool to the next, you might be a little shocked at how things are organized. I don't see them changing that any time soon. However, the design could be improved upon.

I've used the solution for about four years. 

The solution seems to be stable. I haven't had any issues yet.

The solution is very scalable. I haven't pushed it to 100 plus or anything like that. However, based upon scheduling and triggers and SLA management, it's much easier to scale.

We did work with other RPA solutions in the past. The differentiation comes from the triggers, and the attended automation. The platform now is a big part of this. 

For example, Blue Prism is one of the tools that we work with as well. If you want new functions, new features, say, process mining, you have to go to Celonis or someone else, whereas UiPath is providing this platform with new capabilities almost daily.

It also depends on what kind of COE you want to build. Looking at Blue Prism, they have a nice UI as well. It's very business-focused. With UiPath, you need to have some developer capacity. There's .net in there, and some people just might not get that. However, at the end of the day, if they don't get that, should they be building processors? There's a bit of a challenge there.

The initial setup is not that complex. It's more about the client's setup. For example, the domain, entries, things like that, would add to the complexity you face.

If everything goes well, you can get things set up probably in a few weeks. I would say a month or so is needed for deployment and implementors should set expectations. For example, security depends on how much the organization is ready to take it on as well. If you don't get their buy-in right away, then you're just going to get delays.

Most of the companies see a good ROI from the solution.

The pricing and licensing get a little complex. There are so many different options that you can choose from, and practice adds to the time to figure these things out. Whereas, with, for example, Blue Prism. It's a pretty standard basic model. UiPath gets a little hectic at times.

The customers that use the on-premises version tend to use the latest version of the solution. 

While those using the cloud version of the UiPath apps feature are in the UK, the US users are not using that functionality. Mainly most of our focus has always been on RPA and then expansion. From what I've seen, we've mainly been using UiPath. At least on the North American side, it's been relatively new. That's why they aren't using apps yet.

We don’t have any clients that are using the solution's AI functionality in their automation program yet. I’ve only played around with it myself.

From a road mapping perspective, I'd advise potential new users that your key is the business case. If there's no business case, then this solution doesn't make sense for you to get involved or do anything else. The first part is to really understand the business case. Just to substantiate getting it into the company. Once you have that, that's basically your low-hanging fruit. 

That said, the key is not to hang everything on one process, not to sit there and bank it, as the concept is a program approach. Over time, it is going to sustain itself. Companies need to be ready to look at a process and think if it's a good idea first. And as you move through the steps, you're basically doing additional checks. As you learn about the process, you're also learning what it's like behind each process and what the value add is. At each stage, users need to ensure that it makes sense to continue. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. While there's always room for improvement, market-wise they are at the top of their game.