What is our primary use case?
We are an EdTech company. We are working on a solution that allows us to customize our offering by reviewing the intelligence that we have about a person. For example, based on how a person learns, we can customize our offering. If a person is more tactile, we can give more quizzes and other things so that the person uses his or her hands to interact. It is a work in progress. We are still implementing it. It is a lot of work.
How has it helped my organization?
It is very easy to build automations with UiPath. It is completely visual. You can easily drag and drop and create a process. It is fairly easy. People who are not technical are also able to work very well. In education, we have to work with educators apart from techies. In EdTech, we have people who understand learning, so we are able to deploy them for this, and we are able to build a better solution. Techies will not be able to build it because they are not educators. We have educators with over 20 years of experience. If we train them to be techies, they will take 10 years, but if we ask techies to become educators, they might take 100 years. With UiPath, we are able to use the skills of our education specialists along with IT and other departments that are needed.
UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. We can use AWS, Azure, or any other product. It is easy for us to integrate UiPath with our current offering. It is very easy to implement and go live.
We are working on using their AI functionality. We are trying to use the user data that we have to understand about a person and deliver a solution accordingly. For example, right now, in education, one size fits all, so there is one program that is directed at a hundred people. If you see Coursera, they have a completion ratio of around 3%. What we have observed is that when we use a solution like UiPath, for the test cases, the completion ratio is very good. It is close to 80%, which is very good. It is going in the right direction.
As far as our business is concerned, if a person does not complete the program, we do not get paid. There is a revenue leakage. By using UiPath, we are seeing a higher completion ratio. For example, if a person enrolls in a university and completes the program, he will pay up for four years. If he drops out in two months and finds that we are not useful, then obviously, we would lose the revenue for three years and ten months. It is helping us reduce wastage. It is helping us increase our revenues with minimal cost addition. The pricing of UiPath is negligible compared to the benefits. We can recover its monthly cost from the revenue that we get from just one student. We have close to 5,000 students. It is very good for us.
In terms of reduction in human error, when you are developing a program, initially, you will discover many errors that you have been missing out on, so human error will be reduced to minimal if your protocol is right. If you make a basic flaw in your design, then it is different, but otherwise, human error is more or less eliminated. There is close to 30% reduction in human error. Once we scale up, that percentage will go up and efficiency will go up.
We plan to automate all manual processes. Some of them are already automated using UiPath, some of them are in progress, and some of them will be automated in the future, but we will save a lot of human time. Human resources are very costly these days. It takes years and years of training for them to add to our business. UiPath has been good for a lot of things that we thought were not possible. We are able to do them after using UiPath. They are able to help us in finance. They are able to help us in HR. They are able to help us with contact centers. It is very good.
What is most valuable?
One thing that we love about UiPath is that the pricing is very good. While we are developing, they have a free option. The Pro option is for just $420. Once we go live, we do not mind paying, so the price point is very good.
The platform is robust. Particularly in process mining and task mining areas, it is very good. We are working on integrating it with our solution, and the API is fairly easy for us to work with.
UiPath is very good. They have OpenAI integration. It is a free integration. They have something for extracting data. They have something for copying text from an image. These are all free and ready to be used in automation.
They have a UiPath community. They have a lot of activities to engage people, and the community is growing. It is not as wide as some of the older products such as PHP or Java, but for AI, it is a very good community. They have DevCons that are very popular as well. Their community is all over the world. They have developers in India. They have developers in the Philippines. It is very good.
What needs improvement?
We would like to see small modules that we can pick and use. Currently, we have to implement a lot of things. The platform is very good, but we would love to have some more templates that we can quickly implement. Other than that, it is very good. We do not require anything else. We are very happy with UiPath. It has been an eye-opener for us. We have discovered things that we thought were not possible earlier.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using UiPath for 17 months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is completely stable. I have not had a single downtime in our development journey and usage. It is a very stable solution. I would rate it a ten out of ten in terms of stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is easily scalable because of the way it is implemented. You start with a small license, and as your needs grow, you can keep taking more resources. UiPath also makes money as you grow. They scale it up for us, so we do not have to worry much about the product as such. It is quite scalable.
We have UiPath in multiple departments. We are an EdTech company, and we are using UiPath in the product department and the finance department. We are integrating some elements of HR. Customer support is the most vital component for us because you save a lot of manhours in customer support. Our tech teams are based out of India and the Philippines.
At the implementation stage, we have only 14 developers, but once implemented, it will be used for at least 5,000 customers.
How are customer service and support?
They have been very prompt and helpful. They pay attention to detail. They are available. Their support is a class apart. There are no issues. I would rate them a ten out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We tried several products but did not implement any RPA. We tried Automation Anywhere and Microsoft Power Automate. We found UiPath to be the best in terms of features, community, and support. Some of the things that we tried did not work well for us.
UiPath is a class apart. Automation Anywhere is a standard solution. Overall, Automation Anywhere is very easy. It does not have a community. It does not have all the features. You are mostly platform-dependent when you are using Automation Anywhere, whereas UiPath has a community. You do not need UiPath to help you with everything. There is a lot of talent available. UiPath Academy is good. A lot of people get trained in UiPath. Pricing-wise also, UiPath is cheaper. It is also easy to implement. Automation Anywhere helps to get started very quickly, but we needed customization for our business. This is something where UiPath was better.
How was the initial setup?
It is deployed on the cloud. Everything is on the cloud. UiPath has helped to minimize our on-prem footprint. Ever since COVID, everyone has been moving to a phase where they can be completely remote. We have been transitioning from on-premises for the last few years, and this is a step in the right direction. Of course, we need to do more, but it is going in the right direction.
The number of people required depends on what you are using it for. We are using it for our own custom solution. We have 14 resources working on UiPath for our solution, but a small enterprise does not need that many people. A smaller team is good enough to implement because it has everything. For example, if you want to integrate Salesforce, you can easily integrate Salesforce. You can go and click on the marketplace and just use Salesforce.
It does not require any maintenance from our side. Everything is automatically maintained. The platform is continuously upgraded in the backend. We do not need much maintenance. It is a cloud solution, and everything is maintained at the backend. You do not need any intervention.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It is super cheap for the value you get. Their free version is good enough to implement. When you are building a solution, it takes months of effort, and sometimes, it takes years. Its free version is good enough for you to test out everything, so when you are developing, you do not need to pay. After that, there is a Pro version at $420. It is reasonable for the value it is offering. Their basic support is also very good, which comes with the Pro version.
The Enterprise license is suitable when you need a hundred automation licenses. It is also reasonable. They give good pricing when you negotiate.
What other advice do I have?
I would highly recommend UiPath. You can definitely go for it. I would suggest being a little bit patient while implementing this solution initially because it can be overwhelming. There are so many options.
UiPath as a company is also good. They respond quickly. It has been a pleasure so far. Our product is not yet live. We are still working on it. It is a very big solution for us, and it will be a game changer for our business.
Overall, I would rate UiPath a ten out of ten.
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.