UiPath Reviews

We are using it for financial applications in the financial sector. We also have a couple of bigger federal customers who started RPA development on their own, then needed our help. 

Internally, the RPA offerings team is developing more resources, so we can support all our customers. This involves a lot Pegasystems, ERP, and homegrown systems.

We are really seeing that RPA in the production, where people are using it, they are getting benefit.

Screen scraping credentials of whatever features that it has. The robot can log into the system, scrape the data, and enter the data into the system. This eliminates a lot of the manual work that the team had to do, which has improved the performance. Our teams used to do a lot of data entry, and this repetitive work has been reduced. The same resource can now work on some high-end work.

The ease of the use is good and exceeded my expectations. The implementation became easier and more standardized. Also, our development time has been reduced. Using ReFrameWork, we saw that the code become organized very nicely by UiPath and the implementation became easier and more standardized with more prebuilt components, which reduced development time. If you load the ReFrameWork nicely, you can do things faster and more standardized.

I have found there to be setup issues with Chrome. Right now, I am using IE.

I am looking for more batching processing because of the ODI framework. While they have a process where they log everything into Orchestrator, then they process it. However, when I have 50,000 to 100,000 records being batch loaded and processed one-by-one Orchestrator, I am apprehensive about it.

Stability looks good except that we see that when we run the bot sometimes somewhere in the middle it fails. It will recovers, but I don't know why and can't answer to my customers why. I don't know if something can be done to eliminate the failing piece. I don't know whether it is a stability issue, but it should be handled in future. Other than that, stability looks great.

If you start using Orchestrator, and you put your Orchestrator on a very high-end machine, it can handle thousands of bots. I don't see any issues with running multiple processes on a single bot, then connecting it to Orchestrator.

Before using UiPath Academy, we used the customer support to answer our initial questions.

This automation is not exactly like other automation that we used to do. This is a different type of automation where we are not disrupting the existing codes. We are providing all these features to the customer.

The initial setup is simple. Once you install Studio, you can do the development within minutes.

Once the bot is programmed, it eliminates human error. It doesn't make any mistakes if you have programmed it correctly.

Right now, we are not working with other vendors.

I would recommend UiPath and its bots.

Most of our work is with unattended bots. People are more keen to work with unattended bots because they just want to schedule it somewhere in the night and let the bot run, then come in the morning and have it ready.

Everyone in our organization has used the UiPath Academy. We are certified in it. There are three levels of training, which we had to go through before the final certification. The Academy is very good and well-organized. We went through it step-by-step.

One of team members developed a bot in a Citrix environment for a project, and it looked great. From his machine, he connected to Citrix, logged into the application, did some data scraping, and built an Excel file, then provided the data.

We automate processes across a number of different agencies. We automate whatever use case they determine. We tend to focus on the financial management side, but we have other areas that we've delved into such as HR and general data pulls for executive dashboards.

Oddly enough, a lot of our clients have not focused on work where there are people actively doing the process already. They've chosen to focus their efforts on processes for which they haven't had the manpower. It has been a little bit of a challenge in that the use cases tend to be coupled with a lot of process-development stuff. We have to figure out what the process is before we can even begin to automate it.

But over time, we plan on trying to shift that focus back to areas where they have a large number of people doing a process all the time and getting them to shift those people into doing the complex processes where there isn't a structure already determined.

The differentiation between unattended and attended bots is valuable, as well as being able to do portions of a process that are unattended coupled with portions that are attended. We can get human interaction, all within the same product.

The product is easy to use and definitely exceeded my expectations in that context. I have an IT enterprise architecture background with some computer programming experience. This was very easy to grasp.

The additional plugins and different partner programs have been a huge help.

My only complaint is that I hate VB.NET. If I had to pick a language, it would not be VB.NET. That whole .NET framework is just overly complicated. But I can understand why it's necessary for the use case of RPA.

We haven't had any problems with the stability. In comparison, we do use Blue Prism and that solution often runs into memory issues. That's one thing that we have not had to deal with, with UiPath.

I haven't had a lot of chances to test out the scalability firsthand, but the documentation is all there and it makes sense. It seems relatively simple, which is a big help. Once again, this is in contrast to Blue Prism whose documentation is not good. It's very confusing to figure out how you take it from a single-bot use case to multiple bots and more.

It's an easy setup. It's a single install which is pretty simple. Connecting to Orchestrator does get a little complex in some cases. It is what you make of it. Certainly, installing Studio on a single desktop for proof of concept is easy. It takes five minutes. When you start to get into enterprise-level setups, where everything's a different server and everything has to be connected, that's necessarily complex.

Blue Prism definitely has a simpler licensing structure, but I feel like that's almost a shot in the foot at certain points. It also gets kind of deceptive. There's a crossover point at which, if you're scaling up to a high number of bots, UiPath path definitely does come out cheaper. But the initial implementation has a higher cost.

We've been working on RPA, in general, for about two years. We're at different points in the process for different clients. We have some that have grasped onto it quite quickly and others that are still in the proof-of-concept/pilot realm, and we're trying to push it past that. We've been doing it for a fair amount of time, given the relatively young age of RPA as a whole.

I've done a number of different training sessions through the UiPath RPA Academy. The introductory ones are fine, but I really found a lot of value from the ones that focus on solution architecture, the courses that were more on the general infrastructure of how you would implement UiPath.

I would give the solution a solid eight. The first big thing with software is, if you're not running into bug issues all the time, that's an easy five right there. If it's easier to use, that's a six or seven. And it's just been consistently good. I haven't really run into any areas where I've had any trouble. The only real issue is that, from a consulting perspective, I can't really go out there and say, "We're going to use UiPath," all the time. We really have to leave it up to the client.

We currently use the tool to sell solutions to internal customers. Most of the work that we automate is the migration of data between systems, automation of emails, extraction of data from PDFs with OCR, among others. The gain has been perceptible from the first moment, as human errors have been noticeably reduced to almost zero. Another good point for us is that we can leave the robot working for as long as we want.

UiPath is certainly the most acclaimed RPA tool on the market. Its ease of use and firepower are prime points for its worship. Its interface is user-friendly, and even those who do not have programming ease can use it. The implementation and editing of selectors make the tool extremely powerful, and your courses at UiPath Academy make learning very easy and fast. The Orchestrator course is really good and allows the solution developer to completely meet any type of demand.

• Integration with Outlook, which is the main mail server we use in the company. 
• Integration with Google OCR and Microsoft OCR is very useful when we need to extract information from scanned PDFs. 
• Data scrapping when we need to extract large amounts of information from websites. 
• Integration with Excel, when we need to allocate this data in tables or CSV for future use, and many others.

Unfortunately, some things could still be improved. The documentation of ReFramework is very confusing, although there is the advanced course of UiPath, where the focus is ReFramework itself. I believe this is the most difficult, since certification is mandatory in ReFramework, and it is the Framework indicated by the company for the solution of problems.

'Automation' is the word. It started with the purpose of automating, and now it is used in our company in many areas.

UiPath is used extensively in fields of energy and utilities, banking, finance, operations, paperwork.

• Automating the workflow using all the four types of recorders
• RE Framework
• Citrix automation, as it has unique features that are best in competition.

Whatever happens, happens for best. So far, it's going good. So, its going nicely to one of its goal to replace desktop support & IT jobs. One concern is robot failure. It may be due to any reason like improper scheduling of bots wrt orchestrator. If bot fails, it impacts business, as it does not meets the requirement in a timely manner, ultimately disturbing smooth functioning of business. (Ofcourse, its a good thing that bot is mostly 100% accurate)

Mainly, we are using this product for automation, the kind of automation that a human usually does.

For example, if we process where 10 people are working manually, which we can automate using RPMs (Revolutions Per Minute), we can reduce this up to eight people. We can't reduce the human manpower 100%, but we can reduce up to 80% of the manpower. But, for the remaining 20% we need human interaction. Manpower is still needed for checking the report and verifying information. For these tasks, it is still key to have a human take charge of the process.

The specific feature I find most valuable is its ability to access a database, automating inquiries, and sending emails. This is very useful. Now, spreadsheets and ledger books can be done within five seconds.

I want to improve machine learning. 

I have used this product since 2016, and uploaded three different versions. It is very stable. 

It is scalable. There are no issues with scalability. 

There is a good support network. Their response time is good. They will find a solution within two days.

It was very simple to set up the solution for our company.

It's kind of like a process which can be done easily by anyone. There is no human involvement required. It is a very easy model to work with, and it is a win-win situation for both business owner and user.

The pricing differs on the requirements. If there is a huge purchase, then we get a discount.  There is not a fixed pricing of the product. 

Blue Prism is a competitor that has benefits, but we chose UiPath. 

It is very easy to learn and easy to adapt. For example, if we have to open a browser, we need code. If we are using Selenium, or some other programming that you have to write code for, it could be 30 or 10 to 15 lines of code. But in UiPath, there's true ease of use. It is as simple as dirt.

We use it across all functions, but our major groups right now are accounting followed by tax.

There are man-hour savings. Some of that equals headcount reduction, but we've also been able to redeploy people to more value-add activities. It has met our expectations. We wanted to automate manual tasks and it has successfully done that, across multiple systems. I would rate the performance benefits at nine out of ten.

The most valuable feature is automating tasks that are highly repetitive, such as Accounts Payable. It is also easy to use.

I would like it to better handle updates from other systems, whether it's SAP or a website. That's the thing that we struggle with. Anytime a system changes, we have to go in and modify the code.

Stability has been an issue. It has taken about three months for a task to become stable. That was not a huge surprise, but anytime there's an upgrade of a website, things change on a website that we're using as part of the automation task, we have to go in and make those changes to the code.

It's very scalable. That's been a nice feature of the tool.

We have not used technical support.

Dive in and get going.

We have used UiPath RPA Academy training and we like it. It gets us about 80 percent of the knowledge that we need, and then we have a group of in-house folks that will teach people who complete a class how our policies and our procedures are rolled into the tool.

It's changing daily but we have about five developers. We have business users who are now being trained to do development. They're actually working on developing their own task now. In just a few months, we'll probably have 15 to 20 developers.

We've been pretty pleased with the product. The lack of stability is our biggest issue. There are external issues that cause that, so we're not surprised by it. We were expecting it, but that's the biggest issue.

My primary use case is automation. I worked in multiple companies with the same product on the same profile, and most of them were automation. The actual business use case would vary from company to company, and project to project as well.

One feature that I personally found valuable was the orchestrator. It is a pretty mature platform as of now, and it was three to four years back when I started to first use it. It has matured quite well. They had a major change a couple of years back. Our company transitioned from an older approach to a newer modern approach that they deployed. The orchestrator platform was very well-suited to the new approach - as was the development studio. It's really easy to use and intuitive. That has matured quite well as far as I can tell. These two are what I liked the most about the product.

UiPath’s ease of use and quick deployment times were great as the cloud orchestrator, which did not need much of a setup.

To build automation using UiPath is fairly simple. The studio is quite easy to use. Even now, with the community edition, it’s great. If we want to learn to start or try out something, we do not have to wait for licenses or anything else. That said, we can also get an enterprise trial. If we want to do something, learn something, even during our personal time, we can just download it. They also provide a free orchestrator version as well, so it becomes quite easy to learn and develop. 

The building, deployment, and manual deployment processes, for small-scale projects, are very easy. If we need to build something, we just publish it, and it generates the NuGet package. It's very easy to deploy there.

The materials and the training courses are all pretty well-structured to get started with.

UiPath Academy courses have assisted in the process of getting our team up to speed. The basics were there even when I started out. I was not initially an RPA developer. I was into server operations before this. The UiPath Academy training really helped a lot with the initial courses, where they give you a tour of the platform and each and every activity. For audiences who are not much into software development, these courses can guide them towards that. The building blocks got us up to speed. They have very good courses there.

Regarding the Academy, it is a great learning platform for basic tasks. However, for more complex information, I turn to UiPath Forum. Sometimes I need some Python or C# scripts or am building custom libraries there. That gets shifted onto different platforms like Stack Overflow. We Google other platforms as well for the other types of queries.

UiPath Forum is a pretty good place in terms of the user community. Most of the queries that are posted generally get answered. Sometimes, even for smaller issues, we do not go directly into UiPath support and we first try to resolve the issues via what we find in the UiPath Community. Overall, it’s a pretty good place to solve our issues, and the community as of now is pretty active.

We saved time in our IT department since we started to use this solution. UiPath handles infrastructure for the orchestrator and its maintenance. There's a pretty good amount of time saved as we had initially had a server on-prem deployment as well. However, it became cumbersome to deploy multiple databases and they have some Elasticsearch requirements and security updates that need to be regularly maintained and in sync with UiPath. Due to this infrastructure overhead, our time could be consumed maintaining everything. Without them handling the infrastructure, we'd be maintaining instead of building automations and deploying them. We realized that an automation cloud would be a better option which is why we switched.

UiPath reduced human error. That said, we do not track errors in the process. It's a good metric to track as well, however, we currently do not track it.

It reduced employees’ time on certain tasks. The main purpose of automation is to save us the number of hours that the project will take. There are many other parameters, however, the time saved is one of the big ones. 

A weakness with Academy is that, with the current updates that they have, the newer updates, the courses are not up to speed. Nowadays, Academy does not feel that intuitive and does not give sufficient information about the product to the customer.

In our current use cases, we do not need much user interaction. One shortcoming with UiPath Apps is that it cannot directly integrate with the orchestrator platform itself. For example, if we need to fetch any assets, values, or cue data from the orchestrator itself, it's basically a web platform. Even if we develop apps and want to do something based on that data, they do not have direct integration with the orchestrator. We need a separate bot, which will then interact with the orchestrator and then pass it back.

If we need ten to fifteen users who might simultaneously use apps, and we want to run a process for each of these users, then we might need fifteen licenses to do that. That is something that has been holding us back from using it, as it does not have direct orchestrator access. We need a separate bot to get the data to perform some actions.

Scaling and licensing need major improvement. I know that they have released something called Serverless Cloud Robots, where the bot machines do not need infrastructure. However, we do not generally want to run the bots or the data in the UiPath cloud as well. There are some hiccups that do happen when we run bots on another machine. That said, it might be a good feature and we can scale up and scale down more effectively.

I've used the solution for nearly four years now.

The stability has been quite good for a couple of quarters now. We had some issues two or three quarters ago, where there was a downtime of around thirty minutes which impacted assessment. After that, for the last couple of quarters, we have not seen any issues regarding the platform itself. It is pretty stable.

The product allows scaling up, however, when we deploy and run the bot, the bot does not actually run on the orchestrator. The orchestrator is just a management platform. When we need to scale up bots, what we would need to do is spin up new virtual machines. We need those virtual machines in order to scale up. This, along with the licensing affects the ability to scale.

If someone does not have a license, it cannot scale up. When comparing it to something like AWS offers, or any other cloud service, where you can rapidly scale up and rapidly scale down based upon our demands, that is currently not possible with the UiPath. We do not get to easily scale up. We need to plan in advance as to when we run our automation, what time we need to offset the loads, and which automation gets priority at that time. That becomes a bit of an issue.

As of now, scaling is a bit cumbersome, whether we are scaling up or down, and the licensing also revolves around scaling.

We use both attended and unattended automation. In the case of attended automation, scaling is a bit tricky. We need to consider licenses. Very few need the same automation to run on one hundred machines. If we do, then we would need to find a way to manage these one hundred licenses as well. It again comes down to cost.

Our thought process is that whenever possible and where we need to scale, we try to avoid human interaction, and we try to convert our bad pieces into attended automation. If some automation requires a manual login due to regulatory compliance or maybe due to capture, what we do is have these login paths that we take in as unattended input. Then where it’s possible, we would run it as an unattended mode and maybe then pass on the output to the attended mode.

We have support from UiPath, however, I'm not sure what model we are on. 

The support is not as responsible as we would expect. It's not bad, but it's not good.

The response time, the overall solutions that they provide, and the workarounds are okay. It's a mix of everything. We've had somewhat of a mixed experience with them.

Neutral

UiPath handles infrastructure, maintenance, and updates for the Automation Cloud - the infrastructure being the orchestrator infrastructure. The robot infrastructure is handled by us.

I was involved in the initial deployment of UiPath in our organization's deployment process. The deployment process is pretty straightforward with automation cloud data, so we did not need to worry about that. The administration is pretty straightforward as well. They have all of these access models, folders, and groupings. It's very easy, even for a new user that needs access to a particular box to run. It's also easy to maintain.

In terms of deployment on the cloud, there is no overhead. The administration process is simple. Maybe it took us around two to three days of initial setup. Most of the time was spent brainstorming on how we would need to structure our use case. That was what took the majority of the time. Once we decided on that, it was pretty easy. It can be done in one day. The process is also ongoing as the requirements change and the roles change, and it always requires some sort of maintenance, taking out users, taking in new users, et cetera. However, that's pretty easy.

In terms of the deployment of individual bots, it is pretty easy. The manual deployment is also pretty simple. We deploy it from the studio. We get a bundle package and we upload it at the studio level as well as the orchestrator, and it's done. This is a straightforward model. We do have a CI/CD pipeline setup for enterprises where we avoid manual deployments. In that case, we do not use UiPath CI/CD. We do use Git and pipelines to push our packages directly to UiPath.

I can't speak to if there has been an ROI or not.

The licensing could be more flexible. They might have a different enterprise cost strategy for each of the licenses. The license is rigid in that you cannot generally scale up. To scale up, we have to have a license procured before we can run a bot there.

I am not involved in the comparison between Uipath and its competitors, such as Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, or any other platform.

We do not really have clients in healthcare, however, my previous company has mainly evolved into what I can say is a pharmaceutical supply chain. The company is an ordering platform for pharmaceuticals. I'm not sure whether I can consider that as a healthcare pharmaceutical or supply chain use case.

I had done some trial POCs around the UiPath Apps feature. We did some basic trials within our team, however, we do not have any end-users who actively use UiPath Apps.

We're still at an early stage in terms of using AI in our automation via UiPath. We tried out some POCs, and I'm also just getting training on that as well. We do not have any production use cases right now that go into full AI or ML.

In general, they have a good ecosystem of developers. It would be easier to set up and use it. However, if a new company has heavier workloads and needs scaling capability based on time, they’ll need to calculate their requirements. For example, if I process 1,000 to 2,000 transactions per day and I need ten robots to do this and it's fixed every day, then it's fine. That said, if I have varying workloads, where the workload is the last week of the month and the workload is very high, maybe I’ll need twenty or thirty bots to accommodate this workload, while, for the rest of the month, I’ll just need around five bots. That's twenty-five bots that I’ll need to purchase, with many idle most of the time. That is one issue that needs to be planned correctly during the initial stage. 

Overall, I would rate UiPath eight out of ten.

We use it for financial use cases: purchase-to-pay processes, reconciliation processes, vendor payment, and merchant payments. This is just in finance. Then, we have retail order processing, order creation, PO generation, delivery note generation, and all those things in retail. We even have banking processes as well, such as a payments portal. We use it in most of the fields.

We don't use cloud licenses. Most of our licenses are on-prem.

We use both attended and unattended automation in UiPath.

We are partnered with UiPath. Sometimes, UiPath refers customers to us, bringing us business. We also give them business.

We have a third-party order processing portal, which keeps on changing its UI very often and has elements that keep on shuffling between the metadata. What we had in this case was the script running was shuffling the elements, and we are disabled that thing. Then, we used the selector technology instead. Selector technology is very important for all our UI-based processes. We rely on it. 

We used the AI Fabric functionality in one of our projects. We had to categorize users' reviews based on the sentiment scores. Everything was already available, including the model. So, we just have to click on all those things from UiPath now.

The new features that they are adding in, these are very different from other RPA tools in the market:

• AI Fabric
• Integration with different data models
• You can do all the data processing, data mining, etc., in the back-end UiPath. 
• You don't need a separate tool for data mining or other cognitive abilities. You can do all the cognitive abilities in UiPath. 
• UiPath Apps, which they're bringing in just now, is a really good thing. It has a good user interface.

Most RPA tools do not directly have these features. Also, we don't have to rely on other tools in order to develop these things. We can directly develop and integrate them with UiPath on one platform. So, we don't have to struggle within multiple platforms.

UiPath Apps is available only on Community. So, this was a best case scenario for us. It was pretty good. The only thing is that it has to be more advanced. Now, it is very basic. I would like more integration with the UI elements. It should be more user-friendly, especially if we go for any other application development. For example, in other UI development platforms, you can easily drag and drop to develop in a UI. However, it is a very initial phase for UiPath Apps, and maybe in the future, they might improve this.

We have used the Picture in Picture functionality for a few attended automations, where the user is monitoring or we are installing a new interface. Sometimes, in my experience, Picture In Picture is a bit buggy. It takes over your control, then the controls get mixed. That is one of few issues that I have found. Other than that, Picture In Picture works pretty well.

I had an instance when UiPath crashed on my computer. Then, the code that I was working on also crashed. This was a very crucial process for us, but we apparently didn't have a backup. UiPath also didn't have any way to recover that code. This was something which I found very strange, because ideally the source company should have a mainframe where they can recover a code. Or, if I give them a corrupted damage file, then they could easily recover that code. 

The stability is pretty good when we follow the best practices, i.e., whatever is in the REFramework. 

Scalability is something that we are still figuring out. RPA is something which we cannot do for everything, because there is a small gap between profit and the cost.

The support has been pretty good so far. The response time could improve, then it would be much better. However, once we get a ticket assigned to a technical person, then it is pretty straightforward. They are very fast, know their job, and know how to resolve the issue.

The on-prem setup is straightforward. There is very detailed documentation. We always get support from UiPath, so it is not difficult. I have never faced any issues, but I have only deployed on a small scale.

The timeline of the project depends on the project's complexity. Usually, the due diligence and everything else takes about two or three weeks. Then, the design takes another one or two weeks before we start with the development, depending on the inputs.

I get involved with small client setups.

There is a client-facing team of around 25 people who do due diligence and design work. There is also our back-end/technical delivery team, which includes mostly developers, a product project manager, project owner, and developer lead, who are there mostly for their technical abilities, not for their design abilities. 

The price of Orchestrator is pretty high in general as well as compared to other solutions, because Automation Anywhere does not charge for its Control Room.

We can develop our own packages and integrate them, which is pretty good. Other tools don't have that.

There are a lot of cons with Automation Anywhere, which we are using. They deployed a new version, 2019, which is very buggy, and they are still working on that. I don't know how or why they released it to the public. They did so much testing, but it is still buggy.

Power Automate (previously Softomotive) needs to improve on its UI. The ease of use is not there with this solution.

Go for it. It is a pretty good tool, which is straightforward and easy to use. They have training in place. Even if you are new to it, you can go ahead and learn to do it. 

They are bringing in new things. You can automate, integrate, and test things. It is even used for mobile testing. It is pretty good in that case. For most of people's use cases, UiPath will suffice for their use cases.

I would rate the solution as an eight (out of 10).