It's a good tool, but I feel like it doesn't get updated frequently enough. There aren't a lot of new features or a clear roadmap for future improvements. While it's technically sound, it could be better adapted to handle newer technologies.
In Pega, the UI has to be improved because that is the most challenging area that most of our customers ask for because we have to depend on some other React JS or some other tool to bring that kind of UI experience. So, there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of UI and UX.
The new players such as UiPath and ABBYY are moving very quickly, but Pega is not. I'd definitely like to see Pega doing a few more interesting things on the AI or machine learning front so that we can use the platform for multiple things.
Learn what your peers think about Pega Robotic Process Automation. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
What I see as a difficulty in Pega is that, from the programmatic perspective, you need to know how to program. In this modern world, in this automation space, if Pega could provide more options that are user-friendly and provide a way to quickly develop an automation solution that is drag-and-drop with a minimal coding approach, then it would be great for automation. They need to make it quicker in terms of doing the development.
The orchestration needs to be better. It needs to offer an end-to-end solution similar to Google Chrome Universal Web adapters. They have few limitations in comparison. Technical support could be more helpful. We'd like to see more automation in terms of picking up on changes surrounding the browser. If it could automatically identify the attributes of the expected controls.
Excel connectors need to be improved as there are a few connectors in Excel areas. The recording is not at best in Pega Robotics. They could look into it. The interactions with some applications, like Windows and web applications, are a little slow. They need to improve their speed. It should be normal, to open it with other tools. However, right now, it's a little hard. Users should feel they can develop easily. It will sometimes hang while interacting with third-party applications. Instead of adapters, if we had direct interaction of the applications with API and had scripts, that would be better. We have only CSharp supported right now. We'd like to have Python supported. If it was, it would be easier for us and make the solution more flexible. Currently, we are adding three different configuration files, however, if I had the option, I'd prefer to make a single configuration file and then differentiate it in all three environments. It can be difficult to create logic in automation. It's hard than if we used other RPA tools. If they could add more toolbox options, that would be ideal. They need to do what they can to help us reduce complexity in the automation and combine things under, for example, a single control.
What I don't like that much in Pega Robotic Process Automation is its monitoring tool because that tool is tightly connected with the platform. If the Pega team can deploy the monitoring tool separately, so that it's a separate solution altogether, then that would be good because currently, if you have to use the monitoring tool, then that means you have to use the Pega Robotic Process Automation platform. The initial setup for Pega Robotic Process Automation also needs improvement because it is complex. The only additional feature I'd like to see in the solution is for the monitoring tool to be a stand-alone rather than being tightly coupled with the Pega platform. Looking at the current features of Pega Robotic Process Automation concerning application automation, it covers most of my needs currently.
Digital Transformation Director at Tata Consultancy
Real User
2022-06-21T15:52:33Z
Jun 21, 2022
There have been some scenarios where the bot was not able to replace some of the controls and could not recognize and personalize the task we wanted to automate.
Practice Leader at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Real User
2021-08-31T11:01:40Z
Aug 31, 2021
As part of the digital transformation, most organizations are looking for the cloud option, and Pega's cloud presence is pretty much restricted to North America and Europe. There is no cloud presence in the Middle East, India, and other regions. Financial customers in these regions are skeptical. They don't want to have their data outside of the geography for multiple reasons, mainly because of the government policies. Pega should consider putting the focus on other regions such as India and the Middle East. They should also start to think about a data center that is hosted in that particular country. It is not as easy, to implement bots in Pega with the features it carries as it is in UiPath. For example, implementing a chatbot or your email bot is not that straightforward in Pega. When we consider OCR, the degree of accuracy is less with Pega when the data is structured or semi-structured. The accuracy of the OCR in UiPath or some other products is much high with structured and semi-structured data. The handwritten structured and semi-structured data recognition accuracy is much lower and is an area that definitely needs to improve.
Technical Project Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2020-12-15T22:21:37Z
Dec 15, 2020
It would be nice if they brought in some pre-defined functions such as drag and drop coding. I would like to see an enhanced auditing feature included.
President at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Real User
2020-09-14T06:48:44Z
Sep 14, 2020
My pain points with Pega Robotic come down to two big things. It is swivel chairing and dual entry. Those are the two big things that are an issue with old mainframe systems. That is what people are dealing with. It is just not doing the same thing twice. Ease of use could probably be improved. A lot of what you do in Pega is built on Visual Studio with OpenSpan. Pega is very user-friendly and it is easy to build. But you have to know Visual Studio .net to build with it right now. If you are used to Pega, it is a different way of building because it is still essentially Visual Studio. That is the issue. No question that it can be improved. It can be improved a lot.
I have faced many scenarios in the business workflow, where a few applications run on the Citrix environment. That could be a critical part of the process without which business won't be able to accept the automation solution. Because of one small bottleneck, you will lose a very good candidate for process automation. Pega Robotics needs to improve in this area by any means. Other tools are using OCR technology and sending keystrokes to the Citrix window. To automate a critical business process I used Pega Robotics and another automation tool just for the Citrix part. Even though both they had enough licenses for both tools the customer wants to build it in Pega Robotics.
Senior Business Automation Support Developer at TIAABANK
Real User
2020-06-28T08:51:00Z
Jun 28, 2020
Pega's main drawback was that you have to go and install their platform and their platform is meant to be their main selling point with robotics just a small part of what they do. It's the platform and the overhead that requires so much extra training and costs. In contrast, Automation Anywhere is just simple to control and all about the bots. Pega has a no-code low-code environment. We do everything based on established rules. You kind-of have to learn how all their rules work and how it works for robotics before you can use the solution effectively. If Pega built out the robot manager side a little bit more (so you didn't have to learn the ins and outs of their Pega rules) that would be ideal. They have this robot manager application that sits on top of the Pega platform and it does most of what you need it to do. However, there are some initial steps that do need to be set up inside of the solution, or even inside workflow items. That way, I'm just learning how to use the space.
Senior Manager - Business Excellence at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2020-01-30T07:55:36Z
Jan 30, 2020
The OCR capabilities of the solution could be improved. The ability to call different website services from the server would be helpful. The solution should offer integration with applications in Citrix.
There is no two-dimensional lookup table implemented. There is one dimension then to a single dimension. You cannot use a two-dimensional array to read the data. First, you have to read the rows, then go to the columns, then repeat the rows from the columns. You have to write a simple C# script for this to work. In the next release, I would like to see a better UI with the latest features to design and develop faster.
With Pega Robotic Process Automation (RPA), organizations can automate the mundane, tedious, time-consuming, manual work that is hampering productivity and efficiency. Whether adjudicating claims, onboarding customers or employees, reconciling financials, updating customer information in systems record, Pega RPA can manage the work across your enterprise.
The solution's configuration and settings could be more comprehensive.
It's a good tool, but I feel like it doesn't get updated frequently enough. There aren't a lot of new features or a clear roadmap for future improvements. While it's technically sound, it could be better adapted to handle newer technologies.
In Pega, the UI has to be improved because that is the most challenging area that most of our customers ask for because we have to depend on some other React JS or some other tool to bring that kind of UI experience. So, there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of UI and UX.
I would like to improve the tool's integration features and stability.
One of the difficulties we have is not knowing when we will receive alerts.
The new players such as UiPath and ABBYY are moving very quickly, but Pega is not. I'd definitely like to see Pega doing a few more interesting things on the AI or machine learning front so that we can use the platform for multiple things.
What I see as a difficulty in Pega is that, from the programmatic perspective, you need to know how to program. In this modern world, in this automation space, if Pega could provide more options that are user-friendly and provide a way to quickly develop an automation solution that is drag-and-drop with a minimal coding approach, then it would be great for automation. They need to make it quicker in terms of doing the development.
The orchestration needs to be better. It needs to offer an end-to-end solution similar to Google Chrome Universal Web adapters. They have few limitations in comparison. Technical support could be more helpful. We'd like to see more automation in terms of picking up on changes surrounding the browser. If it could automatically identify the attributes of the expected controls.
Excel connectors need to be improved as there are a few connectors in Excel areas. The recording is not at best in Pega Robotics. They could look into it. The interactions with some applications, like Windows and web applications, are a little slow. They need to improve their speed. It should be normal, to open it with other tools. However, right now, it's a little hard. Users should feel they can develop easily. It will sometimes hang while interacting with third-party applications. Instead of adapters, if we had direct interaction of the applications with API and had scripts, that would be better. We have only CSharp supported right now. We'd like to have Python supported. If it was, it would be easier for us and make the solution more flexible. Currently, we are adding three different configuration files, however, if I had the option, I'd prefer to make a single configuration file and then differentiate it in all three environments. It can be difficult to create logic in automation. It's hard than if we used other RPA tools. If they could add more toolbox options, that would be ideal. They need to do what they can to help us reduce complexity in the automation and combine things under, for example, a single control.
What I don't like that much in Pega Robotic Process Automation is its monitoring tool because that tool is tightly connected with the platform. If the Pega team can deploy the monitoring tool separately, so that it's a separate solution altogether, then that would be good because currently, if you have to use the monitoring tool, then that means you have to use the Pega Robotic Process Automation platform. The initial setup for Pega Robotic Process Automation also needs improvement because it is complex. The only additional feature I'd like to see in the solution is for the monitoring tool to be a stand-alone rather than being tightly coupled with the Pega platform. Looking at the current features of Pega Robotic Process Automation concerning application automation, it covers most of my needs currently.
There have been some scenarios where the bot was not able to replace some of the controls and could not recognize and personalize the task we wanted to automate.
The development experience needs to be improved. It could be better. The initial setup could be a bit easier.
As part of the digital transformation, most organizations are looking for the cloud option, and Pega's cloud presence is pretty much restricted to North America and Europe. There is no cloud presence in the Middle East, India, and other regions. Financial customers in these regions are skeptical. They don't want to have their data outside of the geography for multiple reasons, mainly because of the government policies. Pega should consider putting the focus on other regions such as India and the Middle East. They should also start to think about a data center that is hosted in that particular country. It is not as easy, to implement bots in Pega with the features it carries as it is in UiPath. For example, implementing a chatbot or your email bot is not that straightforward in Pega. When we consider OCR, the degree of accuracy is less with Pega when the data is structured or semi-structured. The accuracy of the OCR in UiPath or some other products is much high with structured and semi-structured data. The handwritten structured and semi-structured data recognition accuracy is much lower and is an area that definitely needs to improve.
It would be nice if they brought in some pre-defined functions such as drag and drop coding. I would like to see an enhanced auditing feature included.
My pain points with Pega Robotic come down to two big things. It is swivel chairing and dual entry. Those are the two big things that are an issue with old mainframe systems. That is what people are dealing with. It is just not doing the same thing twice. Ease of use could probably be improved. A lot of what you do in Pega is built on Visual Studio with OpenSpan. Pega is very user-friendly and it is easy to build. But you have to know Visual Studio .net to build with it right now. If you are used to Pega, it is a different way of building because it is still essentially Visual Studio. That is the issue. No question that it can be improved. It can be improved a lot.
I have faced many scenarios in the business workflow, where a few applications run on the Citrix environment. That could be a critical part of the process without which business won't be able to accept the automation solution. Because of one small bottleneck, you will lose a very good candidate for process automation. Pega Robotics needs to improve in this area by any means. Other tools are using OCR technology and sending keystrokes to the Citrix window. To automate a critical business process I used Pega Robotics and another automation tool just for the Citrix part. Even though both they had enough licenses for both tools the customer wants to build it in Pega Robotics.
Pega's main drawback was that you have to go and install their platform and their platform is meant to be their main selling point with robotics just a small part of what they do. It's the platform and the overhead that requires so much extra training and costs. In contrast, Automation Anywhere is just simple to control and all about the bots. Pega has a no-code low-code environment. We do everything based on established rules. You kind-of have to learn how all their rules work and how it works for robotics before you can use the solution effectively. If Pega built out the robot manager side a little bit more (so you didn't have to learn the ins and outs of their Pega rules) that would be ideal. They have this robot manager application that sits on top of the Pega platform and it does most of what you need it to do. However, there are some initial steps that do need to be set up inside of the solution, or even inside workflow items. That way, I'm just learning how to use the space.
The OCR capabilities of the solution could be improved. The ability to call different website services from the server would be helpful. The solution should offer integration with applications in Citrix.
There is no two-dimensional lookup table implemented. There is one dimension then to a single dimension. You cannot use a two-dimensional array to read the data. First, you have to read the rows, then go to the columns, then repeat the rows from the columns. You have to write a simple C# script for this to work. In the next release, I would like to see a better UI with the latest features to design and develop faster.
Pega Robotic Process Automation can improve the OCR area. They don't have a powerful OCR engine to read documents or files like other tools.