ABBYY Vantage Reviews

We use ABBYY FlexiCapture to extract data from invoices and purchase orders.

It is saving a lot of time, especially for the users who are doing the same tasks on a regular basis. Previously, they were manually copy-pasting from the PDF files to the legacy systems. By using FlexiCapture's integration with UiPath, we are able to automate a lot of complex processes and save time.

We are able to extract details from a PDF and put them into a CSV. It is able to extract the details that we are looking for. We have the Machine Learning feature to extract the data with respect to the position of the field.

Most of the features are already included in ABBYY FlexiCapture. It is 95% good. It only needs an improvement of 5%. 

Occasionally, we found the Machine Learning feature to be not working as per our expectations. Sometimes, it also failed to extract details from a PDF. It would be great if training batches work with 100% accuracy. I don't see any other major concerns with ABBYY FlexiCapture.

In the future release, in the admin console, they can include information about the number of pages that we have consumed and the number of pages that are remaining. Currently, we are not able to see how many pages we have consumed. We haven't received any feedback from ABBYY on how many pages we've consumed for each template or the whole process. If they can include that in the future release, it would be great because we don't know how many pages we may require on a yearly basis.

It is expensive.

We have been using this solution for about two years.

We haven't seen many crashing issues so far.

The scaling process is of medium complexity. My company is a sales-based company, and we get millions of purchase orders from different vendors. So, we use ABBYY FlexiCapture a lot. We have plans to increase its usage in different departments.

Once in a while, when we have any questions, we reach out to ABBYY. They were okay, and they were able to help me.

We haven't used any other tools. We started with ABBYY FlexiCapture.

Its deployment process is of medium complexity. Currently, only one person from the India team or the Austria team is deploying the packages for ABBYY FlexiCapture. I have been deploying UiPath packages for a very long time, and the process for ABBYY FlexiCapture is a little bit different as compared to UiPath. ABBYY FlexiCapture is a little bit more complex than UiPath.

It takes 15 to 20 minutes for one template.

We have definitely seen an ROI. It might increase in the future.

It is expensive as compared to UiPath. We pay for the licensing and the page count.

We didn't explore any other OCR tools as of now. We are good with ABBYY FlexiCapture, and I don't think we are going to explore any other tools in the future.

I would strongly recommend using ABBYY FlexiCapture if you have a high number of invoices, purchase orders, or any manual checks, and you want to extract details.

I would rate ABBYY FlexiCapture a nine out of 10.

One use case was known as Manual Order and it was a type of invoice processing. When a customer had or was going to receive invoices from different distribution centers, which all could be accessed in different formats. For example, they could be different templates, be digital, and scanned. There could a wide range of variations. The purpose or the aim of FlexiCapture is to extract the information out of those invoices, such as a certain number of fields, which we need to extract from the invoice and that sent on into the SAP. For the SAP we were using Pega. There is integration between ABBYY FlexiCapture and Pega to solve the whole use case.

The second use case was for claims. For example, if a customer was supported to get a claim from the distribution center but some of the quantity was not being sent to them correctly or the price was not good, they would send those for correction. One claim could have multiple claims in between them that could have a price difference or quantity difference. It is more complex than device processing because it has more variations in the template. It has more business complex routes. On the FlexiCapture, we are extracting the data out of this document. We implemented some of the business tools and we are using Pega to revalidate the data in the SAP to correct it.

Additionally, we have four or five business processes that are already running in production with Blue Prism and ABBYY FlexiCapture.

While using ABBYY FlexiCapture we did not use the generic models that they do have for invoice and purchase orders. For one of the use-cases, the document was exactly the purchase order, but we are not using that generic model. We are creating the model from Scratch. However, if I was to compare ABBYY FlexiCapture with other IA tools, the machine learning and how the extraction is done is far better than competitors. This allows a lot less effort for the development.

The generic models have a lot of areas to improve. In our experience, we are not able to get good results in the generic models. From a developer's point of view, there could be more improvement if the source code is available on a broader scope. It is a low code platform but it requires implementing more complex code to be able to accomplish certain tasks. We are not able to tune the model on a programming level because we do not have the source code to do it. From a business point of view, ABBYY FlexiCapture is one of the best platforms for machine learning. The solution does not have anything related to RPA or robotics, but we can integrate it easily with a Pega or Blue Prism for these features.

ABBYY FlexiCapture has a lot of functionality but it does not have options to implement more machine learning business rules. It does not have the option to write the logic to implement other options according to the business. Most people do not like to choose ABBYY because of the lack of those functions, such as reading email or saving them to excel, they use other tools for these activities. If ABBYY had these functionalities more people would use it and it would be more useful.

I have been using the solution for approximately a year and a half.

The solution is stable. However, new versions come out frequently and our customers do not have a choice whether they are going to update since it is on the cloud. They still have to make sure it does not have any negative effect on their exciting solution in a bad way. 

There are times it takes a lot of time when we submit a document to FlexiCapture in between getting the results When this happens we raise a ticket to the ABBYY team and it gets released very quickly.

We have approximately four people in my organization using the solution. It is not the majority of the teams. We had five customers for which we were working with this solution, we had a trial contract with another tool, but due to some reason, the customer wanted to use FlexiCapture. I am one of those four people who have this experience in the ABBYY FlexiCapture.

We have plans to increase the usage of the solution.

My experience with customer service has been really good. I have not contacted them directly, but they do have forums. When we initially started, I had posted some technical questions and I did get a response from them.

ABBYY FlexiCapture is not very old which causes a limited knowledge base for assistance, this is possible because there are not a lot of people using it. There is documentation from the ABBYY FlexiCapture which is okay. However, if you start working with the solution, the practical knowledge is better than what you will find in the documentation.

Before using FlexiCapture we were previously using WorkFusion. It is an RPA or IA tool that has both the RPA plus machine learning. PNG decided to reconstruct those use cases and some others with the ABBYY FlexiCapture.

We did the installation for our own company, it is not very difficult because the customer service is good and are you will be given a particular team who will be responsible for the deployment.

We used the deployment team from ABBYY FlexiCapture for the implementation. The time it took was approximately two months including all customization and licensing.

Most of our customers have purchased an annual license and if you have multiple developers from other companies, you can assign the license on a monthly basis to developers. 

We have licenses for ABBYY FlexiCapture for our company.

We did evaluate other options with our customers before choosing ABBYY FlexiCapture.

My advice when doing the implementation is to do the practice mode rather than only going through the certification and documentation. It is better to implement the model, instead of using the generic model.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate ABBYY FlexiCapture an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case of this solution is for document processing. Whenever I receive an email from a vendor or business it gets processed to the ABBYY server. I've created a layout in FlexiCapture that recognizes the template, extracts the field and puts it into the Excel format. I mainly work with purchase and invoice documents and ABBYY checks the validation conditions of an invoice. I'm the manager RPA developer and we are customers of ABBYY FlexiCapture.

The advantage of the solution is being able to identify and extract the element you need from a document. The template can be customized for this. We can create our own rules to validate some values before exporting the results. 

I would like to see consistency improved. If the same document is uploaded twice, I might get a different outcome the second time. Machine learning needs to be improved. We have some issues with scanned documents that may have a quality less than 300 dpi and the quality isn't high enough for ABBYY to accurately read it, and it therefore requires manual intervention. There is scope for improvement which could include AI modelling and training. If AI is there then it will identify it in a better way. There is a field training option that already has an ML algorithm for it, but it's not much use. Hand-written documents have less than 50% accuracy. 

I've been using this solution for a year and a half. 

We haven't had any issues with stability, I think it's better than other solutions. 

I don't know about scalability because I'm the only user in the company. We deployed in the AWS server and we have a team who control everything. We currently have eight projects related to OCR which are in the pipeline. I have already trained two other guys.

There is a forum for support but not many people are active. We have a license with them so we will usually receive a response within 48 hours. 

The initial setup was okay, the difficulties came later with the poor quality of documents we received. 

We pay an annual license fee, our management team that deals with that. 

I did a POC on all the different OCR tools in terms of the level of accuracy I get from each document. ABBYY and Amazon Textract did quite well, whereas Kofax did not provide as good a result. Textract reads the entire document data and provides raw data output in the string format. With ABBYY, I can add a field into the template and then extract it but in Textract adding a customized field is not possible.

Anyone using this needs to know they won't get 100% accuracy. Human intervention is required depending on the quality of the document. Clearly, if the quality is good, the results will be better. ABBYY has been on the market for over 20 years so they're well supported including all other RPA tools. Competitively, I think ABBYY is better than other OCR tools. 

It's good to test the solution with multiple samples. Once you create a layout, test it with multiple documents and see what you're able to achieve. If I see that 30 out of 100 documents are not processed 100%, I'll retrain it to improve the accuracy level for when the same document comes in next time.

I rate this solution a six out of 10. 

We use ABBYY Vantage for invoicing problems and for unstructured forms and documents.
ABBYY is an older tool that specializes in data extraction, OCR, ICR, and other recognitions. The company or the department just has to decide the use case. 

I like the flexibility of the layout. For example, for the documents that we're using, this is the main feature that is very useful and makes it flexible for extraction.

It could be more intuitive. It's huge and has many options, and that makes it difficult. You have to go to Google and search for documents and videos to try and understand how it works. Some tools or processes or some parts of the process should be intuitive to make it easier for the developers.

Many of these tools are divided into many parts. You have to buy different parts, and you have to know the difference between features. Sometimes it's difficult for the developer because you don't have the old information available in cleartext. These things need extra plugins to try and collect the different parts in different ways. 

It would also help if they improved the engine for ICR. I know that people improved this tool, but it's not expanded right now. We need to use an additional plugin to design or code some parts using a toolkit. It's not properly included in the standard package. 

I have been using ABBYY Vantage for about seven months.

ABBYY Vantage is very stable. I don't have any concerns about it.

I know that scalability is available, but I don't have a big project reference right now. We have about 50 people using it right now.

In the last three or four projects, we used ABBYY instead of IQ Bot. I know that IQ Bot probably works with a simple OCR extraction without complicated decisions or business rules. If we have more complexity when it comes to the business rules, for example, the quality of the images, or apply different filters over the images and do other things with ABBYY, we use ABBYY instead of the IQ Bot. But IQ Bot is more flexible.

It's not easy to set up this solution. But once the installation is done, you don't have to configure anything. The main part is related to the server and the infrastructure people handle that.

For simple types of documents, medium-sized projects with 25 types of unstructured documents, with seven or eight field sections, it probably takes one week to deploy. This includes bulk extractions where the information is put into the different outputs. We mainly use this in our Excel template.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give ABBYY Vantage an eight.

We use this solution mostly for processing Brazilian servicing invoices and personnel documents and contracts, such as personnel ID cards.

I am a strategic partner of ABBYY here in Brazil. I deploy this solution for the customers. We mostly deploy it on a customer's cloud infrastructure. It is not the cloud side from ABBYY. It is like on-premises, but it is in the cloud of the customers.

Most of our customers work with RPA. On the cognition side, you have to look at the document and also create some intelligent rules to validate the data from the document. We give the bots the ability to put documents to be processed, and then the bots give back the results to move on to the next task in the process. In the process on which bots are working, there are two high-value workflows that require finding things and using judgment. Both are conditional logic.

When talking about documents, RPA can read the full text of the document, but it cannot understand the rules of a document as a human does. This is something ABBYY can do very easily. You put some rules in the ABBYY task, and ABBYY will say, "Okay, so this invoice is $20, and 10% tax is $2." If the tax is $3, ABBYY will say, "Look! There is a mistake here with this tax amount." ABBYY is able to understand the content and the context of the document and give it back to the RPA to go on with the task.

The most valuable feature is the ability to scale for big processes. We are able to process 1 million pages a day. Its accuracy is also very nice. It is a good feature that they have. 

It is an independent platform, which is its biggest advantage as compared to other solutions. It is also very stable and powerful. It is 100% on time.

They should improve the RESTful API side of this solution. Currently, fully RESTful API is not available in the on-prem version, which is really a problem, and we have to work around this limitation. The cloud version already has a fully RESTful API, but the on-prem version doesn't have a fully RESTful API, which is a big mistake. It is easy to solve, but they aren't solving it quicker. They are taking a long time. Nowadays, most people don't go to the interface. They like to use RESTful API.

I have been using this solution for about 20 years.

It is very stable and powerful. 

It is easily scalable. It is for all kinds of customers. Our customers are small, medium, and large businesses. RPAs are used in all kinds of organizations nowadays, and documents are always involved. RPAs are used even for testing and learning, and documents are always a problem.

Our clients do plan to increase the usage of this solution in the future. FlexiCapture is able to scale or spread in the department without having the need for any other RPA tool or AI tool.

They are very good and fast. If you find any vulnerability or there is an issue in scaling this solution, they are very fast in fixing the issue.

It is very easy to deploy but only after we have handled the security side of the customer. It is not complex, but, like any other server-based solution, things have to be clarified with the security team and the IT team. The biggest friction is not involving all the teams from the customer side, especially the security teams.

Our implementation strategy is to involve everyone two or three months before. This is because the businesses that purchase the solution sometimes don't have a good relationship with the IT team. We go to a workshop with them and try to understand their concerns, which takes two or three days. Its installation takes one or two days.

Our clients evaluate Kofax, UiPath, Brainware, and Nuance. The competition is big here. FlexiCapture is the most independent solution. It is an independent platform, which is its biggest advantage. You are not dependent on other solutions. In UiPath, you depend on scaling the RPA to spread OCR.

I would highly recommend this solution. My advice is to engage with a professional services provider at the beginning for installation, deployment, and training. Don't try to do it on your own because it is a very powerful and big solution. You'll have to learn it before you try to use it. Don't do it yourself. 

I would rate ABBYY FlexiCapture a nine out of ten. It is missing only RESTful API.

We are using this solution for PDF reading capabilities for some invoices. We also utilize it to read DW4 forms.

There are many others to compare with such as Google and Microsoft, but we haven't seen any specific distinction that stood out with Abbyy.

They were the most used, which is the reason we chose them.

Abbyy is really good in terms of reading OCR.

There has always been a challenge with Word and PDF reading capabilities. This is an area that needs improvement.

There are certain controls like radio buttons and checkboxes that when reading PDFs, really doesn't go well with the RPA.

We work with Abbyy and UiPath. Abbyy provides its API to be utilized with UiPath, and that is how we use it.

We have been working with Abbyy for at least one year. We have one or two projects that we have worked on with Abbyy.

Abbyy is a stable solution.

It's not really scalable. When it comes to PDF reading, we are very specific to that particular document and that template with some of the verbiage.

I have not seen it to be more scalable with any OCR capabilities.

I have not contacted technical support.

Previously, we didn't try any other solutions. We have to have that screen gripping capabilities and OCR. UiPath with Abbyy was the right choice.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We did not go with the licensed version of this solution.

It's more trial and error, but Abbyy is still really good in terms of OCR. If you have a consistent use case, then I think that Abbyy is the right fit.

I would rate Abbyy Vantage an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case of this solution is for our invoice project. We wanted to capture the sales and use tax data from our invoices. I'm a senior manager and we are currently customers of ABBYY, hoping to become resellers in the future. 

I think the machine learning capability of ABBYY is pretty good. You can create your small frame model and then the software works well, applying that training to extract the data out of other invoices.

I think that the tool is really complex. It works well, but in terms of rolling it out to a large audience that is not very tech savvy, this tool might be a little too much for them to handle. I think there needs to be some sort of simplification for that kind of user. ABBYY has the FlexiLayout Studio tool which is used for creating layouts for semi-structured and unstructured documents. It's pretty complex and we'd like to see some simplification there.

I've been using this solution for four months. 

I think that once it is installed, the solution is stable. There are no issues that come up. 

When it comes to scalability, you might need to install multiple instances of these stations. It comes in two pieces, one is a server and one is the stations. The stations can be scaled up, and can connect to the centralized server and work well, but I think that if you wanted to have it scaled for a large number of users you might have to think about creating some wrappers around it.

We have a user base of around 50 to 100 people but we are gradually rolling it out, so I think right now we only have 20 users who are actively using it, but down the road we expect that to come close to 100.

In general, the ABBYY support is pretty good. They are very responsive and try to resolve any issues.

I think installation is pretty straightforward, except that if you are using a distributed version, then there are some prerequisites in terms of IAS that need to be installed beforehand. That makes it a little challenging, but I think if you have the right support from ABBYY you can manage that easily.

The ABBYY license is calculated by pages and it all depends on how you negotiate the licensing with them. If you have a pretty large use case, you might get some discounts, but if you have a pretty small use case, they might be firm on the price.

We did our due diligence on a number of solutions and we found ABBYY to be more widely known and they've received pretty good reviews. That's why we chose them along with the fact that their licensing is decent enough. The other solutions we looked at were not as good as ABBYY and were more expensive. 

I think each company needs to make a judgment as to whether you can handle a technically challenging solution, because ABBYY is challenging. If you need to have your people trained ahead of time to get some support built into your organization, you should do that. If your organization is not very tech savvy, this solution might not work for you very well.

We still need to carry out more evaluations. For example, the out of the box, SDK support. I'd like to know how much free SDK support we would get if we try to build a wrapper around ABBYY. I think those are the things that we need to evaluate on our end, but overall I think we are pretty happy with this tool.

I think this is a good solution and would rate it an eight out of 10.

We use this solution for invoice processing.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its ability to extract content from documents. It is able to identify specific fields and special characters. We are able to train the tool to identify certain sets of fields based on specific definitions. This solution is also user-friendly. 

This solution could be improved by offering better integration with other platforms. They have released the connectors for all other RPA tools such as Blue Prism UiPath, but this integration is quite challenging to use. It's not very straightforward or easy to understand for a non-technical person. The integration should be configured in such a way that anyone can understand it and use it.

I have been using this solution for six to eight months.

ABBYY is a user-friendly and stable product. ABBYY is more flexible and stable compared to a solution like Kofax.

This is definitely a scalable solution. 

The customer support team are knowledgeable and responsive. Their response depends on the license that you hold with them. Their licenses come with predefined response and SLA times. If you are a golden license holder, you will receive a response within three to four hours. 

Positive

There are different sets of initial configurations and this depends on the use case. We have standalone and multi-server setups. Being a consultant, I configured ABBYY FlexiCapture myself. I could easily go through their documentation and figure out what needed to be done and how it needed to be done. The documentation is user-friendly.

They have a trial license that is limited to a certain number of pages. The paid license varies from six months to one year depending on the number of documents that need to be processed. We are a consulting firm and our license model depends on customer requirements. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.