Automation Anywhere Reviews

We have had a number of different use cases for Automation Anywhere. As a higher education institution, many of the use cases have been for back office operations. 

Some use cases include automating expense reimbursement processes. This involves the submission of data after collection, validation of data, and several different steps in that process. 

We are exploring invoice reconciliation and invoice processing as a new use case. Many of the other use cases have been system-to-system data transfer where they don't have APIs, which has been accomplished through UI automation and RPA.

We chose Automation Anywhere to investigate the feasibility of using RPA in place of dedicating other team's time for developing custom APIs between systems. We wanted to tackle problems that we couldn't dedicate resources to solving with custom in-house development and bridge the gap between third-party external software.

The governance guardrails built into the Automation Anywhere platform have allowed us to develop solutions at a pace while adhering to our internal organizational policies.

The scalability of Automation Anywhere, the framework, and user interface are particularly impressive. When evaluating Automation Anywhere versus alternatives such as UiPath for RPA specifically, their tool works exceptionally well. Their customer support model has been fantastic at resolving issues. Security and infrastructure are other significant components why we continue to use them. 

The actual tools on the RPA side have been very nice to work with. When onboarding members of our team, being a lower-code platform with much of it being no code, it has been good to bring people up to speed. It's easy to bring both people from developer and non-developer backgrounds up to scale. Our developers have applied standard SDLC principles towards working within that platform.

With agentic process automation, there are several challenges we were looking to solve. GenAI infused document automation has been of great interest to us, especially in invoice processing for our financial side. With APA in particular, some use cases involve taking complex processes that could have large decision trees, and instead of dedicating time and resources towards fleshing out all those if/then statements or pushing exceptions to human middle processing, we aim to lower that scope and allow for quicker delivery time.

The Composer orchestration tools have been great in developing new solutions. Automation Anywhere started as a pilot at our CMU, where we are at the forefront of numerous computer science areas. It's part of our CTO's mission to embrace automation tools, artificial intelligence, and robotic process automation, bringing internal processes into the 21st century and beyond.

Automation Anywhere helps us overcome challenges in the age of GenAI. The platform has solved our initial challenges as we transition from being a pilot to a long-term customer. With GenAI, challenges revolve around use case identification and implementing AI in processes while ensuring governance and protecting sensitive information, government information, and student information.

AI governance and data protection are extremely important for our company. We are currently reviewing the Autopilot capability and evaluating document automation with AI capabilities for new solutions.

As we expand our components of the Automation Anywhere platform that we utilize, we need better connections between them. Currently, our shell framework, metrics, logging, and guardrails are done at an RPA or Bot level. As we take advantage of other features such as work queues, process Composer, and AI agents, we would prefer to see features around offering frameworks around those models or domains specifically that can encompass all of the subset features that Automation Anywhere offers.

Bot Insight is an available feature, and we can create our own custom metrics and logging in RPA Bots, but we don't want to have to send results to a logging subset bot after using an AI agent or higher components such as document automation. We need a native way in Automation Anywhere's framework to tie all that information together, including AI dashboard, governance dashboards, and document automation results.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for about two and a half to three and a half years.

Their customer support model has been fantastic at resolving issues.

Positive

In the RPA space specifically, we have not used any other solution that addresses similar needs before using Automation Anywhere. 

For internal technologies prior to implementing RPA, we had various solutions. For table-based and database-based operations, users were using spreadsheets. 

We are now able to convert certain things to databases, even without native APIs for certain software platforms, because we can leverage Automation Anywhere to bridge the gap between disconnected systems. In the specific landscape that Automation Anywhere competes in, we haven't used direct competitors. 

We have been replacing software developer adjacent technologies, custom script solutions, and low code/no code platforms with different features from Automation Anywhere.

Standing up the service itself had no significant challenges. There were a few small challenges, however, nothing significant that were nonstarters for us. Our teams were able to work around any issues. The biggest thing we had was was enabling SAML authentication to work with our identity management services. 

Other than that, standing up the service, connecting the host controller to our local VMs, etc., that was easy. There was a little bit of network stuff, and some of DevOps stuff. Thankfully, we have a great DevOps team. Working with Automation Anywhere is largely straightforward and seamless.

We have been happy with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Automation Anywhere so far. There is sticker shock with many new features, however, we definitely think that the end results can more than justify the cost. We are evaluating the use case and the resources needed to stand up solutions using some of these features. 

The cost versus return for the traditional out-of-the-box features has been very reasonable.

Since the evaluation phase, we have not considered other solutions that do the same as Automation Anywhere. We have been extremely happy with Automation Anywhere. The tools provided for the cost, scalability, robustness, and infrastructure have been very satisfactory, and we have not had a significant need to evaluate alternative platforms. 

This may not stay that way forever as this is an ever-changing landscape, but for the foreseeable future, we don't see ourselves evaluating alternative platforms.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Automation Anywhere a ten.

Hybrid Cloud

We do not cater to clients; we are automating in-house processes like finance and HR, payroll processes, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and collection. These are the kinds of use cases, with separate teams for each domain, while our team mostly focuses on the finance part of it.

I appreciate that Automation Anywhere is so user-friendly, and currently, our team is learning Power Automate and migrating some of the processes as we go. I find Automation Anywhere very developer-friendly, and I have been in this field for seven years, working on tools like UiPath and Automation Anywhere, then switching to Power Automate, which comes with quite a bit of a learning curve. Something that can be done very simply in maybe one or two lines in Automation Anywhere takes a lot of workaround in Power Automate. Automation Anywhere has positively impacted my organization primarily because the deployments were mostly done before I joined, and I focus on knowledge transfer and migration. However, from what I understand, during COVID, they started RPA in our firm and saved a lot of manual hours by automating the business processes, which was a lot of help especially during that time.

One area for improvement with Automation Anywhere is that while Power Automate has very simple integration with Microsoft tools, it is something that could be worked upon. Even in my previous organization and many other organizations are shifting towards Power Automate, especially companies catering to clients because of the cost efficiency with Power Automate, which is also something you can take into consideration. I confirm that while the product has advantages in terms of pricing, in terms of integration, it needs some improvement.

My current experience in this field is seven to seven and a half years.

The deployment of Automation Anywhere is quite simple for me.

We actually have some citizen developers in our organization who develop entire processes on Automation Anywhere, even with very little knowledge of how RPA works. During the migration, I had the opportunity to meet some of these business users when they came to India a couple of months back, and we had the same conversation that Automation Anywhere was very user-friendly compared to Power Automate, which is something everyone appreciated.

There have been many instances, particularly in my previous organization where we did a lot of development in Automation Anywhere, catering to clients like CPA firms in America, where we raised tickets for solutions but did not always find a satisfactory resolution, despite connecting over a call.

I previously used UiPath, but not in this firm where I have been for only seven months, focusing on Automation Anywhere and migrating to Power Automate.

I do not remember approximately how much time the deployment for this product took.

I could implement it all by myself without any consultancy or help from outside.

We do track ROI, though I do not have the exact statistics in mind. For every man hour during any deployment, we estimate about $70 saved based on how much it takes manually to do that process, and we track that every time the bot runs.

I am considering Power Automate because of the cost.

In my current role, I joined about six or seven months ago, and they have been using Automation Anywhere for three or four years with a renewed license for another three years. Automation Anywhere has positively impacted my organization primarily because the deployments were mostly done before I joined, and I focus on knowledge transfer and migration. However, from what I understand, during COVID, they started RPA in our firm and saved a lot of manual hours by automating the business processes, which was a lot of help especially during that time. The challenges I was trying to resolve by implementing Automation Anywhere mostly revolve around automating repetitive business processes, as during COVID, there was a lot of extra work in my role within the aviation industry. Streamlining the business processes made a lot of sense and helped boost the revenue significantly. I provided this review with an overall rating of 8.

On-premises

Other

Our use cases on Automation Anywhere span across HR and finance as the main two areas. 

We are exploring Automation Anywhere A2019 and have found some good ticketing, service now solutions, and integrations that we can use. We're continuing to explore A2019 AI. 

Automation Anywhere is definitely one of the leaders in helping with these challenges. Automation Anywhere is especially useful for us in web automation and browser automation.

It allows us to bring automations to development quickly. It's a quick turnaround. 

What I appreciate most about Automation Anywhere is the fact that there are multiple ways to develop an RPA bot, which is useful to different types of developers. There's the lists, and there's the drag and drop. It's all very easy to automate.

The features of the Automation Anywhere bot bring us the ability to develop automations to production quickly. We can test, and then we can easily fix any bugs that we have in the bots and then we can bring them to production quickly with quick turnaround.

The deployment of Automation Anywhere, meaning just moving bots to production, is seamless. It's easy. We have our environments set up with dev, QA, and production, and it's very easy to move from one to the next.

It's early in our implementation. In the age of agentic AI, my biggest challenges and those of my company include finding the right use case and then choosing the right platform. There are a lot of companies that offer services, so we have to do evaluations across each company and then select the right one to solve the problem. Automation Anywhere is one of the leaders in this space. 

I have worked mostly with RPA in Automation Anywhere. I attended the APA developer class. We don't have any agentic AI solutions, and the ones we have are minimal in terms of the AI component. It's too early to have achieved our automation goals.

The CoPilot fixes the problem of quickly dragging in a lot of lines and the commands in Automation Anywhere.

It would be great if they could do more third-party Salesforce integrations into the RPA side, which would be helpful. I don't know how much will be covered with the agentic AI. More SharePoint integrations and things would also be great for doing more tasks with those tools.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for five years.

We did not use another solution before implementing Automation Anywhere in our company. We started with a lot of the major players, including UiPath, and we chose Automation Anywhere. Some sectors had UiPath, but the dominant one is Automation Anywhere. Automation Anywhere stands out from UiPath for us because of its ease of development and competitive pricing. Those are the two main reasons.

The deployment is seamless. 

I'm coming from a developer standpoint; I don't handle pricing. 

We do not have the AI Agent Studio feature of Automation Anywhere available yet in our government GCC environment. AI governance is very important for us, especially as a government contractor, however, I would have to look into that more. 

I have not used Automator AI yet.

We have our own COE for Automation Anywhere. We have a few dashboards, but I don't think we are using the Automation Anywhere dashboards too much. We mostly use Power BI to get our insights. From Automation Anywhere, we don't utilize document automation in our current processes. We're using Azure Document AI currently, and that's our best source of extraction. I don't know too much about the pricing and licensing from the developer standpoint.

We're also using Azure Document AI for as our main source of extractions. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

On-premises

Microsoft Azure

The main objective of using Automation Anywhere is revenue cycle automation and our tie-ins with the hospital allow us to work in different parts of the revenue cycle. It specifically automates either patient info collection, Medicaid submission, and similar tasks. It is all contained within the revenue cycle, which represents the main services we provide to our clients.

What I appreciate the most about Automation Anywhere is that the tool is very robust. It can handle buttons moving around and any elements changing. It makes the process super easy to maintain and, in terms of tracking failures, it is improving. It is very good for new websites, identifying elements effortlessly.

My main issue with Automation Anywhere might be the logging of bots and getting more detailed feedback of what my bot is doing, step by step. It is hard to track fine-tuning in larger codes.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for maybe a year and a half to two years now, or rather I have been using it since I joined.

Automation Anywhere definitely allows us to provide more reliability and affirmation to the client. For every client we successfully automate, it is a checkmark in our book to show that we have a huge skill set of bots and different capabilities.

Having them operational month-to-month and reporting that they work is a very good confidence booster, especially with smaller hospitals when this is the only grant they can invest in. Once development is done, the bot is relatively stable. It does have some discrepancy with older websites but performs really well with all new websites, current revenue cycle automation, or any submissions we have to do. It reduces the pressure of maintenance significantly because even with numerous website changes, the maintenance becomes negligible for us.

When bringing Automation Anywhere, we were trying to solve the time taken in these processes for hospitals. We aim to improve how fast they can charge their insurance or patients, ensuring they hit their revenue targets. We are expanding into other fields, still centered within healthcare. Having these small working components and consistent bot performance brings in the next client, which is a significant goal for us.

In my company, I have not used another product that does the same as Automation Anywhere, but I have studied and used UiPath briefly. That was about two and a half to three years ago.

When bringing Automation Anywhere, we were trying to solve the time taken in these processes for hospitals. We aim to ensure we can improve how fast they can charge their insurance or patients, making sure the revenue part is properly managed as that is what we are ensuring they hit.

Our team is based on two engineers and one team lead.

For every client we successfully automate, it is a checkmark in our book to show that we have a huge skill set of bots and different things to accomplish.

Regarding the pricing, setup cost, and licensing of the Automation Anywhere platform, I have limited experience in answering as I do not represent the company in this aspect. From what I have heard from my team, the basic pricing seems to work for us.

For larger scaling pricing of other features, we need to bring in more clients and a larger volume to justify the potential cost of the license. Every automation license is specific for each hospital since we cannot share files or security due to HIPAA compliance requirements. Currently, we are able to bring in clients in the current price range, though it is becoming more challenging.

We are among the smaller scale clients for Automation Anywhere. The AI component is something we are still not utilizing much because it is difficult to justify the license cost to our clients. In the healthcare sector, there is hesitation to implement AI due to security concerns and a preference for manual processes during their initial step into automation.

A-People platform is particularly helpful for discussions and finding solutions to issues. The support team provides regular updates and maintains good communication even in uncertain scenarios. The platform has a growing repository of answered questions, similar to resources available for other programming languages.

We use OCR extensively, particularly for older websites and legacy systems where button identification is challenging. We have three active builds in production using only OCR, which demonstrates the robustness of the system.

On a scale of 1-10, I would rate Automation Anywhere 7.5 to 8. While I might rate it slightly lower as a developer who works with it daily, most of my team would likely rate it 8.5 to 9 because it effectively meets our needs and critical client requirements.

Public Cloud

Our primary functionality is built around screen scraping applications. We collect data from one application and either generate reports or use it to complete a user transaction or a customer transaction. For example, I have automation that handles bill pay. A request comes in, we verify it, and then we execute a bill payment transaction.

When we first started, the motivation was not wanting to be left behind in the latest and greatest opportunity for automating desktop applications that are boring and time-consuming but are still very important for the company's business operations.

We were able to see its benefits immediately during our proof of concept five years ago. We were able to take five users of daily work and reduce it to one user of support work. It was very significant.

Prior to implementation, these processes were done by the business units manually. Post implementation, the solutions are IT-based. As a result, IT now has additional responsibility for the business automation, just supporting the business function. It is one thing to build the software. It is another thing to maintain it and keep it running in production. There is a pretty significant lift or burden on the IT side that was not there during the manual executions.

I like the diversity. Every year, maybe even every six months, new modules are introduced to the program, and module enhancements are added to the toolbox to make automating various applications or situations easier. For example, the email module has been enhanced over the years to support all the latest authentication technologies. That is very important as we move away from username and password and embrace multi-factor authentication. Without the ability for these modules to stay in sync and up to date, we would not be able to use them. 

On the document automation side, the document learning features are not as robust as one would expect them to be. When I am doing document automation and a document fails due to low confidence in populating a field, it requires manual correction. Automation Anywhere states that if I correct enough documents, over time, the automation tools will learn where those error situations are and automatically fix them. We have not seen that feature work as advertised.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for roughly five years.

We have not had any issues. I am very impressed with its availability.

It scales quite well. I have not found an application that has exhausted the capacity of the system to execute. If we need to handle more transactions, we simply need to add additional bot runners. We currently have three bot runners in production. If we needed five or ten, I could have five or ten in a couple of days.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rank their technical support group a nine.

Positive

We have two other solutions in-house other than Automation Anywhere. They are very specific to the tasks they are handling.

It was pretty easy. I took a proof of concept that took nine months to build. Since I could not copy it from the proof of concept environment to our brand-new tenant or control room, we had to reprogram it. The reprogramming and testing took three months. Now, if you put all those numbers together, you probably could say it took us a year to build that first application.

It requires operation execution maintenance by my company and my IT group, but it does not take any Automation Anywhere resources to maintain it now. They maintain it at the cloud level and do a good job.

Two people were involved in the implementation.

The pricing is fair. My company is part of a big organization, so the pricing is very advantageous.

Five years ago, we evaluated four products, and Automation Anywhere emerged as the top choice. It offered the best cloud solution compared to the other vendors or providers. Now, if I took those same four vendors and evaluated them today, I might come up with a different answer. The industry has changed drastically just in the last three or four years, and if we did a reevaluation and could start over, chances are everyone, including Automation Anywhere, is on much better footing today than they were five years ago.

In terms of our AI approach, we are very cautious with AI. We are a Microsoft shop, so we are limiting our AI exposure to an Azure tenant-based AI resource. We are probably building our own LLMs to manage the intelligence or the exposure of intelligence to the AI engine. I do not see us ever using external AI modules.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Automation Anywhere a nine. 

I started in the other company with the manufacturing processes for logistics and finance. Now, I am implementing processes for finance and human resources. 

My challenge is to use Automation Anywhere for automatic manufacturing and services. I always push my finance team first, and they have to improve the financial processes before we use Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere is helping us improve processes, as it can handle specific improvements. As we can execute the same processes, it is now easy and fast. With the APA, we can improve more processes. As the processes are more automated and easier to use, it is faster to gain value. Automation Anywhere is helping me overcome these challenges.

Comparing Automation Anywhere with other tools for RPA, in my opinion, it is better because it is easier to use for both the final user and the developer. This gives us many benefits because we can automate the processes more easily. 

APA has helped me achieve my automation goals. It's helped us achieve some of our automation goals. It's made things a lot easier. We have integrated the APA and RPAs with SAP, with Salesforce, and with many data sources. 

I'm using the AI agent studio in the automation process.

I utilize document automation in my current processes. We introduced automation, and where we previously had to use many letters, we now use only documentation.

AI governance is very important in my company, and we are implementing it now. I discovered this company three years ago when I studied the RPA tools. AI governance and data governance are not currently implemented.

There is no need for improvement right now. The AI is very important, and they are starting to use AI. They could continue to develop it out. Innovation is very important.

I started to use Automation Anywhere five years ago when I was working in another company. 

The deployment depends on the processes being put in place. Normally, it is straightforward. 

I do not have the correct numbers to calculate ROI, however, overall, it has been very efficient. The time saved in document processing is good.

The pricing is a little bit high compared with other tools. Of course, some tools may be much cheaper, however, the offering isn't as robust.

For our internal policy, before implementing a new project or new tools, we have to evaluate technical skills and make a comparison with other tools. We did evaluate Automation Anywhere and UiPath. Between Automation Anywhere and UiPath, there are pros and cons. Automation Anywhere is easier to use for final users and developers.

I am utilizing the AI Agent Studio in my automation process. My impression of the AI governance features in maintaining compliance and data integrity in my company is that all the automatic processes are similar to processes made by humans. Only in specific cases do we have to use the compliance process with government; in most cases, enterprises would have to accomplish specific requirements. It is not usual in these kinds of processes to have compliance.  

I would rate Automation Anywhere a nine out of ten. If the price were a bit less maybe I would give it a ten.

On-premises

As a consultant, I have worked with various clients, including banks, insurance companies, healthcare providers, and different tech companies. Each company has distinct use cases. RPA tools are capable of automating any task. We usually automate processes that are repetitive. Automation is always rule-based.

Co-pilot certainly makes the job easier if the client has a subscription. It allows me to analyze desktop flows and activities and create flows using natural language. Natural language processing using LLMs has become an integral part of IT. This tool lets me create flows using natural language, repair automation errors, and answer product-related questions. It is there to assist us in creating automation tests, CI pipelines, etc.

There are many areas for improvement, especially in the developer environment. Providing a desktop version rather than focusing on the cloud is essential. Only UiPath offers a studio environment for desktop application development. Automation Anywhere lacks a desktop version and is solely web-based and cloud-based.

Automation Anywhere is not so easy for business users who are not technical. It is at the medium level. UiPath also provides UiPath StudioX to enable business users to automate easily.

I have used Automation Anywhere for four years. I have also used UiPath for four years.

The support is good. I have faced difficulties with every RPA tool. Automation Anywhere has a good support system but has room for improvement. UiPath has a huge online community for support. They have a lot of active users.

Neutral

The solution we use depends on the client and their budget. 

UiPath is exceptionally more expensive than Automation Anywhere. UiPath is far ahead of its competition, but in terms of finances, Automation Anywhere offers better value and is more effective for organizations seeking cost-effective solutions. Small clients tend to go for Power Automate or Automation Anywhere, whereas large clients go for UiPath.

RPA solutions like UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Power Automate, and Blue Prism can be learned through their academies. When I graduated, I did not know what RPA was. I joined as an intern and was told to go to the academies for these solutions and do the courses. They have developer fundamental and RPA fundamental courses. They also have advanced-level courses of 30 hours, which are free of cost. It took me about two months to learn these solutions. I might have had an edge because of my technical background. For a non-technical person who is willing to put in two or three hours every day into learning, three to four months would be good to take themselves to a level where they can start developing automation at a medium scale. Complex automations happen from experience when you are working with different types of clients. Generally, two to four months is a good period for someone to get a grasp of RPA.

The focus is shifting from RPA to IPA or Intelligent Process Automation. For example, I have done automation for a website task. Previously, when the website changed, such as when a button was shifted, the automation would fail. With Intelligent Process Automation, the bot is intelligent enough to realize the changes that have occurred. It understands what my flow is and what I am trying to achieve. It is then able to modify itself in such a manner that it still works. This is something that RPA has been transitioning toward.

Overall, I would rate Automation Anywhere a seven out of ten.

Public Cloud

Other

I primarily use it to automate repetitive data workflows.

The impact of Automation Anywhere on our organization has been significant. It has helped us save a considerable amount of time, approximately 30% to 40%, in repetitive processes and has improved automation accuracy. The finance team, in particular, has benefited, as their tasks are now automated from the data engineering side. I was able to integrate file transfers, validations, and data loading into pipelines, making the process more efficient.

Regarding the financial impact, my senior mentioned that it saves our organization around 40% to 50% in costs since it automates roughly half of the tasks, including data integration and file transfer.

Having completed the AI/ML engineering certification, I particularly appreciate Task Bots. They are extremely useful for handling repetitive tasks without errors. I also find IQ Bots valuable, as they can process unstructured documents—something that can be quite complicated—and automatically extract data. Additionally, the Control Room stands out for me, as it allows for centralized monitoring and management of all bots, which is crucial when multiple automations are running. These features are among the most beneficial I have encountered.

The platform is functioning quite well. Initially, I faced some challenges in learning the platform; it felt a bit complicated at first. However, as I became more familiar with it, I found it manageable. Debugging can be particularly tricky; identifying the exact reasons for bot failures can be time-consuming. Integration with modern data engineering stacks also posed some difficulties, but I have since learned to navigate these challenges.

I have been using Automation Anywhere as a data engineer intern for a year now.

As for stability, I would rate it a seven out of ten. Generally, the system is stable once the bots are tested and scheduled; they run consistently. We faced some challenges at the beginning, but they were manageable. Occasionally, updates or changes in the system environment can cause some disruptions, but these are not severe.

Scalability is one of its strengths because it can handle large volumes of data efficiently. As processes grow, it is easy to add more bots without incurring significant extra costs or effort. The cloud infrastructure for deployment works well in tandem with this capability.

I am working in a small organization with around 18 employees, all of whom are AI and machine learning engineers, including myself.

I would rate their support an eight out of ten. They are very helpful, but there is some room for improvement regarding quicker resolution times. They can take time to solve issues, but overall, the customer service is solid.

I have only used Automation Anywhere as automation software so far, so I cannot compare it to others at this time. However, if I get the chance to use another software in the future, I will definitely make a comparison.

The deployment process was quite straightforward and smooth since it is cloud-based. We deployed it on Microsoft Azure, starting small and gradually scaling up. 

The Control Room feature made it easy to manage multiple bots in one place, allowing for effective monitoring. In the beginning, it took about two to three weeks to implement because we encountered several issues and system failures. However, our team did a great job, and we managed to overcome these challenges.

I strongly recommend this software to others as it efficiently manages manual processes. All we need to do is monitor it and handle issues related to fault tolerance. Overall, it is quite effective for automation processes.

I would rate Automation Anywhere a nine out of ten. It handles our credential data securely and is user-friendly, though there is room for improvement in debugging and integration features.