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Appian vs Automation Anywhere comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.3
Appian enhances ROI for companies by improving efficiency, reducing costs, and achieving break-even within the first year.
Sentiment score
7.3
Automation Anywhere enhances efficiency, reduces costs, boosts productivity, and delivers substantial ROI, offering significant economic benefits to companies.
They see return on investment in terms of cost savings, time savings, more efficient processes, and more efficient employees.
Appian is very efficient, allowing us to build a lot of applications within a financial year, making it cost-effective.
In terms of cost, we participated in projects achieving two to three million dollars in annual savings.
As a return on investment, we have achieved a 250% ROI in six to nine months, and sometimes it increases up to 380% percent.
Automation Anywhere has helped us save money.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.5
Appian's customer service is excellent but faces capacity challenges; proactive support is valuable despite complex issue delays and high costs.
Sentiment score
7.1
Automation Anywhere's support is praised for responsiveness and helpfulness, despite occasional challenges with response time and documentation.
Their customer service is responsive, and the team is very prompt for support.
The technical support for Appian rates as 10 out of 10 because they have a great support team.
The technical support is generally good.
Whenever we need help, we can reach out to them, and they help us out.
We also have dedicated account managers and technical experts to solve our problems related to Automation Anywhere.
We just have to raise a ticket, after which we receive a call, email, or ping from the Automation Anywhere team.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
Appian is scalable and flexible, but may encounter performance issues with complex processes and large data volumes.
Sentiment score
7.5
Automation Anywhere is praised for scalable architecture and cloud capabilities, effectively managing complex workflows with some cost concerns.
On a scale of one to 10, Appian rates as a nine for scalability.
Initially, without much coding, I can easily handle five thousand records.
Appian is scalable, but it depends on how you build your applications.
As we are using Microsoft Copilot for our AI agents, I look forward to integrating it with Automation Anywhere and its solutions, seeing it as a beneficial partnership as Automation progresses toward AI as the main solution.
For Windows-based applications, it provides UI interface automation, which enhances its scalability.
Automation Anywhere is highly scalable for both horizontal and vertical expansions.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Appian is praised for stability and reliability, with high uptime, seamless updates, and occasional minor database issues.
Sentiment score
7.1
Opinions on Automation Anywhere's stability are mixed, citing robust performance but also highlighting challenges with updates, infrastructure, and deployment.
It depends on how it has been designed and how it has been configured.
The stability of Appian would rate as nine, as it's a stable environment.
With the latest applications, there are no significant issues like freezing or crashing.
The platform runs smoothly, and the deployment process is user-friendly in both UAT and production environments.
It usually does not lag or crash.
 

Room For Improvement

Appian needs improvements in flexibility, integration, scalability, team collaboration, mobile features, documentation, licensing, and handling complex processes.
Automation Anywhere users seek enhanced cost-effectiveness, better integrations, improved stability, robust support, and user-friendly interfaces for optimal functionality.
It has room to improve for use cases where the users are public facing, where anonymous users could come to a site and run a business workflow or interact with some data.
If there is a very complex process that includes a lot of data transitioning and memory-centric processes, it consumes a lot of memory.
I would like to see more enhancement in the user interface to allow more freedom in designing the sites and pages.
It is better to write a Python script instead of using Automation Anywhere's package when dealing with Excel because it is buggy and tends to break.
Making the product more lightweight by reducing its dependency on infrastructure could greatly help in the long run.
It would be beneficial if the platform provided options for power developers to integrate seamlessly with languages like Java or C#, allowing them to write their own scripts and code.
 

Setup Cost

Appian offers flexible pricing with cloud and on-premise options, but costs can rise with usage and require negotiation.
Automation Anywhere offers flexible pricing options but remains costly, appealing mainly to large enterprises over smaller businesses.
On the pricier side, both Appian and Pega are enterprise-level solutions, placing them on the slightly higher side.
The pricing of Appian is based on the number of users and generally ranges from 70 to 100 USD per user per month.
The price of Appian, on a competitive landscape, is a little bit on the higher side for companies, rating maybe a 6.5.
It is more cost-efficient compared to all other RPA platforms.
Automation Anywhere costs are aligned with UiPath and Blue Prism, which are also expensive.
It is not cheap, with costs ranging between 700 to 800 dollars per month.
 

Valuable Features

Appian provides low-code development, easy integration, scalability, and strong AI-enhanced features with a user-friendly interface and robust support.
Automation Anywhere offers user-friendly automation with cognitive tools, seamless integration, and scalability for efficient task management and productivity.
The zero-code integration feature is remarkable, allowing for ease of data transfer and workflow enhancement.
Appian is aiding in leveraging AI technologies in multiple ways: one way is for developers, as they make development efficient and quick by enabling developer co-pilots across various phases of the application, which helps design Appian quickly and provides suggestions along the way.
It is easy for me to define the process and create configurable workflows.
I can set it up to provide users with a form to fill in all required information, and then the bot operates based on those specifications.
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.
Automation Anywhere has undergone drastic changes over the past five years, transitioning from version 10 to A360, including desktop-based and cloud-based options.
 

Categories and Ranking

Appian
Ranking in Business Process Management (BPM)
11th
Ranking in Process Mining
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (8th), Rapid Application Development Software (9th), Low-Code Development Platforms (6th)
Automation Anywhere
Ranking in Business Process Management (BPM)
3rd
Ranking in Process Mining
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
573
Ranking in other categories
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (3rd), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (3rd), Agentic Automation (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Business Process Management (BPM) category, the mindshare of Appian is 6.0%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Automation Anywhere is 0.1%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Process Management (BPM)
 

Featured Reviews

RAVIRANJAN - PeerSpot reviewer
Low-code with good reliability and good workflows
We have a partnership with Appian. We have worked with Appian to deal with issues. They have already incorporated many things into their platform. One of the things we have discussed, which I can highlight, is related to Excel manipulations. They have incorporated their Excel manipulations so it's far better than the earlier version. Earlier, we had to go with a plugin for even a simple Excel or spreadsheet calculation. Now, they have included all those things in their own out-of-the-box functionality. It's definitely a tool and does not require high code language. There could be a scope of enhancement for capturing the variety of use cases. One thing, for example, is Excel manipulation, which they now provide in their out of box functionality, however, that can still be improved.
Vatsal Mehta - PeerSpot reviewer
Accommodates diverse use cases and effectively meets customer requirements
AI agents need further improvements. AI agent technology in agentic process automation is still evolving. We have only scratched the surface, and there are many potential use cases yet to be explored. As technology advances, I believe it will enable us to implement more comprehensive automation solutions. Document Automation has issues related to speed. When I compare Document Automation with IQ Bot, IQ Bot is faster than Document Automation. My understanding is that they are still evolving Document Automation, and this issue of slowness will be resolved in the upcoming .35 version, so we are good with that. They are working on signature identification and validations for handwritten documents. Currently, we are able to extract data out of scanned but digital images, but there is still scope for improvement for handwritten documents.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
27%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which do you prefer - Appian or Camunda Platform?
Appian is fast when building simple to medium solutions. This solution offers simple drag-and-drop functionality with easy plug-and-play options. The initial setup was seamless and very easy to imp...
Is Appian a suitable solution for beginners who have no additional preparation?
Appian is actually pretty big on educating its users, including with courses that reward you with certifications. There is a whole section on their company’s website where you can check out the edu...
Is it easy to set up Appian or did you have to resort to professional help?
We had some issues when we were setting up Appian. It was quite surprising, since this is a low-code tool which, in its essence, means it is meant for business users and inexperienced beginners. So...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is very good in certain situations but lacks in others. For me, it's more the team tha...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applications that AA has limitations for, such as the Oracle. For web-based applicatio...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Appian BPM, Appian AnyWhere, Appian Enterprise BPMS
Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Hansard Global plc, Punch Taverns, Pirelli, Crawford & Company, EDP Renewables, Queensland Government Department of State Development, Infrastructure and Planning (, Bank of Tennessee
Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Find out what your peers are saying about Appian vs. Automation Anywhere and other solutions. Updated: May 2025.
851,491 professionals have used our research since 2012.