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Blue Prism Cloud vs VisualCron comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 4, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
668
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (2nd), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (2nd), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
Blue Prism Cloud
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Agentic Automation (11th)
VisualCron
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
30th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Managed File Transfer (MFT) (21st), Workload Automation (25th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category, the mindshare of Automation Anywhere is 4.9%, down from 8.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Blue Prism Cloud is 1.9%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VisualCron is 1.2%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Automation Anywhere4.9%
Blue Prism Cloud1.9%
VisualCron1.2%
Other92.0%
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
 

Featured Reviews

Nadeem K. - PeerSpot reviewer
Rpa Developer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Automation has freed teams from repetitive finance and supply tasks and supports global operations
In the current organization, we had trouble initially because I think the documentation and support could be better than what it is now. This is one difference between Automation Anywhere and other RPA tools such as UiPath. In UiPath, if you have an issue, you go to the UiPath website and search for it, and you get lots of help materials. In Automation Anywhere, you do not get exactly what you are looking for. You get a very large number of results when you search for something, and from this large result set, you have to filter out what you need, or only partial information will be available. User handbooks are available for each product. In that regard, I would say Automation Anywhere is lagging compared to other RPA tools. It is difficult to get hold of their customer support team. I want to clarify that it is not a matter of us building logic on Automation Anywhere and it failing. When it is a product-related issue, they have to give us support because we only know how to develop within Automation Anywhere. We do not know how to fix Automation Anywhere itself. Whenever we have an issue, trying to get in touch with them always takes three to four business days.
AyanBanerjee - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud & AI Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Automation and AI integration enhance performance and user experience
The improvements or enhancements I would like to see in Blue Prism Cloud revolve around further developing server-client architecture, focusing on centralized control for remote agents. I believe more capabilities in that area could be beneficial. At the moment, I don't recall any specific features or functionalities missing from Blue Prism Cloud that come to mind. In terms of complexity, I find that Blue Prism Cloud is somewhat straightforward to use. Flexibility-wise, it engages well with Microsoft-based technologies. However, there are challenges with OCR capabilities that remain an issue. While there are readily available features that work well, the effectiveness does depend significantly on the type of use case I am implementing.
Sourav-Dutta - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead - Database Administrator at SMART ENERGY SYSTEMS LLC
It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process
We use VisualCron for all our automation needs, like connecting to FileZilla, calling APIs, generating PGP keys, creating encryption files with the PGP key login to Azure, etc. It can automatically log in to SQL Server and execute SQL script jobs in bulk. We had 2,000-3,000 users at my previous…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"After using AA for some of the flows, we identified that the execution time was reduced by 70% when compared to the other automation tool that we have been using for 8 years."
"Automation Anywhere is a decent competitor and gives a better solution."
"We are getting approximately two hundred percent return on investment from Automation Anywhere throughout our automation journey, including RPA and our current Agentic Process Automation implementation, which is definitely a very good ROI we are receiving from Automation Anywhere."
"Automation Anywhere has helped our organization to save human efforts on mundane tasks and shifted it to more analytical and interesting tasks."
"Scheduling helps to generate and send reports without any delay."
"We have automated our critical functions, like supply chain management and purchase orders, and we have staff who have been moved out of the mundane tasks and are now doing value-added activities."
"I like all of the product features, but I mostly like to work with IQ Bots because they have cognitive automation capabilities."
"From the customer's perspective, the biggest benefits are automation of the security and monitoring systems."
"Blue Prism is a server-based product that is a more mature and stable product compared to what we were using earlier."
"The most valuable feature is the customizability."
"Last year that Blue Prism introduced a community version, and have really opened up their services."
"If I look at the top four, I believe it is far more user-friendly than the other competition."
"This is a very stable solution and it does not require too much knowledge on programming because it has a bunch of native features that work consistently."
"The automation of the processes are very good; it's the most valuable feature of the solution and the product itself is quite mature."
"It automates our accounts payable process, requiring no human interaction and saving us a hundred percent of the time."
"The platform is user-friendly and easy to learn in a low-code environment."
"What I found most beneficial from VisualCron is that you can directly connect it with different databases, user accounts, and credentials. You can run queries from one machine to another using the credentials, unlike PowerShell, that's run by the machine itself. With VisualCron, you can directly ask other machines and run requests through user credentials. Suppose you have an AWS or Azure environment. In that case, you can maintain the connection between on-premises and cloud-based machines, which is the type of setup in the organization I'm working for. You can directly call some of the services via VisualCron on your local on-premises machine, and I found that an excellent feature of the tool."
"The ability to clone jobs to shorten the time it takes to implement a process has been invaluable, but its flexibility also gives us the ability to create a job that can handle a multifaceted process with a complex workflow."
"It helped us reduce manual steps."
"It has improved our organization with more automation within the business departments and less administration and development in the IT department. Usually, as the IT department, we are the bottleneck for many requirements within the business. With this tool, the business departments are able to perform many task themselves."
"Support is AAA+, fast, and very detailed."
"VisualCron makes everything clearer and easier to maintain."
"VisualCron is a handy tool that we (the IT department) provide for the business departments to obtain easy access when automating and scheduling."
"VisualCronv is currently handling so many different critical processes for our company, it's become a key factor in our livelihood and success."
 

Cons

"The OCR component should allow integration with 3rd party OCR. This way we can use the best of breed solution along with AA or allow better control over OCR packages to be customized."
"I would wish for a greater focus on citizen development, which is a priority for our company."
"Applications like Microsoft Power Automate do have zero-code systems. I've not done much research on Automtin Anywhere in comparison. However, if Automation Anywhere could also have something of that sort, that would be a game changer."
"Blue Prism is more secure than Automation Anywhere. E.g., Blue Prism has a system that is difficult to penetrate. You can't simply go into their system and make any changes."
"We had initial hiccups, like any new process. It took us six to eight months to sort the product out."
"Improvement areas will be there for everybody. I think one area which I would like to see improvement is in IQ Bot. Maybe it has improved a lot in version 11 X but I think that that's one area which definitely scope to improve."
"The scripting can be a bit difficult."
"The inclusion of word packages would help us to extract data from Word and automate word-related activities easily."
"Personally, I would recommend using something else for automation projects, but I'm not in a position to make that choice in my company."
"I personally would like the solution to be supporting more languages."
"The AI part is currently missing in Blue Prism Studio... It would be good if the AI part is included in Blue Prism Studio, which can make it much more efficient and good to work."
"I think that there are some improvements in the product performance that are needed in Blue Prism Cloud...The initial setup of the product needs a lot of time and effort."
"They should improve the user-friendliness and they should change their business model."
"I wouldn't call Blue Prism user-friendly. It's one of its downfalls."
"The main issue is screen scraping with Blue Prism gives us a big challenge because we need to define which technologies are web-based have been built instead of by itself discovering the technology that it is built on."
"We have limited integrations in place, and my objective is to integrate Sentinel. However, there are constraints as some individuals have only one or two options for SIM integration solutions. Given the urgency of quick resolutions in today's landscape, prevention and detection are crucial. While these measures provide significant security, it's equally important to focus on response and recovery. In the case of a ransomware attack, it's not enough to solely prevent and detect. Once detection is in place, a response model should be implemented to automate the process and minimize the time required for tasks, such as creating investigation reports. In the past, it would take approximately seven to eight days to create an investigation report for a specific attack, including writing a case study. This process can be streamlined and improved through the automation of contextual investigation reports. By saving base templates and content, including screenshots and attack details, automation can be achieved. We are currently working on integrating Microsoft WAF and Excel for this purpose, but having a built-in tool would be ideal."
"I've mentioned before that it would be great to see a move away from SQLCE and XML configuration files."
"An area for improvement in VisualCron is its cluttered interface."
"The only problem I face when I use the tool is that it doesn't contain much documentation or it doesn't have many video tutorials on its features."
"There are some conditions in the mail trigger, but you can only use them as an "AND" condition, not as an "OR" condition."
"There are some conditions in the mail trigger, but you can only use them as an "AND" condition, not as an "OR" condition. This is an improvement that could be useful. For example, some people put "invoice" in the subject and others put "invoice" in the body. If I want to make a trigger for everybody whose sending invoices, I have to make two jobs for this now."
"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."
"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."
"VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"One of the key features that we chose, the bot as a service or the BotFarm, when they launched version 11.3, they decided not to have the BotFarm anymore. This put us in a situation because we expected to have bots on demand, just like our cloud software. This would have been cost efficient for us to use. We hope to see this again being realized with A2019. I hope the scalability from an on demand basis improves."
"In terms of pricing, it's not at all cheap, and that's a concern. The licensing cost is very high. While I don't know the exact prices of other tools, Microsoft offers the lowest pricing for its RPA platform compared to UiPath and Automation Anywhere."
"The pricing is fair. My company is part of a big organization, so the pricing is very advantageous."
"It is subscription-based. They have different schemes. The price depends on how you negotiate with the local partner or local representative in your country."
"Whatever investment, licensing, and resource costs together are put in for development and delivery, we are still at an ROI of 250 percent."
"We're on a license package with Automation Anywhere (AA), paid yearly. What would be better is for them to have different packages for different types of organization."
"Initially, they charged a premium, but now the rest of the vendors have increased their overall pricing and Automation Anywhere is not that high at this time. It's pretty viable."
"We have seen about a 10 percent monetary savings."
"When compared with UiPath, I believe it will be difficult for Blue Prism to maintain its market share."
"The price is very competitive when you are comparing to other providers."
"The pricing is fine."
"I am not sure how we are set up today, but I recall we had an annual License."
"There are costs for the machine to run the robots."
"There are many RPA solutions available from different vendors and the pricing for Blue Prism is competitive."
"I would rate the pricing a five out of ten, with one being cheap and ten being expensive."
"Annual licensing costs were somewhere between $5,000 - $10,000 for the development tool. For the control tower, I think fees were about $50,000 annually."
"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
"ROI is 95 percent."
"We are fine with a rather cheap setup. Licensing with VisualCron is fair. You have a simple one-year licence in different sizes. There isn't a licensing jungle with hundreds of options and opt-ins."
"The price is a bit high."
"VisualCron is correctly priced because it wasn't very cheap, and it wasn't overly expensive, so the price for it was set correctly. When my previous company bought VisualCron, it was €800 per server per year. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing for VisualCron a five because it was just right. The tool was affordable, and it has one of the most competitive pricing in the market."
"ROI is one month."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
13%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business162
Midsize Enterprise86
Large Enterprise565
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise22
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

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 ver...
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 applic...
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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Blue Prism Cloud?
Concerning pricing, it's moderate now, but when it comes to the cloud, it is a bit expensive.
What needs improvement with Blue Prism Cloud?
The area for improvement in Blue Prism Cloud is the support component. Whenever I reach out to the Blue Prism communi...
What is your primary use case for Blue Prism Cloud?
My use case for Blue Prism Cloud is for automation.
Ask a question
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Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
Blue Prism Thoughtonomy Virtual Workforce, Blue Prism Virtual Workforce, Thoughtonomy Virtual Workforce
No data available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Cabot Credit Management, Hovis, Utilita
7 Eleven, ABB Sécheron SA, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Amazon Europe Core, Apple, Assa Abloy, Aston Martin, Banco Santander, BMW (Australia)
Find out what your peers are saying about Blue Prism Cloud vs. VisualCron and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,939 professionals have used our research since 2012.