UiPath Platform Reviews

As a partner, we see many use cases. Our clients are really looking to UiPath or RPA as a means of digital transformation. Some of the areas we see them use it are in finance, supply chain, human resources, IT automation, and tax functions.

The way we tell our clients to look at UiPath is that everywhere they have repetitive functions happening, they should explore RPA as an opportunity.

We see the real value coming out of UiPath in the ability to transform our clients' businesses: Produce rapid time to value and a very good return on their investment as well. That's the real value UiPath provides to our customers.

It is transforming our clients' cost structures but, at the same time, it improves their time to market. It helps them to improve their employee morale, make sure that employees stay longer, and it helps them improve their customer experience.

We see that the speed of business functions has improved by as much as about 70 to 80 percent. A particular process that, at times, would take about ten minutes to execute, has gone down to just two or two-and-a-half minutes. I would give performance benefits full marks with UiPath.

The way we look at it is that features are a commodity. We prefer to look at the value it provides.

Having said that, it is very easy to use. We have seen new developers becoming productive in a matter of weeks, not months. The entire solution is structured in such a nice way that clients can start seeing benefits in six to eight weeks.

One of the things that many of our clients ask us about is security. Some of them are really struggling with how to do multi-factor authentication. A robust and solid approach for dealing with multi-factor authentication would be one of the things we would like to see.

Also, some of the IAM tools have features that have somewhat segregated duties. For our clients, this is a big challenge in terms of how they do SoD. If there were some features related to SoD that were added to the tool, that would be really great.

It is fairly stable. We have not seen any major issues in terms of stability.

The scalability has been good.

We have not used technical support.

The setup is relatively straightforward. It is easy for our clients' security groups, their IT departments, their compliance departments, to understand. They know the key steps that need to be taken. From that perspective, it is relatively easy.

Many of our clients have used UiPath RPA Academy training and have found it very helpful.

In addition to UiPath, the top options are Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. In addition to that, we have seen some interest in exploring solutions from Pega and Kofax.

One of the reasons our clients select UiPath is that it now has a very well-established customer base. Those success stories help UiPath. A second factor is the ease of use. Our clients find it is easier to train their developers and access the necessary workforce. Thirdly, the licensing model is where clients see that it is among the best-of-breed.

Focus on your objectives. Don't consider UiPath or RPA as just a shiny technology. You need to know what is it that you want. What are your business objectives? That is the first thing you need to determine. Second, you need to set very realistic goals regarding what you want to accomplish. Thirdly, don't wait for a long period of time. Get started. You need to get into finding success as soon as possible. Find the low-hanging fruits, create a few bots, demonstrate the value for people, and then look at scaling up.

The pitfall I see with many of our clients is that they want to think big, do automation for 50 processes at once. But they get a lot of organizational resistance. The key here is to start small, show success, and build on top of those successes.

Almost all companies recognize that there is a need to invest in automation, both RPA-type automation and cognitive automation. When we work with them we try to understand what their strategic objective is. Is it about improving time to market? Is it about improving efficiency? Is it about improving customer experience? Or is it about improving the cost structure? In some cases, it is a combination of all of these. Determining that is usually our starting point. Then we can deep-dive into what the process areas are where we can get the maximum benefit.

All the companies we deal with are focused on improving their cost structure, so cost-saving is the most important criteria that our clients articulate. But in many cases, clients talk about improving the efficiency of their workforce or being able to respond to their customers' needs.

From there, we do an opportunity assessment, identify some of the key, low-hanging fruit where they can benefit. We prepare a value case which could be anything, depending on the client. It could be related to cost savings, it could be related to time to market, etc. Then, as we implement, we set up a value-realization office to track the benefits very closely.

Despite all the new hype happening around upcoming RPA and automation tools, what we have seen is that clients usually do not have the internal workforce that is trained and that really knows the best practices that are involved. That is where they look to partners, like us, to bring in their skills. When we start working with the clients, we start in a 70/30 model where 70 percent of the team comes from Accenture and 30 percent of the team comes from our clients.

To begin with, when our clients start a proof of concept, on average the team size is usually about six to seven people, including the IT support functions that are involved.

I rate UiPath a ten out of ten because of multiple factors: ease of development, ease of maintenance, robust security, and a very good installed client base. These are the factors that actually lead to a perfect score.

I work in the healthcare domain. We've automated a lot of financial and invoice-types of business processes, bringing in efficiencies in terms of saving time spent by field representatives in processing requests.

The time saved is anywhere between 10 to 15 minutes, on average, because a human would have at least that long, and up to 20 minutes, to do these tasks, while a bot takes just 4.3 seconds, which is huge efficiency.

Also, the time to market is very quick compared to other applications out there. RPA is very quick. My team has produced bots in as little as two days, from discovery to development and go-live.

Performance benefits rate a nine out of ten, because of a Citrix automation fragility concern. Otherwise, I would have given a ten out of ten.

It's easy to use and it's easy to host.

The most valuable features are the ease of use and the UI. It's much better compared to all the competitor applications out there. I've literally used all the applications that are in the market, and UiPath has been, by far, the best.

Another prime factor is that it scales up horizontally and is on the cloud, on AWS cloud. That's where we host our processes and our services. That connectivity feature, the availability, is a primary winning element.

The Citrix automation - the way that it's fragile right now - if that could be made stronger and more stable, that would be icing on the cake for UiPath.

When it comes to stability, it all depends upon what kind of touchpoints it has with third-party applications. Citrix automation is always a little bit fragile compared to non-Citrix automations, especially with UiPath. But I'm sure the 2018.3 version, which is going to come out, is going to fix that. I'm hoping that it fixes the issue.

Scalability is tremendous. My organization has been pretty happy with the amount of scalability that it has provided. One bot can literally run multiple processes, and process millions of records.

I feel customer support can be improved a little bit. I raise service requests day in and day out with UiPath. Compared to the competitors, support is very good. Still, the average SLA is around three to four days, which I think can be reduced to one to two business days. It would be very good if UiPath Support could do that.

I was involved in the initial setup: discovery, setup, and development stabilization, end-to-end. It is straightforward. It's a no-nonsense, plug-and-play type of application where you don't have to code something for it to start up and work. It's already available there. All you have to do is build flows in Visio or BPMN flows, as they can be directly consumed by UiPath. And then the solution is working.

It costs much less and it does much more than the competitors' solutions.

The only solution that is close to UiPath is Automation Anywhere.

There are three points that I always have my clients identify to determine if this is a good approach for them:

1. Does your process have a lot of manual steps involved?
2. Are they repetitive in nature?
3. Are they rules-based?

If these three are checked off as "yes," then they qualify for RPA. It's as simple as that.

Regarding UiPath RPA Academy training, I myself am certified by UiPath at all levels of certification which are offered by the LMS system. All my workforce is certified by UiPath as well. It's very intuitive and very easy to follow through and complete the courses, compared to the competitors.

In terms of staff required for development and maintenance with UiPath, for a small to medium-scale bot, we have around two developers working at any given point in time. Developers, here, also play the role of testers because it's an Agile implementation and a single person wears multiple hats. So there is one business analyst, there are two developers, and that's pretty much the team. We are very lean.

The important criteria when selecting an RPA vendor are the scalability, stability, and hosting and licensing costs. Hosting and licensing costs come at the end of the list because people are more concerned about whether the solution works or not. They always want to see a proof of concept and see that it's working. Then they get that sense of trust.

I've been using RPA for almost five years now, pretty much from the time where North America did not know what RPA was. UiPath has stood out and exceeded expectations, always. It's the best. Hands-down, go with UiPath. Don't even think about others.

We use it in our robotics lab to deliver front and back office solutions for the clients. We're a BPO CRM organization, so there is a huge amount of opportunity, not just internally as an organization, but for our clients as well. We use UiPath as a delivery method to find reductions in costs and the like, year on year.

I would rate the performance benefits a very strong eight out of ten. You have to make sure that you pick the right processes that you're looking to automate.

For me, the biggest feature is that my developers love it. And if my developers are happy, then I'm happy. We're totally agnostic and we use multiple providers. But the developers definitely absolutely adore the product.

The speed that in which it can be deployed is something I really like as well because that cuts down on delivery times. I also like the ease of use.

I like the fact that we can program our own .NET to plug into it and there are APIs for multiple different solutions, and the convenience of artificial intelligence and machine-learning and those types of capabilities as well.

The new release broke everything, so I'd like to see that not happen next time. All of our automations broke. It happened to one of our centers of excellence. They just upgraded, pressed next, next, next, and probably didn't really go for the due diligence that we put in place, which is to do a controlled release.

I'd also like to see more machine-learning functionality. I'm really excited to see what's actually on the agenda. There's some really strong stuff about machine-learning being adopted. Unstructured data, robotics being able to read unstructured data, is really one of the strong cases for us. That's likely where we'll be going.

It's phenomenal. The stability is really good but some of the releases have been a little shaky.

To scale it is very easy. But you need to know how to scale robotics, it's not just deploying one on a PC somewhere. We do it on VMs in a data center which is fully monitored by a help desk. We know how to scale bots. It is very easy to scale, if you know what you're doing.

Support has been very good. One thing that the developers are always talking about is the social networking side of it, whereby the blogs and things like that are ongoing. They really like that, that we can actually find a lot of problems already solved within the community and take solutions from there. And the ticketing system is very quick as well.

We've been involved in RPA since early 2014. In 2014 we were using one provider and then we moved into another provider as well. But then we started to look at UiPath and the way it was performing in our proofs of concept. We felt that with those three providers, and our bespoke solutions as well, we were able to pretty much handle any project that came at us, depending on the infrastructure type, and the applications that are interacted with.

When selecting an RPA vendor, our criteria include ease of use, adoption, skillsets in the country, and the relationship with the vendor. I won't name them, but I have challenges with certain providers out there and the way they actually manage relationships. If I were to look again, relationship would be a very strong indicator. And that was one of the things that attracted us to UiPath in the first place, that relationship, that ease. They are very involved in listening to us.

Two things that attracted me to UiPath when we were doing the evaluation were: First, we'd done a proof of concept and we could not understand - I have some very smart architects and they could not understand - how fast UiPath was performing the tasks. The other factor was the interaction with the client side, the relationship side, with UiPath. Considering some of the challenges I've had with other providers, I think this is a refreshing approach. I'm just hoping that UiPath doesn't outgrow itself and leave that phenomenal customer service behind.

We see ROI all the time. We also see performance benefits all the time. We haven't delivered a project where we haven't seen a return on investment using UiPath. The return on investment is normally six to nine months, maybe a little bit less. But we've never not actually been able to achieve a return on investment.

Sometimes it's actually about setting the expectations as well, regarding what you're trying to do. Sometimes it's not about headcount reduction, it's about quality. It can be about looking at what the customer is actually really wanting, and then being able to deliver on what the customer requires for it be a success.

There are some outliers out there, but there is normally a very strong return on investment.

Look at what it is you're trying to achieve. Do due diligence on the assistance that you're going to interact with, the infrastructure that you're going to be managing, and then actually go out and have a look at a few providers. One of the really strong things about UiPath is that they provide evaluation licenses. There's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't try it before you actually start doing it in anger.

We have solution architects, senior developers, developers, business analysts, consultants, help desk, help desk supervisors, infrastructure, and a data center involved. For maintaining and developing UiPath there are 15 people who report directly to me, but the entire support structure is probably closer to 35 people, maybe a little bit more.

In terms of Academy training, we've done the basic and we've done the advanced training as well. The basic training is phenomenal. I think it's groundbreaking. The online university, in my opinion, is revolutionary in this area, when you look at some of the offerings that other providers have.

The advanced training was a little bit of a let down for us. We just didn't get out of it what we were expecting to get out of it. It just didn't achieve what we thought it would, especially for the price. Our expectations were that we would actually be able to sit all our developers in a room and do a process that we had already done, re-engineer it, and make it better. And that never materialized. It was just a little bit of a letdown. But the university piece is absolutely phenomenal.

Overall, UiPath is a very strong nine out of ten. I'm one of these people who doesn't ever leave a five-star review, there's always room to improve. Still, the nine is a very strong nine. This has become our weapon of choice. That speaks volumes.

We are using UiPath to automate our cache application and to download documents to help our finance team.

We're saving a lot of time for all our associates in our company. As far as metrics go, each project that we complete is saving us on the order of 40 hours a month, so it's saving a lot of time.

It also allows our associates to do things that are more interesting, instead of having so much repetition in their jobs.

In addition, we've seen performance benefits because it removes the human error portion of running a process. It makes it easier for the owners of the process because they don't have to worry if they've made a mistake. They also don't have to look something up because the RPA would have everything for them, ready to go. Performance has improved a lot, as well.

I like that it's very flexible, so we can design our automation the way we need to. Some other RPA tools don't really allow us to use all the applications that for our team.

It's also very easy to use. There is a lot of drag-and-drop. There are many different ways to complete a solution. For example, if we're trying to manipulate Excel data, sometimes one solution will be really slow and ineffective, but UiPath gives us the ability to find multiple ways to do the same thing and complete the same solution much more quickly.

There are a lot of solutions in UiPath where we have to know some programming languages. I'd like to cut some of that out, with features that perform those tasks without having to know programming languages. I work a lot with my team members who don't really know programming that well, and I have to walk them through how to do different coding things to effectively develop their RPA.

It can be complicated to get a stable solution, but once you're over that learning curve, it's very easy. At first, it's complicated to figure out how to get a stable solution using UiPath.

We're constantly having to use our solutions on multiple servers and expand to multiple teams, so we need to work a lot with IT. They support the servers and make sure the servers are a mirror of each other. If they're not a mirror, then it can be difficult using UiPath. But once they're a mirror, it's very simple to finish a solution and move it onto a different server or to a different machine, where someone else is using UiPath.

From my experience, technical support is very fast in responding. I will submit a ticket and, by the next day, they're already working the ticket and helping to find a solution, so it's been a very good experience.

We were using another tool before UiPath. The one we were using was Kofax Kapow and it uses a different style. It was very restrictive and they had to update a lot of features for us. There was a large learning curve, as well. When we started using UiPath, I felt the learning curve was smaller and we could get into it a lot easier. It was less restrictive and more versatile in what we could do with it.

When we first started learning UiPath, they gave me the project to install Orchestrator and Studio into our server environments, so that was another learning curve for me because initially, the installation of UiPath was very difficult to figure out. But they've upgraded it since then and it's much easier now. We've now sent that function to our IT teams to do.

I believe Blue Prism was also under consideration, but I was not part of that decision.

Use the forums and surround yourself with people who are technical. Use UiPath Support a lot because, if you don't have a programming background, it can be difficult to figure out how to organize your development in a stable way. If it's not stable, it's going to give you a lot of headaches trying to constantly maintain it.

For UiPath, we have about three different teams of developers in my department. Each team supports a different group in that department and each team consists of about three developers. In terms of maintenance, we're maintaining our jobs. Once we deploy a solution, we're currently maintaining it ourselves. Whoever develops the project makes sure that it's working, but we're also looking at other solutions for maintenance where we would give it to another team. All they would do is make sure the robots are running.

We've used UiPath RPA Academy training and it's a very good tool to figure out how well you know UiPath. I wouldn't use it as something to learn the tool, because there is a lot more in UiPath than is in Academy. But I like Academy because it confirms what I've learned is the way it's supposed to work. It gives you a good basic foundation.

I would rate UiPath as a ten out of ten. I think it's the best RPA tool out there, although I have not used the other one that people talk about, which is Blue Prism. From what I can tell, they're about equal, but my experience is with UiPath and I like it a lot.

I used UiPath for the energy sector and HR, but they were almost industrial processes. The bots were performing and doing transactions all the time.

The use cases were mostly about the extractions from several websites to manipulate data and to put data into other websites to update. We also had campaigns, and we needed to trigger and send lots of emails.

Our clients could automate manual tasks that were boring. They also implemented a chatbot using UiPath where whenever people called, they just entered the application, and UiPath could retrieve information about the person without them having to go to System A, System B, and System C.

UiPath enabled us to implement end-to-end automation. I went to a system, took the information, and went to a website to submit the information and take out the output. That was end-to-end automation.

It speeds up digital transformation.

UiPath reduces human error, but it also depends on the use cases. It has had a positive effect on our clients' businesses. 

Employee time has been reduced because bots can work faster than humans. It saved a lot of time for our clients, but I do not have the metrics.

UiPath, depending on the use case and the company's infrastructure, can save a lot of money. It saved a client's company half a million or a million. It is worth the money.

The best feature of UiPath is that it is easy to use. UiPath Orchestrator is also easy to use. 

Data scraping is very powerful in UiPath. It is very versatile.

I have not explored all the UiPath functionalities. I am exploring it a little bit more now, but they are moving to the modern experience, which is something I do not like. They are going in the wrong direction. I like the classic experience for developing, and as a developer, I am used to it, but they are going to the modern experience with selectors and other things. It might have certain advantages, but I do not like it. They should maintain the classic activities. They can consider providing both options instead of taking the classic ones away.

I have been using UiPath for almost three years.

I have always worked with UiPath for industrial processes. For instance, it was used for a company that was always processing contracts. They submitted new contracts and ended lots of them at the same time. We did not use it for filling forms or small automations. 

I have not contacted their support. I have used the UiPath Community. It is very easy to use. There are lots of people asking questions and lots of people answering them. I usually go there to consult other people. Their community is very valuable.

UiPath was the first RPA tool that I used. Before UiPath, I had only worked with BPM and BPMN solutions such as Appian and Bizagi. I switched to UiPath because my company chose it. We had a client who wanted to implement UiPath.

I have seen it deployed on-premises and also on the cloud. I do not know about the deployment of the UiPath infrastructure. I only know how to allocate licenses or install the UiPath license on a computer, which is not hard. It is easy.

It is worth the money if you have enough automation and enough use cases. That is applicable to every automation platform. As long as you have the use cases and you can automate them through that application, it will be worth the money.

It is expensive, and it is now getting more expensive. They are the number one in the market, and they are taking advantage of that. It is hard for the companies that have the full infrastructure supported on UiPath to change it. They have to keep it. UiPath is taking advantage of it.

Its cost depends on the company and the contract.

I used UiPath in my previous organization. I recently changed my organization, and I am now comparing RPA tools.

I would recommend UiPath to others if they have use cases for it.

I am certified in UiPath. I have used UiPath Academy courses. They are useful when you start developing. I have also attended their seminars.

I have not used UiPath's AI functionality in the automation programs. We started to use it, but then I changed the company.

Overall, I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten. I cannot compare it to others because I never used any other solution, but I find UiPath to be simple and easy to use.