UiPath Platform Reviews

We started out with a lot of unattended use cases and then moved into using attended bots to help users. I've been with two separate companies. One was a financial services company. However, there was a lot of support for external clients. In the company now, we're doing a lot around the back office, HR, finance, and supply chain. UiPath just runs the gamut of all different kinds of use cases.

It's definitely made it easy to build automation. We have a team of about four or five developers. One of them was straight out of school, and they had never really had professional experience. We've also taken a couple of developers that were more into custom code and converted those over to using UiPath. It's interesting to see the level of excitement when you use a tool like UiPath from someone who is straight out of school and can convert over. 

We enjoy the constant innovation. It's coming out with new things that we can use and new features all the time. RPA has been around for a while now; however, the fact that we're adding integration services, adding apps, and all these other features, makes it possible to expand our use case.

We use UiPath to automate processes that deal with a good environmental cause. For example, for the company, however, we get invoices for bulk fuel. Our company sends out a lot of trucks, and a lot of customer engineers to actually service equipment. All this was manual, and a lot of not knowing how much we were paying. We automated that, and then the next step of that process is, "Okay. Can we start figuring out exactly how much money we spend on fuel, now, let's try to figure out ways to lessen that?" I could see how that could be environmentally friendly as we're trying to reduce consumption.

The user community is interesting. I've met a couple of people here and had really good conversations. It's interesting in the virtual world that we live in now, where everybody's just a face on a screen.

We've used UiPath's Academy. Being a solution architect, I'm not hands-on with code every day. I got certified as an RPA associate so that I could better understand what the developers are working on and using. When I'm designing solutions, I have a better knowledge of what's possible. I've taken a lot of the courses on UiPath Academy.

We're actually looking into a document to understand the use case. It's essentially car titles, and we're struggling. We've used several different OCR engines to try to train the model and try to improve it. For us, a little more direction on how to actually achieve this would be useful. We've been struggling for a couple of months now trying to get it working and getting it to the level we need it.

I've been using the solution for five or six years. 

The stability is great. I compare it to what I would think the best in class is. It's like Microsoft releasing patches. I've had fewer issues with UiPath updates than I do with my Office client on my computer. Therefore, it's very stable. 

We've had it where we had an update, and it did break some of our robots, and we had to go and do some troubleshooting, yet that's only been one time. It's pretty good overall. 

It remains scalable for us. We're not a huge shop yet as far as the number of bots, so it remains to be seen. It will be interesting when we try to reorganize our Orchestrator to make it more scalable. I can't really answer that one yet, as we haven't really tried to scale a lot.

Technical support is great. It's easy to reach out to them. It's easy to get feedback. As with any organization, a lot of times, the first answer is, "Go read the FAQ." I usually respond, "Well, I've already read the FAQ. That's why I'm asking." This is normal. Once you get past that, they're really ready to jump in and help.

Positive

I started out in 2016 looking at what was the best solution for the company. We looked at several of the top options. They're still the top ones today if you look at Gartner, Forrester, and publications like that. I used some of them. I've used Power Platform and other low-code tools like Pega and Appian. There are a lot of different tools in this space, and they all bleed into each other. 

I've been with two companies that focus on UiPath. It's just the constant way they try to keep up and keep innovating has made them a bit different than other options.

I was not involved in the initial deployment of the platform. I came in about a year ago. Since then, we've done things like automating month-end close processes, automating a lot of manual processes from moving from an old legacy HR system to Workday, and integrating with Workday. There have also been several other different smaller use cases like that. That said, for the implementation of the main platform, I wasn't here for that part.

The deployment of automation depends on how it's built and how you structure your UiPath Orchestrator, which has changed a lot in the last one or two years. They've got this concept of modern folders now in UiPath.

It's taken a lot of effort to transform what we did previously into what we're trying to do today. We very much had one tenant for one automation or a group of automation. Now, we're trying to do more. We ended up with a lot of tenants. Now, we're trying to consolidate into fewer tenants with these modern folders and trying to understand how that all works.

We have definitely seen an ROI. The team has talked about a million hours returned back to the business for other activities. It took a few years to get there, however, now it's every year. 

The pricing changes every day, however, it's not unlike any other SaaS platform. Sometimes it's hard to understand. That said, I'm more on the technical side. Some of the big questions are unattended versus attended since there's a lot more cost to unattended. When we get into document understanding, it's the number of OCR models, and the models you use that increases cost.

I looked into the other two big ones in this space. One of them, and this was in 2016 or 2017, didn't have a concept of attended automation. They thought it should all be unattended and no one should touch it. It should just run. That was really a barrier for us since one of the big value propositions is just automating those small tasks that people do to free up more time. Attended automation eliminated them.

One of the other ones we looked at couldn't support us. It was a proof of value, proof of concept type exercise, and they couldn't give us the support we needed to execute it. It was pretty easy to disqualify them when they couldn't go through that pre-sales motion to really get us. Why would we want to sign a contract? Why would we want to move forward? 

Potential new users should focus on the business driver or the business use case and find the best tool. UiPath lives in this space of RPA, low-code, AI/ML. There will probably always be three or four of these tools to choose from at any enterprise or sizable company. How do you pick the right one? It's really about what the business is trying to do.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Support is good, reliability is good, and innovation is great. There are just some things they could get better on to catch up with some of the other players in surrounding technologies. UiPath started as RPA. Other companies started as integration platforms. I know we're getting into connectors and things like that. It just keeps moving in that direction.

We use it for admissions policy and also for other financial items such as 1099 reporting from the IRS and things of that nature. There are some manual refreshes of systems and Excel documents that we have automated.

It is currently deployed on-prem, but we are looking at the cloud option. We are using version 2019, which is probably one of the oldest ones. It's pretty old. We're looking from a perspective of whether we upgrade it before we move to the cloud or whether we move to the cloud and upgrade.

We have seen quite a bit of benefit. We used to hire temp staff labor in order to do our admission policy, and now, we don't have to hire them. That would be five part-time people that would come in seasonally. For three or four months, we would have five people just cranking away the admission work. We don't need that anymore because of automation.

There have been time and financial savings. On the other side of the house, some of them are attended bots. We've saved the organization about 140,000 clicks. People don't have to click 140,000 times anymore. As a small estimate, we saved the organization about 250 hours last year. If everything goes to plan, this year, we're looking to save about 450 hours from the financial side of the house. We're only scratching the surface of it, and there is always room to grow.

We're still working through it. We recently stood up our system developer space. We have about 16 processes. We're still new at it and still in the beginning phases. We're really looking forward to pushing that envelope. Currently, we have a hybrid of attended and unattended automations. It's about an even split.

The GUI is valuable, and it's extremely stable. I've had six or seven Studios open at the same time working on different things and nothing has crashed on it. It's very stable software.

I love the community. The community is awesome. That has been very helpful. It provides value in terms of just being able to bounce ideas and understand. Sometimes, I try to do one thing, and I just want to know how to do one thing, but that's where the community can help broaden and look at it from a different perspective.

They say that everybody can do it, but not everybody can do it. You need to have some form of technological understanding about it, and just because we can automate something doesn't mean we should automate something. That's where I think there's a marketing thing. I understand where they're going with it, but it's not necessarily how real life is in my perspective.

I am not looking for any additional features. I haven't even used all the features. I'm still learning the platform as it stands and figuring out what's still available. 

I have been using it since 2019.

From a system perspective, it's stable on my end. It just works. That's the best part about it. It just works.

Scalability gets a little bit sticky. That could be just because of where we sit in the organization, I don't manage that relationship of licenses. I only get so many licenses and I'm like, "Well, can I get more?" It's definitely a limiting factor, but I don't know if it's us limiting it from a cost perspective. 

I haven't had to use their support. I go to the UiPath community for most of my questions. 

We used Microsoft Power Automate. It was okay. I totally prefer UiPath.

I was involved in its initial setup. UiPath was not complex, but we, as an organization, made it complex. 

We used a partner AKOA that got bought out by Roboyo not too long ago. So, we did use a partner to implement it. In terms of whether it was smooth or not, it was okay. Our school made it hard.

Our experience with them was good and helpful. It was a good way to go through it. Now that we know more, I would've changed the engagement slightly to get a little bit more consulting in the sense of the COE, governance, and other similar things around it. That's because for the most part, getting the system up and running was relatively simple, but now, with the whole other pieces of it, we're starting to feel some of that effect. It's now about how do we look at it from a different angle.

We definitely have a return on investment in terms of hours and soft cost perspective. We are saving 250 hours and don't have to hire five temps. I can't give the metrics for ROI, but from a time savings perspective, ROI is definitely huge.

We did evaluate other options. We evaluated Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath. It was about a year-long evaluation period between all of them, and UiPath was clearly the winner. It was clearly out there as the leader in that space, and that's why we chose them. 

From our perspective, the GUI was really helpful and very different from the others. Automation Anywhere touted more of just invoicing, but we didn't want it for invoicing. We wanted it for multiple things. UiPath really showed the breadth of what you can expand across.

To someone evaluating UiPath, I would definitely advise finding a partner. Find a partner with whom you can partner and who understands the use cases of what you're trying to do and achieve from an organizational perspective. Without that, you're not going to get an ROI. 

I would also advise managing expectations. It's fairly easy to use, but it still requires technical abilities. Don't think that it's something that you can just plug and play and do whatever you want. It's not going to work that way. It's more about the person and the change in mindset. If a person is open to an automation mindset, RPA is a really cool function, and UiPath solves that particular mindset. Without it, it's an uphill battle. Even from our perspective, from an education side of the house, getting our educators to be okay with automation is tricky.

We haven't yet used UiPath's AI functionality. We are definitely looking into it to see how we can start taking advantage of the AI pieces of it and advance that side of the house. Currently, we are trying to change the automation mindset. I'm a big RPA evangelist in our organization, and I am trying to promote things like automation. People are on board with the thought of it but not necessarily on board with the action of it. So, we really have to understand their process when we get into their process, and some people are apprehensive to share that information. It's the other parts of the piece that we have to deal with.

We have used UiPath Academy courses. It was useful to know the use of the product, the use of the GUI, understand how things move and change, where the checkmark boxes you need to check are, and all other uses. Now with the new versioning, it looks like a more curated function. It's a lot nicer. Previously, UiPath Academy was just a bunch of courses, and you didn't know where to start. The curation for developers or users is going to help people navigate through the UiPath Academy.

Overall, I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten.

We're a consultancy and I am the strategic architect. I have implemented the product at 25 different client locations spanning multiple industries. Their RPA requirements range from pretty standard, bread-and-butter workflows that navigate an application and follow some business rules, to more sophisticated ones that are integrating Document Understanding and a little bit of chatbot.

I have deployed it on multiple application stacks, including out-of-the-box SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and some specialty, third-party products like DNA, Encompass, LendingQB, and others.

We have helped companies reshape their resources. That's a part of the benefits. They want to put automation in place because they want to change their headcount and not have to do those rote, mundane business processes.

We have been able to show enhancements in resourcing. A very good example is that we built a process for a client who had to spend three or four days a month doing a really lousy process involving 3,000 payment transactions, every month. The robot is able to execute that workflow in a half day, so we freed up two and a half to three and a half days where he does not have to do it. To him, this was a huge lifesaver.

It has also reduced human error, for sure. That's a positive selling point. When we build workflows for our customers we include business reports and audit logs. We typically add a status flag for a record so that every record that is transacted has traceability through the audit log. We also have a status report, and that shows how many records the workflow executed, how many were successful, and how many failed. We see a range where between 65 and 90 percent of the records go straight through. That means all the business rules were met and the process was completed for those records. That shows that they're identifying a much smaller subset of errors and that they can rely on the robot to successfully complete the end-to-end transaction. And whatever is leftover requires human touch.

That changes the dynamic in operations. They don't have to concentrate on every single record, but only somewhere between 10 and 35 percent of all records may have to be handled manually. It shows them which ones had errors, the ones that did not meet the business rules, and they know which ones to concentrate on. That's a feedback loop that helps them decide if they need to add a business rule or change a business rule to get to a higher percentage of throughput.

In terms of employee time, I have documented situations where clients might have had 10 people working on half a dozen business processes. We've implemented IPA—intelligent process automation—and then they only need three or four people, so they can redeploy those other folks to other places. It saves them money because they don't have the FTE costs they had before for those processes.

From a development point of view, the Studio tool as the basis of componentized architecture has been a really critical part. You get out-of-the-box, componentized architecture to jumpstart or accelerate development and that's a very key feature. 

When talking about deployment, you have a very robust infrastructure to manage your automations, the robots, and how they can be configured, deployed, executed, monitored, and maintained. 

When it comes to process discovery, it has excellent front-end tools and capabilities vis-à-vis Task Capture and Automation Hub. 

And at the back end, the notion of botting sites to monitor and manage your robotic infrastructure and reporting on it is pretty great. These are all pretty good tools.

The ease of use is because of the UI's capabilities. The fact that it has a .NET Framework, from a developer's point of view, makes it a very easy product to jumpstart into. But what is key is the ability to do really fine development activities. You really can get to a nuanced level of development for complicated and robust workflows. The tools are definitely well constructed to allow you that kind of flexibility. 

A really good example would be if you are doing something with OCR to read a PDF. You can vary the OCR engines and test them out to determine which OCR engine will give you the best results. That's pretty good because you do get into situations where one engine may work better than another.

We can also implement end-to-end automation and that is critically important. We always strive for what I call "straight-through" processing, where we're trying to handle all the use cases based on business rules. We're not always successful, but that's not a bad thing. If we can take 60 percent of your processes and automate them with straight-through processing, where everything works, your exceptions are a much smaller work set. That has had a significant impact on clients. For one of my clients, where we have worked very hard, they have better than 90 percent "throughput," meaning that 90 percent of their transactions go completely through the automated workflows. The client has been incredibly pleased with that.

We also use the UiPath Academy all the time, in two ways. Internally, we avail ourselves of all the courses. It's especially important to understand new updates and releases. It's a great place to go to understand what those new features are. That is of real value. 

But the Academy is also a good starting point when I want my engineers to be certified. They can jumpstart that process by going to the Academy and making sure they know how the product works. They follow through on that program and complete the training. Once they finish that, we try to get a project or two under their belts, and then have them take the certification exams.

One of the chief problems in all of our implementations is "application sensitivity." If an automation involves a webpage or Outlook, every item on that screen—the menu bar, the actual document, an attachment, a field—has a selector so that workflow can work correctly. UiPath does a very good job, whether for legacy systems or newer systems, of using selectors so that you can build applications that have discrete functionality. 

But what happens when a selector breaks? That means that something has changed in the application. This is especially true with SaaS or third-party applications. They make one change to a field and the selector breaks and that means it has to be touched and fixed. 

UiPath could do a better job of enveloping selectors to make them less fragile. There are techniques that can be used to achieve that, even without a system-related improvement, but they are not out-of-the-box. That is the one area that is the biggest pain point. It happens all the time.

They should reduce selector sensitivity and improve remediation when one does break. 

I don't know how they would do it, but if the change that caused the break were a relatively minor thing, they should somehow have it automatically recalibrated. I'm sure it's a tough problem, but clients complain to me about that all the time. I have to explain to them, "Well, the application changed." They'll say, "Well, we're looking at it, we don't see anything." It's often true that you can't see it, but the selector underneath broke and that means something was done but, visually, an end user would not see it if it was a minor change. So I'd like UiPath to find a way to "desensitize" selectors.

I have been using UiPath for four years.

It is very stable. There are no questions about that.

There are absolutely no issues with scalability. We're using this with multiple clients.

The new robot polling is very helpful. We are using it effectively for clients and that technical capability is a great enhancement. The modern folder profile gets us there as well. 

We're very pleased with the cloud-enabled product sets. I push that with as many clients as I can because it's the easiest to implement. On the cloud side, there were issues at one point with their licensing management, but that has finally been smoothed out and that makes life easier. If you want to add another product, as long as it gets licensed, boom, it's there. I don't have to think about it. Overall, the scalability is great.

The environments that we work in are client-driven, but they can have multiple locations and geographies. We have a couple of clients where the implementation is in the US but it is supporting Europe. And we now have a client that needs to be supported in South America. We are cloud-enabled for them and the product works great. And while it has nothing to do with UiPath, there are some latency issues over the network, so we may have to rethink how we deploy in different hemispheres. But we know that UiPath tech can support that.

We will lean on their technical support when we have exhausted our capabilities. Most of our issues have been in the Document Understanding sphere, especially in custom model development, although sometimes there have been issues with it in out-of-the-box systems. For all of my IPA projects that include Document Understanding, I try to convince the customer to buy Premium Support, because regular support could take two to three days to finally get to the right answer. With Premium Support, I'll get it in a day or a day and a half, and that can make a big difference.

I rate their support at seven out of 10 because the initial triaging takes the longest time, and that's one of the greatest concerns for me. If you have regular support, as part of the triage process they will tell you to look at frequently asked questions, but of course, we've already done that. Overall, the FAQs are one of the weak points in the fabric of available resources. We're putting in a support ticket because we haven't found what we need. That level of support is very generic and you really have to knock hard on their door hard and say, "We've done that already. We haven't found our answer. We need to talk to an engineer." Level-one support is usually too junior, but when we get to the next level, we finally start to get better answers. Level two is good, but level one and that triaging can be painful.

We rely on the partner network, and UiPath has been an excellent partner. We do use the community as a reference point, but we don't get a lot of value from using the FAQs.

On the flip side, I have used the Community editions of all the products. That's a big plus, especially when a client doesn't want to put any money into it upfront because they're very nervous. We use the Community edition to prove the point. In that respect, the Community edition and the forums do become helpful.

Neutral

I started with Automation Anywhere in a previous job. I like both products. Both it and UiPath are excellent. Going with UiPath really had nothing to do with a problem with Automation Anywhere. When I came to my current company, they had already decided to go with UiPath. They had done a few projects with UiPath and that set the tone going forward.

As a consultant in a global practice, I do have a couple of Automation Anywhere projects going on. I also have a project that is using Power Automate. 

Our preferred IPA solution is UiPath, but clients drive that decision. I had one client who said, out of the gate, "No. We're using Automation Anywhere. No questions asked." And I said, "Alright. It's a good product." 

But as a company, we lean toward UiPath as a starting point and they've been an excellent partner, and I say that wholeheartedly.

Deploying the solution is straightforward. It involves a low level of complexity and less effort.

I have a separate DevOps team that actually does the build-out of the environment. They're separate from the developer team. DevOps does the implementation. They'll talk to the client's IT department directly and work on all the details of setting up the infrastructure and they'll get it ready for us. Then the developers take over.

We do lean on UiPath support in some niche issues areas, but for the most part, my engineers are pretty well qualified.

In terms of the solution's AI functionality, such as Document Understanding and chatbots, we no longer advertise ourselves as doing RPA. We advertise ourselves as an IPA shop—intelligent process automation. The focal point of that is Document Understanding and the DRUID AI Chatbot capabilities. We're getting an awful lot of Document Understanding projects and we use our sandbox to pump our clients' data into the Document Understanding frameworks and intelligent form factors to prove that the solution works. We really want to go for the bigger ticket items that require Document Understanding.

When dealing with Document Understanding, we are introducing a new capability to the client. We train them on how to use the tool. That is a definite change in the client's skill sets and it does pay for itself in the long run. There is a delicate balance. The investment cost is always the tricky part, but once clients start seeing their data coming through automatically, the light bulb comes on.

Since UiPath became a publicly traded company, the flexibility and variability on pricing have really gone down a lot. It's tougher to get a better deal out of them. I'm not saying it can't happen, but as a publicly traded company, they're not the same company that they were when they were private and first growing. It's understandable. They have stockholders to answer to.

The top vendors are

1. UiPath
2. Automation Anywhere
3. Blue Prism (which we don't do a lot of work in)
4. Power Automate, only because it's Microsoft.

I encourage people to look at the review and evaluation sites to help them start getting an idea of what is available. Then I say, "Here is some actual work we've done with UiPath. This is our actual experience. Check the marketplace data that's out there," because there's a lot of information they can avail themselves of. That way, they can be satisfied that what our company is recommending is valid.

I may point out some of the key questions for them to look into. If they're trying to scale, what are the business problems they're trying to solve? If they're thinking about a Document Understanding requirement, they should compare what's going out there with other intelligent document processing capabilities and take it from there.

As a partner, what has been helpful is that UiPath offers a not-for-resale (NFR) license. These are fully loaded licenses and ours is cloud-enabled. We're using them for PoCs very effectively. There is a lot of great value in them. I have a couple of projects now where we've asked clients to send us their sample data, their documents. We have our sandbox ready and I have one or two developers knock that process out with a turnaround of one or two days. We can bring it back to the client and say, "Here's your data and this is what we were able to do with it." That is very effective.

I really appreciate the way the product has been architected. It's a robust product set. We have built custom models with the UiPath toolset. We've had several use cases where we had to do so because there was no out-of-the-box solution, and the tools are great.

The AI functionality has enabled us to automate more processes overall. They are the more difficult projects to do because Document Understanding is not a pure, out-of-the-box solution. There is work involved in it but we've been successful at it. Once we get the models well-trained, the client starts to really see real value. They're seeing the straight-through processing that they're trying to achieve.

The client I mentioned earlier, the one with the 90 percent "throughput," is an example. That automation is the result of custom models. We worked hard on that and we were very successful. The client has been very happy.

Overall, the way I would rate UiPath depends on the support level I have to use. If it's Standard Support, it's a five or six out of 10. If I have Premium Support, it's a seven or eight.

We mostly use it for unattended bots. We are a construction company. Our RPA team does more of the complex processes for users. We take high-end complex items, that are redundant, off of the users' hands, then we host it on our servers.

We have a bunch of unattended processes, about 284 processes.

RPA isn't necessarily taking away tasks from employees, but rather moving them from processing-type employees to analysts. For example, if we had billers doing a very redundant task, then we moved that to RPA. Then, the billers do more customer face-to-face work and analysis, e.g., solutions through Salesforce. So, we have those employees who were previously billers move up to better positions where they can do more analysis and human interaction.

The solution has reduced human error. We don't need to go back and fix stuff. Customer representation is also huge. Quality of work is one of our mission statements. Having that repetitive test always being 100% every single day, month, and quarter, and whenever we send specific invoices from our server support, has been really helpful. It increases that quality formation.

There are a lot of job positions that we never really thought that would get created. Freeing up those experienced employees from sitting down and processing a lot of stuff throughout the whole day and moving them up to customers, we started discovering new talents and skills, especially with the younger employees since you are basically freeing up their time to discover new skills that they weren't even aware of. You are investing in them, showing customers that you have a new generation of fine employees who can do a bunch of new skills out-of-the-box.

The orchestration is the most valuable feature, e.g., how stuff can be organized. This is in addition to the fact that we try to move stuff to an unattended base where there is no user interaction. We are moving more to 100% automation rather than putting a human in the loop.

The UiPath Academy is mostly used only by technology associates and power users in each department who show interest in RPA. The academy has improved on the onboarding system that we have for RPA. So, if we see potential with someone, whether it is interns, power users, or even IT professionals around our department, then the UiPath Academy is definitely a good way to go. It kind of eases up the onboarding when determining who is outstanding or could potentially join our RPA teams.

The biggest value of the UiPath Academy is the ease of use. A lot of different platforms can be too complex. The user-friendly platform definitely helps with the ease of its steps. 

While it is the best tool ever, we decided that the user interaction might not actually be the greatest thing ever. 

I have been using the solution for three years.

I am very happy with the stability of it. 

I wish that there might be a better, easier method of updating our platform, especially for on-prem. I believe most of their customers are cloud-based. So, they don't have to worry about updating their Studio versions or Orchestrator. Being on-prem, it can be difficult because we must reach out to have that version. We can't just plan on our own. We are always at least a six-month step back versus the current version.

We have been scaling it as much as we can, especially with how we are trying to scale how big our team is as well as trying to control that specific workspace and workforce that we have.

There are currently five developers using it.

There were a couple of times with the on-premises version that there were complications, since it is not on UiPath's cloud. We have had a lot of complications where we are dead in water. There were a couple of conditions where we weren't able to get someone up to speed on whatever. The support is not as quick to respond as we had hoped. 

We did talk to our account executives about this. It is definitely a work in progress. I know that they have recommended that we move to the cloud, but it is not attractive enough for us to see if it is actually worth moving to the cloud.

We have been with UiPath from the start. We used to have a lot of in-house C# libraries that we curated. RPA was like overpowered macros similar to what we already had. That is why we knew how to deal with it. 

The initial setup was straightforward. We did it through the on-premises by connecting our SQL database, etc. 

The deployment took around three hours.

The initial setup was with their tech support, and that was definitely great. After that, if we had any hiccups, that was where the complications happened.

The main focus was improving efficiency. Once you focus more on redundant paths, having a bot doing it over and over again, that eliminates human error every now and then. There is definitely a huge ROI in that. Our main focus was low-hanging fruit. By low hanging fruit, I mean the redundant processes that users are just annoyed by when they go in every day and have to do it. There has definitely been a huge ROI because we are trying to free up a lot of the project managers for construction to do more focused stuff there rather than job cost details.

We have probably saved the time of 10 full-time employees. For daily tasks, we are saving an average of four hours per employee.

It is one of those things where you pay for convenience. Pricing-wise, UiPath is definitely way more expensive than other solutions that we have seen, especially since we also have Microsoft Power Automate, which is one of the latest tools. UiPath is on the higher end, but it is one of those decisions, "Is it worth the investment? How much are you getting as an ROI?" That is usually how the conversation goes.

Back then, the main competitor was Automation Anywhere, who wasn't necessarily as user-friendly. The main idea was that UiPath was more user-friendly with more forums. It seems like there was a community for it. Whereas, Automation Anywhere was a bit more complex. 

We are using a bunch of other tools to also see the differences. Everything runs so quickly that technology always needs to be up to speed. Companies, like UiPath, are always running so fast to compete in this area. We are also trying to see who is actually the best. UiPath has definitely shown us that, but it also comes with its price.

They are always trying to look for, as much as possible, in-house creation of back-end processes. This means less clicking and tapping on the keyboard for the robot, which is always better. UiPath definitely blends all that together, which is great. It is literally bridging all our platforms together, which is what I love about it.

With UiPath and RPA, the sky's the limit. There is potential for a bunch of things that you can do. When we started, as a construction company, we were thinking that RPA might not be as useful as we might think and make a bigger difference than our in-house solutions. When RPA came out, we thought it was mostly for companies like EY and PWC, e.g., more for financial auditing since there is so much data. However, we definitely benefit from it as a construction company. There is so much potential, whether it is low-hanging fruit or high complexity. It is definitely a win-win for any company, whatever industry you are working in.

I would rate UiPath as eight out of 10.

We are a financial services company, and our primary use is to increase daily efficiency and create automated solutions for our operations team. Our primary concern is time. By implementing a robotic solution for mundane tasks, it frees up our teams to focus elsewhere. For example, going to a website, extracting data, putting the data somewhere, and manipulating it can all be automated, freeing up the team to focus on data analysis. This makes us more time and cost-efficient. 

As a smaller company, it was very important to us that scale automation would be taken care of by the vendor. It was one of our key points in choosing a solution.

The solution saved us a great deal of time and money, while teams have been freed up to focus on more important work.

Human error has been greatly reduced and the solution saves a significant amount of time, these are the two main reasons we started to use UiPath.

The solution helps us to keep track of tickets and send notifications used within our department. It helped a lot with our back and front-end offices. Our main operations team normally had a lot of data manipulation, which is now taken care of. They can now focus on market analysis.

This product is very user-friendly, it only requires knowledge of the most basic coding and how to work with logic. They are quick to respond to software issues. They either fix them quickly or provide a workaround if there is one. Overall, UiPath makes building automation very easy.

We do use the solution's Automation Cloud offering. Sometimes we aren't informed of software updates, meaning we have to figure that out for ourselves, especially when there are issues. We mentioned this to support, as figuring out solutions to issues brought in by updates sometimes increases our workload. Overall though, I would say the solution does save a lot of time for our IT department.

The solution has increased our TTV significantly.

The Automation Cloud offering decreased the solution's TCO by taking care of infrastructure, maintenance, and updates. 

We used the Automation Cloud to build out our own pipeline and connected it to Azure. This has really solidified our SDLC, which in turn allows us to quickly put out automations whenever we need to. 

My team and I used the vendor's UiPath Academy course. The course was very effective, as none of the team had prior UiPath experience. We trained using UiPath Academy for around a month, which got us to a point where we could start to use the solution for projects, which helped us learn even more.

The community is much larger than I expected. I'm regularly on the forum or the community blog, which says a lot about how good it is, because almost any information you need can be found there. Everything is well documented, there's always UI path support, and people answer questions on there, so it's very useful.

Since UiPath is one of the bigger vendors in the RPA industry, there's a larger global community. Everyone is really helpful and I think that's great.

Technical support could be improved.

The setup documentation could be improved to make that process easier. 

We have been using the solution for two years now. 

I'd say the solutions are around 80 to 85% stable. There are some areas that we have to reach out to support for, and they work to improve these areas for the newer versions. For that reason, I can't say the solution is 100% stable all the time. 

The features provided by UiPath make it very easy to reuse, so it's very scalable.

We haven't deployed the solution to its full potential at our company yet. It's used by nine to ten teams out of a total of around 200 teams. We have a lot more to do, as we only started two years ago. We are working towards implementing for more of our teams, but we need a bigger team to push out solutions faster. 

The technical support is inconsistent, it can be good or bad, this depends on who you get connected to. 

Neutral

It was before my time at the company, but I believe they previously used Nintex RPA.

I wasn't there for the initial setup, but I do know quite a bit because we did have to set up more bots later. I'd say it's a little complex if you don't already know what to do, but once you do know, it's very easy to set up. I would say the documentation wasn't that clear.

We're a small team that consists of two developers, one tester, and a manager. This is sufficient for the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

We implemented the solution ourselves.

I would say the cost of the software is around 10K and we've had around 50 projects, with probably $500,000 saved per project. That's a lot of money saved that can be diverted to other areas.

The solution has sped up and reduced the cost of digital transformation without requiring expensive upgrades or support. The product has greatly reduced the incidence of human error.

The solution has saved us a lot of time. I would say it saves us an average of 900 to 1000 hours per month. The additional time has enabled employees to focus on more high-value work.

Overall, the solution has reduced the costs of our automation operations.

The cost of the software was around $10,000.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

The solution builds robots and monitors automation. There is a product called UiPath Task Capture which can do process analysis or business analysis, but I would say it's always better for a human to take care of this. For that reason, I wouldn't say the solution is end-to-end, though we could configure it to be. I would say it works very well from building to the end, and in the testing and monitoring that comes after that. 

We used unattended automation and quickly realized we need attended, because with unattended automation projects take up a lot of time. With unattended automation, we can't run two project processes simultaneously, but with attended automation, we can take out another server and give access to the UiPath cloud to our business partners to run whatever projects they need. We can do this at any time, which is very helpful.

RPA generally isn't widely used, and some people overlook it, but it can transform a business. I would say it's an essential part of any digital transformation, and UiPath is a vast vendor with a user-friendly product. 

We are an agency, and we implement it for our clients. We are not a direct reseller of UiPath. We manage the marketing services and the operations for some companies, and we provide the service of implementing it without having any contracts with UiPath. It is just a service from us.

It is being used in almost all industries and departments, but we have been focusing on finance and operations, such as handling the orders, getting invoices, reading invoices, and managing the orders. We use OCR to read invoices and process them. We also use it for the service department. UiPath is perfect for service and finance.

It is deployed on the cloud and on-premises.

It is very easy to build automation by using UiPath. It is very easy to use. It is different from other platforms, such as Automation Anywhere, which are more difficult to use. The user interface of UiPath is more smooth and easier than the rest. It is easy to build automation without any coding knowledge.

It is helpful for end-to-end automation. We can start with the automation of a simple task, and we can get deep insights and discover new tasks to be automated.

It saves time and money for us and our clients. It has improved the data entry accuracy and minimized the work, human errors, mistakes, and risks. We don't have mistakes anymore. The time saved is now being utilized for more logical things that a person should be doing. 

We are having deeper connections and relations with our clients after using UiPath and fully transforming their operations. It helps with digital transformation without needing any other tools. It can be enough to successfully do digital transformation and achieve success, which increases the customer satisfaction score and saves a lot of time and money. 

Their automation cloud offering has decreased the time-to-value. You can start seeing the effect of UiPath and the automation in the first month. Especially the businesses that have never automated their tasks and never used AI and machine learning for their operations can see the effect in the first month. It is incredibly effective in many aspects, such as time, money, operations, and risks of mistakes. We are able to speed up all the operations. It has improved our communication with the clients. We are able to resolve customer errors and deal with tickets faster.

Their automation cloud offering helps to decrease the total cost of ownership, but other tools also have the same benefit. It saves us a lot of money when you use it with big data or a large volume of data sets. We had an on-premises setup for other clients, but it required big servers and containers to handle a large amount of data. 

If it wasn't a cloud offering, and it was only on-premises, we would be spending thousands on other platforms on hosting and deployment. On-premises setup requires a lot of processing speed and bandwidth and large disk sizes. The cloud offering is not very heavy. So, it saves a lot.

It helps with fast innovation when it comes to automation. It has a lot of intelligence. I could find use cases that I never thought could be done with UiPath, or I never thought could be automated. UiPath helped me to discover the use cases to automate almost the entire operation.

We use the UiPath Apps feature, and it has helped to reduce a lot of workload, not only for us but also for our clients. This was one of the main features that everyone loved. We used it at the beginning for building apps for the clients to handle the workflows. We didn't need expert developers to do this because it is low code. It helps us create professional applications for our internal use and for our clients. Our workload is reduced by 250% by using the UiPath Apps.

I can use the templates to create apps in no time. I can prototype an app with drag and drop. There are multiple templates, and with drag and drop, I can easily build apps and put features and automation that are otherwise time-consuming.

With attended automation, we get the benefits of our employees and robots. The robots provide digital assistance to our employees. We can create robots to assist our employees, and we can create integrations with the ERP and other software for a fast and smooth operational workflow.

We love the AI inside UiPath and the AI center. With the preconfigured templates and out-of-the-box models and templates offered by UiPath, we can take everything to production quickly. Its AI is the main thing that helps us discover what automation needs to be done after deploying it for one week or two weeks and letting our users and our clients work normally. From the insights and the screen recording, the AI starts to learn and recommend what we can do. With the very deep insights that it provides, we are able to find automation opportunities.  We can use AI for decision-making. We are able to make better decisions based on the insights from user interactions, data, and performance.

It speeds up digital transformation. I personally find it enough to do simple digital transformation. 

The UiPath marketplace is valuable. I can easily find templates. They are easy to use, and I am ready for work. When I implement it for clients who have no experience at all, they can easily work with it by using the templates from the marketplace. They don't need to be an expert or have a lot of experience. Anybody can use it without good knowledge.

I love it for the deep artificial intelligence that it has. It has the AI to recognize the processes, analyze all the workflows through user interactions, and discover automation opportunities. It is very intelligent in these aspects.

UiPath's deployment is one of the easiest ones, which is very beneficial for us. It is the key factor in convincing the customers and clients to do digital transformation. When we explain and show them the capabilities of UiPath and the use cases based on different industries, they get convinced. They ask us to implement it for them, which opens the door to do other services for them. One of the highlights for us was being part of the Egypt digital transformation campaign. As a part of this campaign, we implemented it for three government institutions. It was a big achievement for us to be part of it and do this for them. It was based on the UiPath presentation and the explanation of its capabilities. As soon as they got convinced, they invited us to start implementing it.

The UiPath team is incredibly fast, and they are very good at handling the community and the requests for improvements and development. They do the updates frequently, and they fix bugs and listen to the customers.

I don't have critical dislikes, but there is a scope for improving it. Its deployment is easy but there is a learning curve in the beginning. Its onboarding isn't easy, and there is no onboarding guidance. They need to take more care of the onboarding guidance and improve it. It is user-friendly for me and for most people, but for people who have zero programming knowledge, it is hard. They have to turn to the community and other places for knowledge.

Its documentation is good and helpful, but it is not perfect. It is good for people who have basic knowledge about it. 

I have done UiPath Academy courses. I liked them, and for me, they were easy because I have an idea about automation and robotic processes, but most of my team had a hard time understanding and learning from the UiPath Academy courses. They didn't have a fast learning curve. It is not bad, but it is very hard for beginners and starters to learn from these courses.

When it is on-premises, a lot of times, when we are dealing with a large volume of data, it starts to freeze. It also happened once on the cloud. They need to improve the processing and workload capability of UiPath when somebody has a large volume of data. Currently, it freezes, and it is not so stable when dealing with large data.

It is also difficult to extract data from some of the things, such as IFrames. It is not easy to extract the data. 

Their customer support and licensing can also be improved.

It has been about two and a half years. I started using it at the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020.

It is useful for almost all industries and departments. We have installed it for over 40 or 50 businesses. We have installed it for small-sized businesses, and we have also installed it for enterprises. We have gone through many industries, and we have been using it for almost all the departments. 

Their customer support can be improved. Based on the experience of our team and our clients, there have always been delays in answering and resolving the issues. So, we are always the people who fix the issues for our clients. They need to improve the quality of the training for customers and for their support team.

It provides a return on investment and solves any problems of operation monitoring and recurring activities. It saves time and a lot of money, but the most important benefit is time optimization. 

In terms of time, we have saved three hours a day daily from manual and repetitive stuff. This was a total transformation that affected our return on investment. We are capable of doing more things. This was the key factor in convincing our partners and our clients to get this solution because we have seen how we are capable of getting a ton of the tasks and activities done without a high number of employees. At the moment, we are a team of 37 people, and we are able to do the work that would usually need over 100 people.

In terms of savings, yearly, we have saved over $10,000 as compared to our previous cost of using different tools.

When I was using other solutions, it was hard for me to keep paying for every individual software to manage the processing, automation, document understanding, and files. All of them were separate, and I had to pay individually for each one, but UiPath provides all of them in one license. It is not cheap, but it makes it easy for me to sell it to my clients because I sell it individually with the license, apart from my fees for implementing and managing it for them. Before UiPath, I had no service like this for clients. I couldn't sell it as a service to the clients for implementing or managing it. After using UiPath, I started selling it to the clients. Now, I have over 40 or 50 implementations, and I am managing about 20 of them. The rest of them are being managed by the clients themselves.

I like that there is one license for all basic needs, but it is still expensive. Sometimes, we don't need all the tools or capabilities. We only need basic automation and processing for certain clients, but we're required to get the full license. They can improve its licensing and provide more flexibility. They can create more plans or packages, or they can let the users choose the capabilities they need and base its pricing on that.

I personally don't find it expensive because it replaces a lot of work. The work done by 5 or 10 employees or team members can be easily handled by UiPath. As compared to other tools, its pricing is not bad. It is fair enough.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It is very different from other solutions, and they are making a lot of things easier and friendly for customers.

At my company, we automate everything, including the ERP. It's for logistics as well as the production. 90% of our use case is automating SAP and the bonus software.

The user interface is amazing. If we want to look at the conditions, we can do so easily. We can just search and we can find it. It's very simple.

They provide architecture that is really amazing. 

It is quite stable. It is really good and very reliable, which is what I really want. 

You can scale the solution very well.

I have used automation. The report was helpful. It trains employees - even those that didn’t have any experience. In UiPath, it’s not as clear how you go about things or where to click. It's very difficult to change items. The best part of UiPath is the automation.

I have a downloaded code. When you ship the plan from one country to another country, there will be a lot of historical data in the item. Typically, we have to delete this manually. It is a lot of data. We have exclusively recruited people for this job in the past. Then, we came up with some designs for the automation and it has saved them plenty of time. We are able to finish all the deletion of unnecessary data in record time. That was a really easy way to help save time and human resources. Automation Anywhere is really helpful financially.

Manually, a task like this would have taken around 30 days to deal with 10,000 lines of deletion. Now, with automation, the same task can be done in two days.

In the past, our recruits have come from Ireland. I’m not sure how much labor time we’ve saved with UiPath, however, it’s significant.

I have tried UiPath’s Academy. I got certified from UiPath. The best part is that the lectures are really good. They also provide the trial motions, which is really helpful when learning.

I have watched UiPath Academy’s orchestrated videos and done the pre-development. I completed the entire video and then did the test. They have certified me for Orchestrator and the developer parts.

One really good thing about UiPath is the user community. We can just search for a term and get help with questions. Most questions will be answered by the community. That is really amazing and helpful. Participating in the community makes UiPath really easy. It's very easy to find solutions to questions you have.

The UiPath community compares well against other RPA communities out there. On a scale of one to ten, I would say that the automation ranks at a nine. It’s a helpful tool.

We use attended bots as well as unattended bots.

Attended automation has helped to scale RPA benefits in our company by automating departments or all specific processes that require human-robot collaboration. We know how to use automation with merchants so that they help you with authorization for the end-users. The robots have really helped us in specific use cases, especially around logistics, for example.

We have just started using UiPath’s AI functionality. We are exploring it now after we got some orientation from UiPath. Within one year, we'll start using it for the plans that we have created for this year.

UiPath automation has reduced human mistakes. That is the best part. If somebody, a human, does the same continuous actions, mistakes will happen. With automation, we’ve had zero errors at this point.

UiPath updates its software every year. The problem is the support for the old code. For example, right now I'm using the 2021 10.3 version. If I have developed a code three years back and I want to update the packages, it won't work as expected. They do not follow up with support for the old version. Therefore, a person has to exclusively work again with the old robot to make it compatible with the new version.

I've been using the solution for four years now.

Stability-wise, I would say, for an ERP, UiPath is good. If you are going to automate some websites, the stability is very bad, however, for ERP it is really good. 

The scalability is good. Based on the demand, we can actually scale up things. Again, it depends on how we implement UiPath in the organization.

We pay extra for UiPath support. For us, it's really good.

Since we are paying extra money for support, whenever we have a problem they exclusively send two people to our organization. They elaborate and explain the solution to the problem. That's only due to the fact that we pay extra money. We have experienced only positive scenarios with support.

While I'd rate paid support eight out of ten, when you don't pay for support the service may be only a five out of ten.

Positive

I also have Automation Anywhere and Microsoft.

Microsoft's solution is better than UiPath. However, UiPath compared to Automation Anywhere is better.

With UiPath, they should have at least some basic knowledge of .NET. It's very different from Microsoft. Somebody without any background can develop robots.

Compared to Automation Anywhere, UiPath is really good. Especially the user interface. Some of the Orchestrator functionality is also really good compared to Automation Anywhere. 

We had used an earlier version (8). We had to use that and log into the Orchestrator, et cetera. At that time, all versions were difficult. Now, they have the availability to make the setup easier and we have the entities to deploy the package. It's now very easy and very convenient.

The deployment takes about two minutes maximum.

For the deployment strategy for UiPath, we did a QA first. We had a tech that would create the instance, we'd deploy the Orchestrator and then just do the QA. We'd create another code request for the master branch. 

I have seen some ROI, however, I have only high-level ideas about what it is. Our team is in Denmark and in India. From what I heard, we are getting considerable value for money at this time.

The solution is a bit pricey.

More and more companies are coming out with similar solutions, and therefore the space is likely to become very competitive.

I have used the cloud deployment at well. Now I use the on-premises version. 

If anybody is going to evaluate UiPath, first, I would say, you need to look into what kind of automation you are going to do. If it's ERP, I would definitely recommend UiPath. If it's something, like a PDF or insurance kind of use case, then I wouldn't recommend UiPath. From my experience, what I understand is that UiPath is good for SAP. However, you can use it for any other kind of ERP as well.

I'd rate the solution a seven out of ten.

As consultants, we have implemented UiPath for clients when they have asymmetric workloads because of COVID and they want to scale up but don't want to hire new people. We've implemented automations for clients that want to decrease their workflows. And we've seen efficiency gains as well when clients want to complement the work that humans are doing with the help of automations.

A good example of a client use case is a client that does mortgage loans. When someone comes to a loan officer, there's a lot of information that needs to be provided. There's a manual process that includes inputting the information into the system. Once the information is in the system, they need to run a lot of services, such as lien and credit checks, location verifications, inspections, flood reports, et cetera, before a loan application can be approved. 

We've automated this entire process for them. Our automations, built on UiPath, run all these services, generate all the reports, and store them in a centralized repository that can then be eyeballed by a human. That way they can make a judgment call on whether a loan should be processed or not.

Our in-house use case right now is around structuring reporting with UiPath. We have a Power BI layer and we use UiPath internally to check employee availability, as well as who is charging hours, and how many, to our projects. Overall, we use it for HR activities. We go into our HR management system, generate and download the reports using UiPath, and then modify and massage the data depending on business rules. We then publish that data into Power BI and that's used as a centralized dashboard for reporting for the organization. 

We recently did an engagement with some leaders in HR management. That organization has two kinds of certifications that they give out. We automated those processes as well as the reporting and the revenue reconciliation around them. They wanted to understand how many people were doing re-certifications, and their demographics. They wanted to see what the pass percentage was. They also wanted to be able to give the marketing team data about whom they should be targeting.

The automations we built for them using business rules produce information on whom they should be targeting. They help them understand which part of the world is doing their exams and which part of the world is not doing their exams, and where they need to spend more on marketing.

Before we automated these things, they had a team of four people doing that kind of work. Now, there is one person managing the automations instead of managing the actual processes. That was a big win for them as an organization. They were able to redeploy three people to do other work inside the organization. And in terms of savings, if the average person works 2,040 hours per year, we saved them around 8,000 person-hours of work annually.

Internally, in our company, the reporting process that we have automated used to take 45 to 50 minutes for the HR team to do. Now, reports are generated automatically. It has decreased the amount of effort that the HR team needs to do to generate reports.

There is also a lot of benefit with respect to human error. The tasks that you want to automate are usually repetitive, mundane activities—the swivel-chair activities where a junior analyst might be processing 500 loans in a day. People tend not to concentrate and they make mistakes in that kind of situation. Automation is not going to make those mistakes. There's a great reduction in human error when you implement RPA using UiPath.

In addition, as a small company, one of the biggest advantages we see from using UiPath is that they handle infrastructure, maintenance, and updates with the cloud offering. That helps a lot of small and mid-tier companies implement automation, companies whose IT practices aren't as mature. That's one of the most important features and benefits of UiPath.

The cloud version does decrease your startup time. Where you might have spent four weeks provisioning a server or a virtual machine, installing things, and then securing network assets, with this solution you don't have to do those things. It's all available directly, plug-and-play from UiPath. The time to value is decreased. Cloud instances are, obviously, a little bit more expensive than what you would pay with an on-prem solution, but because UiPath gives it to you at scale, the difference is that great.

For SMEs, the effort to stand something up themselves adds a lot of work to the automation. The ROI is quicker for SMEs when they do a cloud implementation.

The only way you're able to show true value with an automation program is if you automate something end-to-end. UiPath does end-to-end automations and, among all the other tools that are available, UiPath is the leader in end-to-end automation. 

In addition, they're growing their platform. It's no longer just an RPA program. It's a platform that gives you capabilities like AI, Computer Vision, and chatbots. It's not just about task or process automation, it's about the end-to-end life cycle. Previously, if you wanted to do a chatbot integration, there was no end-to-end solution for it. Today, UiPath offers direct integrations with chatbot services and direct integrations to some level of AI analysis on your processes. No other provider today does any of that. If you get into specific, end-to-end scenarios, UiPath certainly is a platform that allows you to achieve that end-to-end automation.

UiPath's AI capabilities are pretty good. Computer Vision is their AI functionality that helps you look into images. If you're automating inside a Citrix environment, for example, you really can't access the usual selectors or data boxes or text boxes. It's all an image. We had to do an automation in such an environment, and we used the AI capabilities of Computer Vision to build dynamic selectors. That was beneficial. I don't think any other vendor currently has that capability. The way they've implemented AI is not just a buzzword. They've really applied it in the Computer Vision feature.

And when it comes to the UiPath user community, nobody would be able to do implementations without it. It's a lot like Stack Overflow, but for RPA. It's a very strong community and it helps anyone who is doing development, management, initialization, et cetera. 

They can certainly improve their Automation Hub, which is their centralized place to gather new opportunities. The improvement could be, in part, in the capabilities. For example, it would help if there were a centralized dashboard. Maybe they could combine Insights and Automation Hub into one solution.

And they also need to revisit the pricing model of Automation Hub. It is an expensive functionality that clients don't really want to pay for. They feel that it should be part of the program and available out-of-the-box. Because it's not, clients just do things using an Excel sheet.

I started doing automations back in 2015, and I've been using UiPath since around 2017. I work as a management consultant. The company I work for provides consulting services to organizations that want to use UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere.

I started out doing development with UiPath, and now I do a lot of infrastructure initialization. I've done development and implementations on the on-prem solution, although I've never set one up, and I've set up cloud instances of UiPath myself.

As a company, we also use the free Community Edition in-house so that we can build a point of view on solutions, but most of our implementations are for clients as consultants.

Scaling is a benefit of the cloud offering because you can easily add a new license without provisioning a new server virtual machine, and you can also or decrease licenses. This is only applicable to an organization that does not have high IT maturity and does not have virtual machines that can be spun up. If a client is very mature, Fortune 100 or Fortune 50, with a very robust IT team that can easily spin up virtual machines, the cloud solution is not going to be beneficial when it comes to scaling.

They have multiple tiers for technical support. I've used all of them. With the Premium Plus Support you get immediate remediation. You have a support representative available who is like an account executive and who is the go-to person for any issues. It's very easy and very quick. 

The mid-tier is Premium Support where you don't have a direct point of contact, but you still get priority service. 

We recently had a production issue with Orchestrator. I opened a ticket on February 2nd and we just resolved it this morning, six days later. It wasn't a big issue but it took them some time. That was with the free support. I didn't expect them to prioritize it

Overall, they are responsive. The top-tier support is a 10 out of 10, the mid-tier is about an eight out of 10, and the free support is about a seven or eight out of 10.

One of the biggest advantages of UiPath is the ease of setup. Their cloud instance is probably four or five releases ahead of what Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere offer right now. You can buy a license in 30 seconds and get your own automation instance set up on the cloud within an hour.

UiPath has made setting up and starting an implementation very easy because it's a service. If you're going with the cloud, there's no installation, no setup, and no server or VM initialization.

UiPath also has something called REFramework (Robotic Enterprise Framework). The REFramework is built-in and helps streamline implementations with some of the industry best practices for development. UiPath provides that to everybody as a basic template to start an implementation. Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere usually provide you with a blank slate and a junior developer might struggle a bit to actually understand how to do exception handling or logging. UiPath allows you to do that very simply with REFramework.

We have also used the UiPath Academy courses and they have been very beneficial. UiPath started giving all their Academy material free of cost to everybody. They were the first RPA vendor to do that. By doing that, they created a competency, globally, inUiPath. It certainly helps everybody. If I don't understand something about a new feature that comes out, I open the Academy and watch a video, or I read some material or a white paper that they have published, and I understand it better.

The material is really good. It helps you understand their platform in a very robust manner. There are walkthroughs where you can do implementations and developments while the course is going on. That really helps as well.

The Academy helps us build an internal understanding of new capabilities and then go to clients and tell them, "This is another new capability. It's available to you free of cost because you've already purchased the licenses. Here is what its potential is, and this is how you should implement it." As a result of the Academy courses, we can advise clients better and help them unleash that potential.

UiPath changed the way that they do licensing, starting in 2022. Any partner that has status with them is now allowed to sell licenses, because UiPath itself does not sell licenses anymore. They have a sales team that manages licenses and works with vendors like us.

They can definitely work on the way that they publish material about their licenses. Every year they change their license SKUs. They change the definitions and the naming conventions. They change capabilities and functionalities. It becomes very hard, as a user, to track it. We recently had to renew our licenses and the way that they defined the RPA developer license had changed. The RPA developer license is now called an automation developer license. The two capabilities are very different. We had to go through learning to make sure that we would have all the capabilities that we had previously, and understand what the new capabilities are.

There was no material available on their partner portal or on the internet to help us understand which licenses give you which capabilities. That's something that they need to make more transparent and not reinvent it every year. They need a level of standardization.

There is a tool called Power Automate which used to be called WinAutomation. Power Automate is available to everybody with an Office 365 license. The only other competitor to UiPath's community would be the WinAutomation/Power Automate community. It is a very community-driven solution, similar to UiPath. That community is as strong as the UiPath community.

UiPath recently got into the process analysis space. They've started doing things like task mining and process mining, but I wouldn't say UiPath is a leader in that space. They do have something called Task Capture that allows you to document processes for automation. But UiPath's process analysis piece is not yet as developed as much as something like Celonis.

The way we break down the process around automation is into three stages: advice, implement, and operate. The advice piece, which includes process assessment and building business cases is an area where UiPath is not great as a tool. It has the capabilities, but it's fairly new.

But at the "implement" stage, obviously it's a great product.

And the "operate" is where they have realized that the stickiness comes in with clients. There's always going to be a need for "operate" and they are getting into it. They provide something called UiPath Insights that gives you analysis about how your automation is running in production and to help you manage the automations. It gives you quick dashboards to present to senior leaders to show ROI and business case creations. UiPath needs to grow in the "operate" space and they are doing so. Neither Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere offers anything for process mining or task mining.

In terms of innovation, I don't think that the cloud solution helps me innovate. UiPath's integration functionalities can help me come up with an innovative solution, but the fact that it's a cloud instance or software as a service, does not really help me innovate as much. I could do the same innovation with an on-prem solution.