UiPath Platform Reviews

We automate the entire revenue and order to cash and then process it to payables. It is used for processes, from generating customer invoices to ensuring that all our vendors are getting paid timely. We also use it for data reporting, audit requirements, or whatever information gathering that the company may need.

We've automated about 30-ish processes, and that's just the tip of the iceberg of where it's going.

All of the processes are attended to right now. We're still getting the backend set up to move some of them to unattended.

The solution has improved the organization by providing time savings. That's one of the most fundamental things. We recently had a project that would take a human who's actually navigating through the screens and clicking all the buttons roughly a month's worth of work, if that was their primary focus all day long. We were able to get that completed within two days using UiPath. Therefore, the time savings are phenomenal. 

Also, when you're dealing with all that data, there's a lot less likelihood of human error and missteps. With the bot, we know for sure that the line is the line, and that's it. It's error-free for the most part.

The low to no-code is by far the most valuable feature. Developing a bot in under a minute that saves you an hour a day is phenomenal.

The user community is great. Looking at the forums, when a question is posted, the responses are fairly quick, either from UiPath or the community itself. In my past role, I posted to the community before, and I had been able to answer some questions as well. Then, it's nice to know people are having the same problems you're having and finding solutions.

I've taken UiPath Academy courses. I've taken mostly the developer ones, and then I'm looking into more of the admin side, with the Orchestrator and project management side of it. The biggest value is that it walks you through step by step and you're doing it alongside the course. It's hands-on learning. It's one thing to watch a video. It's a different thing actually to play with it and have something start working.

Overall the training and documentation could be better. There's just so much of it, so a streamlined way to get to the information I need would be ideal.

I've used the solution for about two years. 

It's very stable. Performance-wise and stability-wise, it's great. We're able to access it from anywhere. I have the Orchestrator app on my phone, so I can always keep track of the bots that we've developed and see how they're doing and everything.

Scalability is something we're still looking into. We just started, so we're still in the groundwork. However, in terms of being able to scale, the potential's there. We just need more time to play with it.

I've had one instance with them, and it was great. They knew their stuff, they walked me through everything.

Positive

Before UiPath, we used Nintex RPA, and then an SAP RPA tool as well. We used to UiPath to get more usability and scalability. The user-friendliness of the product and just the engine and the innovations that they're making behind it really placed them as a leader in the sector.

I was involved in the implementation since proposing the idea to start developing and starting a road show to be able to expand.

The process was straightforward. I had no qualms about it.

We started small. We essentially had two developer licenses, a couple unattended, and then a couple attended. We had already identified who would the attended bots go to, and did all that legwork in the forefront. Once we got the license enabled, we could activate it, work in the Orchestrator to assign the specific roles, and then have them start running. Within a week, we were able to get bots out the door and have people actually using them.

Everything has been done in-house. We've been building everything ourselves. 

We've definitely seen an ROI. For example, in one project, we were able to take a month's worth of human effort and completed it in two days with UiPath. We've had several others of a similar nature.

The pricing is a bit high compared to other products. That said, it does offer more. From working with other ones, it is definitely a more powerful tool and well worth the pricing.

We did evaluate other options. We had the ones we used before. We also looked at Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and a couple of others. 

The difference was a sense of familiarity. I had previous experience with UiPath. Mainly the innovations and the fact that since 2019 on the Magic Quadrant, they've been the leader consistently, and they will continue to be, were the reason we chose UiPath.

We do not use the AI functionality in our automation as of right now. It is something I'm interested in, however.

Our company will be involved in an environmental initiative using UiPath. We have an environmental group. As of right now, we haven't thought about taking it that far. We've only had it for about a month or two. It's something we're considering for the future. 

The most important part is going to be the user interface. The people who are developing it, the people who are using it, they're the ones who are going to have the most to say about it. Your business end-user has the most to say about it; if they don't like it, that's all you'll hear. By focusing on that user interface, which UiPath has done, you really get a solid project that people get excited about rather than leaving a bad taste in their mouths.

I'd rate the solution a nine out of ten. I love the product.

Our biggest use case right now is around business development. We use UiPath to run reports that we get off of the internet against our internal databases to try and find anyone who is a client because we're a law firm.

Most of my development right now has been on the business development side. We're helping clients with their cases, whether it's a litigation case, a bankruptcy case, or a real estate case. I use UiPath to help identify potential clients or current clients so that we can help them in their legal space.

UiPath has helped to alleviate some of the workload of our paralegals, assistants, and secretaries. They were going through large files of cell rows, and it was taking up many hours of their day. Using UiPath, I was able to automate a lot of it so that they don't have to spend that time. Now, it's more of a review process as opposed to a daily, mundane process of going through Excel files.

On one of the other processes that I developed, a marketing assistant had to take another daily report, and check to see if any of the companies that were filing for litigation on that report were clients or prospects. It took three hours of her day every day, and it's done five days a week. Now with UiPath, I have it unattended and running at 5:00 a.m. so that when she gets in, all she has to do is review the report that I generate for her. That's a consolidation of what comes off the website, what we have in our internal systems, and anything that matches.

I do all my developing in Studio. I develop and publish into the orchestrator cloud, and then I try and run everything unattended. So, Studio is a very valuable feature for me.

Another feature that I've been using a lot is the new integration app with Microsoft that triggers emails.

The UiPath Academy courses are great because when there are things that you don't know right off the bat, it helps you develop, learn, and grow within the platform. I've done a few courses and plan on doing more. It's definitely helpful for me being someone that didn't come from a development background. I taught myself UiPath in the beginning, and now that I know how expansive the Academy is, I'm definitely going to take more classes so that I can learn exactly how much I can do with UiPath.

I would like to see ongoing integrations with different applications. For example, we have UKG, which is an HRIS or HCM system. I'd love to see if there could be some sort of connection there because there are definitely some HR tasks from onboarding and offboarding that we do in the HCM that I'd love to have UiPath help with.

I like that UiPath is a platform for more than just one specific product. So, I'd like to see continued expansion of the platform and have different APIs connected to it. Different integrations sitting on top of it are just going to make it more beneficial because you'll be able to have everything come into one spot instead of having to buy four or five different products.

My firm has had it since 2019, and I've personally used it for about a year and a half. 

We're in the cloud and not on-premises, and I think the cloud runs pretty well. Up until last week, the stability was great. 

Last week, I had an issue with one of my licenses falling off of the unattended robot. I was surprised that it happened. I don't really know why it happened, and I'm working on getting it fixed.

The scalability is great. There's definitely a lot of potential for it to scale, especially in our environment.

They support infrastructure and not development, which at first was a little bit of a bummer for me. Their tech support has been great when it does revolve around infrastructure, and I'd rate them at eight out of ten.

Positive

We found a couple of clients using the UiPath processes with respect to business development.

I think the pricing is reasonable. I don't think it's too much of a stretch, and I think it's where it should be.

If you have a lot of paper processes or routine processes that are weighing down your employees, then UiPath and automation, in general, are the way to go. There's fear that it's going to take over the human role, which it just doesn't. From a 500 foot view it kind of makes sense, but when you're developing and working on the automations, you realize that you really can't get rid of the human aspect of it. This is because there are always going to be some sort of checks and balances as well as things that the robot can't do and decisions it can't make. So, don't have that fear and push away from automation or UiPath. They go well together, and you should definitely consider it.

Overall and considering the usability of UiPath, I'd give it a nine out of ten. I think there's a lot of documentation out there with the forums and with partners that support as well. UiPath does a really great job, and I'm happy that my firm decided to purchase its product.

We can use UiPath for pretty much anything, including document reading, day-to-day processing, or maintenance cases. For pretty much anything that the business comes up with, we can use UiPath. 

It's the only RPA software I've ever used. It's really given us the capability to help automate a ton of slow-moving tasks.

It is helping to automate some finance processes, shared service processes, and items like that to eliminate some tedious tasks that people don't want to deal with.

The Automation Hub helps prioritize things. I'd say using the community edition to get citizen developers on board has been great. Those are probably the two biggest aspects of the solution for me.

The user community is helpful. The forum is really great. I need to build up a bigger community around me; however, for right now, the users are super helpful.

I've used UiPath's Academy courses. It's great for letting people do training at their own pace. It also speeds up training. I don't have to spend hours teaching people how to do stuff. They can do it whenever they want. That's super helpful.

We'd like more onboarding features for new people. I mostly taught myself. It would help if it was more proactive in reaching out and saying, "Here are all of our connectors. Here's the stuff you can do." The program itself is really easy to use, however, to understand the capabilities, it would be nice to have more of a guiding hand.

I've used the solution for probably two years. 

The stability is good. I've never had a feed down and find it to be rather solid. 

The scalability is pretty strong. It seems to be as scalable as you want to make it. It depends on your design. For example, if you make a shady bot, that's not going to work scalability-wise. However, if you build your bot the right way to handle tasks quickly, it'll do it quickly and will scale well.

Technical support is really good. I've only used it twice. However, both times they have been really quick to respond and help.

Positive

We did not previously use any other RPA software.

I am involved in the initial setup process. I started the CoE of my last job, and I'm doing that at this job now.

We used a partner to help with it, so it was pretty straightforward. If I had to do it myself, I'd probably struggle, however, with partners, it's easy.

I have seen an ROI. The first spot I made paid for the license. It's pretty quick to realize a return on investment. 

We've used Automation Hub to track monetary and hourly savings. My last company probably saved to the tune of $300,000 annualized. I just started this job. I will be able to note an ROI pretty soon.

I need to dig into pricing a bit more. It's pretty affordable for what you get. 

We evaluated the whole market before choosing UiPath. However, I wasn't directly a part of the process and, therefore, can't get into specifics. 

I do not yet use UiPath to automate processes that deal with a good cause that our company is involved in. I've only worked at the company for two weeks. I'm a little new.

I have yet to use the AI functionality in our automation program. 

I'd advise others to work with a partner to deploy it at your company. Don't try to do everything at once. Build a list of ideas before you start trying to get into things. Have a funnel of projects to do.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. They could improve a couple of things. However, it's really easy to use. You don't really have to learn any code. It is really easy to get people to learn it on their own. It's pretty solid overall.

We have quite a few use cases, and a few big ones are creating purchase orders, reviewing invoice PDFs and extracting information from them, and creating customer orders from forms that are emailed in.

UiPath Orchestrator is a valuable feature for us. We started with all attended bots without Orchestrator, on-premises, or on the cloud. It was almost like a very low-cost way to prove that we needed this technology and that we could use it. So, for our first year, we did that. For the second year, we got Orchestrator, and it gave us the ability to utilize the bots more effectively. I thought we were going to have more attended bots, and we didn't because the process owners wanted things to happen in the background and wanted to be able to schedule them. Being able to do that and not have to have someone worry about triggering the bot or babysitting the computer while the bot runs, etc. have been the biggest game-changers for us.

The biggest benefit we've seen from using UiPath is time savings. Since June, when our fiscal year started, we've saved 8,000 hours so far. We're measuring everything in terms of hours saved, mainly because that's where we see the most benefit. I haven't really seen a big cost reduction, like replacing people with automation. Our teams are pretty slim right now.

A lot of the time what we found was that people were working extraordinarily long days. Now, they're actually able to do their job because they don't have all these other things that they had to take care of before. With some of our use cases in customer service, we've been able to avoid costs by not having to hire temporary staff. This is because a lot of the transactions that they would've taken care of are now done by the bots. They are doing it faster and more accurately. We have automated 36 processes so far. We have three attended, but most of our processes are unattended.

The biggest value of the UiPath Academy courses has been the ability to point new citizen developers to it. They are self-guided and require very little oversight from the team, so it provides the ability to grow a citizen development community with very little time from our team. The UiPath Academy is also useful for onboarding new team members; you can point them to some of the basic courses and have them get an idea of what RPA is all about, what we have, Orchestrator, etc.

UiPath Insights needs improvement. It's been almost five months since we got it, and I'm yet to see a business impact dashboard, which was the selling point.

Trying to get Insights support has been really tricky. The documentation that's out there is not detailed enough, and it doesn't really tell you how to make it happen. I've paid for a product for five months that I still can't present to my senior leadership.

I've been using UiPath for about two and a half years.

The stability is good overall, and we haven't really had any issues. We do have certain processes, especially with certain systems, that are very finicky, and we have to go back and keep updating. I don't know how much of it is UiPath versus just the nature of automation.

We got premium support, but getting the attention of the person that is dedicated to our account has been really hard. It shouldn't be that hard, especially not when we're paying $12,000 a year for it.

We've also had a lot of issues with Insights. When we get to the right person, it's helpful and easy, but getting to the right person is way too complicated, especially considering that we're paying for premium support.

So, I would give technical support a rating of seven on a scale from one to ten.

Neutral

We went with UiPath because they are a leader in the robotics industry.

The initial deployment was complex. We started with all attended, and transitioning from attended to orchestrated was not easy. Nobody understood that we had been operating robots without any orchestration, so whenever we talked to UiPath, they would tell us to get our on-premises Orchestrator and migrate it to the cloud even though we didn't have an on-premises Orchestrator. They should've already known that because they had all the details. It wasn't straightforward, but we did it.

Transitioning to Orchestrator in the cloud, probably, took us three months. 
We had to recreate workflows because the workflows were attended to.

We did it ourselves.

I talked to the CIO of a medical company, and they had implemented Automation Anywhere. They had a good experience with it, and it was good for their use cases. However, their use cases were very different from ours. So, I talked to some of our partners, and one of our partners had a relationship with a UiPath partner, so we did the proof of concept with UiPath. It worked, and so we just went from there.

Understand what your goals are with RPA, and make sure that UiPath is the right vehicle for it.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would rate UiPath at nine.

We have implemented a couple of use cases. One is with our creative collection scenario. We are also working on order automation. That will go live in October.

Since we are fairly new, I will say we have only two scenarios running right now, and they've been going on for almost a year. It's definitely saved us a lot of time. We haven't rolled out too many scenarios yet. When we'll be rolling out our order automation for 15 countries, I will see more benefits in the uses as we go.

The most valuable feature is definitely the document understanding. We have started using it for the order automation project that I'm working on. It definitely has some challenges also, especially dealing with other languages. However, so far, it's good.

We only have our Cash App or our credit collection scenario. We save around one-tenth of the time we typically spend where a lot of transactions happen. We save around 60 hours every month, at least for now.

UiPath's user community is definitely helpful. Usually, I'd look it up there first when we run into a problem.

Our team has used UiPath Academy courses. Academy courses were really helpful in giving us a good start to have a good foundation. Although we use UiPath to develop our scenarios, having that Academy access and going through the training definitely helped us get up to speed very quickly.

I definitely want some improvement on the documentation of the understanding side.

Maybe they should build more out-of-the-box apps rather than companies building their own implementation from scratch and maybe build them as a product on top of the platform. That would save time in implementation.

We're a SAP shop, so I'm looking more at what scenarios can be pre-booked using UiPath. I know there are some escalators that are there in SAP. However, they are not production ready, in my view. That area definitely can be improved since they're all Excel-based, and they're more proof of concept rather than production ready.

I've been using the solution for almost two years. 

Stability is one area where I'm really concerned. Sometimes it does behave erratically and I have to stop everything, and deploy it again, and it works fine. Therefore, I have some concerns about how it's going to scale out when there is a very high volume.

I'm concerned that we may have issues with scalability as it can behave erratically, and I have to stop and redeploy it.

For example, right now, we have a very small implementation. We will be implementing this order automation for 15 countries with a lot of customers. So I have concerns about how UiPath will scale out to these countries plus even more countries that I am planning to implement as well. What will be the process, what will the performance impact, and how is it going to behave? I do have concerns there right now.

I have dealt with technical support a few times. That said, most of the time, I could figure out the problem myself. There is one problem that I'm still dealing with in terms of technical support, and it's been ongoing. They have involved the product team to help resolve that particular issue. I have to say that I'm not thrilled with the support that I got.

Neutral

We did not previously use a different solution. We used to do everything manually.

I lead our automation implementation. For our treasury, it was easy; however, for the automation we are going live with in October, the process is a bit more complex. 

Our implementation strategy involved starting small and starting with a couple of use cases. I decided to use UiPath as our partner to cover our bases since I wanted to ensure we have a good foundation with best practices before we start doing anything in-house.

We had UiPath assist us with the initial implementation. The experience was pretty good. There were some challenges to deal with in terms of having a robust solution with good logging and notifications. That definitely didn't happen right off the bat. That said, overall, it was an okay process. 

We are definitely seeing an ROI. For example, we are saving 60 hours every month, and it's a small implementation. With order automation, we are going to save a lot of time. I don't have the exact numbers yet. However, we are positive about the outcomes we expect.

I was quite surprised at the pricing. We decided to implement action forms, and at that time, I was not aware that there is a separate licensing. It's difficult sometimes when you have to go back to your finance team or the sponsor and tell them that you need more money. Any licensing requirement has to be clear up front rather than being revealed later. I'm not worried about the cost, it's more about knowing what license we need, and in my implementation, we had quite a few mishaps related to licenses.

We looked at a couple of other products.

I don't want to go into what products we looked at. However, I can definitely say the main criterion behind selecting UiPath was its ease of use. We did a proof of concept in-house without any help. That was my main criterion for making a decision. 

Also, there's a good product path in terms of what they're doing next. UiPath is a market leader. We wanted to go with a solution that not only meets our needs for now but also is taking the effort, time, and money in building the product and bringing new capabilities.

We're fairly new to the process and have yet to get into using UiPath for a good cause.

We aren't using the AI functionality yet.

I'd advise potential users to do their homework. Look at other products and make the decision based on what capabilities you are looking at. I will say don't look at only one scenario. Look at the overall picture. Look at what your future plans are. I still believe UiPath is the best product when it comes to RPA. However, you have got to look at the whole picture at the outset.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. There are a lot of good things happening. It's very easy to use, and UiPath has a very good product roadmap. That's the key for me. Especially with AI, process mining, cost mining, et cetera, they're really going to help any company that signs on.

We use it mostly for reconciliation, automatic emails, and monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports and extractions. Document Understanding is another big use case for us.

The AI functionality cuts down development time. The out-of-the-box models are pretty good at extracting and do account for variations. We don't have to do it template by template, at least for invoices and purchase orders. Thus, it's a huge time saver.

We have more than a hundred unattended automated processes and hope to scale as well. We have a healthy pipeline, and our COE just prioritizes them and chooses the ones with the most impact.

The core RPA is the best feature because of how easily we can get started. The other most valuable feature is DU or Document Understanding. It doesn't require huge setup and implementation times. When you look at a pure machine learning model, it requires a lot of expertise. Though UiPath is not purely plug-and-play, it's almost like plug-and-play because it can be up and running very quickly.

UiPath has definitely helped us with productivity. It has helped us to grow because as we bring in more companies, we don't have to add more people or train new people. The existing staff can handle the growth. Also, the team no longer has to do some of the manual, repetitive activities and can focus on more value-added work. We're looking at how to move analytics and data into the department and use the time saved to upskill the employees.

I connect with local customers and find it very beneficial to share best practices. My team tells me that the UiPath user community forums are pretty active and that if they're stuck and post a question they get a response pretty quickly. I only hear good things about the forums.

I took the UiPath Academy basic certification training before I rolled it out to the others. It's pretty good, but you still need to be technical. You cannot pick an analyst and then put them through the full certification. However, the training is self-explanatory. The Automation Academy is good as well. The biggest value I've gained from UiPath Academy is the self-learning methodology. Having free self-learning material makes sense when you don't know whether you are committing to the solution.

I would like to know more about the product features and real use cases. Sometimes, all I hear is how quickly the solution can be up and running, and I don't hear about all the work that goes into it. Because everybody has a choice with bots and process improvements, unlike that with ERP systems, I would like to have more information on how to constantly evangelize.

In the UiPath Academy, there's not much documentation for Document Understanding and Process Mining. Documentation for some of the newer tools needs to be added to the UiPath Academy.

I've been using UiPath for three years.

I haven't seen any degradation in terms of performance.

It scales well.

UiPath's technical support is pretty good. If their level one support is unable to take care of an issue, they will then escalate it to product managers. I would give technical support a rating of eight on a scale from one to ten because they are not as good at supporting some of the newer technologies.

Positive

The initial deployment is straightforward. It took a few months to set up everything, and we scaled slowly. It's easier now that we've moved to the cloud.

We did it all ourselves. We tested everything in UiPath Academy first to see if it would work for us.

UiPath has reduced the number of hours spent on manual work, and that is our ROI.

The cost could be lower. The pricing is not transparent, so we don't always know if we really are getting a good price.

We evaluated Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. When we looked at the total cost of ownership, UiPath felt better for our situation.

Compared to other solutions, UiPath offers a lot of products in its portfolio. The customer success manager attends to our needs, gives access, answers our queries, and takes care of us. Also, UiPath has a robust community, so it pays to be with the leader to get all of these benefits. Thus, I rate UiPath at nine on a scale from one to ten.

We're currently rolling out some of our first few automations. So far, it's been in finance and procurement. We're just automating some of their inventory processing workflows.

The automation will be unattended. We have three that are in active development and another six in backlog awaiting development.

The first few automations have definitely had an impact already. One that we're rolling out, we anticipate having a great impact. One that I'm currently working on should probably have the biggest impact so far on one of our departments. It will save us time and therefore cost. It's a very manual process with lots of human error opportunities. Between how much faster it's going to happen now and how it will be 100% accurate, we anticipate seeing a huge benefit from that.

I appreciate the infrastructure. There are numerous platforms through which we can perform automation. We are in the Microsoft sphere, and so we have the opportunity to use the Power Platform to do lots of automation. However, I've been impressed with the infrastructure that UiPath provides in developing, publishing, and rolling out these automations and then being able to monitor and manage them effectively.

The community can be helpful. In the public forums, I have seen some forum threads that are very active with lots of people that respond with great answers and great context, and multiple options. That said, there are just as many cases where no answer is ever provided, and it just disappears into obscurity. I've had multiple of those types of approaches myself, where I've posted questions and gotten no response. The community can be helpful. For somebody like me that wants to get something out of it, I would also need to be willing to put something into it and help others answer their questions, as that's how the community works.

For the most part, I was impressed with the Academy courses. They did a great job of introducing me to a new piece of software I hadn't seen before and establishing some familiarity with it. The instructor-led training from UiPath, allowed me to put into practice some of the things that I had learned in the Academy. 

The biggest pain point we've seen so far is that we have trouble identifying best practices in certain areas and circumstances. There is no shortage of resources in the Academy and on the forums that have great information. That said, a lot of them are specific to use cases, or they're too generalized, which makes it difficult to know exactly how we should be handling a certain scenario or just some basic things about how to best set up the folder structure for our given environment.

It's been difficult to navigate that as it is still so early in our implementation of RPA. We want to ensure we're doing it right to establish a good foundation from which we will build all of our future automation. We are constantly concerned that we're not doing something the right way.

During a UiPath conference attendance, I really appreciated having access to experts directly. I can just ask them, "Here's our scenario. In this context, what's the best practice?" And I can get a straightforward answer. We don't have access to them outside of this conference. I don't always have the time to watch the videos or go through the multi-hour-long training to get to the one best practice that might be nested inside a larger training.

Finding some of the answers ourselves is difficult since they are contingent upon our scenario and the context we're building. There's not a one size fits all. To that end, it's no surprise that there's not going always to be a single solution that can just be published to say, "Always do this, this way." Without that context, we really do need to be able to talk to somebody, and we haven't had that yet.

In terms of the UiPath community, I probably can't answer a whole lot of questions since I'm so new; however, for a community like that to function and succeed, there have to be enough people with the expertise that are willing to put in that time for free. In a realm of automation that touts itself as a solution for people who have no time, it's no surprise that there are not always people that are willing to sacrifice what time they don't already have to begin with to give out free service.

Once I have automation ready for production, I don't see a way to deploy that to a production tenant environment without manually recreating everything. In a typical development environment in software development, you develop in one area, and then when it's ready for deployment, it's packaged up with all of the assets and everything that it needs, and then you deploy it to the production environment. You do some final testing to ensure the deployment takes, and you're done. Whereas here, it seems like I'm having to recreate everything manually. I can import the automation, yet I need the whole structure and orchestrator and all of the assets (75), and I have to recreate everything manually. It seems something is missing. 

I just started using the solution three months ago. 

The solution is pretty stable. That said, that'll be a question better suited for me in about three months after we've had our bots live. Since we're only in development and testing them in pretty controlled environments, it's harder to tell. It seems like it would be pretty stable. However, I can't answer that fully.

From what I understand, it scales well. I understand that's one of the directions that we see ourselves going. We'll be taking on more and more automation and scaling up quickly.

I haven't had any technical support directly from UiPath yet. I've only learned that we can request a technical account manager, and I understand that we don't have one right now. I'm not sure what additional cost that may incur, either. It's always that question of the cost versus the benefit. That's what we need - that technical expertise from somebody that can have a short conversation with us and help steer us in the right direction.

I have worked in the Power Platform with Microsoft. That is not specifically for RPA, per se. However, I've worked in it and have familiarity with it. 

One of the biggest pros for sticking with Microsoft would be that we're a Microsoft shop, so it would keep all of our solutions in the same realm. We wouldn't have to export and import data across services and databases. It would just all be under the same umbrella. That's a huge benefit of sticking with Microsoft.

With UiPath, there's a stronger infrastructure that supports the development, maintenance, and scale of automation versus Microsoft. However, Microsoft is still pretty new and young to the RPA development environment, and they move very quickly. I would expect that they are not done developing their RPA suite either. I imagine that we'll see future iterations where they become a stronger contender to what UiPath provides.

I was not involved in the initial setup. That happened before me. 

We have yet to see an ROI since we don't have any of our automation fully live. We anticipate an immediate return as soon as these are in production based on the countless hours that will be saved from people's workdays.

The licensing is a headache. Luckily, I don't have to deal with it directly. That's above me. As a developer, I have to deal with the licensing just in trying to build new automation and ensure that there are licenses available to be allocated at runtime. That alone is just obscure enough to make it complicated and leave me unsure as to if I've set it up correctly.

I'm an RPA developer.

We do not yet use the AI functionality. 

I would advise potential new users to make sure they know what it is that they want. In our case, we need to choose between the options of sticking with the Microsoft Power Platform or going in a new direction with UiPath. Even though the Power Platform could potentially do everything we need to automate, it's not apples to apples against UiPath. If what your need is better suited to one or the other, don't force your solution into one product.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I'd rate it higher. However, there are technical issues that I've encountered and a steep learning curve. We've had difficulty in finding the specific answers we're looking for and lack access to technical experts that can answer complex questions, pricing, the ambiguous nature of the licensing, and how those get provisioned. There are some core features still missing.

Our company uses the solution to process state reporting uploads for clients. 

For one use case, we automated the process of dragging forms, filling in fields, capturing confirmations, logging information, and moving files for upload. 

For another use case, we automated the process of manipulating data, setting filters, and generating reports in Excel. 

We are now moving to another department that uploads yearly tax reporting files to websites. 

We do not yet use AI but have many possible use cases for reading invoices and PDFs so we will try these processes first. 

We have saved a lot of time on uploads. For example, our state reporting uploads now take only two to four minutes and that saved us 7,500 hours for January alone. We anticipate similar time savings for the automations we are currently doing in another department. 

As we continue to automate our uploads, we will not need as many seasonal workers so that is a big cost savings. 

The solution includes preset activities but allows integration of code and expressions that make it more powerful and dynamic. In nine month's time I have barely scratched the surface, but it feels like it integrates to so many things that finding new use cases is easy. 

The automations allow us to better catch errors because data is always transcribed correctly.

The upgrade process could be improved so that it does not require download and reinstall. It would be nice to have an upgrade option that talks directly to the orchestrator. 

Some documentation can be improved. For example, documentation for integrations and activities tells you what it does but does not tell you how to fill in variables or fields. I had issues finding some things I needed for new activities or integrations. 

I have been using the solution for nine months. 

The solution is pretty stable. You may have version issues because there are a lot of updates, but that is not a stability issue. It is always important to make sure you have the latest updates. 

The solution is definitely scalable but it takes time to learn how to best scale. There are many routes you can take which depend on different things. 

The Community is super helpful because they share information that is of great benefit. Forums have been useful when I have needed help. 

I gained my experience through the Academy's courses. I was in a different role at my company but they needed another UiPath developer. For three months, I did a rotation with the RPA foundations course. After that, I was able to start working in the full time developer role. The Academy was very helpful and allowed me to jump in with no UiPath experience. 

Technical support is very helpful. I only contacted them once for an issue with the Salesforce API package that would not run with attended users. They responded in a timely fashion and helped me quickly resolve the issue. I rate support a ten out of ten. 

Positive

Our company previously did not use an RPA tool but rather used command line scripts and tools with Python. 

One of our developers had been writing scripts and came across the solution. He showed our company how much time it saves while improving accuracy. 

The setup is pretty straightforward. 

It is amazing how easy it is to automate some things. Once you learn the interface, everything is straightforward. 

I assisted our department in implementing the solution in-house. I helped build and run things for our big rollout in January of 2022. 

Since then, I have automated fourteen processes with attended bots. 

There is a big learning curve to ensure you get everything invested in the solution to realize ROI. 

For example, my department only had two developer licenses but still managed to save 1,300 hours in the first year. Another department was scaling a much bigger deployment, so it took longer for them to hit returns.

The solution is affordable enough to get a good return on your investment. We get ROI over the cost of licenses. 

We started out on-premises because we did not have attended licenses. Now, we are moving to attended for bots and trying to publish more things to the cloud so others can run them. 

I looked at Blue Prism but have not spent time using it. 

Start with a couple of solid use cases that would realize time and ROI benefits so you can see how the solution works. 

Do not go too wide or too fast with deployments. Focus on a few things first until you are clear how you want to expand. It is important to decide whether you want more citizen or RPA developers and whether your bots will be attended. Just take it slowly unless you are working with someone who has high-level knowledge. 

I rate the solution a nine out of ten.