UiPath Platform Reviews

My primary use case is automation. I worked in multiple companies with the same product on the same profile, and most of them were automation. The actual business use case would vary from company to company, and project to project as well.

One feature that I personally found valuable was the orchestrator. It is a pretty mature platform as of now, and it was three to four years back when I started to first use it. It has matured quite well. They had a major change a couple of years back. Our company transitioned from an older approach to a newer modern approach that they deployed. The orchestrator platform was very well-suited to the new approach - as was the development studio. It's really easy to use and intuitive. That has matured quite well as far as I can tell. These two are what I liked the most about the product.

UiPath’s ease of use and quick deployment times were great as the cloud orchestrator, which did not need much of a setup.

To build automation using UiPath is fairly simple. The studio is quite easy to use. Even now, with the community edition, it’s great. If we want to learn to start or try out something, we do not have to wait for licenses or anything else. That said, we can also get an enterprise trial. If we want to do something, learn something, even during our personal time, we can just download it. They also provide a free orchestrator version as well, so it becomes quite easy to learn and develop. 

The building, deployment, and manual deployment processes, for small-scale projects, are very easy. If we need to build something, we just publish it, and it generates the NuGet package. It's very easy to deploy there.

The materials and the training courses are all pretty well-structured to get started with.

UiPath Academy courses have assisted in the process of getting our team up to speed. The basics were there even when I started out. I was not initially an RPA developer. I was into server operations before this. The UiPath Academy training really helped a lot with the initial courses, where they give you a tour of the platform and each and every activity. For audiences who are not much into software development, these courses can guide them towards that. The building blocks got us up to speed. They have very good courses there.

Regarding the Academy, it is a great learning platform for basic tasks. However, for more complex information, I turn to UiPath Forum. Sometimes I need some Python or C# scripts or am building custom libraries there. That gets shifted onto different platforms like Stack Overflow. We Google other platforms as well for the other types of queries.

UiPath Forum is a pretty good place in terms of the user community. Most of the queries that are posted generally get answered. Sometimes, even for smaller issues, we do not go directly into UiPath support and we first try to resolve the issues via what we find in the UiPath Community. Overall, it’s a pretty good place to solve our issues, and the community as of now is pretty active.

We saved time in our IT department since we started to use this solution. UiPath handles infrastructure for the orchestrator and its maintenance. There's a pretty good amount of time saved as we had initially had a server on-prem deployment as well. However, it became cumbersome to deploy multiple databases and they have some Elasticsearch requirements and security updates that need to be regularly maintained and in sync with UiPath. Due to this infrastructure overhead, our time could be consumed maintaining everything. Without them handling the infrastructure, we'd be maintaining instead of building automations and deploying them. We realized that an automation cloud would be a better option which is why we switched.

UiPath reduced human error. That said, we do not track errors in the process. It's a good metric to track as well, however, we currently do not track it.

It reduced employees’ time on certain tasks. The main purpose of automation is to save us the number of hours that the project will take. There are many other parameters, however, the time saved is one of the big ones. 

A weakness with Academy is that, with the current updates that they have, the newer updates, the courses are not up to speed. Nowadays, Academy does not feel that intuitive and does not give sufficient information about the product to the customer.

In our current use cases, we do not need much user interaction. One shortcoming with UiPath Apps is that it cannot directly integrate with the orchestrator platform itself. For example, if we need to fetch any assets, values, or cue data from the orchestrator itself, it's basically a web platform. Even if we develop apps and want to do something based on that data, they do not have direct integration with the orchestrator. We need a separate bot, which will then interact with the orchestrator and then pass it back.

If we need ten to fifteen users who might simultaneously use apps, and we want to run a process for each of these users, then we might need fifteen licenses to do that. That is something that has been holding us back from using it, as it does not have direct orchestrator access. We need a separate bot to get the data to perform some actions.

Scaling and licensing need major improvement. I know that they have released something called Serverless Cloud Robots, where the bot machines do not need infrastructure. However, we do not generally want to run the bots or the data in the UiPath cloud as well. There are some hiccups that do happen when we run bots on another machine. That said, it might be a good feature and we can scale up and scale down more effectively.

I've used the solution for nearly four years now.

The stability has been quite good for a couple of quarters now. We had some issues two or three quarters ago, where there was a downtime of around thirty minutes which impacted assessment. After that, for the last couple of quarters, we have not seen any issues regarding the platform itself. It is pretty stable.

The product allows scaling up, however, when we deploy and run the bot, the bot does not actually run on the orchestrator. The orchestrator is just a management platform. When we need to scale up bots, what we would need to do is spin up new virtual machines. We need those virtual machines in order to scale up. This, along with the licensing affects the ability to scale.

If someone does not have a license, it cannot scale up. When comparing it to something like AWS offers, or any other cloud service, where you can rapidly scale up and rapidly scale down based upon our demands, that is currently not possible with the UiPath. We do not get to easily scale up. We need to plan in advance as to when we run our automation, what time we need to offset the loads, and which automation gets priority at that time. That becomes a bit of an issue.

As of now, scaling is a bit cumbersome, whether we are scaling up or down, and the licensing also revolves around scaling.

We use both attended and unattended automation. In the case of attended automation, scaling is a bit tricky. We need to consider licenses. Very few need the same automation to run on one hundred machines. If we do, then we would need to find a way to manage these one hundred licenses as well. It again comes down to cost.

Our thought process is that whenever possible and where we need to scale, we try to avoid human interaction, and we try to convert our bad pieces into attended automation. If some automation requires a manual login due to regulatory compliance or maybe due to capture, what we do is have these login paths that we take in as unattended input. Then where it’s possible, we would run it as an unattended mode and maybe then pass on the output to the attended mode.

We have support from UiPath, however, I'm not sure what model we are on. 

The support is not as responsible as we would expect. It's not bad, but it's not good.

The response time, the overall solutions that they provide, and the workarounds are okay. It's a mix of everything. We've had somewhat of a mixed experience with them.

UiPath handles infrastructure, maintenance, and updates for the Automation Cloud - the infrastructure being the orchestrator infrastructure. The robot infrastructure is handled by us.

I was involved in the initial deployment of UiPath in our organization's deployment process. The deployment process is pretty straightforward with automation cloud data, so we did not need to worry about that. The administration is pretty straightforward as well. They have all of these access models, folders, and groupings. It's very easy, even for a new user that needs access to a particular box to run. It's also easy to maintain.

In terms of deployment on the cloud, there is no overhead. The administration process is simple. Maybe it took us around two to three days of initial setup. Most of the time was spent brainstorming on how we would need to structure our use case. That was what took the majority of the time. Once we decided on that, it was pretty easy. It can be done in one day. The process is also ongoing as the requirements change and the roles change, and it always requires some sort of maintenance, taking out users, taking in new users, et cetera. However, that's pretty easy.

In terms of the deployment of individual bots, it is pretty easy. The manual deployment is also pretty simple. We deploy it from the studio. We get a bundle package and we upload it at the studio level as well as the orchestrator, and it's done. This is a straightforward model. We do have a CI/CD pipeline setup for enterprises where we avoid manual deployments. In that case, we do not use UiPath CI/CD. We do use Git and pipelines to push our packages directly to UiPath.

I can't speak to if there has been an ROI or not.

The licensing could be more flexible. They might have a different enterprise cost strategy for each of the licenses. The license is rigid in that you cannot generally scale up. To scale up, we have to have a license procured before we can run a bot there.

I am not involved in the comparison between Uipath and its competitors, such as Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, or any other platform.

We do not really have clients in healthcare, however, my previous company has mainly evolved into what I can say is a pharmaceutical supply chain. The company is an ordering platform for pharmaceuticals. I'm not sure whether I can consider that as a healthcare pharmaceutical or supply chain use case.

I had done some trial POCs around the UiPath Apps feature. We did some basic trials within our team, however, we do not have any end-users who actively use UiPath Apps.

We're still at an early stage in terms of using AI in our automation via UiPath. We tried out some POCs, and I'm also just getting training on that as well. We do not have any production use cases right now that go into full AI or ML.

In general, they have a good ecosystem of developers. It would be easier to set up and use it. However, if a new company has heavier workloads and needs scaling capability based on time, they’ll need to calculate their requirements. For example, if I process 1,000 to 2,000 transactions per day and I need ten robots to do this and it's fixed every day, then it's fine. That said, if I have varying workloads, where the workload is the last week of the month and the workload is very high, maybe I’ll need twenty or thirty bots to accommodate this workload, while, for the rest of the month, I’ll just need around five bots. That's twenty-five bots that I’ll need to purchase, with many idle most of the time. That is one issue that needs to be planned correctly during the initial stage. 

Overall, I would rate UiPath eight out of ten.

We are a service-based development company and we implement automation for our clients. UiPath is one of the RPA solutions that we use for this.

A recent use case that we implemented for a client involved a macro in an Excel sheet. The macro contained approximately 1,000 lines, and it was being used in an Excel spreadsheet about 10 pages long. They had dropdowns within the sheet that had to be set, depending on the action. They also had to work with some of the logic themselves.

With UiPath, we implemented a solution where the bot will create a task. It first checks to see if all of the necessary conditions are there. If they are, then the bot will automatically run the macro. If instead, some of the values are missing and user input is required, then the bot will create a new task to request the missing items from the user. It uses the UiPath forms and the client will receive an email to say that a task has been created and that it will be completed once the necessary values are selected.

Finally, once all of the values have been selected, the bot will run, use the input, and complete the execution of the macro.

A second use case for us was done using the Action Center. In this case, our clients send emails, and we have API calls that are done in response. Once an email comes in, a message ID is created and assigned to it, then it is turned into a Queue item. At that point, the user is presented with different actions that are dictated by the content of the email.

Depending on the user's selection, there are three or four paths that it can take. Ultimately, the bot will send an ETA and some request data to the appropriate parties, which is controlled by yet another process.

Using UiPath for automation is a little bit costly but it saves a lot of time, and it also reduces human error. When humans perform tasks, there are a lot of errors that come about. However, when a bot performs the same task, the number of errors is significantly reduced. This is the reason that companies are implementing UiPath and undergoing a digital transformation.

In our experience, bots run with minimal errors, in the one or two percentage point range. Of the thousands of items that they process, very few will result in an error. Humans, by contrast, normally have an error rate of 5% or 6%.

It is very easy to develop automation using UiPath, and I would rate it a four out of five in this regard. This is true whether it is IT automation, UI automation, desktop automation, or otherwise. We have even performed Citrix Automation recently, where we used remote runtime. In that case, we had access to a lot of features and this made our work very easy to do.

This product enables us to implement end-to-end automation. Some of our clients use the process mining feature, which includes task capture. Then, based on that, they generate the process design document (PDD). After they have the PDD, the bot is designed using Studio, and then it is ready for deployment. Deploying a bot includes publishing it using Orchestrator, and once it is running, Orchestrator monitors it. From end to end, UiPath is part of the process.

This is important to us because some of our clients are not very technical. They have ideas of what they want to do, so they walk us through the steps in a process. During that time, we will begin using the task capture capability to record what they do, making it easier for us to gather ideas and requirements. The whole process is an easy way to capture good use cases for the client.

Most of our clients are now opting for cloud-based deployment. This is important to them because they don't have to store everything on their on-premises servers. Essentially, they don't have to waste any space.

One of the features that I like is that the bot will continue to work on other tasks, even if one task is blocked because it is waiting for user input. For example, it's very good because whenever we need to have user input, we don't need to use the attended automation. Just because the user is not available to select the actions, it will not break the bot. Rather, the bot will work on other tasks. Once the person manually completes the required action, the bot will resume the pending task.

It is very easy for us to get selectors by using the UI Launch Explorer. I have used other tools that require we visit the webpage and get the selectors manually. This means that we have to inspect the page and find the elements. However, with UiPath, we have the selectors readily available using UI Launch Explorer.

Another good feature is the UiPath Academy. Whenever a new feature is released, we learn about it from the Academy. I would rate it a four out of five in terms of helpfulness for getting employees up to speed. When we review the new courses that they release, we can quickly get a complete idea of the feature that they are presenting.

The UiPath forum is very helpful. It is the best forum available for any of the tools that we have. I would rate the UiPath forum a five out of five.

One of our clients is using the UiPath Apps feature, and although it is easy to use, they are having some issues with it. For example, when they deploy an update, it is pushed to the cloud and then it will break an hour later. There have been two or three such issues and ultimately, they result in a high priority ticket to fix the problem.

I have been working with UiPath for approximately four years.

With respect to stability, the general system is stable. This includes the robots, Automation Cloud, and the Action Center. However, we have had a lot of downtime with UiPath Apps. It had been one or two days per month when our processes were getting blocked and although many of these issues are resolved, last month we had recurring issues with downtime.

The technical support team is very helpful. For anybody with a license, there is an option to raise a ticket based on priority. The support team tries to fix such problems very quickly.

Overall, the support team is very good and I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

I have explored two or more other RPA solutions. One of them is Automation Anywhere, and another is Microsoft Power Automate.

When I explored Power Automate, it didn't have many features. It is a product that is still growing but when I looked at it, UiPath had more features.

In the case of Automation Anywhere, it's a little bit more difficult to work on. As an example, Automation Anywhere does not have ready-made selectors. There is no equivalent to the Ui Launch Explorer so we have to go to the webpage and find the elements by ourselves.

One advantage to Automation Anywhere is that it's a little bit less costly.

Using the Apps feature for one or two of our clients has sped up the time required to develop bots for them. Also, because it is a drag-and-drop interface that only requires a small amount of coding, making it work is much easier.

Our clients dictate the deployment model, whether it is on-premises or cloud-based. One of our clients uses Amazon but the majority of them work using virtual machines that are running on their in-house servers.

The automation saves time and money for our clients, although the amounts vary and are based on the specific solution. As an example, in an email task that we automated, the bots replaced a team of people. On average, the automation saved 28 hours per day for that task.

In general, several hours can be saved per day for each automation.

Due to the reduced costs and other benefits, our clients are ready to create more bots.

UiPath is a little more costly than competing solutions such as Automation Anywhere. 

The cost for licensing is handled by our customers that use the bots.

I have not personally used the AI functionality when creating automations, although some of our clients use features such as Document Understanding for invoice processing. They also use the ML Trainer. These features help them to automate processes that are more complex. For example, when they have 20 or 30 invoices coming in each day, the bot is trained to look at them and it makes the job very easy to do. Also, when the accuracy drops, the bot can wait for input in an attended fashion. This has helped a lot of our clients.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I use it for automating activities and processes in my company, and for discovering new automation opportunities. UiPath is my main tool for automating every process in business operations.

One of my main use cases for UiPath is around service desk and support center operations. I use it to take tickets from customers and users and automate answers using UiPath's machine learning. It links the questions to documentation where we already have answers.

I also use it for automating invoices with the pricing and other information and sending them to customers when they buy an item.

In addition, when somebody subscribes to a newsletter I have set up a process to send an email in reply.

Using the solution we can do task mining and process mining. The automations make everything easier for my business and for the other businesses where I implement them.

For example, one of my use cases is for a doctor's office to help manage the patients by handling their inquiries and automating the invoices. I have also set up processes to help with research and prescriptions. All these processes are automated and run without any human involvement.

And it has helped my business operations a lot. It's helping us detect all the performance issues and data threats. UiPath Insights helps us to prevent these issues from happening again. It's powering up our operation. We can analyze all our departments in one place and get the best usage from them using Insights.

We fully depend on UiPath for the three departments: sales, marketing, and service. Many of our sales operations are done by UiPath, such as generating invoices, research, and engaging with clients through the help tickets they submit, as well as through the email communication we do. 

And one of the most important benefits is the ability to identify new opportunities in my employees' workflows. It is able to record and discover what my employees do and we are able to create automations as a result. 

Digital transformation is another main focus. Through the UiPath Marketplace, I can get expert virtual employees who do very expert jobs and tasks without having to hire somebody or bring them into the office as an employee. It's all automated by the software. I can discover, build, manage, and engage with the robots. My employees can easily manage all the robots and the processes, increasing the collaboration among us.

All of this makes it easier to store and move data from Google Sheets to my own sheets or my CMS on WordPress.

It saves a lot of time. It has really transformed my operation from a situation where we were always pressed for time and had slow response times to customers. With UiPath, we have increased our customer satisfaction scores and get tasks done faster than ever. My employees are now using the time they used to spend on certain tasks for things that require more thought. It has transformed business operations 180 degrees, making everything easier, helping the business to grow faster, and improving performance. We have control of the front-end work as well as the back-end processes.

For me, the most valuable feature is the solution's ability to discover automation opportunities.

The Document Understanding feature for extracting information from documents or images helps reduce manual work, saving people from having to scrub data from PDF files or images. UiPath extracts all the information and stores it.

In addition, its AI and machine learning make everything easy, as do the Data Service tools, because they don't require coding to create automations. I can do everything without coding knowledge.

And the UiPath user community is the best. The people there are very friendly and helpful, and engage with each other. UiPath has done a good job building a good forum and a good blog, and making the community members interact with each other. The community is one of the reasons UiPath is my choice. It is a strong community.

I like most of the UiPath tools, but the UiPath Academy, in particular, wasn't my favorite part. It didn't have enough onboarding guidance when I started. The learning curve for the courses in the Academy was very difficult in the beginning. I had to turn to Google and YouTube to learn from other people, experts, and the community. The community was friendly, but the academy wasn't that helpful for me. I think it needs to improve on the information it provides to make it easier for beginners to learn, to help decrease the learning curve.

Also, the user interface needs to be more customizable, and the debugging tool doesn't work well enough. It needs some improvements.

I have been using UiPath for one year and eight months. I have several websites and three startups, and I also implement UiPath and automations for other companies.

It's stable. It has 99 percent uptime. 

Sometimes, when we are dealing with a large set of data, it becomes slower. I don't know if it is something to do with UiPath or something else, like the operating system or the connections. It is almost always stable, but when dealing with large data, it becomes a little buggy and slower. Sometimes it freezes and I have to turn everything off and restart it.

Their support staff has good knowledge about whatever I raise, but they are late in responding, at times. I have had to turn to the community more. When I can't find an answer, I turn to them and only after them to support. It should be the other way around. I should be turning to the support group and then, if needed, to the community. 

One good thing that I have found is that UiPath responds to the community and the recommendations of users. When we recommend something, they put it on their roadmap and they make plans for it in their app. They are engaging and friendly with users and the community, but they are late in responding.

Positive

I started by using Blue Prism but only for three or four months and then I left it and turned to UiPath. I couldn't find answers to my questions when I was using Blue Prism. I couldn't find a professional community to engage with or to get help from. This was the reason I started turning to UiPath, after reading a few reviews from several websites and some of the community posts. The UiPath community was providing good information about every capability of the solution. In my experience with Blue Prism, I couldn't find any valuable communities out there. With UiPath I found the opposite. 

Even now, I find it good to engage with the UiPath community. Whenever I need an answer to something or an explanation about a use case, I always turn to them.

They have to reduce the price a little bit for basic users, startups, and small companies.

One of the projects we have been working on is for a medical company. It includes fetching medical records from the company's web-based portal. These records have to be pasted into Excel and consolidated. We then send them back to the client via email. We use Orchestrator to schedule the process to run every day at three intervals. It is running as an unattended bot.

We have also used it for another company to help with their employee onboarding process.

If we had to build code from scratch in UiPath, we would have to configure proper exception handling and log creation. We would also have to connect it to Orchestrator queues. But with the predefined REFramework (Enhanced Robotic Enterprise Framework) template, those requirements have been built already. All we have to do is invoke our code in one of the four states: Init, Get Transaction, Process Transaction, and End Process. Because it is connected to Orchestrator's queues, we can then run the process.

We have also been able to develop our code based on UiPath's security and compliance credentials. UiPath supports confidentiality. Until now, we have never faced a security problem. It is the most secure RPA tool.

Another benefit is that UiPath automation saves our clients time. During our requirements gathering, one client told us that the process they wanted to be automated takes around 15 to 30 minutes to complete when done manually. As a result of the solution we implemented using UiPath, it is now completed within two minutes.

There are two features that I find to be the most valuable in UiPath. 

One is Orchestrator because it allows us to manage the bots and processes. For example, we can monitor unattended bots' run history and their logs. We can also modify our code based on screenshots by logging the screenshots and then viewing the logs in an Orchestrator job. That helps us trace errors and rectify them.

The second valuable feature is REFramework which is a pre-defined template built with proper exception handling and logging activities. Those aspects help developers to develop code properly.

In addition, I have implemented UiPath with ABBYY FlexiCapture for some projects, and that has been very helpful for successfully completing those projects and providing a positive impact for our customers. It makes it very easy to extract data from a PDF and then build code to process it in UiPath. The integration of ABBYY FlexiCapture with UiPath is a very good feature.

When it comes to REFramework, we need more training videos and tutorial documents for beginners. 

And while there are a lot of videos to learn about basic activities in UiPath, we need more documents and key points on how to connect third-party connectors. That would be very helpful for beginners and for quick implementation.

I've been working in UiPath for almost two years. I use it daily.

The stability of the solution is excellent.

The scalability is also excellent.

Sometimes technical support will get stuck on how to execute further, but we raise our queries in the UiPath Community Forum. There are so many RPA developers there and we get quick replies from them. We're able to build solutions based on their information. The forums are very useful for us.

Positive

I used to use Blue Prism.

I have seen a lot of return on investment with UiPath because it enables quicker implementation of automations.

When I compared the basics between Blue Prism and UiPath, I felt UiPath was much better.

With Blue Prism it takes a lot of time to build code and workflows. For example, to fetch data from Excel within UiPath only one activity is needed, called Read Range. But Blue Prism requires use of three activities to do the same thing. First, I have to open the Excel instance, then open the worksheet, and then fetch the data from the worksheet. Using UiPath means quicker implementations. 

And there are a lot more features in UiPath when compared to Blue Prism, and I haven't seen any disadvantages of UiPath. Using it, there is a solution for every process. There is no such thing as a process that cannot be done in UiPath. UiPath is the best solution for RPA and for our customers.

UiPath doesn't require any maintenance.

We are able to build workflows very quickly and it doesn't take that much coding knowledge to learn and understand UiPath. Beginners are able to learn it quickly and get into the businesses.

Choose UiPath. It is more helpful than any other tool for implementing solutions quickly and creating customer satisfaction. Based on my experience, UiPath is the best tool for automating RPA projects and repetitive processes.

I'm not currently using UiPath, but in my previous organization, which I left seven months ago, we had a complex trading application that included a web form and a Windows form. And on the Windows form was an Electron framework. If you want to run a web application inside a Windows application, Electron is a bridge between the web application and the actual Windows app. Because it was a complex application, it was not very easy to automate. That's where UiPath came in. It perfectly fit our automation testing scenario.

Before UiPath came into the picture, we were planning on doing automation testing with Selenium. The test plan with Selenium was going to take about three months. When UiPath was introduced and we started working on it, we completed the whole automation, end-to-end, in about one and a half months. It saved us that much time. And we made sure that our product was delivered with the required quality and that we did not compromise on that.

Because UiPath is SaaS, we were able to automate everything in a very productive manner. We were able to cross-verify all the flows and all the functionalities. And UiPath didn't require a huge amount of setup. It runs on minimal requirements.

In terms of human error, we saw a reduction, of course. It's not possible for a human to catch every error when new functionality is built. With UiPath automation, we were able to analyze errors right away and resolve them.

Another benefit was that it freed up employee time. It did a lot of the work by itself. The user only had to make sure that the correct workflow was involved and he could just sit back and check that everything was going correctly. It probably saved us 45 minutes daily.

UiPath makes you more productive because it comes with a lot of drag-and-drop features. You don't need to know the APIs to access particular elements on the screen. You can just drag and drop and define your actions and go ahead with the workflow. You can focus on the workflow rather than learning about the APIs, which is what happens with Selenium and other automation tools. That is one of the most beneficial features of UiPath.

I don't know if I was doing something wrong, and I did get assistance from the UiPath guys on this, but sometimes UiPath wasn't able to find an element on the screen. But that's what UiPath is for, and we wanted to make sure that our workflows were working correctly. Sometimes it was able to find an element and sometimes it was not. UiPath support did give us a solution, but it was not helpful enough.

The issue that I mentioned earlier, that sometimes it wasn't able to find the elements, was the only issue I saw with respect to UiPath. Otherwise, nothing was breaking and nothing was problematic on the UiPath side.

They were very friendly and they tried to be very helpful, but they weren't able to solve the issue I raised.

Positive

The version of UiPath that we used involved a direct installation. We asked our in-house team to get it installed because we didn't have the permissions to install software. They installed it in our system and we started using it right away. It was very straightforward.

I have worked with Selenium, which is an automation tool. That has quite a learning curve, but with UiPath it only takes you one or two weeks to get started. Once you're familiar with the basic tools, you can start writing a workflow. It is straightforward; nothing complex.

I never did the UiPath Academy courses because we had senior team members to help us and, in that company, we had a "learning playground" where we could go through the slides directly, without going through a whole learning process. We were then able to start our work right away.

UiPath did a good job. Before going into production, we needed to make sure that every test scenario and every case was handled. That's where we took advantage of the UiPath. We would run UiPath again and again and there were no breakages in our code and nothing was falling apart before going into production. I was working for an investment bank and every record was important.

We are partners with UiPath and Automation Anywhere. We use this solution for IT services and for the education sector.

OCR Tesseract, by default, is the good OCR search engine to extract data from a digital PDF. For any Unstructured document with a normal noise, background letters, either UiPath Document Understanding or AbbyyReader fails to extract the exact values. Very difficult to depend on Computer Vision too as a third party tool for small to mid-range business purpose. Hence, a combination of AI/ML with a good OCR Engine is required for UiPath to go forward.

UiPath Orchestrator is definitely a plus point in the product. This helps in all formats of UiPath version ranging from PoC till Product Deployment.

The OCR functionality for this solution could be improved. It should have a better capability to read unstructured documents. The next generation of OCR is ICR and UiPath does not have this. This would enable us to read and search through documents.

We have used this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The technical support is not that satisfactory. We have to find the answers by ourselves through non-community groups. 

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward and the deployment was easy. 

It was implemented in-house. 

The return on investment is really good. I would rate it a three out of five.

We're an official partner of both AA and UiPath and both of them carry the same weight with a very marginal difference but there is a difference in cost. Currently our clients are looking for cost optimization post-pandemic and UiPath comes at a high price point. 

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We are using UiPath for automation processes in an insurance company in the finance department.

The most valuable feature of UiPath is if you set a form and there's an interaction with the user, it's easy and fast to build than the other RPA tools. Additionally, it is simple to use the connectors.

In UiPath they should improve the input and outputs of processes. I found it very complicated.

In a future release of UiPath, they could improve the OCR engine to make it better. All the RPA tools use some OCR engine, while UiPath's is the best but it is hard to configure and set up for your projects.

I have been using UiPath for approximately six months.

The stability of UiPath is highly stable.

We have approximately four people using this solution in my organization.

I have not used the support from UiPath.

We previously used Blue Prism.

UiPath gives a return on investment, it does what it is supposed to do.

UiPath is an expensive solution but it is worth the money. You have a lot of features. 

The licenses need to be improved because when you have to use UiPath on another system, you have to set up the processes manually, and you are not able to change the process the time if you configure a process running at the system. You have to stop it and then run to the other system. It's not too easy to configure it according to the system. If you have a large deployment, for example, 10 to 20 bots, it's hard to configure.

UiPath has a lot of free training and a lot of free processes ready to go. You have to see the best practices in order to receive the best way of development. It is important to see the best practices guide.

I rate UiPath a nine out of ten.

UiPath is great because it's highly stable, it's fast to develop, and easy to configure. However, there are some improvements to be made.

We have deployed a chatbot in our system.

Designing a chatbot would usually require some language coding and it would have to be deployed with certain front-end languages. But UiPath gives us the ability to automate this functionality with drag-and-drop features. That is the very best part, where UiPath is doing an amazing job. It doesn't require any language coding or front-end coding to create the user interface.

Because it is easy to use, it saves a lot of time for the developer. When it comes to programming, UiPath has made all the manual work, such as verifying and correcting errors, and even repeating processes, less complex and less time-consuming. If you were to try to choose a coding language and use it to streamline things and design a bot for automation, it would take more time. Doing that would take 15 days to learn the language and to code with it. There would be a certain number of errors that you would have to deal with, as well. There might also be a backend required. UiPath can easily save you 10 to 15 days, automating in two to three days, maximum.

It gives you the ability to automate workflows and large processes that would take a long time to do manually. With the help of UiPath, the time it takes to get those tasks done is reduced and it reduces human error. In addition, it saves you money because you don't need to hire people for the tasks that have been automated.

There is also the benefit of not having to hire an engineer to program things. If you had to hire an engineer there would be the expectation of a payment package. There would also be the time spent on dealing with errors the engineer makes, and this person might also require mentors. UiPath decreases the spending of time, energy, and money, especially.

UiPath also saves our organization time because the automation cloud handles infrastructure, maintenance, and updates.

One of the most valuable features is that it provides you with the ability to learn the system and understand the concepts through specific demos. UiPath provides you with education, through the UiPath Academy, on the basics of how to use the software and for what purposes you can use it. It is a very good thing that they provide education with it. That makes it easy for us, as developers, to gain the knowledge we need.

Another good feature is that it comes with an embedded recording functionality. You didn't require an external screen recorder. The embedded screen recorder enables you to record things so that you can remember them over time.

In general, it is easy to build automations using UiPath. You just drag and drop according to your needs, and you can automate things in a single go.

One thing I don't like about UiPath is that it does not have a very good user interface for a newbie. It's not that the user interface itself is bad, but when I started using it, it was very difficult for me to understand the tool and how to use it. It has N functionalities and a user has to learn the particular things that these functionalities are used for.

The user interface should be a little simpler than it is right now, as it is very complex.

I have been using UiPath for more than a year.

In terms of scalability, this software can grow with the industry, especially since more companies are focusing on automation. Here in India, for example, there are many companies, like KPMG, focusing on the field of automation. Software like this can help them to scale more and more in building their automations. The software can really scale up well, as long as the user interface is improved.

Their support system is very good. If you have a problem and you reach out to their support system, they are quick to reply. Problems are solved within 24 hours of reaching out to them.

Also, you can use the UiPath user community instead of contacting support. There is value to the user community because people help each other there. Because we are concentrating on development in my company, we tend to not be as active on the community side, but whenever we do use it we get help from them.

Positive

I have only been exposed to this software. I graduated and started working in the RPA domain by using this software.

It wasn't that complicated to set up. 

The pricing and licensing are pretty decent. If you are using it as an automation developer, it comes in at under $500 a month. Still, the pricing can be reduced, but the service and functionality are solid. 

I have heard from some of my colleagues that there are many subdivisions of the pricing and some of them are between $1,500 and $2,000 a month. That is expensive. But overall, my colleagues say it is a cost-effective program in the long run.

If you are working in the RPA domain as an automation developer, you should look at UiPath because it gives you many functionalities. Also, the education aspect of UiPath is a very cool feature because you don't need to rely on other software to learn it. Thirdly, the bot-building process is very smooth. 

UiPath is a fast, time-saving, money-saving, energy-saving solution. Using UiPath has been the best experience. I would recommend it. You can choose this software without any second thoughts. It can provide a good return on investment to your business.

The solution has provided assistance with the removal of repetitive human transactional activities; document to text solutions; complex data extractions; cut and paste operations; information content management. This is either supported in promoting strategies with our business partners, or implemented at our clients, or included in products we develop for our clients. 

We use it in our own operations that have been migrated to other products or solved with coding or third-party software offering solutions to specific needs. Solutions are based on client sites and our clients pay for their own licensing.

The costs involved and the licensing model have forced us to recommend other solutions to our clients and to stop using UiPath internally due to constraints imposed on small businesses (specifically around the community edition). 

For our clients who can afford the licensing costs (Blue Chip Clients), the benefits have been to remove some repetitive activities from the target areas. 

In most cases, where there is a high-value resource impacted by these repetitions, there has been a cost-benefit in doing so, however, where the labor cost is below a certain threshold, the benefits are contained to error avoidance and reliability only with (additional) costs being migrated to support the technology and increasing overall IT OPS costs - particularly now with the increased fees and current licensing model.

The product as a whole is a valuable contributor to efficiency improvement. It integrates with ease (although some coding experience is required for higher/involved functions). We use it to streamline and support our customer operations primarily, but also to do internal acceleration on human-dependent (simple) tasks.

Simplification of complex task creation by introducing pre-coded objects is the single most attractive feature of the product. The choice between attended and unattended Bot applications with similar functionality is an advantage. 

Features are on track, however, service and cost models need to be reviewed to be market sensitive and related to the industry. Providing a great product at the wrong price without consideration to the economic conditions of the markets within which it is being offered, creates barriers and another product is sure to fill the void.

Closer integration with machine learning frameworks and matrix processing can be improved and will benefit low-cost/entry-level uptake and activation for some clients. Although pass-through options exist and have been activated, this is not sufficient to create encapsulated learning within the organizations and serves to improve third-party algorithms with added exposure to privacy (information systems security management) risks. 

I've been involved with UiPath since the launch in South Africa with Larc Technologies as the first UiPath solutions partner and reseller for the country.

No robotic solution can ever be classed as stable unless there are no change dependencies. It will always require more support than any other core technology - its the nature of the beast.

Running multiple robots in an environment requires orchestration, which is another expensive modality in the UiPath stable.

Consultations outside the normal service environments are strained, authoritative, and inflexible and there is little consideration for anything outside their immediate scope of vision and there is zero hesitance to move against initial strategic positioning and commitments. 

Neutral

We have been involved with and supported UiPath from the onset. We have also delivered enterprise solutions with BluePrism and Automation Anywhere. UiPath has proven to be capable, but costly and inflexible from a pricing and support model viewpoint.

It depends on the nature of the requirements and can be super complex or super easy. Supporting the bots are always a challenge and supervision (alerts, monitoring) is essential.

We work with excellent vendor implementation teams and have in-house competence in design and delivery. In most customer environments, there are competent implementation and maintenance resources for bot environments. Over the past 5 years, bot development, administration, and maintenance skills have improved, however, there is still a significant gap in proper orchestration and optimization within bot frameworks - which affects the overall cost and effectiveness of automation strategies.

At present, the ROI is negative for us as a company. For our clients, it varies. When all costs are considered (TCO) over a two-year period, financial breakeven is mostly attained with some negative ratios (if it's the wrong tool for the job). 

In most cases, there are intangible benefits. In all cases, IT operations cost increased and, in worst-case scenarios, the business benefit was short-lived as the technology costs escalated and the resource reduction potential was never attained.

HA and DR planning are essential when determining actual resource reduction potential.

UiPath is becoming expensive and will be outpricing themselves if they continue to enforce their current service configuration (model). Many clients have been impacted by the pandemic and instead of assisting to breach the gaps, there is a sense that UiPath is monetizing on the disaster.  

We looked at BluePrism, Automation Anywhere and we are now moving on to Open RPA - a viable option if you have the right skills to plug gaps. 

We primarily use the solution for operations processes in our corporate investment bank. For example, screen scraping, querying from databases, or any transactional processes. Those are what we're really looking at the most.

The orchestrator is very valuable for us. The ability to have processes, especially transactional processes, be fed into and triggered from there is excellent. I really like the ease of use that allows not just typical developers to use the Studio version, but also StudioX, which allows citizen developers with little to no coding background to be able to automate their own process. Studio limits a lot of the coding you would generally do in Visual Basic and offers a pretty easy use case for people who want to get into development, who might not have that background.

I’d rate the ease of automating within UiPath at an eight or a nine out of ten. Maybe even a perfect ten. They make it very simple. It's a really good platform and for everything I've used it for so far, I can't think of how I would do this X, Y, or Z differently. I really like it.

In terms of our adoption of it, we just started using it this year. We haven't had a large volume of bots delivered and put into production, however, with what we're using, we have a lot of proof of account sets and use cases that are getting pushed along that are going to save the company time in man-hours.

It's going to save the company a lot of potential risks in terms of manual error. It's also something that can be used to automate processes that are very heavily related to compliance procedures as well, where you don't want as much manual touch for the same reason and you don't want to risk, even if it doesn't take that much time for a person. With automation, you remove the risk of somebody making an error.

We don’t have a crazy amount of metrics. We're really in the process of adopting it into the organization. I'd say within the next year, we're really going to be seeing a very large adoption of it.

We have seen direct savings in costs. Every project we deliver in time save has an associated cost reduction to it. If you're saving, for example, four hours a day on a manual process, you're saving that money. You’re also saving on anything that's related to risk. I don't have any hard numbers on the amount of time that's been saved, however, it’s been positive.

Our teams have used the UiPaths Academy courses. It’s helped make the process of getting employees up to speed with UiPath very straightforward. It's one of the better learning platforms I've seen. Between them and Alteryx, they both have very good learning platforms.

What's really important is that you don't need to wait for instructor-led training, which is infrequent. We have it sometimes, still, even when we’re having it a few times a year it gets expensive. The online training, which covers most of the same material, is a really good way for people who don't want to wait for the instructor-led training and want to immediately get their own feet wet.

The Academy is very comprehensive. It's well structured and training is easy to follow. I've used other tools that have been much harder to follow online. This one I really like.

The biggest values that we’ve seen From UiPath Academy are ease of use and ease of scalability. The solutions you make based on the infrastructure that's built around it can be made to be very scalable. There's so much that depends on other terms, such as the data that we have on our own processes, that it's going to be the yes or no, whether or not a process we build can be scalable automation for other teams. As long as we get the data and the processes lined up in the right way, we can make very scalable processes, which is good as that's more cost savings for fewer bots and that's really like what we want to see.

There are some external dependencies. When we have APIs available, UiPath does have that option that we can hook into APIs. That's really where I'd like to be down the line, more like hooking into APIs, data warehouses, so that you don't have to worry too much about the screen scraping functionality, even though that's a great big part of what it does.

I would really like the ability to bring OCR connectors into StudioX, if possible. Right now we're only using OCR and Studio as that's where the plugins are available. I don't know enough about the back end of what makes this feasible versus not feasible. However, at the moment, with StudioX, you can only really read and digitize PDFs. If they can bring in the OCR connectors, they'd allow citizen developers to be able to read in a larger breadth of documents that they would generally need Studio to do.

I've been using the solution for about ten months. 

The product is as stable as it can be for the processes we use to expand on that. We do a lot of screen scraping and web scraping a lot. I want to move away from this in the future. However, the stability of those bots is going to ultimately be reliant on how that webpage looks.

We're looking at very specific parts of the website, such as the HTML tags. If those stay stable and we build our identifiers on those sites to be relatively dynamic, the process will be fine. 

We do plan to increase usage.

The idea is to train up more citizen developers. We need to strike a balance between getting the tool out to the citizen developers and making sure that they're following the governance procedures as well. There's also a little bit of risk of it due to the fact that you give people licenses to build and then they can build something on their desktop. They can just, without going through the proper governance, run it. Therefore, you need to make sure things go through the correct governance. That's why we're trying to make sure we have a very good system in place so that when we grow and are training system developers, everything they do goes through the correct controls and governance process.

We're planning to keep building the users over time. We really want to start looking in the next year from more of a top-down perspective, across larger organizational issues where we can make more scalable bots rather than strictly or mostly automating one-offs. We're looking for where there's more commonality across different businesses that do similar processes, and maybe access similar data sources.

I'm not sure exactly how many people are using it across the organization currently. My guess would be at this point there are 75 to 100 users. However, I could be completely wrong. I'm just guessing, as I don't know all the citizen developers, and who in the operation's teams are using it.

I have not used technical support, however, some people who work for me on my team have. I manage a small team of developers. They have worked with UiPath consultants who are on contracts with our COE. They've been extremely helpful with working out some kinks that they've come across in their projects. 

I haven't used blueprints on my Automation Anywhere. We used to use Automation Anywhere and we are moving off it in favor of UiPath, though I never used those other tools myself. I use ALteryx and it has some RPA abilities, although I use it much more for just basic data transformation workflows. I have coded RPA bots and Python before. What I like, with UiPath, is it's still a tool that's based on code - Visual Basic, VB.NET. However, the coding is really for the most part restricted to your data manipulation, working with variables. The control flow that you normally would need to code in Visual Basic is all drag and drop. I really like that versus straight coding. It still gives you that flexibility of a lot of development environments, however, you can have that drag and drop canvas that allows you to really not need to program as much of that control flow. 

We moved towards UiPath as it's cheaper per bot and it enables more of a citizen development model as well. Automation Anywhere bots were only developed by our COE at the time and UiPath COE's going to use them also, however, they're allowing users in operations to use both Studio (if they have the taste for it) and StudioX. It gives a lot more citizen development capabilities for more advanced functions and automation-type stuff, whereas previously, you would normally need somebody on your team who happens to know BBA to do it. 

In the past, if you have someone from the team who knows BBA and makes something, and they leave and their code breaks, you're screwed. However, if you have a StudioX bot, if it breaks, it's going to be much easier to look into the issue and fix it. It's also supported by our C0E's tech infrastructure. Those are the main driving points for shifting off as well.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I've interacted with UiPath only as a user. I was one of the first users, however, I had nothing to do with deploying the tech infrastructure and developing the governance and controls. I'm just a developer.

We have seen a return on investment. Every project we've delivered that has some sort of time savings to it has had an intrinsic ROI. I don't know the total ROI across the organization, however. I work in one specific part of the company and it's been adopted in a few places. I don't know the total ROI that's been delivered yet.

It's my understanding that it's delivered close to a full headcount so far, in terms of productivity of capacity. There are approximately eight hours a day of time-saving for every workday of the year. That's where we are right now, as we've really just begun adopting it. We're not really deployed into production, and the larger-scale projects aren't in place yet. So far, the projects have been smaller tactical builds that we've been using and it's been delivering up around eight hours of time saving a day. 

I don't know the pricing enough to really comment on it. I know we're getting a better deal in automation than what we had with Automation Anywhere bots, at least per bot deployment. However, I don't know what the licensing costs are.

We do not yet use the Uipath apps feature or their AI functionality in our automation processes. That said, with AI, we're bringing it in and we're definitely planning to use it in the future.

I'd advise new users to make sure you have the controls and governance structures, first and foremost, and you want to make sure those controls are going to be in place and understood before you start deploying licenses to users. I make sure that everything is going to be done and compliant with the audit. As somebody who works in financial services, which is a very heavily regulated industry, that's something that really needs to be kept in mind. You don't want to develop what are essentially just user tools that are not going through the proper controls and treat it like a lightweight software development lifecycle project. You need to make sure those controls are in place, and yet, don't do it too much to the point where it's going to deter the users. At the end of the day, we're not making software, however, we still need to strike that balance.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. Nothing is perfect. I know you UiPath wants to improve the stuff that has not been perfected. I'm not going to say it is a ten out of ten, even though I'm struggling to think of what I don't like. Something that would be very helpful for UiPath is to go back to try to build OCR in StudioX. That would be ideal. Also, being able to implement different types of loops in the Studio would be great. Right now, you can only do a four-loop in a repeating loop. If we could implement wall loops, that would be nice.