UiPath Platform Reviews

I personally do a lot of process automation and data visualization. I work with a lot of people in procurement and finance to pull data from a lot of different systems, consolidating it, and creating reports, then presenting it. What I do a lot of is taking that consolidated data and creating automated reports with Microsoft Power BI and visualization tools. A lot of where people get hung up is pulling the data and the amount of time it takes to do that. So, people want to be able to automate their processes, as well as have my reports.

When I heard about UiPath, it addresses the initial problem of having to constantly pull data, get updates, consolidate the data, then model it in Excel or other sources, like databases. Being able to speed up that process, then connect it to automated reports, can fully lay out that entire pathway. 

It has a simple user interface. We used to have the training onsite Friday and Thursday, and while I personally have a computer science and web development background, a majority of the people there were finance and were procurement who didn't have any technical background. Yet, they are able to learn it because of the GUI and hotkeys, because it is just enter, drag this there, and do that. 

You don't have to write any code. You simply click function, open an Excel file,  and open web browser, then you just grab and drag it. This makes it easy to understand what you have to do and where you have to put fields.

It could be a little more aesthetically pleasing. 

I would like it easier to find things. How it works now: 

1. You look up all the different built-in functions that they have. Most are pretty straightforward. It is click in an open access web browser.
2. If you don't know the name of what you are looking for, but if you want to be able to do something, then you have to scroll down the page and click it, if it's found.

I would like a better way to find the little things that aren't simply named.

I haven't found any problems specifically using the tool. I have only had a few errors, but that is because of personal mess ups when I'm creating processes and a field is messed up or a variable is incorrect. I haven't had any crashes or faults with the free Community Edition and the bot that it has come with.

I have talked with the UiPath training staff who came to our site and worked with them. They helped us out with any problems that we had learning things.

I haven't communicated directly with any of their support team members.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It was easy for us, and we are government contractors. We had to get all the approvals, but once that was done, it was very simple to get it installed and set up. Then, you just have the desktop client right there. 

I assume going through any of the training on the UiPath Academy that you would have an understanding of how to work through installation issues.

I see the potential for ROI and how much time it can save me on cutting down weekly and monthly reporting. It will probably save me five hours a week and another 15 hours a month.

It is a tool, which does what you need it to do.

I went through two non-technical training course to get an understanding of using robotic process automation because I didn't know much about it before I started using the tool. That set me up well before the UiPath Academy to get an understanding of robotic process automation and where it's been going, because I didn't have much knowledge beforehand. However, I plan to go through the Academy training courses. I've heard that it's what UiPath uses internally to get ready for certifications.

RPA overall is about routine, mundane, structured tasks. We use a number of them at my client's work in terms of how do we do back office reporting for general deliverables, contract compliance, etc. 

We had a few different reports that we had to do every month. We have to hand-jam them into a very poorly-formatted database which had weird drop-downs. Instead of entering them manually, and spending a day or month just punching in titles and numbers, we compile it onto an Excel sheet and have a bot run and dump all that information. 

All I have to do is tweak what information has changed from month to month. This has made my life a lot easier.

When I was first introduced to UiPath, I stated that I am very adamantly not a coder. I hate code, lines, and missing that semicolon somewhere in there. Being able to understand that your path is structured as a process flow, you are still able to declare variables, and ensure the background logic is sound. You are also able to really visualize what the process needs to do and the paths that it needs to take: true, false, etc. So, it has been very useful in terms of crafting it.

To exceed the expectations, it needs to be easy to debug, not only easy to craft. You need to be able to make it truly do what you want it to do. As a user, you have an idea of what you want it to do. However, when you hit run, it doesn't always do it, then you have to figure out why. That ends up being the majority of your development time. UiPath does pose a bit of a challenge in terms of easy to understand errors, where it's getting stuck, or what was the logic behind the process that we were trying to do from a UiPath standpoint. Making improvements to these would help out a more in terms of being able to make it more user-friendly.

Looking to go from structured to unstructured data, then UiPath needs to be able to handle understanding natural language and scanning of documents which are not well-written or visible, in terms scanning quality. These are probably the easiest target areas to improve on first.

If I'm using it as an attended bot, it's pretty stable. When you discussing unattended bots, anything could go wrong in the entire stack. We have found times, if I run UiPath for a week, and it needs to simply loop a PowerPoint presentation, come back in a week, then sometimes the PowerPoint will be dead. It is harder to understand if it was UiPath's fault or if it was because the device decided to do a random Windows update and restart itself. It could be a litany reasons, but even then, I can't be 100% confident that the unattended bot is going to run forever.

It would have been hard to set up without some basic training and basic use cases to practice through first. After some familiarity with the product, it is not hard to set up.

We have seen ROI across the board.

It has limited human errors within the confines of how bots were constructed on what we needed them to do.

My specific process that I use it on went from a day to about 15 minutes (time savings).

All the RPA tools are good for different things. For my very simple process, I didn't go with Automation Anywhere because setting up the Orchestrator and turning on the server is a pain. I have had any experience dealing with Blue Prism.

We use UiPath primarily for our financial operations.

We use this solution in a virtual environment called VMware Horizon. It has allowed us to get started without investing a lot, which was good for us. We need to go to the enterprise solution using Orchestrator as soon as possible. That said, I wouldn't do it differently, because if we were counting on the enterprise environment to get started, we wouldn't have deployed anything in the past year. Because we had this virtual environment, we've been able to deploy 16 bots so far.

We were able to automate a lot of data entry into our financial system. We've automated spreadsheet manipulation in the area of financial management.

We knew that our process was very inefficient, so we had to invest in a solution like UiPath. We hadn't used any other solution before UiPath. Our processes are manual and error-prone and we have mid-level people who are highly skilled who are doing this non-skilled labor, which is a problem for the workforce.

The most value we got from UiPath is the ability to automate manual tasks, reduce labor hours, and shift people to higher value work.

We found the solution easy to use. We wanted to train our staff who were not IT and we were able to do that. People who worked in financial operations were able to learn the software and have successfully developed bots.

We used UiPath Academy RPA training to train 14 people. It was good. I think UiPath needs to do a better job of setting expectations and defining the skill level required. That wasn't very clear to us. We couldn't get a good answer. Therefore, it was trial and error. We were told that people just have to be motivated, but learned that that is not enough.  The trainees need to have some demonstrated technical ability.  We found that some people dropped out because it was too difficult for them. Other people picked it up very well because they had somewhat of a technical background. That would be my message for UiPath, to give better guidance on qualifications in the background needed for training.

One does not need IT coding to learn this, but something within business operations that's somewhat technical. For example, writing Microsoft Excel macros, writing business objects reports, and SQL queries. People who can do those things, they can use UiPath.

I'd like to see the ability to operate in a non-persistent environment. Other than that, I'd like to see more intelligence being built in. We aren't using any intelligence yet, but we'd like to.

It's stable. We haven't really had technical issues.

It's scalable. We're not scalable now because we aren't using the Orchestrator software yet. We have successfully tested Orchestrator and will begin using it for production soon, giving us greater scalability.

We really haven't had to use technical support much. Most of our issues had to do with configuration and the environment, more than the software itself. It's just been one configuration issue related to this software, so far - operation in a non-persistent environment.  I was told there's an enhancement coming, but I don't think we have the enhancement yet.  However, we will not have this issue when we migrate to our enterprise platform with Orchestrator. 

The level of support we received from their technical support was good.

The initial setup was medium complexity. We were using a virtual desktop environment and had to configure it for the software. It took a few months.

We used an integrator to deploy UiPath. Our experience with them was good.

We have definitely seen a return on our investment. It took less than a year to see a positive ROI because we had a very small investment to begin with.

This solution has absolutely helped us to eliminate human errors. Most manual processes have 1% to 3% errors, some much higher. One of our processes has a 25% error rate.  The bots eliminate those errors. 

This solution also saves many hours of manual work. We have measured the number of labor hours automated to be 25,000 hours a year, so far.

We pay $3,000 per license, annually. We're using attended robots, but we will move to unattended as quickly as possible.

We chose UiPath because we simply followed NASA's lead. We wanted to move quickly and we talked to NASA. 

We're driving hard to automate as quickly as possible. Traditional IT is not able to automate all the manual work. A lot of manual work unavoidably accumulates between and around core systems.  RPA needs to be part of IT strategy to automate this residual work.  

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. The only reason it isn't a ten is because it lacks the ability to work in a non-persistent environment. Effectively when you log in, you have to download the software every time.  However, this is also due to our choices in configuring the environment.  

One of the main use cases is stringing together different applications, like a financial system to a database for data manipulation or data extraction. Then, all sorts of little things are added onto that from a process prospective.

From a process perspective, every single implementation that we have done has saved time: Anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of eliminating the process time. There was an example where there was an analyst who was doing a manual comparison process of a bunch of different systems. The use case was that the bot just goes and checks a bunch of systems, then compares everything. They only have to manage the exception, but it almost entirely eliminated the time capacity.

There are pre-built activities, which let you build stuff quickly. It is a functionality where you can record, as a baseline, what a process looks like. Then, you can iterate off of that to build the bot and make it more stable. That is pretty nice because it saves you time.

It also lets you display something very quickly, so you can see exactly how it's going to work.

The product has met expectations in terms of ease of use. There is a lot of stuff going on underneath. In the Studio view, there is a right-hand side where there is a lot of configurable components of activities which are built. Some of those are exposed, and some are not. From a stability standpoint, it would be interesting if more of that was power user available.

Some of the documentation that UiPath has around the technical specifications, from a security perspective, are very factual and comprehensive, but they don't have an audience, like CIOs who need to approve this solution. Therefore, the documentation is one area where I might smooth the process out a bit, since the audience is different from the way the documentation is written as technical specifications.

In a Citrix environment, you can't directly connect to a lot of the applications that you can on a desktop environment, or in a server environment, where it is not a virtual machine and going through a pipe. However, that's just a technical restriction.

I would like it if UiPath could watch someone do a process, then builds the bot, but not in a recorder fashion. I want it to watch someone during their day and observe the processes that they do, then provide an informed assessment of what parts of that could be automated. This is because some people do stuff that they don't even realize could be automated, like an interpretation of people's tasks. Technically, that would be hard to do, but it would make a killer application. This make it a product to install on every single person's computer at a desktop level, or every environment, wherever the process is taking place.

There is some learning curve to using even the initial capabilities. While there are a lot of great tools to help you get up to speed and learn how to do it, I almost think there are two types of tracks which are only being addressed by a single product: 

1. People who are technical and know the stuff which going on behind the scenes. When they use it, they want to have more access and more ways that they can tweak it. 
2. People who have no coding experience, or low coding experience. In this case, it's great, but slightly limited, in terms of the activities which are pre-built and those are very extensive.
   

It would be nice to have a medium between the two or power user concepts, where you can open up all of the back-end. I do know you can do this in UiPath to access the code and take advantage of APIs, when you get into some of the really complex implementations beyond just send an emails and copying and pasting data from one thing to the other, which takes up a lot of people's time. There are additional things behind the scenes that would be great to have access to with UiPath.

It seems very stable. Like in a desktop environment, I can't think of any issues.

For scalability, it requires additional skews to orchestrate everything. While it is an area where I've had less experience, that is the key component to making it scale.

Automation technology at our customers' companies is in its early phases. They are beyond the pilot, but not at scale, which is pretty common.

A lot of the agencies that we work with, where they are doing a pilot, do one-offs and growing exponentially (one to two to three bots). They just keep using it, then reinvesting it. The bot process is pretty quick: We are doing sprints for them in six to 12 weeks, and they are done. 

As a partner, we have a lot of great people at UiPath who we can call and ask about things. 

They've been helpful with understanding what the timeline is for new stuff, like integration and new activity sets. 

From a partnership perspective, like in delivery, they've been really helpful.

Having a free Community Edition makes a difference. As long as you can get it installed, then there is no barrier to playing around with it and seeing what it can do.

The simplicity or complexity of the installation depends on the environment and the CIO's willingness to install it, especially in the Federal space.

It takes no more than six months to get to an ROI that is at least recouping the costs. Time and again, we are just seeing those cost savings get rolled back into doing the next project. It's like a self-funding, revolving process.

UiPath help our customers to eliminate human errors.

I would like to have transparency in pricing. We're creating more functional robotic process automation use cases all over the place. I'm never really clear on what the pricing model is, the skews, and how much of an investment can be made in letting new agencies do any of the following:

• Start to do pilots versus proofs of concept.
• Pricing per bot in production versus Orchestrator costs. 
• Fixed cost versus licensing cost per user. 
• Have access to Studio.

Our customer also evaluate Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere.

It is a really slick product. Just play around with it. It's doable for all skill levels.

The UiPath Academy RPA training is good and easy to use. There is a lot of content there in terms of going from a very basic understanding to being able to do developments. It was one of the first RPA training courses, from anywhere, that I took. I thought it was really good. I has a lot of use cases to practice on.

We are trying to focus on using UiPath for our mission. A lot of people use RPA for things that happen everywhere, such as in financial or HR. We are a bit different. We are trying to focus on things which will improve what our customer are doing.

For example, one of our customers is a bank. Therefore, we are focusing on improving their relationship with the bank's customers by using RPA. While there are use cases everywhere, we are focusing on trying a company better and more streamlined at their core.

The robot (in the bank example) focuses on improving the way a customer interacts with the bank. The robot facilitates the monthly interaction that customer the bank by providing information to the bank, processing information much more quickly, helping the customer and bank at the same time. The bank doesn't need to spend a lot of time or resources looking at the information coming in. The robot can process the incoming information, validate it, and do lot of the work which had been done before. It is a win-win on both sides of the relationship.

We are seeing RPA use cases everywhere. Pretty much every one of our customers has some type of RPA that we are talking about as turning into a pilot or have already moved forward with as an RPA solution.

One example is we created a robot to use with DocuSign, which is fairly industry standard.

It has a core tool set of things in use to quickly put together an automation, whether it's interacting with an application or website. It gives you the tool kit that you need to quickly put something together. Very often, we can create something in a very short time frame, like in less than a day, and show it to someone. Then, they can see the immediate value of the solution.

UiPath was easy to use when I first came into it. Though, I have a software developer background, so a lot of the concepts were very easy for me.

UiPath has a whole bunch of online courses in the UiPath Academy. These are very helpful on understanding the capabilities of the tool and some of the nuisances of it. 

It takes a bit of thought to find the right thing that fits into RPA at this point. However, with the things that we are branching into with natural language processing and imaging things, there will be more possibilities and opportunities.

UiPath should continue to grow and integrate with things that we can interact with, particularly with other enterprise solutions out there. They should continue to have out-of-the-box things that we can just take and work with.

I have seen a lot of improvement in the stability and scalability in UiPath over the last year or so. There have continued to be new releases with new updates, along with new technologies that help. Therefore, the maturity of the product has gone a long way in getting to a stable, scalable product.

Going forward, I would like to see more stability in the robots. When I create a robot, then I want it to work for quite some period of time. I've had some situations, where things will update, change, and the robot is broken. Part of this is making a more stable implementation easier.

We have put together a couple installations using Orchestrator. We haven't had the need for huge scalability yet, but it seems that the platform is there and has the capability for it.

One of our customers is a very large financial institution that has a lot of automation, because they have millions of customers. Then, some of them are smaller who are just trying to put their toes in. Even at our very large customers, there are still opportunities for improved, additional automation. However, the maturity across our customers is very diverse.

UiPath has always been there to answer the questions that we have or help staff when we need it.

Our customers ask us about the solution because of the government mandates.

Compared to the other RPA platforms, like Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, UiPath is much easier to set up. This is the value that a lot of our customers have seen, because it is so easy to set up, you can set up and install something on your own computer, use it, then run with it, and finally, play with it.

That is a huge advantage: You don't have to set up a large infrastructure just to do RPA now. Of course, Orchestrator is a little bit more complicated, but then I've had a much easier time setting up Orchestrator than I have had with some of the other leading RPA products previously mentioned.

The biggest thing for a lot of our customers is ROI. It takes about a year to see ROI, but it does vary based on use case.

One of the use cases that we are looking at is for a large government agency. They are taking people out of doing reports and putting them back in the field. In a cost constraint environment that we are in, this is critically important.

Some of the things that we've done have cut down tasks that took four hours to 30 seconds. So, there is a lot of benefit. Our customer are experiencing very large benefits from automation.

Go download it, install it, and play with it. You can't do this with any of the other platforms.

There is an easier level of entry for UiPath.

While you can easily automate with RPA, the tasks someone does repetitively and is likely to make mistakes, thus eliminating human errors on a lot of things, but at the same time automation is only as good as you make it. So, humans are creating the robots at this point, and obviously there is still a possibility for errors. However, in processing workload, you will definitely cut down on the errors happening there.

I work for the financial management office. We do a lot of manual processes. Our use case right now is that we look at all of our financial business processes, break them down, and identify the subprocesses that we can use UiPath to automate. This is very manually, so we try to find some efficiencies which have the most the value for our organization.

The most valuable feature of UiPath is we have direct access to read and write data in our applications, so we don't need to build a back-end interface.

The security needs improvement, especially in regards to managing the credentials.

I would also like to see better integration with Microsoft products.

We still have to test the final product. UiPath's recommendation is build another bot to validate the other bot's work. That is the scary part: If you make a mistake creating the bot, how can you recover from that mistake?

A lot of Elastic is not working, which is why the solution is not integrated.

While the commercial solution is successful, the government solution needs improvement. Government has so many regulation and requirements that still need to be address by the product.

It's a bit choppy, so people need to find workarounds.

We haven't deployed our first bot yet, so we are unable to gauge bot stability.

We tried to set it up in the virtual environment because we want to leverage a lot of the Microsoft features. They need to include all the API features going forward to make the virtual environment effective.

We are working closely with the UiPath technical team because we are pioneering putting this infrastructure on the cloud. 

The technical support team is responsive.

There is a big community.

We rely on our partner to identify a solution and give us a recommendation.

We set it up in Studio and Orchestrator. We are also ready to put the bot on our Amazon Cloud environment.

We had contractors, a consultancy company, help us build the system. They are a really good team, who also help deploy the solution for government agencies (DHS and DoD).

There are a couple options on market, like Automation Anywhere. UiPath is one of the leaders, so we picked UiPath.

Automation Anywhere is not on the DHS approved vendor list, so we couldn't pick them, as the approval process would take longer for them than UiPath.

Use UiPath in a more process-driven way, instead of BI-driven way.

We put everything on Amazon Cloud, even our development is cloud-based.

We haven't had a change to use UiPath Academy for RPA training yet.

The primary use case is data management.

The object cloning in UiPath is a lot more consistent than Automation Anywhere. The consistency with which it captures the information that it's supposed to in order to do the rest of the process is probably the most useful component of the tool package.

1. Navigating the directory of objects needs improvement. I would like a better way of finding the command which allows you do the thing that you're trying to do. This would help. For example, there was this one command that I was wrongly using for months. Then, someone told me, "You can do that by just using this one command instead of three jerry-rigged together." Therefore, I would like to be able to put in keywords that would allow me to figure out what command will allow me to do the task that I am trying to do.
2. The testing could be a bit easier. There are error handling steps in the platform tool, but it's not super robust. It's very user friendly from a development perspective. However, from a testing perspective, it is unclear what I am looking at. Maybe, they could add more commenting. 

When the complexity increases, the bug related issues go up. There are limitations to utilizing RPA software, in general, where sometimes you have business leaders who think something is a good process. Then, they ignore the technical advice to not move forward, or choose to. Thus, you're left in a situation where you're trying to automate a process that isn't great for automation.

One of the easiest things about UiPath is you click one link, it downloads, then you are done. With Automation Anywhere, we have a whole days worth of setting up that needs to be done. This is another component that UiPath is leading the industry in.

UiPath works best when there is a strong understanding of the capabilities and limitations of RPA. I have seen it work best when you have an experienced practitioner who has seen what an implementation looks like. Therefore, they know the right questions to ask as you are determining which process to automate. It is better to have skilled developers, who are more technically capability, to develop solutions using the tools which come with the package to make sure it is working correctly. 

There is the upfront work of talking to clients. There is a middle part of developing it, then the maintenance and operations post-implementation. You have to manage the bot after it's built, and it works best when you have someone who comes in and knows all three of the step components are equally important to a quality end product.

The ROI on all of our RPA use cases is from a throughput perspective. Processing time improvement is anywhere between 70 percent faster to 300 to 400 percent faster. For the right processes, there is even up to 7X to 10X improvement from a throughput perspective, even though it works through the UI. 

The most impressive use case that I've heard of was about saving a year's worth of FTE time in a month's worth of development, testing, and deployment, then doing the processing.

I have used all of the major RPA platforms: primarily Automation Anywhere, UiPath, and Kofax.

UiPath is the most open in getting people to use their software. I think they understand that the most successful relationships in sales come from people playing with the solution.

I started out as an Automation Anywhere person and will always be better at Automation Anywhere because of my affinity with it. Where Automation Anywhere might have UiPath beat is the speed at which you can automate simple processes, like being able to create and automate simple processes. Automation Anywhere is a better point of departure because the way you look at the script in it, there is almost like a sentence that you can read. Being able to understand what a process is supposed to do, you can just replicate the steps in your head. A non-technical person can open this web browser, type here, and press enter.

With UiPath, it's more from a process perspective, which is more useful if you're looking at automating a process. Instead of something simple, like for training, we'll have people look up the weather in five, ten, or a 100 cities. From that perspective, it's easier to start up than Automation Anywhere. 

UiPath makes up for its steeper learning curve by being a more reliable product. 

If you are looking on the spectrum of which is most to least technical and most to least scalable, UiPath is a happy medium compared to Kofax, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism. UiPath is less technical and not so hard, but it's also scalable, so it's a happy medium.

UiPath Academy is by far the best online training resource. From an online content training perspective, their videos and training modules are leading the industry.

We have multiple primary use cases for UiPath. We have already implemented three, but I foresee many use cases in the future. For example, I am working on one which will automate the gathering of information to comply with subpoenas.

The automation of repetitive tasks that eliminate human error. 

The speed: It is so fast when it replaces a human, you become much more efficient.

I would like to see some integration, or ease of integration, with APIs, so we can automate stuff faster. E.g., we go through a co-op, which is a card processor, and they have a very powerful API.

I haven't had any issues with the architecture at all.

We are starting small and have three bots.

I'm already engaging in conversations with UiPath consultants to ensure that I have the right structure. I know I will need Orchestrator soon as we continue to develop more.

I introduced automation with UiPath. This was our first introduction into what is robotic process automation.

The setup is straightforward. We did the complete setup in a week, which includes the server, the virtual machine that it would be running on, and a developing environment, because I wanted that to be separate from our production environment. This is for a small environment. I am expecting the bigger environment to take us longer.

For our service test department, we created a bot to automate the reset of pins and passwords for our users. This was the number one call for our service desk. The bot now takes care of it, and we freed resources. Now, we don't have any calls to that service desk team, and they are doing other things.

It was easier to use than I expected. We started with a very small bot. It took us three to four weeks to develop, then put in production.

My staff is using the UiPath Academy. I manage the development department. My staff has gone through the Academy's training, and it's awesome. It's a great resource, because now that I'm hiring more people, I'm having them go through it. Then, I onboard them on what is it that we need them to do.