UiPath Platform Reviews

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.

In general, we use it for automating monotonous, manual processes which a lot of our clients have. We also use it for internal employees in our company.

We had a use case where there were a lot of documents that had to processed to give access to certain systems. With UiPath, we were able to really streamline that. Instead of having an end-user go through these documents manually, do reconciliation, and send emails back and forth, we were able to automate that solution from beginning to end, with very little human interaction. In the end, over the entire process, it saved hours out of their day, when you compound how many times they run this. It has really freed them up to do other more important tasks. That was my first foray into the client side, and seeing how happy they were to have this bot was great. At first, they were skeptical, but once they saw what it allowed them to do and what it's capable of, they were really happy with the software and what we were able to develop for them.

In this use case, UiPath reduced human error by 100 percent because we completely removed the human element from the data reconciliation for those documents. Through automation, along with some fine-tuning, we were able to get the data reconciled between the two files with 100 percent accuracy, and inputted into the system. Not every use case is going to be that straightforward, but in this use case we were able to get that result, which was wonderful.

The number-one valuable feature is the ease of use. I come from a development background where I wrote a lot of code. The fact that you have these activities with pre-built functionality is great. You can drag them in and use them as shortcuts to get to an end result faster than if you had to do it in a programming language. UiPath exceeded my expectations in this area.

Also, the training that's available through the UiPath RPA Academy, as well as the community - the forums, where you can ask questions - both are helpful. The community is a good way to see what others are doing and learn tips and tricks for the platform. That's very useful in comparison to other companies that do RPA but don't have robust training.

A lot of the features that I had been asking for have actually been released. We were using an older version of UiPath and we were having issues with Computer Vision and the OCR engine with UiPath. But now that we see that there's a whole Computer Vision activity suite available, I'm excited to use that. I haven't gotten to get my hands on it yet.

But in terms of additional features, I can't think of anything that I would request. I see that they have the AI functionality, as well as the Computer Vision. They have a lot available that I haven't even been able to get my hands on yet. I think once I get some more time to explore the tool and exhaust its capabilities I can look for additions from there.

There is some room for improvement in the area of error handling. I had to create a custom approach to error handling. If there were some sort of activity or workflow that could be easily dropped in to help support that, it would be good. Error handling and logging, as well as process logging, would be a big help.

I can't speak about its scalability too much because we haven't gotten there, even as far as using Orchestrator. Most of the automations that we have done have been one-offs which are done locally on someone's laptop.

But from what I've read in the training and what I've seen in the demos, it seems like a very robust platform that can definitely scale, when designed properly. I'm looking forward to the next phase of the development journeys that we have, where we are actually doing things to scale and thinking long-term about how we can share bots across an entire enterprise. It does appear that they have a pretty robust toolset.

I have had to reach out a few times to support, especially when I started and was trying to find my way around the tools and some issues that I was having. The response was great. I was able to get on a video call and actually show my use case and show the kinds of issues I was having and they were able to walk me through the process and suggest ideas about how I could approach them. My overall experience with technical support has been very good.

Our company is always looking at the latest digital trends and what we can do to offer our clients new solutions which keep them at the forefront of IT. We were aware of RPA and it was just a case of narrowing down which solution was the best to deliver to the clients.

The initial setup is straightforward. I've used other tools where there are components that you have to install prior to installing the software. You have to create a database and things like that. Whereas, with UiPath, it was a very light install. You just have an executable. It is able to install the components that it needs on its own. There was no other configuration that I had to do on top of that to get rolling. That's a major plus to me and, especially, to our clients. If we don't have to spend as much time getting them configured and set up, it's better for them.

We did the installs ourselves. We have a test lab that we built. We set up an Orchestrator lab so we can get more familiar with the tool. That was all done in-house as part of our training to get familiar with the tools. Essentially, if we want to sell this capability to clients, we want to at least have some knowledge of how to do it ourselves and not have to rely on a third-party.

Unfortunately, a lot of what we've been delivering right now are pilots. A lot of our clients are still in the "show me" phase of what RPA can do. We don't really have any data to say what the return on investment is. But they do see the potential. I definitely see the potential. Once we get past that pilot phase and into something that we can actually deploy in a production environment, we'll have a better sense of the ROI.

I did work with Blue Prism initially. I found it hard to get support and training on their platform. Whereas, when I transitioned over to UiPath it was much easier. I knew where to go to get assistance. Also, the "Welcome" documentation really helped me in developing and creating solutions for clients.

We also worked with Automation Anywhere.

The decision to go with UiPath was due to the ease of use and the training. Having that available, that we could train our employees internally and our clients as well, is invaluable. That allowed us to really get through the initial phase of familiarity and get right into development. Those other tools required a lot of learning on the job and on the project, which is not always available, especially when there are tight budgets.

Start small. Don't try to automate the most complex use case you can find. And definitely go through the training. There's a wealth of information on the Academy site as well as in the forums to get you that foundational knowledge, to really be able to do some cool stuff with UiPath. I know a lot of people don't read the manual, they like to jump right into things, but there is a benefit to going through some of the training courses to get yourself familiarized before you dive in.

I've been working in automation for a couple of years and have used quite a few tools. I do find that the overall approach that UiPath takes toward RPA is really good for getting people in and developing and delivering in a much more efficient manner than with some of the other tools I've used.

Automation technology is something that's needed, although I don't think it is known enough yet. People know that it's out there but they don't know in what capacity it can be used and how it can help them. It's definitely something that needs to be pushed and communicated. But I see it as a technology that can assist in all facets of an organization. It's something that all people within a company can benefit from, whether internally in our company or externally for our clients.

I would give UiPath a nine out of ten. There are always things that can be improved.

We automate processes across a number of different agencies. We automate whatever use case they determine. We tend to focus on the financial management side, but we have other areas that we've delved into such as HR and general data pulls for executive dashboards.

Oddly enough, a lot of our clients have not focused on work where there are people actively doing the process already. They've chosen to focus their efforts on processes for which they haven't had the manpower. It has been a little bit of a challenge in that the use cases tend to be coupled with a lot of process-development stuff. We have to figure out what the process is before we can even begin to automate it.

But over time, we plan on trying to shift that focus back to areas where they have a large number of people doing a process all the time and getting them to shift those people into doing the complex processes where there isn't a structure already determined.

The differentiation between unattended and attended bots is valuable, as well as being able to do portions of a process that are unattended coupled with portions that are attended. We can get human interaction, all within the same product.

The product is easy to use and definitely exceeded my expectations in that context. I have an IT enterprise architecture background with some computer programming experience. This was very easy to grasp.

The additional plugins and different partner programs have been a huge help.

My only complaint is that I hate VB.NET. If I had to pick a language, it would not be VB.NET. That whole .NET framework is just overly complicated. But I can understand why it's necessary for the use case of RPA.

We haven't had any problems with the stability. In comparison, we do use Blue Prism and that solution often runs into memory issues. That's one thing that we have not had to deal with, with UiPath.

I haven't had a lot of chances to test out the scalability firsthand, but the documentation is all there and it makes sense. It seems relatively simple, which is a big help. Once again, this is in contrast to Blue Prism whose documentation is not good. It's very confusing to figure out how you take it from a single-bot use case to multiple bots and more.

It's an easy setup. It's a single install which is pretty simple. Connecting to Orchestrator does get a little complex in some cases. It is what you make of it. Certainly, installing Studio on a single desktop for proof of concept is easy. It takes five minutes. When you start to get into enterprise-level setups, where everything's a different server and everything has to be connected, that's necessarily complex.

Blue Prism definitely has a simpler licensing structure, but I feel like that's almost a shot in the foot at certain points. It also gets kind of deceptive. There's a crossover point at which, if you're scaling up to a high number of bots, UiPath path definitely does come out cheaper. But the initial implementation has a higher cost.

We've been working on RPA, in general, for about two years. We're at different points in the process for different clients. We have some that have grasped onto it quite quickly and others that are still in the proof-of-concept/pilot realm, and we're trying to push it past that. We've been doing it for a fair amount of time, given the relatively young age of RPA as a whole.

I've done a number of different training sessions through the UiPath RPA Academy. The introductory ones are fine, but I really found a lot of value from the ones that focus on solution architecture, the courses that were more on the general infrastructure of how you would implement UiPath.

I would give the solution a solid eight. The first big thing with software is, if you're not running into bug issues all the time, that's an easy five right there. If it's easier to use, that's a six or seven. And it's just been consistently good. I haven't really run into any areas where I've had any trouble. The only real issue is that, from a consulting perspective, I can't really go out there and say, "We're going to use UiPath," all the time. We really have to leave it up to the client.

The primary use case of this solution is to generate a report by scraping data, filtering it and combining the data for input to another system.

UiPath has improved our organization; the primary difference introduced by the application of the UiPath tool is the speed of processing and accuracy in the data processing.

The most valuable feature is the unattended robot, it adds a lot of value. Besides, there are certain situations where attended robots are employed to perform specific tasks.

Making improvements in the processing speed would be a good idea. I have experienced that sometimes during the development of robots, it becomes prolonged and unresponsive. Also, sometimes errors pop out of nowhere for already working simulations. This is not a significant limitation, but it would be nice if these instances can be eradicated.