WorkFusion Reviews

I am a solution provider and I implement RPA products and automate processes for my clients.

In my recent deployment of this product, it is primarily used for financial processes, such as reconciliation in Excel. There are different Excel sheets that I reconcile using automation.

This product helps us by automating functions in finance. Users are able to have attended bots but can save time by handing processes to the bots to run.

The bots are deployed on our on-premises server, and users are able to assign work to them to run while they continue their own work. The processes that the bots are running do not interfere with the day-to-day business. The server simply gives them time for the processes that they are performing.

When a process is running in the background, it is consistent. In situations where processes are running and controlling the user interface, once in a while they might miss what's being clicked.

The most valuable features are the Excel activities. It has a number of Excel activities that are quite reliable.

The Studio is used for development and the Control Tower is used for management.

This is a Java-based application that takes up a lot of space and when it runs, consumes a lot of memory. This affects the reliability because it gets to a point where it hangs.

There are some basic features missing in the Excel activities. For example, you cannot delete a row or a column, which are some of the things that I would like to be able to do.

An example of something that is difficult to do is get yesterday's date. There is a lot of scripting that has to be done. It's not direct because you can't simply use a date variable and then subtract one day. Instead, you have to do some coding to get it. That was a problem for our deployment because reconciliations are done for the previous day, and when you're naming files with yesterday's date or creating folders according to date, you have to do a lot of manipulation in the code.

I worked with WorkFusion for approximately eight months between November 2020 and August 2021.

In terms of consistency, it's good. However, in terms of reliability, because it consumes a lot of memory, it gets to a point where it starts hanging. The fact that it needs a lot of memory is the only problem.

I would not recommend this product for large automation projects because it gave us problems in terms of space and the speed at which it was executing. Once it starts running a large process with loops, it hangs. So, the process takes longer to complete.

When I deployed this solution, it was for a financial institution that had a six-person team. We automated three processes that have to do with reconciliation and they run them every week or two. The six people share roles and the bots assist them.

The reason that we deployed bots for them is that they are limited in number and needed assistance. At this point, the usage is not expected to grow.

I asked some questions on the forum and I tried to contact the support in South Africa, but I couldn't get the assistance I required. These people were not coming through, so I just had to do my own research.

Ultimately, technical support never got back to me on any of the queries that I raised. As such, I cannot give them any plusses. In fact, I still have pending questions in the forum.

I also work with UiPath and Microsoft Power Automate.

Setting up the server and the desktop versions are quite straightforward, both for the studio and for the control tower. As long as you have the required access, the setup process is straightforward. You just have to press the Next button on a series of screens.

We had a deployment on IIS and I built a web application on top of the bot. In total, the deployment took about a week because there were some functionalities that were not being picked up properly. Once those were completed, everything worked properly.

Post-setup, the deployment was a little bit difficult.

In terms of maintenance, one or two people are sufficient. You need a developer, and then somebody to support the infrastructure.

I implemented this product alone. It was a bit difficult so I used the online forum and also tried to contact technical support in South Africa.

My client is using RPA Express, which is available for them to use free of charge. Their parent company is in another country, so they're not paying for anything locally.

The Studio comes standard and is available at no charge but the Control Tower requires a license. The orchestration platform, where you manage your bots and users, is also available with a separate license.

As a developer, you cannot download the developer studio for free unless you are working for your clients. 

My client had chosen and acquired WorkFusion in advance of hiring me. They were looking for a consultant to assist them with development and deployment.

My advice for anybody who is implementing WorkFusion is to use it for small desktop processes, such as sending out a report via email, or small amounts of Excel reconciliation. However, once you have more than 1,000 or 2,000 data rows, it's going to be a bit hectic to consume that much data. That said, for small desktop applications, it's going to work.

When it comes to deploying to the server, it's going to be a bit complicated for enterprise solutions, especially because of the space. When they want to deploy it, they should have at least 16 GB of RAM and at least four CPU cores. Otherwise, anything below that will be too slow.

In summary, this is a good product for small desktop-level automation, but I do not recommend it for large-scale automation because it consumes too much memory and the processes run slowly or hang as a result. There is a lot of work to be done and considering the support does not get back to you, you might struggle with an issue for a long time. Also, there is very little content available online.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We are using WorkFusion as our enterprise RPA solution at this time to help us deploy some automation. It is a hybrid-based installation. Eventually, we are going to try to move everything to the cloud. Some of our customers are dealing with transactions, trader solutions, governance compliance needs, and other special cases so it is not totally possible to go totally on the cloud at this time. There are also clients who deal with things like a KYC (Know Your Customer) type solution, and then a few operational needs like ATM reconciliation and financial revenue reconciliation. The regulations sometimes preclude certain solutions in certain configurations.  

It helps us to provide some of the bot solutions we need to work with our customers.  

I suppose that the most useful feature in WorkFusion has been the desktop solution — also known as a desktop option. It is a type of RDA (Robotic Desktop Automation) express option because it allows us to do very quick developments outside of the normal BI (Business Intelligence) process. Even though the bigger enterprise is obviously more robust, there are a lot of small solutions that can solve pain points in our business at a particular moment that do not require more rigorous development.  

Obviously, the WorkFusion Enterprise product is very technical. You have got to be Java proficient and otherwise technically oriented. I guess what could be an improvement in the product is moving towards more "codeless" coding. That would be using things like a drag-and-drop interface to build solutions with premade components. These components would have set functions to simplify using the coding portion of the product for the business user. Instead of keeping the product in use with only the more technically inclined users, they might create a way for the business user to assemble what they need and enhance development opportunities.  

I think a move towards that sort of codeless coding would be a great step in creating more utility for more end users. Maybe API calls or other creative components could be worked in. The express version does not do API calls and the Enterprise version does not do codeless coding. It would be nice to have a solution somewhere in the middle. WorkFusion has got the very easy, light version covered and the very technical, heavy one covered. There seems to me to be a gray area or gap in the middle where a whole set of potential users is not addressed.  

I think our organization has been using WorkFusion for three or maybe four years overall. With my group in the Africa regions, we have been using it for about two years.  

I do not think we have ever had issues with stability. It seems to be very good from my personal experience. It is more likely that something in the solution will be affected by the environment changing than it just breaking down. The question becomes can an RPA solution adapt to changing architecture through various upgrades and version changes and remain compatible with the environment.  

The stability of the product itself is something we have not had issues with.  

I would say there are probably just less than 100 users currently working with WorkFusion at our company. I am not sure what the total number is, but probably less than 100. Within the African group, we have probably got about 15 to 20 total users.  

Most of the people using the product are using it on a daily basis. The processes created as bots are obviously running in real-time all the time. The developers are either busy with deployments or they get involved from an analysis and design perspective. But working directly with the product consumes a high percentage of the users' time.  

Our scaling is simply replication across countries and geography. There are always new projects and configurations that need to take place to augment the system, but it is pretty easy to scale usage of completed bots.  

I do not ever have the need to contact the WorkFusion tech support directly. We have got a Center of Excellence that supports us from a group perspective. We deal with them and they deal with the vendor if anything needs to be resolved.  

This solution is actually the first RPA I have used. Maybe it is not so surprising considering the technology is not very old.  

I joined the team after all of the internal architectural decisions, choices, and implementations were completed. Because of that, I can not really comment on the evaluation process. I have just been making use of the system that was in place after its adoption, and I can not really complain.  

I was not involved in the initial installation as it happened before I arrived. I can only say that I have not heard anything about the issues that may have occurred.  

It does require maintenance and there is ongoing support from a technical training standpoint. Then the bots themselves require maintenance and updates. That is, if there is anything that changes in the environment or any process changes, the bots may need to be reconfigured — or even replaced — to work with the changes.  

WorkFusion is cheaper than quite a few of the potential solutions, but we have also heard some complaints that it is a more expensive solution than others. It is certainly not the cheapest solution. I think Help Automate came in as quite a bit less expensive. Obviously, we have to have an enterprise solution with a company of our size and there is an opportunity to negotiate to potentially work out a volume discount. That would make the cost less significant in the choice of what we continue to use.  

As far as I know, all other services are included in the license as a single point of pay without any additional fees.  

While we have got WorkFusion as a solution at the moment, we continue going through due diligence. We actively check and evaluate the alternatives that are available. We consider it an ongoing or proactive review of our current toolkit. We currently use mostly WorkFusion, but we also use Python for some of the other automation. We are looking at other important products like UiPath, Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and Help Automate. Those are the tools that we are pulling in to use for our comparisons. One of them may solve potential pain points the current solutions do not.  

Overall, I would recommend this solution to other users. I have got nothing against UiPath or Blue Prism or any of those other products, and I think there are other options like Python people can make use of. But from my experience with this product, I certainly recommend it.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate WorkFusion about an eight. Between a seven and an eight but on the high end of that range.  

We implement this solution for our clients according to their needs.

WorkFusion's SAP integrations are really good. 

When it comes to the artificial intelligence part, WorkFusion is demanding in terms of having extra skills. You need to be a bit of an expert. If you look at Automation Anywhere, IQ Bot is a business-friendly tool. To develop applications in WorkFusion, it's much more time consuming, and much more expensive in terms of the additional skills and resources that are needed.

WorkFusion is time-consuming in terms of development. Especially when compared to UiPath and Automation Anywhere. The inspector elements have a separate window, and that's something that takes extra time, in terms of developing WorkFusion. 

The installation and the software required for WorkFusion is really massive. You need a professional IT administrator to actually do all the installations. That makes it very expensive, to get the infrastructure up and running. It involves Tableau, and other items. There are many third parties you will need to bring up the ecosystem,which further adds to the expense.

They should have a simplistic infrastructure. They are built for huge enterprise-scale companies of 1,000 or 10,000 or more. You don't see that kind of RPA implementation very often. They should have a simplistic version of implementation for smaller enterprises without all of that extra software. It would be great if they offered both a very basic installation, plus their already existing enterprise edition. They should work on stripping down the amount of software and the amount of hardware required.

The technical support can be improved. 

I've been dealing with the solution for a number of years now.

I can't comment on the stability per se. All of the bots are pretty much the same. As long as the underlying applications work well, it also works well.

I can't really comment on the scalability, except to say that large enterprises would already be best suited to this solution due to the size and cost constraints inherent in its design. 

During the current COVID situation, technical support has not been great. Typically they respond back promptly. As of now, there is absolutely no response coming from WorkFusion. While in the past we may have been satisfied with their assistance, I wouldn't be able to say that today, due to the complete drop off in responding to issues.

It is complex for enterprise implementation. The solution needs a needs minimum, of 20-22 servers. It's no small task. This is not a straightforward setup. It's a large undertaking and there are many moving parts.

Deployment takes at least a month. In terms of getting everything done, a company is looking at a deployment of 15 to 20 days minimum.

This isn't the type of solution where anyone can try their hand at implementing and deploying. An organization definitely needs an expert to assist them with the process.

This is an expensive solution. 

They have a very expensive license compared to any other automation tool. For instance, at $50,000 - $60,000, you can bring in an Automation Anywhere solution. For this solution, you need at least $250,000 to get something going. 

That's three or four times expensive. They do have a "free" version, but it's not good. They should have an intermediate version that's int he ballpark of $100,000. Mid-tier pricing is needed.

We're hoping to partner with the solution in the near future. Right now, we currently just service our customers as required.

We are IT services providers, so we work on all deployment models. We match our offerings to what the customer is currently looking for.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten. While it's a good solution, there's a lot to work on.

They should work on productivity for the developers. As of now, their productivity is very bad compared to what Automation Anywhere or UiPath offers. It's why I've ranked them a bit lower. A simple business user can work with a UiPath and on Automation Anywhere. That's not true with this solution. It has an ease of use problem that needs to be tremendously improved. They have to catch up in the RPA market.

I'd recommend other companies first consider UiPath. If there are a lot of unstructured data, the first preference would be to go to Automation Anywhere. This is due to the ease of use of IQ Bot. 

We like the tool, and we want to use it. Our only request would be, they should simplify the tool as much as possible and work on the productivity of developers.

One thing we didn't like was their OCR solution. We felt it's somewhat inefficient. And on the cloud setup, I would like to see more OCR-related features because other solutions integrate various tools into their services. For example, a few RPA solution providers have dynamic services for Workfront and some other services. They can dynamically pick services from NLP or various other areas on a case-to-case basis. So depending on the scenario, the product itself will pick those services to create consistent efficiency. It's similar to the service AWS or Azure uses. All these individual services are efficient in specific scenarios, so these bot platforms can identify which one to use and dynamically switch among them. It has produced exceptional results. So that is one recommendation I would make to WorkFusion. This one feature could significantly simplify things. However, it might be already available on CloudFront. I'm not sure.

We've been using WorkFusion for almost a year now.

WorkFusion's price could stand to be a little lower.

We recommend different solutions based on our customers' needs, and WorkFusion is what we offer for those who need a premium solution. But when cost-conscious customers ask us for a robust solution, we recommend LokiBots because its capabilities are pretty good. And if a customer is open to using a cloud-native product, we generally go ahead and suggest LokiBots because it is very competitive and robust. Also, LokiBots uses some of Google's advanced technology stacks.

I rate WorkFusion eight out of 10. WorkFusion will begin training our team in a month or two. So after that, my rating might change. But currently, I would rate it around eight. For people thinking about switching to WorkFusion, I would suggest considering if this is the approach you want or if you would rather go with the on-premise solution. If there are conservative customers, we recommend they go ahead with that because it may limit the major vendors available, but at the same time, they will not be disappointed. But on the other hand, if somebody wants to go through a complete detailed evaluation, then we have other recommendations also.

The solution is not just about playing recordings, dragging and dropping them onto the platform. It does more, it allows your business to have more use cases. When you are using the framework it allows you the ablility to customize the Java code according to business requirements. This is what makes it easier for us.

I think from a business point of view, we have accomplished what we wanted to. From a skills perspective, there is still a lot of upskilling that is required because our next step is machine learning.

The solution is customizable, you can create new APIs according to your requirements.

We have had some problems in the past with the Inspector tool that looks at the elements on the screen. Replacing it or improving it is needed.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The solution is stable, we have not had any glitches or problems. I would say currently the stability is approximately 95%.

The version we are using has been able to scale fine since we have done it already. I would like to see how the scalability is of version 10, which we are waiting to do.

The customer service uses tickets for tracking support. Their turn around time is very good, we typically get a response within a day.

The setup was time-consuming but simple. We had the skills and resources to complete it without a problem.

The whole implementation took approximately two months. We had different environments and hardware which can add up to more time for the process. Typically, the more changes that are required the more time it can take.

I do not have high-level experience with platforms that offer similar robotic process automation currently. The capability is there in this solution, the platform has a lot of features and capabilities. The onus is of the user to utilize all of those capabilities that WorkFusion has. 

If you have a small business there might be a better solution out there for you but if you have a large organisation, I definitely recommend it.

I rate WorkFusion an eight out of ten.

Banking, FX Trading, Collateral, Allocations (FI, EQ)
Process inbound emails (with & without attachments) from external clients for above lines of business.

Workfusion uses Machine Learning to process inbound data.

Automated manual tasks

It's a pretty robust product.

It comes packaged with ELK Stack, Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash.

It has a lot of monitoring capabilities that we're taking advantage of.

Throughput monitoring and database bottlenecks are areas that we are working on that need some improvement.

I have been using WorkFusion for 9 months.

We are having some database issues, but we are addressing them.

It's a scalable solution that integrates well with other solutions.

Technical support is very robust. When we have production issues, SLA is 30 minutes. 

They are responsive and helpful.

We are using other RPA  and RDA software solutions in addition to Workfusion, such as UiPath and Pega

I was hired specifically to support this environment.

When I came on board, it was already implemented, rolled out, and already in production.

I've been involved with implementing software upgrades for the product with vendor assistance.

Vendor support has been excellent

I can't speak to pricing. It's a contract signed by upper management.

We use Control Tower (UI) to control the Business Processes.  I support the production environment and respective monitoring across multiple Linux and Windows servers.

 I am part of the team that supports Robotics within our organization including bots running under Workfusion, UIPath, Pega, etc.

I would rate WorkFusion an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is for desktop automation for smaller solutions that stand outside the development on the core operating systems.

We also use it for building robotics capabilities and skills in all of our geographies across fourteen countries in Africa.

Automations have been done over several operating environments and include solutions in the following areas.

1. Operations

2. Compliance and Risk (Regulation driven requirements)

3. Credit solutions and integration with decision systems

The primary focus is delivering solutions that enable better customer experience.

WorkFusion's SPA capability, although powerful, is somewhat restrictive as it requires a considerable infrastructure investment and would require considerable network and bandwidth capabilities to function from a central site without the deployment of local instances.

Their proposed Cloud solution should resolve many of these issues and enable multiple geographic areas to benefit from the solution's capabilities.

Their RPA Express solution is free and provides a way to expand the Robotics footprint.

WorkFusion's RPA Express's ability to scale across multiple geographies with limited impact on additional IT Hardware requirements. This has enabled the scaling of Robotics capabilities and solutions across all our entities.

The RPA Express solution is a free addition to the current Enterprise Agreement the Group has with WorkFusion and provides an excellent entry point into Robotics for new "Intelligent Automation Practitioners". 

Training has been standardized and formalized Academies have been set up.

The product needs to be "simple and easy" to use. 

A good example of this is the use of Python code to perform automations. It is free and the skills transfer is able to happen quickly and the operation and initiation of the completed automation are easy to execute. 

The primary focus of the Robotics Process Automation software should be to enable business users to perform "codeless" automations that will still fall within the strict governance and compliance structures within which we are required to operate.

We have been using WorkFusion for 24+ months.

A formal training programme has been initiated with the objective to create an Academy.

The Group has built up a sound knowledge and experience base with the technology.

The SPA is not so good.

RPA Express is very good.

This expertise has grown considerably and continues to do so.

We also do use Python to develop automation solutions.

Setup - Unable to comment

Support - Support has grown and continues to expand

We implemented using both an in-house team and a vendor team.

The Vendor Team is very proficient.

These is primary drivers that will determine the selection of a solution as there are currently huge pressures on overheads given the decrease in revenue following Covid-19.

We are currently reviewing alternative, scalable solutions.

• Simple to use (business user, not IT reliant)
• Cost-effective
• Easy to support and integrate with current IT Architecture 

Our primary use case was very simple. It read information from a spreadsheet and captured that into a core processing system. The benefit was that this process was carried out hundreds of times every day, and took up to an hour each time, so the capacity saving was massive. 

The most valuable feature is having the technology to interface into systems where we didn't otherwise have an API or some other kind of service or access. The benefit is in creating solutions where we don't have a backend API to call.

Everything has room for improvement, and the product continues to evolve. One area of improvement would be the ability to run headless on their Express product. This would allow one to run the automation on their local machine, but still be able to work in other applications using mouse and keyboard while the automation runs headless in a minimized window in the background.

A single-server version of the product that will work for a mid-range mid-size company would also be good to see.

Finally, working in partnership with software companies like SAP to improve their interface interactions would be a good advantage.

I've been familiar with WorkFusion since 2015, so I have worked with it for almost five years.

The stability has been good. If there were problems, I'm not aware of them. We did have a team of guys looking after the servers and if they picked up any issues they would have dealt with them on-the-fly. I'm not aware of any issues at all.

We are quite happy with the scalability. To scale, it just requires more nodes to make for more bots. We have probably about 100 or 200 robots running. So there are over a hundred instances of automations running and they execute many thousands of times each. I'm sure we plan to increase usage even more and we are confident that we can.

The technical support was very good upfront and we have a good working relationship with the vendor.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. That may have been because we had the guys who built the system from Minsk come and do it for us. The initial installation took six months and that included doing a proof of concept.

WorkFusion worked with us directly on the implementation.

Pricing models are available online. Some vendors provide a free entry level solution to get you started.

Yes, we carried out a high-level RFI (Request for Information) / RFP (Request for Proposal) process with a number of the big vendors. After deliberation and measurement against our expectations, we picked WorkFusion.

My advice for those thinking of implementing an RPA is that they start small and simple if they want to see if it works for their company. If it doesn't work as a small scale, investment in the long-term solution doesn't make sense.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate WorkFusion as a seven out of ten. It is not higher because they have got some work to do now. Other companies have caught up. They were the first ones to offer a free desktop automation product and the others will now need to follow suit. To stay ahead it is time for them to come up with the next innovation.