ABBYY Vantage Reviews

We are a logistics company, and, due to the fact that a lot of documents get generated on a daily basis, documents need to be processed and data extracted. That's our primary use case for this solution. We use it for a lot of data extraction.

The fact that IBM Datacap uses ABBYY's core engine for OCR, is quite useful for us. It makes them one of the key players as far as OCR extraction is concerned. 

The fact that they've packaged it very well in the sense that you have these field extraction batches which enable you to auto claim the documents, and you have these templates which are structurally laid out, which enables you to mark a specific zone from which data can be extracted. 

It saves us a lot of manual work.

The automation on offer is good.

Technical support, for the most part, is helpful.

A lot of things could be improved, especially if you look at the number of support tickets that we have created. Looking at those would indicate the things that can be improved. 

For example, more often than not, we are forced to rely on template creation in order to bring the accuracy of extraction to 100%. 

Even though the training works, it's not as good as it is made out to be. In our case, we've got thousands of suppliers and it is just not humanly possible for us to keep creating templates for each one of these suppliers. What we would need is an out-of-the-box extraction to be even more accurate, or for the training to improve in such a way that just the training should be able to give us a reasonable amount of accuracy. I know that 100% is too high a limit to aim at, however, even if we get close to 85% to 90% margin, it would be much better. Something that could do that out of the box would solve most of the problems.

ABBYY introduced a reporting data warehouse last December, however, that reporting data warehouse has its own fair share of problems. Something like accuracy and completeness of out-of-the-box recognition is something that should be available as part of your default reports in the tool itself. Right now, that is missing. 

ABBYY provides a document definition for an invoice, however, that invoice is a supplier invoice. In our organization, we deal with commercial invoices most of the time. The problem there is that supplier invoices. If you put them into the system, it gives you around 80% to 85% accuracy out of the box. However, with commercial invoices, you only get around 60% accuracy out of the box.

Based on the input that we have provided, ABBYY is now working on including the commercial invoices as well as part of that default invoice document definition. They are working on that as well. There are a lot of minor things that have come up. For example, when you create a template, ABBYY claims that you can export the default template that is generated as part of the training, and then make changes to that and then import it back. What we found was that the concept applies only to certain things. The training of the line items cannot be exported as a template. They said it's to do with the way machine learning was being applied and all that. However, these are all things which kind of increase the development time.

I have a couple of years' experience with this solution. I've been working with it since about 2019.

The performance can improve. Even though we have tried out the solution's provider, ABBYY, in terms of having more processing stations, all still boils down to the fact of how your application is configured. For example, in our case, we have about five processing stations in production. When we started off, it took almost 60 seconds to process one page because of the complex nature of our application. We had around five document types, and each type has to be classified based on a set of keywords, and then you had to apply the document definitions on top of them. Then it goes through this concept of the generic layout and the additional layout and so forth. Almost every page used to take about 60 seconds on average. Then we made a lot of tweaks to the application and then we brought it down to around 22 seconds per page.

That said, even then, when you're talking about the space that we are in, the domain that we are working in, sometimes a 100-page document has to be processed within around 30 minutes. If you take a 100-page document, only for processing that itself, it takes almost close to an hour. Then, what happens is that additional stages like verification, et cetera, by the time the data is exported and uploaded into the target system, it's taken too long.

With the normal ABBYY support, you go to support.abby.com and you raise tickets. The support is almost immediate. There are constant responses that come to you. However, what I've also seen is that there are a lot of complex problems for which we have not gotten the solution we need. While the response has been great, if you asked me whether all the queries for the problems that we raised have been solved, the answer is no. On the other hand, we also have a chance to interact with the ABBYY professional services team directly due to the contract that has been established with our organization. They are a wonderful bunch of people and there's this personal rapport that we have with them. We get in touch with them on a weekly basis and our query is resolved.

In our organization, it is the IT team that takes care of the installation. I do not have much information about the process and I wasn't really a part of it. 

We're just a customer and an end-user.

I'd advise users that, when you start off with your first project on FlexiCapture, choose a project which has at least something which can accommodate a very high pattern. For example, if you're going to go for a use case wherein documents have to be processed within the next 30 minutes, you're going to face a lot of problems. ABBYY is a wonderful tool, however, it has got its own set of constraints. It's very important to understand the constraints of the tool.

The strength of the ABBYY FlexiCapture license is the OCR engine. However, if you're extracting it to process millions of documents within a very small amount of time, that is not going to happen. 

It's very, very important for the final operators who are going to use the tool to understand what OCR is all about. The problems that we face are not technical at all. It is about trying to convince people, people who have been doing operations manually to change their processes. If you have a situation where people are looking at documents, looking at the data, and entering it into a system, and then come and tell them that the solution will extract that information automatically and they just have to verify that information, they'll need to change their approach. 

It's very important to get the business team who will be doing the verification into a meeting, in order to help them understand what OCR is, and also its limitations. 

You will need to specify the stock field and the zones. OCR is able to learn on its own and understand how to extract data from it. However, there are certain things that you will have to teach people. You have to tell them the fact that a page is converted into black and white, and that the gray areas either cannot be black or white as certain characters that are being recognized may turn out to be something else. OCR tells you the level of confidence based on what gets extracted. All this has to be translated to the business team so that they understand the tool and its limitations. If you do this, you can ensure the success of the project.

Therefore, while ABBYY, as a tool, is great, there is a lot of work that needs to be done before you start implementing it.

I'd rate the solution overall at a nine out of ten. We have had to initiate a lot of fixes, however, overall, it's quite good.

We need to understand ABBYY Vantage to add some projects and push them to our customers.

I have worked on many different OCR extraction tools, like document understanding, which uses ML technology. Compared to other tools, ABBYY Vantage is better because it's very user-friendly. It has a wide variety where we can manipulate or code the document as per our specifications, like OCR or many more specifications.

Since we are using a trial version, we don't have administration access to create a tenant to integrate my OCR series with Postman. Right now, we are doing one POC, and to complete that POC, we need that access because it's a requirement.

I have been using ABBYY Vantage for a couple of months.

In my team, three to four people are using ABBYY Vantage.

Our experience with our FlexiCapture was good. In FlexiCapture, you have to create templates because it does not use ML or AI technology. We learned that ABBYY Vantage uses ML technology, and we want to explore it.

ABBYY Vantage's initial setup is very beautiful. We didn't face any hurdles during the setup.

The solution is deployed on ABBYY cloud in our organization.

Overall, I rate ABBYY Vantage an eight out of ten.

We use ABBYY Vantage for invoicing problems and for unstructured forms and documents.
ABBYY is an older tool that specializes in data extraction, OCR, ICR, and other recognitions. The company or the department just has to decide the use case. 

I like the flexibility of the layout. For example, for the documents that we're using, this is the main feature that is very useful and makes it flexible for extraction.

It could be more intuitive. It's huge and has many options, and that makes it difficult. You have to go to Google and search for documents and videos to try and understand how it works. Some tools or processes or some parts of the process should be intuitive to make it easier for the developers.

Many of these tools are divided into many parts. You have to buy different parts, and you have to know the difference between features. Sometimes it's difficult for the developer because you don't have the old information available in cleartext. These things need extra plugins to try and collect the different parts in different ways. 

It would also help if they improved the engine for ICR. I know that people improved this tool, but it's not expanded right now. We need to use an additional plugin to design or code some parts using a toolkit. It's not properly included in the standard package. 

I have been using ABBYY Vantage for about seven months.

ABBYY Vantage is very stable. I don't have any concerns about it.

I know that scalability is available, but I don't have a big project reference right now. We have about 50 people using it right now.

In the last three or four projects, we used ABBYY instead of IQ Bot. I know that IQ Bot probably works with a simple OCR extraction without complicated decisions or business rules. If we have more complexity when it comes to the business rules, for example, the quality of the images, or apply different filters over the images and do other things with ABBYY, we use ABBYY instead of the IQ Bot. But IQ Bot is more flexible.

It's not easy to set up this solution. But once the installation is done, you don't have to configure anything. The main part is related to the server and the infrastructure people handle that.

For simple types of documents, medium-sized projects with 25 types of unstructured documents, with seven or eight field sections, it probably takes one week to deploy. This includes bulk extractions where the information is put into the different outputs. We mainly use this in our Excel template.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give ABBYY Vantage an eight.

Our primary use case of this solution is for our invoice project. We wanted to capture the sales and use tax data from our invoices. I'm a senior manager and we are currently customers of ABBYY, hoping to become resellers in the future. 

I think the machine learning capability of ABBYY is pretty good. You can create your small frame model and then the software works well, applying that training to extract the data out of other invoices.

I think that the tool is really complex. It works well, but in terms of rolling it out to a large audience that is not very tech savvy, this tool might be a little too much for them to handle. I think there needs to be some sort of simplification for that kind of user. ABBYY has the FlexiLayout Studio tool which is used for creating layouts for semi-structured and unstructured documents. It's pretty complex and we'd like to see some simplification there.

I've been using this solution for four months. 

I think that once it is installed, the solution is stable. There are no issues that come up. 

When it comes to scalability, you might need to install multiple instances of these stations. It comes in two pieces, one is a server and one is the stations. The stations can be scaled up, and can connect to the centralized server and work well, but I think that if you wanted to have it scaled for a large number of users you might have to think about creating some wrappers around it.

We have a user base of around 50 to 100 people but we are gradually rolling it out, so I think right now we only have 20 users who are actively using it, but down the road we expect that to come close to 100.

In general, the ABBYY support is pretty good. They are very responsive and try to resolve any issues.

I think installation is pretty straightforward, except that if you are using a distributed version, then there are some prerequisites in terms of IAS that need to be installed beforehand. That makes it a little challenging, but I think if you have the right support from ABBYY you can manage that easily.

The ABBYY license is calculated by pages and it all depends on how you negotiate the licensing with them. If you have a pretty large use case, you might get some discounts, but if you have a pretty small use case, they might be firm on the price.

We did our due diligence on a number of solutions and we found ABBYY to be more widely known and they've received pretty good reviews. That's why we chose them along with the fact that their licensing is decent enough. The other solutions we looked at were not as good as ABBYY and were more expensive. 

I think each company needs to make a judgment as to whether you can handle a technically challenging solution, because ABBYY is challenging. If you need to have your people trained ahead of time to get some support built into your organization, you should do that. If your organization is not very tech savvy, this solution might not work for you very well.

We still need to carry out more evaluations. For example, the out of the box, SDK support. I'd like to know how much free SDK support we would get if we try to build a wrapper around ABBYY. I think those are the things that we need to evaluate on our end, but overall I think we are pretty happy with this tool.

I think this is a good solution and would rate it an eight out of 10.

The solution is used mostly for form extraction, fixed form extraction, text forms, data extraction, OCR, et cetera. We use it for digital document processing.

We run software that does basically business process automation. It's given us a form extraction utility to add. We're utilizing the ATR in the FlexiCapture engine, and in that way, we can use the FlexiCapture engine to process forms. Any forms that contain data, we can extract.

Without that, we would have to use pattern extraction, regular expressions, and things like that. This is a forms processing engine, which allows us to be able to set anchors and OCR values, et cetera. 

The form extractions engine and the FlexiCapture designer are really useful.

The solution is easy to set up.

We have found the solution to be stable so far. 

The product is extremely scalable. 

The UI is okay, however, I remember the scanning and the way that you actually get documents into the system. The FlexiCapture, what they call a process developer, could use some work.

The solution needs more web or cloud-based development. Cloud-based FlexiCapture development would be great.

The on-premise web version doesn't seem to be intuitive or easy to use or install. It's not user-friendly.

Technical support is slow to respond.

The pricing is a bit high and we are looking into other options. 

I've been using the solution for three years now. I've used it for a while. 

The stability is good. It's a reliable solution. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution scales very, very well. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. 

We have about ten users on the solution right now. They are mostly developers and consultants. 

Technical support could be better. once you create a ticket, it takes some time for them to respond, from a partner perspective. You send a ticket to an email address. There's no phone number. You can send it to support@abbyy.com and you have to wait. 

They do have a fairly thorough knowledge base. There are also available videos on YouTube. However, if you're having complex problems, it can take sometimes days for them to respond. If you're running a professional system, that's not going to cut it.

I don't know if they have level levels of support, and we have maybe just a really poor version of the support system. I can imagine that, if you pay for a really high level of support, then, of course, they're available. That said, from our perspective, being a partner developer, we've had problems with the support, for sure. If you pay for Professional Services hours, it would be my assumption that they would respond right away, however.

The initial setup was straightforward and easy. It was not too complex or overly difficult. 

Licensing is paid on a yearly basis. I don't know the exact price of everything, however, I do know that it is expensive from the perspective of our management team. We've also been looking for other solutions.

We are a partner with ABBYY.

I'm using version 12. I believe it is the latest version. I haven't seen any updates as of recently. There could be a version 14 out, however, I'm not sure. We're using the desktop version. 

I would advise those considering the solution to watch the YouTube lessons and pay for Professional Services training and assistance. 

At this point, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We use ABBYY FlexiCapture to extract data from invoices and purchase orders.

It is saving a lot of time, especially for the users who are doing the same tasks on a regular basis. Previously, they were manually copy-pasting from the PDF files to the legacy systems. By using FlexiCapture's integration with UiPath, we are able to automate a lot of complex processes and save time.

We are able to extract details from a PDF and put them into a CSV. It is able to extract the details that we are looking for. We have the Machine Learning feature to extract the data with respect to the position of the field.

Most of the features are already included in ABBYY FlexiCapture. It is 95% good. It only needs an improvement of 5%. 

Occasionally, we found the Machine Learning feature to be not working as per our expectations. Sometimes, it also failed to extract details from a PDF. It would be great if training batches work with 100% accuracy. I don't see any other major concerns with ABBYY FlexiCapture.

In the future release, in the admin console, they can include information about the number of pages that we have consumed and the number of pages that are remaining. Currently, we are not able to see how many pages we have consumed. We haven't received any feedback from ABBYY on how many pages we've consumed for each template or the whole process. If they can include that in the future release, it would be great because we don't know how many pages we may require on a yearly basis.

It is expensive.

We have been using this solution for about two years.

We haven't seen many crashing issues so far.

The scaling process is of medium complexity. My company is a sales-based company, and we get millions of purchase orders from different vendors. So, we use ABBYY FlexiCapture a lot. We have plans to increase its usage in different departments.

Once in a while, when we have any questions, we reach out to ABBYY. They were okay, and they were able to help me.

We haven't used any other tools. We started with ABBYY FlexiCapture.

Its deployment process is of medium complexity. Currently, only one person from the India team or the Austria team is deploying the packages for ABBYY FlexiCapture. I have been deploying UiPath packages for a very long time, and the process for ABBYY FlexiCapture is a little bit different as compared to UiPath. ABBYY FlexiCapture is a little bit more complex than UiPath.

It takes 15 to 20 minutes for one template.

We have definitely seen an ROI. It might increase in the future.

It is expensive as compared to UiPath. We pay for the licensing and the page count.

We didn't explore any other OCR tools as of now. We are good with ABBYY FlexiCapture, and I don't think we are going to explore any other tools in the future.

I would strongly recommend using ABBYY FlexiCapture if you have a high number of invoices, purchase orders, or any manual checks, and you want to extract details.

I would rate ABBYY FlexiCapture a nine out of 10.

We use ABBYY FlexiCapture to recognize pictures or PDF files and transfer them to Word or Excel.

It's easy to use.

The integration with UiPath is not good.

I would like to see more documentation and guides to help gain more in-depth knowledge of how to use ABBYY FlexiCapture.

I've been working with this solution for about three or four months.

I have had no issues with stability so far.

I chose ABBYY because it had more solutions for intelligence automation, and it looked like I could combine it with other automation solutions. We currently have 20 to 30 users.

I recommend ABBYY FlexiCapture, and on a scale from one to ten with ten being the best, I would rate it at eight.

One use case was known as Manual Order and it was a type of invoice processing. When a customer had or was going to receive invoices from different distribution centers, which all could be accessed in different formats. For example, they could be different templates, be digital, and scanned. There could a wide range of variations. The purpose or the aim of FlexiCapture is to extract the information out of those invoices, such as a certain number of fields, which we need to extract from the invoice and that sent on into the SAP. For the SAP we were using Pega. There is integration between ABBYY FlexiCapture and Pega to solve the whole use case.

The second use case was for claims. For example, if a customer was supported to get a claim from the distribution center but some of the quantity was not being sent to them correctly or the price was not good, they would send those for correction. One claim could have multiple claims in between them that could have a price difference or quantity difference. It is more complex than device processing because it has more variations in the template. It has more business complex routes. On the FlexiCapture, we are extracting the data out of this document. We implemented some of the business tools and we are using Pega to revalidate the data in the SAP to correct it.

Additionally, we have four or five business processes that are already running in production with Blue Prism and ABBYY FlexiCapture.

While using ABBYY FlexiCapture we did not use the generic models that they do have for invoice and purchase orders. For one of the use-cases, the document was exactly the purchase order, but we are not using that generic model. We are creating the model from Scratch. However, if I was to compare ABBYY FlexiCapture with other IA tools, the machine learning and how the extraction is done is far better than competitors. This allows a lot less effort for the development.

The generic models have a lot of areas to improve. In our experience, we are not able to get good results in the generic models. From a developer's point of view, there could be more improvement if the source code is available on a broader scope. It is a low code platform but it requires implementing more complex code to be able to accomplish certain tasks. We are not able to tune the model on a programming level because we do not have the source code to do it. From a business point of view, ABBYY FlexiCapture is one of the best platforms for machine learning. The solution does not have anything related to RPA or robotics, but we can integrate it easily with a Pega or Blue Prism for these features.

ABBYY FlexiCapture has a lot of functionality but it does not have options to implement more machine learning business rules. It does not have the option to write the logic to implement other options according to the business. Most people do not like to choose ABBYY because of the lack of those functions, such as reading email or saving them to excel, they use other tools for these activities. If ABBYY had these functionalities more people would use it and it would be more useful.

I have been using the solution for approximately a year and a half.

The solution is stable. However, new versions come out frequently and our customers do not have a choice whether they are going to update since it is on the cloud. They still have to make sure it does not have any negative effect on their exciting solution in a bad way. 

There are times it takes a lot of time when we submit a document to FlexiCapture in between getting the results When this happens we raise a ticket to the ABBYY team and it gets released very quickly.

We have approximately four people in my organization using the solution. It is not the majority of the teams. We had five customers for which we were working with this solution, we had a trial contract with another tool, but due to some reason, the customer wanted to use FlexiCapture. I am one of those four people who have this experience in the ABBYY FlexiCapture.

We have plans to increase the usage of the solution.

My experience with customer service has been really good. I have not contacted them directly, but they do have forums. When we initially started, I had posted some technical questions and I did get a response from them.

ABBYY FlexiCapture is not very old which causes a limited knowledge base for assistance, this is possible because there are not a lot of people using it. There is documentation from the ABBYY FlexiCapture which is okay. However, if you start working with the solution, the practical knowledge is better than what you will find in the documentation.

Before using FlexiCapture we were previously using WorkFusion. It is an RPA or IA tool that has both the RPA plus machine learning. PNG decided to reconstruct those use cases and some others with the ABBYY FlexiCapture.

We did the installation for our own company, it is not very difficult because the customer service is good and are you will be given a particular team who will be responsible for the deployment.

We used the deployment team from ABBYY FlexiCapture for the implementation. The time it took was approximately two months including all customization and licensing.

Most of our customers have purchased an annual license and if you have multiple developers from other companies, you can assign the license on a monthly basis to developers. 

We have licenses for ABBYY FlexiCapture for our company.

We did evaluate other options with our customers before choosing ABBYY FlexiCapture.

My advice when doing the implementation is to do the practice mode rather than only going through the certification and documentation. It is better to implement the model, instead of using the generic model.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate ABBYY FlexiCapture an eight out of ten.