ABBYY Vantage Reviews

We are using ABBYY FlexiCapture for invoices.

The most valuable feature of ABBYY FlexiCapture is the accuracy of the general extractions.

ABBYY FlexiCapture could improve in the maintenance, and there are some issues. You have to make efforts to do corrections. Additionally, it could be more user-friendly in terms of connecting between different solutions.

I have been using ABBYY FlexiCapture for approximately one year.

ABBYY FlexiCapture is highly stable. The processing time is very fast.

We have two people using ABBYY FlexiCapture in my company.

I have tested Vantage, and it is more user-friendly than the ABBYY FlexiCapture.

The initial setup of ABBYY FlexiCapture was not easy, mainly because you have to configure a lot of things. It depends on the installation itself if it's going to be on the server or on the same system, but either way, it is not simple. 

I rate ABBYY FlexiCapture a nine out of ten.

Most of the use cases were invoice-related for sectors such as supply chain and finance. Sometimes, they were a little bit related to HR and payroll. We also had use cases for passports and IDs and documents related to HR and onboarding. 

I've also worked on a larger scale project for importing and exporting in Dubai. It had invoices, country of origin statements, and everything else that comes through with an import check event.

It was on-premise on all the projects I've worked on. I've never worked on it with the cloud. We would connect it to an RPA tool, such as UiPath or Automation Anywhere. So, it was a part of a larger solution.

Usually, it does the reading task for a document, such as an invoice, and that is a very mundane task for an employee when they have other stuff to do. It pretty much takes that off their plate. It gives them time to focus on bigger picture things or even look at the process as a whole.

It lessens the errors that can happen. An employee can be tired and read a number wrong, but if it is a computer-generated invoice, it is going to be of the best quality. If it is computer-generated, it will come out with zero error every time, and it will do it a lot faster than a person. It will extract the information and continue doing whatever you need to.

Verification station is a really good feature. It allows part-owners to be able to take a look at what comes out of the tool after a document, such as an invoice, is run through ABBYY. It also allows them to update it if there are any mistakes. So, it kind of gives them a little more control over what goes through the system and lessens the errors.

They say that they have invoice training or document training where if you put in a certain number of documents of the same type and you fix it once, twice, or a few times, it'll automatically be able to read the same document perfectly without you having to create a layout for it to follow. That has never worked properly for any project, so I just stopped recommending it completely. We spent time trying to test and getting a bunch of invoices to test it with, and in the end, it just didn't do what it needed to. If they fix that or if they can improve on that, that would be great. It will save a lot of time for a lot of people, and it will allow people with less experience with ABBYY to be able to use it.

The way FlexiLayout Studio and Project Station read a document, such as an invoice, is a little bit different. So, if you set it up in FlexiLayout Studio and create a template, it will read it just fine, but when you import it into Project Studio, sometimes, it will not read it the same way. The way both of them read is a little bit different. So, you have to go back, and you have to change it again, and it is trial and error until you get it right.

Its price should be a little lower. It is a lot higher than the competition.

The last project I worked on was in February of this year.

It is pretty stable. If I remember correctly, it has only crashed once, and I don't think it was a system issue. It was just some weird, bizarre glitch that happened at the time. Once the projects were live and running on the client system, we've never had any issues that I can think of.

Its scalability is good, but it also depends on how you're working on a project from the beginning. I like to put everything together, and I usually do think of it in a way that if we were going to add invoices in the future, it won't be a hassle. It is pretty scalable. I can have many different invoices on the same project. I can have a project going on the client-side for years and then just add to it if needed.

Usually, we have some type of business analyst whose main role is doing something that we call an OCR study. The business analyst would be reading the invoices and just telling us what the client wants to extract from them. On their end, they also make sure that the quality of the invoices is good for ABBYY. It can't be something that is written over and damaged or put in someone's pocket for a day and then in the scanner. It won't give us perfect results.

There would also be a developer who would take a look at the OCR study fed by the analyst and then think of how to develop each template. If you don't understand how you're going to design the whole project, you might need someone. Because we're putting it into another automation tool as well, after we've sort of developed everything, depending on the scale of the project, we may have somebody dedicated to just testing the submission before sending it over to the client.

We have plans to use it, and of course, it is a good product, but we work with what the client wants. So, if a client doesn't want it, then they're not going to be using it. It is not like a solution for every case in my line of work. It depends on if the client actually has a bunch of invoices or a bunch of documents that they need to read quickly. If that's the case, then we definitely recommend it every time. We recommend it over any other OCR solution on the market. ABBYY in itself isn't a perfect tool, but ABBYY is pretty good. It is not the best on the market at the moment.

I've been in contact with several people from ABBYY and their support staff. They're very helpful.

We were using the default OCR tool that came with the UiPath software. It is integrated with Google OCR and Microsoft OCR, which are okay for smaller, simpler documents, but they're not going to give you the control that you can have with ABBYY. The engine itself isn't as good.

ABBYY is definitely more mature. It's all-around better. If I pass through an invoice PDF, the percentage of getting everything right with ABBYY is higher than it is with the others. It is definitely a lot more expensive, but I can tailor what I need to each document, and I have multi-lingual support. I can pretty much just get behind what ABBYY is trying to read and make sure it is reading everything correctly, whereas, with Google OCR or Microsoft OCR, I just worked with whatever came out, and I had no control over it.

It depends. There are two types of installations. There is the standalone installation, and there is the server installation. The standalone one is very simple. It is just a normal install. You just push the license through the command prompt, and that's pretty much it. The other one is just going to take a little while longer depending on how you're going to deploy the solution for FlexiCapture on the system. From my experience, if someone is going to install it for the first time, they might need just a bit of help, but it is not that complex.

The duration depends on the solution. It depends on what a customer wants and how many invoices you're going to be preparing in ABBYY, but usually, we say that a good rule of thumb is about one to two hours for a normal invoice. If it has a complex table, then it may take three to four hours for an invoice. So, the time taken would depend on what the client actually wants. If we have five invoices for which the customer wants to use ABBYY, they can be created in a day or two days. We'll give half a day for installation, which also depends on how many servers we're going to be using. We'll give like another half a day for testing and pushing the project. So, maybe two days for five invoices is fair.

In terms of the implementation strategy, first, I would pretty much gather all the invoices the customer needs, and usually, if they are in the same sector and in the same business, they'll be very similar. If we have 50 invoices, I would rather waste an hour or two figuring out the similar invoices and then creating just 10 templates instead of 50. After that, I'd start with identifying the means of the values that I want to extract and figure those out in all of those 50 invoices, especially the ones that are going to be in the same template. Then, I'd get to work on those templates. Once I finish those, I'd push them to the project so that I can test them there, and if everything is working fine in the project, then I'd just give the solution to the customer.

We have definitely seen an ROI. Most of the ROI is related to time because it'll take a while for a human to go through a full process. If we assume that we have a process that takes a human or an employee an hour, that would be eight hours in a day. OCR would really cut that time by a lot. I'm also talking about adding automation to it, so I'm pretty much a little biased here. We can cut that time down by a lot, and once we do that, then we just have the whole process automated. It is not being done by an employee anymore, so that employee is free to do something else. So, you're saving time, money, and brainpower.

Its price should be a little lower. It is a lot higher than the competition, and if they just break the gap a little, then more people might jump onto their product. Their price is definitely a deterrent in the few cases that I remember.

They have monthly and yearly options, and if you want, they also have per project and per page options. We partnered with them for a few projects, and they provided us with a trial license that we use on our end for using the system, employing it, and developing the solution. On the client's end, they will charge them for the license because that's ongoing. They also get support and everything else.

They do charge extra for different types of installation. They have the standalone, which is pretty straightforward and a lot cheaper than the server installation. Server installation gives you a lot more, and it gives you control over the environment. They have a web management studio for the whole thing. You can create users and give people different permissions and track the progress of everything, so that's going to be a lot more expensive. I remember that one client was complaining about having to pay extra for having the Arabic language added to the system. I think they made all the languages free after that, but I'm not 100% sure.

I would advise first looking at what you're trying to extract from the documents that you have. If they are simple enough and are being extracted properly through a cheaper or a free OCR tool, then just use that. It is not going to be worth the price. If you have lots of invoices and some of them get very complex, and you'd rather have the control over making sure everything is fine, and you have no room for error, then it would be better to invest in ABBYY.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is that when creating templates with different documents, make sure that you're using different identifiers for those documents. That's because, in the beginning, you might think that it would automatically know the difference between, let's say, an Amazon invoice and a Walmart invoice, but it won't unless you tell it. So, you have to make sure that those files are unique. You also have to make sure that what you've created fits perfectly for that invoice. If you leave a little bit of leeway, it is possible that something else will be picked up that you don't want, and then it will just ruin the rest of the process. It is no fault of the OCR. You just didn't restrict it properly.

I would rate ABBYY FlexiCapture an eight out of 10. It is not perfect, but it is the best I've used.

I specialize in RPA. So, I started learning FlexiCapture to include it in the automation process. Instead of users having to manually enter information into a database or something like that, they can just load their digital documents to a certain location for ABBYY to decipher them, and then the bot and the automation could just continue along with that.

For one of the projects, it was deployed on a public cloud. For the other project, it was on-premise.

The whole idea of designing your own templates is pretty much the bread and butter of the product, but that's really the best part because you can design flexible templates.

There is also the AI part. They have their machine learning models that are pre-setup for invoices and things like that, which is also very handy. It is a really good feature.

There is always room for improvement in any product. Some of the configurations for the machine learning models for invoice reading are fairly complicated. There is so much customization that is possible with that sort of thing, so it makes sense that there are a lot of options, but some of the more important ones can be a little better streamlined or more upfront. Currently, machine learning models are a little bit difficult to configure satisfactorily.

There are a lot of solutions for different things, and they are all kind of headed in the same direction where they all do everything. I know that ABBYY wants to try and do a little more RPA. Solutions like UiPath, for example, want to eat ABBYY's lunch too. They all are trying to make an all-in-one solution for all possible automation needs. In that sense, ABBYY as a standalone product could use some more automation features. They are not there yet.

Its integrations with strictly RPA products, such as UiPath, Blue Prism, and other solutions, work when they work, but when they don't, it is a kind of a pain. Those integrations could use a little bit more support.

I have run into issues with the connectors that they developed for UiPath. I had one issue with that. It didn't want to do what we wanted. We had to change how it worked a little bit as far as the automation goes. It wasn't a huge issue, but it would have been much more convenient if had worked the way it was designed to. Otherwise, in terms of the stability of the project itself, I've never seen it crash.

Its performance is usually dependent on the hardware it is installed upon. That's not really an issue with the software itself. Its accuracy is good. It is probably one of the better optical character recognition packages that I've seen, but it still is not perfect because none of them are. It is the nature of the software, but it is pretty good. As long as the clients can provide reasonably readable documents, then it has got no problems as far as I'm concerned.

It is actually relatively simple to increase the scale of the infrastructure that you install. When I was dealing with it, the licensing structure that they had was relatively affordable as compared to other solutions. The bigger the scale, the more affordable it is. These things change all the time, so I don't know if it is still current.

The projects I've been on were proof of concept and then we just rolled them into production on the first stage. It was pretty small scale, but they had plans to go large scale. One of the projects actually from my end was still just the small-scale stuff, but other departments in the company had already procured a rather large-scale ABBYY license, and it was in production. I had nothing to do with that section, but the company as a whole had a pretty large infrastructure for ABBYY itself. They were dealing with millions of pages per month or so.

For proof of concept, there were probably about four or five test users. For the second one that I worked on, it was planned to go to production from the get-go. It started out on small scale again with probably four or five users. So far, the scale is 20.

I have used tech support, and they've been extremely helpful. There was a part of the solution I couldn't figure out myself. So, I enlisted their help, and they walked me through how to do what I needed to do. They set up a time within the next day or so, and they spent an hour with me. We figured it all out, and it was good. There is always room for improvement. Other instances haven't been as perfect as that, but that was certainly a shining example.

When we did the first project, which was just the proof of concept that I was part of, they had older software from 20 years ago. There wasn't support for it anymore or something like that. They were looking for something that could handle a larger scale. So, they switched. We suggested them ABBYY, and that's where they went.

For the clients for whom I worked with ABBYY, we would arrange for them to provide an environment. We would go into the environment and install ABBYY servers. If required, we'd also walk them through installing the clients on their machines, but generally, what we've been doing so far has been the support to an RPA project. They didn't really need to use ABBYY clients. It has all been pretty much backend stuff. We would install the infrastructure, set up the automation and its interactions with ABBYY, and then run tests in UAT. Once everything is ready to go, we do the final production deployment. After that, we have a week or two of maintenance before it gets off to a specialized maintenance team.

It takes about a week for the installation, but the development planning usually takes months or longer. At the time, I was pretty much doing it myself with support from a business analyst. The deployment of the infrastructure, the development of the automation and the ABBYY components, and then running the testing was usually just a one-man job with support from a couple of other people, such as a project manager.

Once we have developed the solution, there is a testing period where we just put it in their hands, and they throw all sorts of scenarios at it. We fix the bugs as it goes along. ABBYY does have a learning function where it can pick up on these changes when things arise, as long as the users are able and familiar with how to train it, which we show them how to do. So, maintainability is pretty good as far as I'm concerned. If there is something completely wrong and it is not reading anything right, then we have to go in and edit the templates, etc. Generally, if we set it up right and they learn how to teach it right, it is pretty stable.

The client got an ROI in reducing the number of hours that the users have to spend on a given task. Again, my solutions are not purely ABBYY, so it is hard to say how much of the benefit the ABBYY section alone was. Usually, ABBYY is involved because the users are spending a lot of time entering the information they see on a piece of paper into the system, whereas ABBYY can read it all in seconds. So, there is certainly great time savings. It then becomes a matter of comparing the cost of installation and the cost of developing the solution, licensing, and everything else with the costs and the time of those users. Even if it is pretty close to equal, they usually go for it because it is a much better environment for the users to work in and is less tedium. So, they have more employee satisfaction.

It is more on the reasonable side as compared to the competition that I am aware of. I'm not an expert on pricing schemes for all sorts of things, but when we offer them a solution, we like to say we're agnostic. So, we offer more than one solution when possible. Amongst the ones that we've offered, ABBYY usually is the more reasonable solution on a big scale. On a small scale, they're all pretty similar.

As far as I understand, you pay a license for a number of pages, and that's pretty much it. It has just the rate per page, and it decreases as you scale.

I've never done a strictly ABBYY solution. My solutions have all been ABBYY plus UiPath or something like that. After a solution has been deployed, there have always been bug fixes. Other than that, clients have always been extremely happy with this solution. They're excited they have to do less work.

If you have the right use case, it is definitely worth it. As a solution, I would rate ABBYY a nine out of 10. It is a solid solution, and support is there. It is good.

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.

We use this solution mostly for processing Brazilian servicing invoices and personnel documents and contracts, such as personnel ID cards.

I am a strategic partner of ABBYY here in Brazil. I deploy this solution for the customers. We mostly deploy it on a customer's cloud infrastructure. It is not the cloud side from ABBYY. It is like on-premises, but it is in the cloud of the customers.

Most of our customers work with RPA. On the cognition side, you have to look at the document and also create some intelligent rules to validate the data from the document. We give the bots the ability to put documents to be processed, and then the bots give back the results to move on to the next task in the process. In the process on which bots are working, there are two high-value workflows that require finding things and using judgment. Both are conditional logic.

When talking about documents, RPA can read the full text of the document, but it cannot understand the rules of a document as a human does. This is something ABBYY can do very easily. You put some rules in the ABBYY task, and ABBYY will say, "Okay, so this invoice is $20, and 10% tax is $2." If the tax is $3, ABBYY will say, "Look! There is a mistake here with this tax amount." ABBYY is able to understand the content and the context of the document and give it back to the RPA to go on with the task.

The most valuable feature is the ability to scale for big processes. We are able to process 1 million pages a day. Its accuracy is also very nice. It is a good feature that they have. 

It is an independent platform, which is its biggest advantage as compared to other solutions. It is also very stable and powerful. It is 100% on time.

They should improve the RESTful API side of this solution. Currently, fully RESTful API is not available in the on-prem version, which is really a problem, and we have to work around this limitation. The cloud version already has a fully RESTful API, but the on-prem version doesn't have a fully RESTful API, which is a big mistake. It is easy to solve, but they aren't solving it quicker. They are taking a long time. Nowadays, most people don't go to the interface. They like to use RESTful API.

I have been using this solution for about 20 years.

It is very stable and powerful. 

It is easily scalable. It is for all kinds of customers. Our customers are small, medium, and large businesses. RPAs are used in all kinds of organizations nowadays, and documents are always involved. RPAs are used even for testing and learning, and documents are always a problem.

Our clients do plan to increase the usage of this solution in the future. FlexiCapture is able to scale or spread in the department without having the need for any other RPA tool or AI tool.

They are very good and fast. If you find any vulnerability or there is an issue in scaling this solution, they are very fast in fixing the issue.

It is very easy to deploy but only after we have handled the security side of the customer. It is not complex, but, like any other server-based solution, things have to be clarified with the security team and the IT team. The biggest friction is not involving all the teams from the customer side, especially the security teams.

Our implementation strategy is to involve everyone two or three months before. This is because the businesses that purchase the solution sometimes don't have a good relationship with the IT team. We go to a workshop with them and try to understand their concerns, which takes two or three days. Its installation takes one or two days.

Our clients evaluate Kofax, UiPath, Brainware, and Nuance. The competition is big here. FlexiCapture is the most independent solution. It is an independent platform, which is its biggest advantage. You are not dependent on other solutions. In UiPath, you depend on scaling the RPA to spread OCR.

I would highly recommend this solution. My advice is to engage with a professional services provider at the beginning for installation, deployment, and training. Don't try to do it on your own because it is a very powerful and big solution. You'll have to learn it before you try to use it. Don't do it yourself. 

I would rate ABBYY FlexiCapture a nine out of ten. It is missing only RESTful API.

We are using this solution for PDF reading capabilities for some invoices. We also utilize it to read DW4 forms.

There are many others to compare with such as Google and Microsoft, but we haven't seen any specific distinction that stood out with Abbyy.

They were the most used, which is the reason we chose them.

Abbyy is really good in terms of reading OCR.

There has always been a challenge with Word and PDF reading capabilities. This is an area that needs improvement.

There are certain controls like radio buttons and checkboxes that when reading PDFs, really doesn't go well with the RPA.

We work with Abbyy and UiPath. Abbyy provides its API to be utilized with UiPath, and that is how we use it.

We have been working with Abbyy for at least one year. We have one or two projects that we have worked on with Abbyy.

Abbyy is a stable solution.

It's not really scalable. When it comes to PDF reading, we are very specific to that particular document and that template with some of the verbiage.

I have not seen it to be more scalable with any OCR capabilities.

I have not contacted technical support.

Previously, we didn't try any other solutions. We have to have that screen gripping capabilities and OCR. UiPath with Abbyy was the right choice.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We did not go with the licensed version of this solution.

It's more trial and error, but Abbyy is still really good in terms of OCR. If you have a consistent use case, then I think that Abbyy is the right fit.

I would rate Abbyy Vantage an eight out of ten.

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.

We use this solution for invoice processing.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its ability to extract content from documents. It is able to identify specific fields and special characters. We are able to train the tool to identify certain sets of fields based on specific definitions. This solution is also user-friendly. 

This solution could be improved by offering better integration with other platforms. They have released the connectors for all other RPA tools such as Blue Prism UiPath, but this integration is quite challenging to use. It's not very straightforward or easy to understand for a non-technical person. The integration should be configured in such a way that anyone can understand it and use it.

I have been using this solution for six to eight months.

ABBYY is a user-friendly and stable product. ABBYY is more flexible and stable compared to a solution like Kofax.

This is definitely a scalable solution. 

The customer support team are knowledgeable and responsive. Their response depends on the license that you hold with them. Their licenses come with predefined response and SLA times. If you are a golden license holder, you will receive a response within three to four hours. 

Positive

There are different sets of initial configurations and this depends on the use case. We have standalone and multi-server setups. Being a consultant, I configured ABBYY FlexiCapture myself. I could easily go through their documentation and figure out what needed to be done and how it needed to be done. The documentation is user-friendly.

They have a trial license that is limited to a certain number of pages. The paid license varies from six months to one year depending on the number of documents that need to be processed. We are a consulting firm and our license model depends on customer requirements. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.