ABBYY Vantage Reviews

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.

I was using ABBYY FlexiCapture for invoices and purchase orders. We had invoices coming from a German client. From those invoices, we had to capture the invoice number, purchase order number, and invoice date. There were also line items, total quantity, and total sum. We had to take these things in an XML format or a CSV format. The outputs from these invoices were put into an application by an RPA project. So, we were basically using ABBYY FlexiCapture to capture all those details from invoices. In India, we have PAN Card and Aadhaar Card, and I was using ABBYY FlexiCapture to configure PAN Card and Aadhaar Card.

The client had around 400 to 500 vendors, and every day, the client was receiving thousands of invoices. It was a very hectic task for them to capture all those invoices into the application. It was not possible for them to capture all the fields by using any RPA tool because RPA can handle any structured data, but invoices are totally unstructured. So, we needed an intelligent OCR tool. That's when ABBY FlexiCapture came into the picture.

There are a lot of options in ABBYY FlexiCapture, and it is very vast. I have worked with multiple OCR tools, and I found ABBYY FlexiCapture to be the most accurate tool.

The key-value pair and relation were most valuable. Because the invoices were coming from different vendors, it was possible that they would come in different formats. The idea was to capture data from all formats. There were key-value pairs and nearest to the X coordinate or Y coordinate, and with a lot of hits and trials, I was able to get the exact fields configured for every invoice. 

There are very few resources of knowledge. Whenever I got any doubt, I have to raise a ticket into their support forum. I can't find anything in Google or on YouTube. There is no training material, so it was very hard to learn in the initial days. The information about other tools is available on YouTube and other platforms, but ABBYY FlexiCapture is nowhere available to learn for free. They have documentation on their website, but it is very basic. It is not adequate for working on any live project.

ABBYY FlexiCapture has given a basic kind of project for capturing data from invoices, but I feel it is not sufficient for Indian invoices. A lot of times, some of the fields were not getting captured for new invoices. For such kinds of invoices, there is a training field. So, we can train it for the fields that it is not capturing so that when the same kind of invoice comes next time, ABBYY FlexiCapture will pick up these fields from those particular areas.

Another pain area was that clients were not giving proper invoices. We had clearly mentioned the proper DP for these invoices, but few invoices were not readable from ABBYY. 

In IRISXtract, we can have master data, and we can set the master data. There are more options for taking any data and comparing it with master data. For a project, they have a dump from SAP for validation. This feature is there in ABBYY, but it is not extensive like IRISXtract. ABBYY is capturing the data, but there are not a lot of options to validate the captured data. It would be helpful if there are more options for validating the captured data in ABBYY FlexiCapture.

I last used it six months ago.

It takes time to get it stable. If a client has a lot of customers, and a lot of invoices from different vendors are coming, then all those invoices will not work in ABBYY FlexiCapture until and unless we configure each and every one of them. 

It is scalable. There is no other tool in the market that is as creative, as vast, and as accurate as ABBYY FlexiCapture. If you have proper and complete knowledge and all the training for ABBYY FlexiCapture, then you can make it scalable in the organization. You need proper training.

I am not sure about the number of users in the whole organization, but in my team, there were four people who were using it. There were also two people from the RPA side. They all were RPA consultants and developers. There was also a team for Power BI for putting information about the number of invoices processed on a dashboard.

After that project was live, I was moved to a different project. Other people came into the picture for the support role. I was put in a purely RPA-based project. I'm working in Blue Prism for the last six to seven months.

If I send a query, they do reply. If it is a proper query with screenshots, they give you a solution very quickly. If you have a licensed version of ABBYY, they provide proper support.

I've worked with IRISXtract, and I've worked with OCR tools of RPA solutions such as UiPath, which has its own document visualization tool. I find ABBYY FlexiCapture to be most perfect for configuring any type of unstructured data.

IRISXtract is not a good tool. I struggled a lot with that tool. ABBYY FlexiCapture is much better than IRISXtract. ABBYY FlexiCapture is using the ABBYY OCR engine, and IRISXtract is using the Google Tesseract OCR engine. ABBYY's OCR engine is more accurate.

ABBYY FlexiCapture and ABBYY FineReader are licensed, and we can't get them for free, whereas Google Tesseract is a free OCR. In terms of capturing a full invoice from start to end, at least ABBYY's OCR engine is giving line breaks and other things, whereas Google Tesseract OCR, as well as Microsoft OCR, are not giving it in a proper manner. They give everything as a single string without any spaces or a new line. So, ABBYY has more intelligence.

IRISXtract provides more options for taking any data and comparing it with master data.

I initially worked on a PoC. I got a lot of doubts initially, and ABBYY's forum was very helpful. Whenever I posted any queries, they replied in minutes. The deployment was straightforward. We did the whole project in six months, which includes RPA and hosting into SAP application.

Before starting any project in ABBYY FlexiCapture, it would be better to have a few sessions with their product team or technical team to clarify all the doubts. If you have started a project and in the middle, you ask for their advice, it becomes hectic because they might ask you to change your approach. So, getting any support from them initially is always helpful.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using ABBYY FlexiCapture is that only by trying more, you can get to the exact solution. If you are working on an invoices project, you should try multiple types of invoices. The line item is a typical area because different types of invoices have different headers and columns. You need to make sure that you have proper knowledge before configuring any line items details.

I would rate ABBYY FlexiCapture a nine out of 10.

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.

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.

We are using this solution for bank transfer orders.

The most valuable features have been the rate of recognition and the structured documents.

The recognition intelligence could improve by having more details in the documents. There are limitations with the forms, templates, and manuscripts. 

In an upcoming release, it would be a benefit to have Arabic documentation.

I have been using this solution for one year.

We contracted the technical support and everything was fine with their support.

I have previously used UiPath and I would recommend it over ABBYY FlexiCapture. UiPath is easier to use, has both intelligence and robotic processes, supports many OCR platforms, and the documents are updated frequently by the company.

The setup of this solution was a medium level of difficulty. The difficulty level depends on the model, the quality of documents, and the process.

The price of this ABBYY FlexiCapture is a bit expensive and the price is based on how many documents have been captured. For example, one or two million captures.

I rate ABBYY FlexiCapture 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.

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.