ABBYY Vantage Reviews

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.

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 use it for document processing. We have PDF documents, and we need to extract tables from those documents. We use ABBYY FlexiCapture to extract tables.

We are able to extract tables from PDF files. Before ABBYY FlexiCapture, it was done manually. We had to manually input tables into our banking system. We could automate that with FlexiCapture. It is also integrated with RPA. So, FlexiCapture just extracts the information, and RPA takes that information and enters it into the banking system.

Its OCR Engine is very successful, and it is the leading OCR Engine. It also has NLP support. 

In FlexiLayout Studio, you can create your own variables. It works great for semi-structured documents.

Their tutorials are not enough. They can improve the tutorials and maybe add more examples in their tutorials. Currently, if you want to learn ABBYY technology, it is very difficult. There are just a few resources, such as YouTube channels and blogs. There are not many resources for learning ABBYY.

It would be great if they can make a community edition to use ABBYY. Currently, if you want to try ABBYY, you have to contact a salesperson and take a trial license, which is complicated. They should just give a community edition or a free edition with a few features.

Its licensing is very expensive and should be improved.

I have been using this solution since 2019.

We didn't encounter any crashing. It is stable, but it has some bugs. For example, the PDF quality is very good, and you can read the text easily, but sometimes, ABBYY FlexiCapture reads it incorrectly. It is not very frequent, but it can cause a problem for some of the documents.

For such bugs, we open tickets with ABBYY, and they try to solve the issue. If they are able to solve the issue, they send us the solution, and we apply that. Sometimes, they weren't able to solve it, so they took that ticket to their backlog, and after a new release, they notified us that they have solved a problem in the new release.

We don't have a problem with scalability. In the beginning, our volume of documents was small, but it has increased about 10 times. It works without any problems. If we want to increase its capacity, we put another machine, and it defines a processing station. So, we can increase its capacity easily.

Currently, I am the only one using it in my company. I do all the administration and create new templates. Its maintenance is also done by me.

We plan to increase its usage. At the moment, we are using ABBYY in just one project, but there are upcoming projects that require ABBYY.

Their tech support was successful. I would give them a nine or a 10 out of 10.

The deployment process was a little bit tricky for us. We didn't take professionals for the installation or deployment process. We learned how to deploy it from other sources such as YouTube or blogs, and we did it ourselves, but it took about a week to deploy. Now, if I want to deploy it, it will just take one or two days. At that time, we didn't have ABBYY expertise, so we learned how to do it and tried to deploy it. Three people were involved in its installation.

Its maintenance is done by me. It requires some manual effort. For example, for some templates, I do some updates, and there is some manual work. I go to document definitions and remove the other one. I then upload the new one and do some settings.

For an operational process, about 40 people were dedicated previously, but now, five people can do the same work by using ABBYY integrated with RPA. It is not just ABBYY; there is also the RPA part. ABBYY is used just for data extraction from PDF files.

Its price is a little bit high and can be lower. Its licensing is very expensive. I don't remember exactly, but for each page, it is about four or seven cents, which is too expensive.

Before using ABBYY, we considered many products. We considered Ephesoft and other document processing engines, but ABBYY was the most successful one. There may be other successful vendors, but they don't have very strong support in our region. ABBYY's support is very strong in our region. Other tools also do not provide on-prem installation. They are cloud-based, so we chose ABBYY.

Their sales team was great. They were very helpful, and their technology is great. 

If you are looking for an on-prem solution, ABBYY would be better, but if you are looking for a cloud solution, you can use other platforms. Google and Microsoft have great data extraction tools that are cloud-based.

I would rate ABBYY FlexiCapture an eight out of 10. Its licensing price is high, and there are no training materials that you can use easily. There should also be a trial or community version.

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 primarily use this product for data capture.

The most valuable feature is the ability to capture data from documents with different formats.

IT team don't need to maintain multiple systems.

If you are not used for training layout feature, a lot of effort is required in order to upgrade to the latest version.  FlexiCapture get the better training layout feature in deep learning and NLP.

We have been using FlexiCapture for three years.

FlexiCapture is a stable product.

Scalability has not been a problem. 

I would say that the technical support is average. 

This is the first data capture product that we have used.

The initial setup and preparing for our first capture was no so easy. The application used to create the database was not easy to use.

We are the in-house team.

For us, the price is reasonable for semi-structure and unstructured forms.

We did not evaluate other options before implementing FlexiCapture.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that if they have many different types of documents that need to be captured, then this is a good option.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is for invoicing. We use it for product licenses and reports about insurance policies and invoices.

It's a very useful and user-friendly product.

The stability is very good. 

We use around 100% of data and the success rate is 90%.

We have around fifty users using this solution. The users are mostly engineers and developers. 

The initial setup was straightforward. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. Not a ten because sometimes some documents have handwritten data. If this improved, I would rate it a ten out of ten.

The product is user-friendly. I would recommend it. 

We are a solution provider and ABBEY FlexiCapture is one of the products that we implement for our clients. It is an OCR tool that we use as part of different automation solutions. 

It is flexible and easy to deploy into any environment, be it on-premises or in the cloud.

The handwriting recognition is very good, as it can recognize handwriting done with pen and paper with at least 70% accuracy.

The interface is very easy for a non-technical person to use. For example, the fields that have been correctly identified are color-coded green, whereas the exceptions are color-coded red. 

Our basic concern is that ABBYY does not allow you to use the product unless you are a trained professional. This has been a roadblock for some of our clients because they have been okay with the pricing, but because they are not an expert on ABBEY, they are not able to use it.

In the future, I would like to see integration with Google Sheets. That way, if somebody has data in another format then ABBEY can pull it out and work with it directly.

We have been using ABBYY FlexiCapture for more than two and a half years.

This is a pretty stable platform.

We have not found any issues with scalability.

The majority of our clients are small to medium-sized businesses with less than $500,000 USD annual revenue. We do have some enterprise-level clients that have a revenue of more than $1,000,000 USD per year.

The technical support is pretty good. The ABBYY support teams are very good and there is an open community, which is very supportive as well. We normally get a response within about six hours of creating a ticket.

It is very easy to set up. The deployment takes around 48 hours, end to end.

This is absolutely a solution that I would recommend. If you are having problems with handwritten text and the recognition of data then ABBYY is the place to go.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our primary use for this solution is the automatic processing of invoices. We used the invoice module for capturing and processing the invoices.

We have this solution installed as if it were on-premises, but it is hosted on a virtual machine in the cloud.

The OCR is the best on the market. Even if you go for an open-source solution, it will never be as good as recognizing imagines as ABBYY. The is the main reason that we chose this product.

The automatic processing of invoices is not set up. We had to invent our own way of handling this. For example, if the invoice is not recognized successfully then it goes to a verification station for a person to verify whether everything is ok. But, there are no predefined solutions for this. They should have some basic types of different projects already in place, which would allow you to just take a template and customize it for your needs. We had to do all of this from scratch. It was a difficult job because ABBYY consultants are very expensive. You do not have any other consultants that really know the details, and then you have to figure that out all by yourself. It is tough. It's not just about having the product but having some examples on how to use it.

Thre is not much help available on Google or from ABBYY on how to use this solution, and it would be helpful if there were more examples available.

This solution should have better integration with RPA solutions such as Blue Prism.

Generally, this solution is stable. We have had production running for more than a year and a half, and it is fine. However, when we needed to migrate, it was not really stable.

We do not have any other environments for testing and development. We only have production, and it was a mistake that I wanted to migrate to a newer version than we had (from version 11 to version 12) because it broke my project. In retrospect, it should have been migrated in a test environment in order to ensure that it would work in production. After that, it could have been moved.

Since we did not have another environment, and it was broken, I needed to set up and fix it quickly. 

We only have one robot. It's going on and processing invoices every day.

We are now selling automation of invoicing to more of our clients.

Technical support for this solution is mixed. Not all of the consultants from ABBYY are good. For example, we have had very good experiences, but at the same time, one consultant we had really didn't help up too much and took up a lot of time. They have good ones and they have bad ones, but the price for all of them is the same. When you do not receive services for a very high price, it's disappointing.

The initial setup of this solution was difficult and complex because we needed to set up all of the rules. I needed to learn how to program inside of ABBYY. Without those clicks, our project would not work. At the same time, ABBYY sells you the license, but they do not tell you all of the pros and cons, or all of the obstacles that might come.

When we faced all of these obstacles without any help, it was really tough because we were right in the middle of the project. The solution was already sold to the customer, and we were left trying to set it up.

My advice to anybody who is considering this solution is to ask for case studies and examples in advance. Ask for real examples on how to set it up. One example might be for invoices, or for formulas that should be inside the product, and how to set them up quickly. We asked for automatic invoices and they said that they didn't do that yet.

We had to put a great deal of effort into this, and it took a lot of time and our money to invent our process together with ABBYY. If we would have had some examples then we would not have had to start from scratch.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.