Blue Prism Reviews

The solution’s use case for our company is HR hire automation. When an employee gets onboarded there are a lot of formalities that HR should do like collecting data for payroll.

Another use case is tender creation. We use the product for tender creation whenever a lead is converted into an opportunity.

I like the solution’s simplicity in process and objects. The solution has very clear guidelines and demarcation on processes and objects which is not present in other tools. The tool’s architecture is also very simple and clear. The product’s licensing model is also very simple. Other tools do not have such a simple licensing model.

The tool needs to work on its security aspect since there is a lot of regulatory compliance for enterprises like the GDPR. The product needs to improve the data login policy as well. They also need to come up with a mechanism where every change and upgrade happens within the element of the target application. Our partner struggles to keep up with the cybersecurity guidelines of my company.

The solution is quite stable except for a few security aspects. Our partners are highly skilled and ensure that everything meets client standards.

The product’s scalability is quite good but not as good as Power Automate. Our developers, testers, and support team uses the solution. There are around twenty developers, three to four testers, and a ten-member support team.

The product’s support is managed by our partners 24/7. In case we encounter any issues, the partner takes the necessary steps.

The setup of Blue Prism is quite simple. We have the three-tier architecture database applications from the client that comes in the form of a development or production machine.

The deployment took almost a year to roll out the pilot automation. We started in early 2019 and completed it only by the end of that year.

Our partners helped us with the solution’s deployment.

The tool’s licensing is on a monthly basis.

I would rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. I would recommend this solution to anyone where money is not a factor. Blue Prism is very stable and good in terms of data and regulatory compliance if you are dealing with applications based on RDP or Citrix-based applications. However, if there are budgetary constraints and no RDP or Citrix-based applications, then you need to go for Ui Path or Power Automate which is cheaper.

Blue Prism is a mature, stable product with lots of built-in features. 

Blue Prism develops its own tools and process automation, but the documentation is unclear and incomplete. 

I rate Blue Prism nine out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Blue Prism nine out of 10 for scalability. 

Blue Prism provides templates for most use cases, but we've had to contact their developers for a few OCR use cases. They helped clarify some confusion about the documentation.

The initial setup was straightforward like any other Windows application. You set up a basic SQL Server and install it. We installed it on our own on-prem server. 

I rate Blue Prism five out of 10 for affordability. Blue Prism costs much more than other RPA tools. It's expensive, and the maintenance costs are always high.

I rate Blue Prism eight out of 10. It's a good option if your automation team has that kind of budget. It is scalable and easy to implement. You can create lots of boards, but each will have separate licenses and require more resources or on-premise servers.

Our primary use cases are mostly for device processing, such as extracting data from PDFs and reporting it into ERP applications.

We have a customer who used to perform certain tasks manually. They no longer have to do that as the bot performs the tasks. They only need to review whether the bot is working as expected or not. It has significantly improved their process time, and Blue Prism has proven to be time-saving and resource-saving.

The most valuable feature is that it is more secure and reliable. It is also why big companies such as banks mainly use Blue Prism.

Blue Prism doesn't have a web orchestration or control room where businesses can directly check the trends or carry out the process directly from the URL without downloading additional software like Nextiva on their machine.

Some other features are also missing in Blue Prism. For example, the record and play feature makes development faster, but it is not there in Blue Prism. When you start the recording and do the activity, it automatically generates the steps. So that feature needs to be included.

I have about four years of experience with Blue Prism. We're working with the previous update.

Blue Prism is a stable product. But it's not very flexible when it comes to integrations. Blue Prism's forum is smaller, unlike some other RPA tools, where there is a large forum with a wide range of integrations readily available in the marketplace. If you want to integrate any solution from the Digital Exchange, you may not find as many options as compared to other tools. So, while Blue Prism is stable and secure, it may not be as flexible as other RPA tools.

When compared to other RPA tools, Blue Prism is highly scalable and reliable. I have deployed Blue Prism processes that required deployment for up to fifteen users per process. Due to other factors, deployment permission is needed if the workload exceeds the system's capacity. Typically, it runs smoothly without issues, but in cases where the workload surpasses our support team's capabilities, we can deploy up to fifteen percent of the portal's resources, and the system continues to function effectively even at that scale.

In the beginning, when we were working with Blue Prism version 5, there were some issues after installing the latest update. So we decided not to install the latest version and only update after some time. Eventually, it became stable without any issues. When we needed to contact support for updates, we had to reach out to group parameters.

Most of the time, they say it is a known issue and will fix it with the next update. When we faced challenges, like setting up a load-balancing server, the support was good, and we could set it up without any issues. They provide good support for known issues but may not be able to fix some problems.

The initial setup process is easy compared to other applications. Our customers use the on-prem version because they are old customers; at that time, the cloud version was unavailable.

To deploy the solution, it is advisable to deploy it in an environment that closely resembles the development environment. It includes having similar desktop resolution, applications, and access. In case of any changes in common objects, thorough end-to-end testing of use cases is necessary to ensure that the existing solutions are not affected. It can be a time-consuming process due to the increased amount of testing required.

For the deployment team, it would be best if we have a separate chain management process to ensure security and prevent developers from accessing the production environment. Having dedicated resources for chain management would be beneficial not only for Blue Prism but also for other sectors. We can recommend tools to ensure coding standards are being maintained and submit them to the chain management team.

For maintenance, we should have a separate support model in place. Like in any other support model, it would include a support team with levels 0, 1, 2, and 3. The support team would be responsible for automated processes that provide information on the version, system improvements, and high memory usage alerts. This way, the support team can act accordingly and increase the model size if needed.

Having these measures in place would make maintenance easier. Otherwise, if the process runs at its peak level, it may not run as smoothly as needed. Without automated alerts, maintenance becomes more difficult, and the process may not function properly. Implementing these setups could be useful and can be delivered through email.

The pricing or licensing costs of Blue Prism are around $15,000 per year, primarily based on the number of processors run in parallel.

My advice would be first to assess your requirements. If you prioritize reliable security, Blue Prism could be a good choice for you, but it may come with a higher development cost than other vendors. Additionally, if you choose Blue Prism, you should ensure that integration is streamlined by developing your own code.

When it comes to business, the process assessment should be critical in finding the right solution. Not all processes are suitable for automation, and there is a risk that ROI may not meet expectations if the process is not suitable. It's important to consider the required equipment and ensure the solution is designed to handle potential issues, such as offline support. The solution should also be designed with the expectation of needing support once deployed. During development, it's important to follow best practices to ensure the solution is efficient and has a high ROI. It's also important to ensure that the solution is reliable and does not break. Manual intervention may be necessary if there are any issues, so it's important to have a plan in place for business continuity.

Overall, I would rate Blue Prism a seven out of ten because it has stability issues.

Our company uses the solution's automation processes to develop a fleet of robots for one of our clients. To date, we have developed more than 40 robots. 

We also have clients in the banking and insurance industries. 

We currently use both the 6.10.2 and 7.0 versions of the solution. 

The solution is way more efficient for debugging than other tools. 

The UI is more complicated than other tools. In Power Automate, it doesn't even feel like you are working because the tool does the job for you. But in the solution, there are studio, process, and object interfaces and you have to decode your own objects.  

The free objects that are predefined are not good compared to other tools. There is still a lot of work to do on the solution's intelligent automation part. 

I have been using the solution for three years. 

The stability depends on the processes and needs. If we deal with a lot of data, then the solution is not stable. The UI automation mode is also not that stable.

Stability is rated a five out of ten. 

The scalability could be improved so is rated a six out of ten. 

I previously used Power Automate. 

I come from a mathematical background, and the solution is not difficult to setup. It took only two weeks before I was fully able to use the solution. 

The setup is rated a nine out of ten. 

We implement the solution for customers. We do coding in a week and deploy in one day. Our team size depends on the complexity of the project. 

For one project, there is a team of 80 people. 

For our robot project, I have been working solo for two years and sometimes collaborate with the client. I take care of development, testing, deployment, and maintenance. 

The solution is not that expensive and a five-year license costs about 20k euros. A company that automates a lot will not view this as expensive in comparison to UiPath. 

I recommend you practice with easier tools before moving to the solution. At that point, you will have a very good experience. 

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

Blue Prism is a tool designed to securely automate web processes, and it helps automate processes for people in banking. Banking transactions are often divided into sections to keep a track of the transaction records, card numbers, customer names, and client supplying numbers, and it is important to ensure that the records of these details are secured. To achieve this, Blue Prism has incorporated 256-bit, which is way faster and better. Owing to this reason, it has been approved by IT security teams.

My company decided to go with Blue Prism because of the security it provides. One of the other reasons our company decided to use the tool is because of our strong partnership with SS&C Blue Prism's team.

The most valuable feature of Blue Prism is its very strong focus on documentation. They have documents for everything, which include documents for each component, documents for each action, and documents on how to defend the process.

Blue Prism features two layers of documentation. If we could make it in one layer, then it would be easy to develop, and it would take less time for developers to complete the task.

Blue Prism is a very comfortable and good tool to use. From my end, I don't think anything else needs to be added to the tool.

I have been using Blue Prism for five years. The current version I am using is Blue Prism 7.1. Also, my company has a partnership with Blue Prism.

Blue Prism is a very stable solution.

Blue Prism is a highly scalable solution that has been used by over 1000 people across the three companies where I have worked to date. As of now, 50 people are working as developers, and 200 people are working at an architect level.

If we purchase multiple bots, we always receive quick support from SS&C Blue Prism's team. Therefore, if we face any challenges or issues, they quickly jump in to solve them. I rate their tech support team a seven out of ten.

Neutral

Setting up Blue Prism is easy, and it won't take more than 15 minutes if we have proper documentation with us. We should follow the steps in the documentation to deploy Blue Prism and get it up and running.

Blue Prism is an expensive solution, especially in Southeast Asia, while in Europe and the UK, it can be considered moderate in terms of cost.

If someone wants to start using Blue Prism, I would suggest that they start learning database configuration, Object Studio, and Process Studio. I rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are using Blue Prism mainly for the finance and IT automation processes.

The most valuable feature of Blue Prism is the control and development of the processes from one location.

The solution can improve by having a free license for evaluation purposes.

I have been using Blue Prism for approximately one year.

Blue Prism is a stable solution.

The scalability of the solution is good.

The solution can be suitable for all sized businesses, but it depends on the use case.

The support from Blue Prism is very good.

I have used UiPath and Robocorp. Blue Prism is more stable and provides good support, and a monitoring and development perspective.

Robocorp provides Python as a programming license and the cost is very low. All the features are available, but coding knowledge is required.

The initial setup of Blue Prism is of a moderate difficulty level.

I do the implementation of the solution with my clients.

The price of Blue Prism is high compared to others solutions. It would be helpful if they could provide a trial version for new users to try. Other vendors provide a community or trial version. There are not any hidden costs.

There are three different packages Blue Prism provides.

We are completely satisfied with the solution.

From a monitoring perspective, we have various stages and phases in RPA that enable us to perform monitoring, scheduling, and management simultaneously, which is a significant advantage. As a result, I can recommend to my colleagues that they utilize this capability and obtain certification.

I rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten.

The use cases range from document ingestion, process enablement, and data management, including financial records cleanup.

So it's essentially the arms and legs for digital processes. So the clients have processes that have tech enablement, but there's stuff that needs to orchestrate the different tools and bring them all together into an end-to-end automated process.

There is room for improvement in the pricing. 

I have been working with this solution since 2017. So, we have a mix in our portfolio. So, some of them still have the older versions, but some of the newer clients are on the latest versions.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. Because a lot of times, there are specific versions of things that you have to use. So browsers, plugins, all that good stuff. 

For example, some of our clients had their clients on auto-update. And what happened was it was updated during the auto-update, and then the bots would fail because there were plugins or features that were specific to versions of Chrome that we included in the solution. But on the upgrade, they would then fail. On some of the older versions, some of the challenges were around the actual configuring of the virtual machines and their allocation of memory.

In essence, you had the physical memory on the machines, but virtual machines weren't configured properly, so they would run out of memory.

The scalability of the solution is a two-factor thing. 

The ability to scale up and scale out of the Blue Prism portfolio, meaning the agent server monitors all that good stuff, is pretty straightforward. I would rate the scalability for on-prem a seven out of ten and about eight out of ten for the cloud. 

But the second factor is a lot of the scalability has to do with the latency of what you're connecting to. And so if you're connecting to something that isn't particularly scalable, it doesn't matter how many robots you scale out. You're constrained by the latency and the size of the application or solution or service that the robot is using. 

Therefore, scaling is normally an organizational issue such as procurement.

We have around nine customers using this solution. 

The customer service and support depend on your customer level. So, if you're a platinum implementation partner or a platinum client, you obviously get better support than if you're just using the standard features. But we've been involved with Blue Prism from the beginning, so we have a bit of a privilege for this.

The difference is UiPath, you are part of the community, and getting support from within the user community is actually quite effective. But it's just because of a significantly larger install base.

Positive

The biggest challenge is at the infrastructure layer, especially if you're doing on-prem. Getting all the network and firewalls and all of that sorted out because many clients want you to use the robot on the production systems, but the production systems are in tightly controlled network environments. It normally means opening a firewall, subnetting, and all that kind of stuff. But getting the software up and running and getting the agents up and running, all that type of stuff, that's pretty straightforward. 

On the cloud side of things, it's providing access from the cloud platform to on-prem data. So it's more client-specific security and networking issues that are the challenge versus installing the software if you do on-prem or configuring it if you do it in the cloud.

We provide the maintenance for the solution for some of our customers. We are the solution provider. That's a full-stack contract, meaning that we run it, manage it, maintain it. 

And then, for some of our customers, we are an enablement partner that's really about providing design and build and training. And for some of them, we provide secondary or second-level support.

I've considered other options because of how Blue Prism's product and its acquisition by ACM have shaped its direction. Blue Prism seems to be moving into a more confined space and may not be as open as UiPath. 

In UiPath, the ecosystem just feels a lot broader, and there's a lot more innovation and commercial models. 

With Blue Prism, everyone wants to charge for everything, whereas in UiPath, you know, the community guard. There's a lot of really good stuff and useful stuff coming out of the community guard that are solving problems because they need to be solved, not necessarily because there's a business model or a commercial model sitting behind it. 

Blue Prism is definitely more about the seats and tires, whereas UiPath is for the sneakers and jeans guys.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. The only reason that I'd rate it as a seven is because of the commercial model. Blue Prism has some great features from a technology point of view, but they're more on the pricier side compared to UiPath. The difference in technology and the solution doesn't warrant the difference in pricing.

We are a company that automates console services. We work with console tax, revenue, and benefits.

We manage approximately twenty consoles in the UK, and we have achieved considerable savings with Blue Prism. We were able to automate a large task using Blue Prism to verify extensions and console tax, and we have seen great benefits from using Blue Prism for these tasks.

Although the solution may look complicated it actually has a lot of features and user space to work out of.

Optical character recognition has room for improvement.

I would like to have more options to automate from mobile devices without having to pay for additional licenses.

I have been using the solution for five years.

I give the stability a nine out of ten.

I give the scalability an eight out of ten.

We have around 18 people using the solution in our organizations. We have around 30 licenses to easily scale if needed.

The initial setup is not straightforward but also not complex. We had to set up the database. We required two IT people for deployment. 

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have seen a return on investment with Blue Prism.

I give the price of the solution a seven out of ten.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

The more time spent using the solution the more proficient we become.