Blue Prism Reviews

We are primarily using Blue Prism for automating repetitive Excel tasks and preparing reports. This involves downloading reports and data from websites, followed by data massaging. Most of the automation is within Excel. 

The studio is very easy to use. It is not just for coders, as you can have a diagrammatic representation of the process.

The debugging is great because you can step into the code during the process, and you can also re-step, which means returning to a previous one. You can also change the code while the process is running and see the effect without having to stop the execution.

Blue Prism is expensive to scale because there are costs associated with additional licenses and improvements to infrastructure. In general, it should be easier to expand my user base.

The assisted automation functionality needs improvement. Right now, it does not support it very well. As a person who uses a computer, I want to have my email categorized or perhaps have some attachments saved from my emails, the minute I start my day. I don't want a server to do it, and I don't want a separate license for that, either.

I have been using Blue Prism for the past three years.

Blue Prism is working fine and the stability is fantastic.

It is difficult to expand the use of Blue Prism in an environment. For example, if I have 10 members in my team and I decide that it isn't enough, and in response, I want to onboard 100 more people, it's difficult to do. This is related to the costs of licenses and infrastructure.

The difficult question becomes if I want to get 100 more people involved in automation, how do I scale the team?

When it comes to scalability, nowadays, it's about citizen development models. Everyone wants to use RPA, which means that any number of people might be doing it. As a center of excellence, if I tell them that they need additional infrastructure, licenses, and training to accommodate it, then onboarding 100 people is a large commitment.

Improvements could be made by supplying a URL to the website for training, creating group licenses, and using a plug-in instead of a dedicated machine or virtual machine. If we could install an agent on a machine without any license for development purposes then it would be helpful.

Currently, we have approximately 100 users.

I have been in contact with technical support many times, and I would say that they are good. It is robust I would say, although not very quick. There seems to be a lack in terms of regional representation, which means that it takes longer because the support is online.

We also use UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

Our adoption of Blue Prism is an expansion in our automation efforts, and we did not switch from using these other products.

Most of the RPA solutions are very similar, although the debugging is better in Blue Prism than other products. Instead of being able to change the code while it is running and then have it continue, with other products you have to restart the process and monitor it after each change is made. Debugging in Blue Prism saves a lot of time.

The initial setup is simple and it took us approximately half an hour to complete.

Our in-house team handled the implementation and deployment.

Maintenance is required and it is handled by our "Run and Maintain" team. Their primary job is to make sure that the bot runs at the right time.

Our licensing fees are approximately $5,000 USD per year. The price is based upon the licensing model, where clients are assigned categories such as platinum, gold, and silver customers.

Everything is included with the cost of the license. 

This is a good RPA product and definitely one that I recommend. When I want to automate stuff with the web site, perform web scraping, or interacting with Excel and SAP, it is quite stable. The bot does not just fail. Once you capture the underlying application control, it's there and will not just break.

I've seen other RPA tools wherein you do the automation, do the recording, and once you replay it, it doesn't work because of some random lag in the timing of the application. Similarly, if something changes then it may not work. In Blue Prism, you have complete control over that.

Overall, I would say that this tool is very good. It is one of the best in the market.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The initial setup is simple. The deployment is pretty fast.

The stability is good. 

We've found the solution to be scalable. 

Technical support has been responsive when we have needed their assistance.

It's been our concern that we will be able to move more towards sustainability within our own company. We do rely a lot on third-party vendors, and we're hoping we can have more internal talent to actually manage all our projects. That's our number one goal and concern. We are looking into providing training to our business users that is similar to something like PowerBI, where you can basically configure and use less coding. That's what we want to leverage.

The license cost is a bit high. Being a finance guy, that's number one for me. 

Number two is that whatever bots that you put inside, they only can run a specific activity at a specific time. For example, let's say I want to do a bank reconciliation at 10:00 AM, and, at the same time, I want to do some kind of asset capitalization, I can't do both. I need to choose which I can run at 10:00 AM. With one, I may need to re-time it. I'd basically like the bot to work on multiple activities at once. 

The deployment of the bots should be much faster and more intuitive.

The stability has been good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. it performs well.

We are actually expanding into other centers of excellence, or what we call a COE.

Due to the fact that we are a COE, the group finance, the group tech, we have about a thousand plus users at this time, and that will grow.

Technical support is okay. They're quite responsive.

That said, in terms of support, we do have our own technical panel internal itself, and they are actually the first layer, or level one. Subsequently, for level two issues and onwards, the vendor comes to the picture.

This is the first RPA we've worked with. We did not use another solution previously.

The initial setup is quite straightforward, and the deployment is quite fast.

The cost of the solution is high. It should be lowered. They need to make it more affordable. 

We are currently looking into ServiceNow that also has RPA capabilities. 

I'm actually not a technical person, I'm actually more of a finance person. I'm a business user.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

I'd advise potential new users that they need to take an actual use case, an actual business point, and do a pilot on it first to visualize how the solution could potentially work. If they find that it's satisfactory, then perhaps they could work on other rollouts. The key is to develop more on the user experience side of things.

I work with an insurance organization and we are currently using it to automate our back-end office processes. For example, within insurance, you have claims and you have policy owner services, and you have different business units. We are looking at those processes and automating them through Blue Prism robotics.

Mostly we use the Design Studio to develop the automation. It's great. We put them into deployment and have the automated process running. It's essentially the Design Studio for Blue Prism and the entire methodology of delivery that is the most useful or valuable to us.

The solution can scale. 

Technical support is very helpful.

It's not very easy to use. There is some learning curve that you need to manage as an individual.

In the past we have had platform challenges with Blue Prism, like the scheduler functionality doesn't always work as expected and there are content downtimes as well. On the stability, I will probably rate it a little lower than medium.

If they could have process recording and task recording also in place, that will help expedite the delivery for the automation.

I've been using the solution for about six years. It's been a while. 

The stability could be better. The scheduler functionality doesn't always work as expected and there is content downtime as well. It's okay, however, they could work on improving it. 

The scalability is not an issue. Scalability is good. We are using it for around 500 robots, and the scalability is not an issue at all.

In terms of users, we have around 50 odd configurators that actually use Blue Prism on a daily basis. Within the technical team, there you have a few project managers and within each project team, you have a business analyst and a configurator and then, you have a setup process controller who manages the processes.

At this point, we do not intend to increase usage.

Blue Prism provides us with the technical support we need. They even have a monthly catch-up with our team and we are able to raise our technical queries during that time if we have any. There are no issues at all. We've been very satisfied with their level of attention and assistance.

I wouldn't know about the setup process. That's really more for the infrastructure team. I can't comment on it mostly due to the fact I wasn't a part of it.

We have an enterprise-grade license with Blue Prism and it depends upon your requirements. We ask for additional production bots, which is the main parameter for the license cost.

We're customers and end-users.

There are multiple tools in the market for RPA - Blue Prism, UiPath, Automation Anywhere, et cetera. I wouldn't rate it better than anyone else, and yet, I wouldn't rate it less either. It's as good as any other tool. Therefore, every company will need to do its own analysis and select the tool that makes the most sense for them.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

The primary use case of Blue Prism is for financial services. It can't be accessed via a simple web application like you can do with its competitors. For financial services where the main requirement is to retain data in-house, Blue Prism is the way to go. I'm an RPA engineer and we are customers of Blue Prism. 

Blue Prism has helped the company in areas such as invoicing, requests on an augment coming from customers and things like that.

I love the development phase of Blue Prism because there are simple things you can put in place that help you understand workflow and how implementation acts. I love how Blue Prism can use the same variables and objects used on other processes, the really key value is the object sharing. I like that you can forward so you can speed up the process while it's executing which you can do on other RPA tools, but you can also simulate the feed tool from two to four and reach the output quite nicely.

For me, a web application that can improve the connection between robot and human, and share information simply without any file sharing, without any access from the machine, that has the tower controlling it, is the easiest way to share information.

The user interface could be improved and I would like to see a web interface to easily access robot information. The key value of Blue Prism is also its main weakness because Blue Prism is quite connected to its data, so anything you do on Blue Prism is logged on the database. It's quite difficult to read these logs, so I would like to have a more valuable way of understanding how robots work on the environment. Blue Prism doesn't manage variables well. It's annoying because you have to declare visually every variable but there's not a list of the variables. You have to open the graphical elements and check the variables.

I've been using this solution for one year. 

It's a stable solution. It has a quite simple architecture and is very connected to the machine on which Blue Prism works. The RPA tools are connected with the machine, with the applications, with the credentials, and that improves stability.

The solution is very scalable because you can deploy a robot on the machine and with the same licenses you can deploy another robot on another machine. 

Technical support is quite good although I think not as good as with some other solutions. UiPath, for example, has great support, great speed, and they're right on the issues. Blue Prism has that too but they're not as good as the others. 

The initial setup is quite straightforward and similar to other solutions. 

This is an expensive solution. I think Blue Prism has a licensing mode quite different from the other RPA tools.

Blue Prism is a very secure solution because you can implement a structure as a high availability infrastructure. If you have, for example, three machines and one license, you can put this license on any of the machines. If the first machine is down, then you can put that license on another machine.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

We are a relatively new company, which specializes primarily in finance. I believe roughly 5% of our company uses this solution, which is quite low.

Some fields in our company require the use of this solution daily, but other fields use it only monthly. So, we use it on-demand.

When we initially started using Bue Prism, it was actually acquired by the financial department in our company, but soon after, it was put across as a legacy to IT. We then expanded our use cases to other areas of IT throughout our company, but primarily, our major footprint in Baxter has been in finance. Blue Prism dominates in finance at the moment. We also have a few use cases relating to HR.

Blue Prism was our first automation platform. Originally, we used version 6.2, which was very geared toward core development. You need to have some development background to develop the bots, and they were pretty much heavy in terms of the monolithic way of the solution. But from version 6.4 onwards, there became a feature known as an API call. Technically speaking, they have actually increased their capability in API calls, which means that Blue Prism has a lot of flexibility to integrate with other enterprise applications. This API feature, which is available in version 6.4, has made our lives a lot easier compared to version 6.2.

I have been speaking directly with Blue Prism's engagement manager about making the solution more web-based. It's not quite there yet. Currently, the latest version is still under the beta version, so, as a customer, we don't have access to it. They are making it much more web-based, but for now, everything you have to log into requires an enterprise server — It's still more client-based than web-based. They are aware of these issues, but it's not available yet. If they would have done this earlier, it would have helped them occupy the market space better.

In the next release of Blue Prism, they are bringing in some great features, like deployment. I believe it's really going to focus on centralized monitoring. They are making it web-based. I think the scalability and the ease of installation are also going to get an upgrade in the new version. They are working on merging technology, like OCR capabilities — they are bringing everything under one banner. That's definitely going to help. This reboot of Blue Prism is definitely required. It's a little late, but at least they're doing it.

We have been using Blue Prism for roughly three years.

We used to have some issues with the older version of Blue Prism, which required technical support, but this has been addressed in the newer versions. Overall, after the upgrade, I'd say it's very stable.

Is it scalable? Yes and no. From Blue Prism's perspective, it's easy: you spin up a server and start deploying your blocked runners, making sure to keep them running; but from an organization's point of view, there is a lot to do on the infrastructure side — you have to pay special attention to the infrastructure where you can run your bots. So, it's scalable, but there is a cost associated with it. Every organization needs to be very careful in regard to how they're scaling it: are you going to scale it horizontally? Are you going to scale it vertically? Are you going to scale out? These are the questions that must be carefully considered when scaling it up. Otherwise, your cost will be exponentially higher if you don't pay attention to these factors.

As I mentioned earlier, we get our support from a third-party vendor and our partner — they log the tickets with Blue Prism. They engage all of the support that we are entitled to, for example, tier one, two, and three. Also, we have client engagement from Blue Prism who is constantly in touch with us, and they are always open to our feedback surrounding areas of improvement. Overall, I would say our relationship has been good with Blue Prism.

We also have experience with Automation Anywhere. From a marketing perspective, Automation Anywhere has done a lot, but since we have just started using Automation Anywhere, our lower environments are built, but our higher environment is yet to be built. 

So, why did we make the choice to use Automation Anywhere when we have Blue Prism? The simple answer is because the marketing of Automation Anywhere is better. They were offering IQ bots and attended bot runners; Blue Prism wasn't really offering these. These were big areas of consideration between the two, because when we were actually evaluating, Blue Prism didn't have a similar offering for IQ bots or attended bots that Automation Anywhere had.

The initial setup sounded simple when we started, but when we were upgrading to version 6.4, we needed our vendor partner and Blue Prism to come together. Originally, the upgrading process was estimated to take eight weeks, but we almost spent four to five months getting it set up. I think there's still a lot of complexity involved, It's not that simple. They are not very lightweight yet. There is a lot of heavy software involved, which makes the set up a little complex.

The maintenance is primarily done by us. We do have a complete license, including support, and we are in a tough IT agreement with the vendors, so we do have premium support with Blue Prism. If we require assistance, we write a ticket on the vendor platform and they will eventually hook up the Blue Prism guide. In short, we do have content enterprise support with them.

We got a discounted price after negotiating with Blue Prism, as well as Automation Anywhere through our procurement. From a list-price perspective (due to the marketing strategy of Automation Anywhere), Automation Anywhere appears to be much cheaper compared to Blue Prism; however, if you do a detailed analysis in regards to the total pricing, I think both are pretty much at war with each other. Automation Anywhere has broken down the licensing costs into multiple factors, whereas Blue Prism is very straightforward — you purchase a production license, that's it. This looks much more expensive compared to Automation Anywhere prices, but with Automation Anywhere, you have to start from scratch. I'd say they are pretty much head-to-head with each other. 

With Blue Prism, there are no additional fees. The price depends on the number of processes that you run in production and you get a license for that. Also, the lower environments are free of cost. It's pretty straightforward.

I think it's very important for an organization to evaluate what kind of use cases they have: what's their roadmap and how long is the journey that they're looking at. As the market says, most organizations are looking for this digital transformation, and Blue RP is only part of it. For any organization that needs to adapt to a digital transformation, automation RP does play a good role. They need to evaluate what exactly they want to do and then engage with Blue Prism about how to go about doing it. Remember to always bring in the experts in the market at the beginning of your journey, and work together. That helps a lot.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Blue Prism a rating of seven.

In the financial environment, such as in the banking and insurance sectors, we use them to automate mundane tasks, the kinds that require repetitive human work with not much thought process involved.

We use it for simple things like automating the processing of work queues, reading information from an email, extracting the attachments and forwarding those to available people.

It helps us reduce the number of people involved in mundane tasks.

In the case of Absa, it has really impacted them, the way the customer interacts with the organization when it comes to certain processes. They have become one of the better banks in terms of technology now.

When having to fill out an application, for example, there's an app. In the back-end of that app, the whole process is automated. They get an acknowledgment within a couple of seconds. That is the way it has a positive impact on the organization. If the end-user or the client is happy about the way things are going now, as oppose to the way things were before, then that's a big win.

The automation in version 6 seems to be a lot better than it was in previous versions. In my opinion, that is great. 

The matrix in terms of reporting is becoming more friendly. It can be used with other analytics tools and that too is a great thing. You can pull stuff into stats, you can pull stuff into any kind of data analytics tool, like Tableau for example.

You can easily see where all your problems lie, in a visual way. It's always nice to have a visual representation of things, whether you're a kid in school or whether you're a professor at a university. Seeing things at one glance makes a lot of difference, instead of having to read through the fine print and see where the issues are.

Another feature I like about Blue Prism is the Control Room and how easy it is to find exceptions, to find common issues, and to troubleshoot your exceptions. Your Control Room person, without any development skills, can easily pick up what the problem is, with the exceptions, especially when there are a lot of exceptions related to one use case or process.

Blue Prism is lagging in terms of artificial intelligence. There is no artificial intelligence in version 4 or 5, which most people are still using as far as I'm aware. To be fair, they do have AI in version 6. Still, it's lagging terribly. Blue Prism is the inventor of the name of the term "RPA," and it's disappointing to see they are sitting around.

Blue Prism, in my opinion, is very solid because it has so many years of evolution and backing. It's more solid than the other platforms but I feel that the intelligent automation needs to be jacked up to where the other platforms are, at least.

Cognitive learning, for example, where it can actually follow your movements on the screen, is not there in Blue Prism. The bot will only do what you program it to do, whatever processes and objects that you refer to. It only follows that. There is no cognitive learning happening, whereas Automation Anywhere or UiPath can actually follow your movements, follow the steps that you're doing and then, bang, can go ahead and repeat those processes. And at the same time, it will learn to do it better as well.

Also, when exceptions are being passed to Excel, there's a huge issue dealing with the date format. You actually have to program your date as a text, as opposed to as a date, and that is something I would like to see improved. I cannot say whether it has been fixed, as I don't have exposure to the new version.

We have had the odd case of the robot falling for no reason. Then you restart the whole thing and you find it runs okay. To me, that's a very big problem with stability.

The stability issue is there, especially when you scale it up. If you're doing 1000 processes a minute or every 10 minutes, and then you scale it up to 10,000, I think Blue Prism has a problem with that. Guys from the banks have told me they really don't look at Blue Prism as being scalable enterprise-wide because it does tend to fall over.

Having said that, I haven't necessarily heard of issues like that in the international environment, but I have heard of issues like that here in South Africa. Having read of the success stories, worldwide, and the extent to which they've been involved in enterprise-level, I wouldn't necessarily say this issue has come to the fore.

I'm sorry to say their technical support is very bad.

The technical support, the client support, the academic support, are almost nonexistent, if you ask me. I have had very nasty experiences where we're stuck in a deployment and we are about to go live and there's an issue and we ask for help and we get a reply a day later or two days later, if they reply at all. In my case, I had to rely on the community that I'm involved in - the LinkedIn group and WhatsApp groups that I have connections with. I was able to solve problems that way. If I have a problem with Blue Prism I won't go to Blue Prism for help. That's how bad it is.

I would generously rate technical support at four out of 10.

Blue Prims was the first tool that I used in automation and, in some ways, I got stuck with it. There was a huge demand for it in South Africa so I have always followed the Blue Prism path. But after having used Blue Prism, I used Automation Anywhere and am extremely happy with it. Their support is extremely good.

Depending on your environment, setup can become very complex, especially if the permissions and access are not dealt with correctly. Your change management has to be very clearly outlined and mapped out before you even go into an environment where you try to implement Blue Prism.

You have to have access to a SQL Database and if that is not all sorted out, you're going to struggle. Even just deploying it, and your bot access and your VDI access, etc., it's really quite difficult to do in a very secure, locked up environment.

Blue Prism is pretty steep compared to the others, much more than Automation Anywhere. That can be a hindrance as well.

In terms of world usage, the market slice Blue Prism has, it is only in third place now, simply because it has been lacking in certain areas. The lackluster Robotic Process Automation Blue Prism is a dumb robot, as opposed to Automation Anywhere which is capable of cognitive learning - and that's a big plus. Even if it's in a very simple manner, even if it's not an IQ Bot, there is a lot of cognitive learning that's built into the other platforms which I find much better to use.

Even if you take out UiPath which is bigger - it now has a huge amount of money that was invested by Israeli investors who have pushed UiPath to a point where it has expanded to almost every country now, including trying to get themselves established in South Africa. Even if you take them out of the picture, and they are the biggest threat, Automation Anywhere, which is much younger than Blue Prism, is still way better and rated much higher than Blue Prism in terms of market share and popularity, ease, etc.

If I wanted to choose a platform, depending on the environment, I would not be fixed on one platform. The companies that I worked for previously only focused on Blue Prism while others only focused on Automation Anywhere. That's the wrong approach. You should be agnostic, you should use a tool that is appropriate for the scenario. There are some things that, obviously, Blue Prism will do way better, way faster than Automation Anywhere and there are some cases where Automation Anywhere would be more suitable.

For example, if you are looking into natural language processing, Automation Anywhere does a far better job of it in terms of reading an email and making a decision based on the content of the email. Blue Prism can't do that.

I would also say you need to get your planning right. Once you have that right, you'll have no issues with implementation. Seek advice from people that have successfully implemented it. There are many community groups and a lot of people in the Blue Prism community, so become part of the community; there's a lot to be learned from that.

Overall, it's pretty solid, it's pretty good if you want to start doing things in robotics or process automation, but it's definitely not the end of it. I would suggest that people always look at other platforms and see where they could be used in a given situation.

The tool's user interface is very intuitive. 

The solution is pretty high priced. The tool's support also needs to be better. 

I would rate the tool's stability a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the product's scalability a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the product's setup an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the product's ROI an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten. 

The end users are happy about the solution.

I am using Blue Prism for my RPA enterprise project. I haven't used the cloud version, because I work from a financial institution and we are very strict about the confidentiality and the security of the data of our clients.

Blue Prism is a great enterprise and it has offered the solutions that I have been needing in order to give my organization an RPA.

The most valuable features of Blue Prism are the Control Room, autonomous bot, unattended, attended bot, and Decipher. I have been using the decipher functionality recently, and I want to explore the Capture functionality in other works that I have.

Blue Prism has given me the features that I need.

Blue Prism is a little behind Automation Anywhere in the topics related to maintenance and report building.

The report in Blue Prism could improve. I am in version 6 and they are already in version 7. The features or changes I need could have already been resolved in the newer version.

I have been using Blue Prism for approximately three years.

They have a call every three months with me to understand what are my needs at that moment. If they can adjust something in our contract, they have been very kind and very friendly. That has allowed us to adjust our agreement, functions, and training that my team needs in order to boost Blue Prism in my organization.

I chose Blue Prism because it is priced well. The pricing was right for me at that moment even though Automation Anywhere is better in other aspects.

I rate Blue Prism a nine out of ten.