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Appian RPA vs IBM Datacap comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
661
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (2nd), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (1st), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
Appian RPA
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (20th), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (11th)
IBM Datacap
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (7th)
 

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at Accenture
Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions
Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.
Kunal Sharda - PeerSpot reviewer
Director & Key Managerial Personnel at Newlight Technology Solutions Private Limited
Partnering with comprehensive automation for increased efficiency
The best feature of Appian RPA is that it is highly integrated into the Appian platform itself. It is very easy to configure that in the end-to-end Appian automation solution. The second notable feature is that Appian RPA gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of how you want to design the robotic tasks. It has a very detailed orchestration console which provides details about the entire runtime and the logs of Appian RPA where you can find in detail what the robot did on the virtual machine. Appian provides dashboards where users or admins can log in and see how the robots are performing various robotic tasks. It is very detailed and gives substantial insight into how Appian RPA is functioning or is operational. It also lets you drill down into specific details at each task level.
DeekshithShetty - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Development Senior Specialist at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
High-accuracy document processing with easy integration and good image enhancement
The OCR extractions are very good, almost 100% accurate now. The integration with other tools is very easy, with inbuilt actions to configure and directly export to multiple depositories. It is also good at image enhancement, including the removal of lines, which is helpful in processing and automation and ensures very little user intervention, thus saving time.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Unattended use is its most valuable feature."
"Using Automation Anywhere saves us time, money, and eliminates errors."
"The best feature is its ability to combine Automation Anywhere with AI to build intelligent bots."
"The features of Automation Anywhere improve my company by making deployment and maintenance of our automations a smoother process overall."
"We have saved customers 400% in terms of time saved by implementing this product."
"My experience with Automation Anywhere is quite good because we can automate the whole end-to-end process with no human intervention, and we are able to focus on higher-value activities rather than working on the same repetitive tasks, which is quite important and gives the highest impact to the business as well."
"The most valuable features for us are the Image Recognition and Object Cloning. We used this feature to automate our web-based tasks with repetitive actions or complex conditions. These features are very easy to use and do not require you to have deep knowledge in programming to understand since it has a drop and drag feature used to control it."
"Automation Anywhere has helped our organization to save human efforts on mundane tasks and shifted it to more analytical and interesting tasks."
"Appian RPA is super easy to use, offering low code, no code capabilities."
"The best feature of Appian RPA is that it is highly integrated into the Appian platform itself and is very easy to configure in the end-to-end Appian automation solution."
"I find the pricing of Appian RPA reasonable because it is user-based, and we can experiment with it."
"It is highly scalable; we have customers who are pumping through thousands of documents a day, and if you're looking for enterprise, this is the solution because it is a platform."
"The standout feature of this intelligent product is its remarkable capability."
"The installation of the solution is very simple."
"There's something that's very unique about IBM DataCap. It provides me with a good solution for extracting, reading the QR codes, and scanning them. In this stage, we are working in a UIT phase before implementing this protocol in all our branches. From my initial observation, IBM DataCap is good, it is not working too fast, but in a good manner for us."
"At the forefront of my thoughts, the standout feature of this intelligent product is its remarkable capability. This project we're currently engaged in revolves around streamlining workflows within both our company and the customer's company. It entails handling information from various documents with diverse formats and types, even when they contain the same data. The ability to connect this information with the appropriate database and recognize it irrespective of the format or source is an extremely valuable feature. Moreover, leveraging machine learning is crucial since our customer deals with an extensive archive of over five million documents. Machine learning can significantly alleviate the backlog by becoming well-versed in various scenarios they might encounter during their work once we've completed our application."
"I work for an insurance company, and we use Datacap for document processing."
"It's a platform, not a configured application, so you can do what you want with it."
"Both Datacap Studio and Datacap Navigator are great features."
 

Cons

"Automation Anywhere is expensive. They should consider lowering the price to make Automation Anywhere more affordable to SMEs, which comprise a huge segment."
"To achieve a perfect ten, I would want to see new features working as expected and further advancements in automation."
"Excel functionalities, the macro interface can be improved in the next release of RPA platform Automation Anywhere. Functionalities such as maneuvering on the excel worksheets, increased capability to manipulate formulae, and other Excel functionalities will give Automation Anywhere and edge in the RPA platform category since most financial applications use a lot of Excel and macro sheets for their calculations and postings."
"The biggest challenge that I have with Automation Anywhere is the pace of upgrades that they do. We are not an IT company, we are a mining company. We are very conservative in doing our upgrades and moving from one platform to another. Upgrades are one of the challenges we are having with Automation Anywhere."
"I noticed that from version 10.5 to 11.3 the number of clicks to start a bot through the Control Room and Schedule Manager have increased. In certain cases, I would like to see that become simpler, faster, and easier."
"The time taken to execute a Bot through A2019 can be reduced."
"When you are implementing it initially, it's challenging as there's a lot of change management."
"They are working on scalability, but I'm expecting them maybe a faster pace for the thing already in place. They need to improve the extraction and accuracy. It's a sort of a journey that we started with a few fears that may end up with a 100 or 200 fears. These are our expectations from IQ Bot. We are quite hopeful that a future release will solve this problem."
"In my opinion, Appian RPA can be improved."
"There are many competitive products in the market right now, for example, UiPath and Automation Anywhere. These competitive products are now coming up with features which Appian RPA currently does not have."
"There are not any areas that need improvement off the top of my head."
"IBM needs to improve on scanning and reading accuracy for unstructured documents. Additionally, an important missing feature is the ability to merge documents and present data across different UI screens."
"I would like to see the product have the ability to process more documents in parallel."
"When I scan a document in Datacap that has a watermark or the document is a little distorted, the image output is poor."
"What could be improved in IBM Datacap from a technical perspective is having everything together all in one place, rather than having several different interfaces. The addition of cloud-based OCR technology would also make this solution better. There's also room for improvement for their technical support."
"Third-party integration could be improved; it's very slow."
"One of the things that we wished for was to have an easier way to carry out the customizations. Currently, if you want to customize data, you need to have a developer with C# knowledge. If IBM could implement a no-code or low-code platform for Datacap, it would be easier to adjust it without needing a developer, which was always the most difficult part."
"Going forward, IBM needs to ensure that the output is perfect (as it can make the product) while staying true to platform's core."
"We have page requirements where some values must be copied on each page. For example, say I need to scan a bunch of documents, and the name will be a field on every page. We don't have a default functionality in Datacap to copy the field value on the first page to all the pages. That feature would make the documents easy to prepare."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's the best RPA tool, but the pricing could be improved."
"As our team size increases, we may get some more licenses for the tool."
"The pricing is a bit higher."
"Automation Anywhere is thought to be quite expensive, especially for smaller organizations."
"Pricing is too high for small-scale groups. The Control Room yearly fee is high, making it difficult to break even."
"It is the most economically friendly and it provides you with a lot of functions."
"They give us a good deal on the licensing because we bundle and customize things. If you ask to get a bulk business deal, you will receive more benefit. If you take other products from the suite, like IQ Bot, you can also receive a deal on the licensing."
"It looks like it will be right around $115,000, not counting IQ Bot, which we won't renew until later."
Information not available
"We were using the User Value Unit licensing, which means we get charged per active user of the system, and if I'm not mistaken, we also had it for the rule runner service. They had a PVU license model, which is a processor value unit. For each process that we have in our system, we pay a certain amount of money. We found the pricing to be quite steep. It was really an expensive solution in comparison to Kofax, which had a different licensing model and was actually cheaper overall because they charge per page and not per user and per process."
"It varies, and it depends on the client's requirements and negotiations. Nowadays, Datacap is also included in the IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation."
"IBM could offer more competitive pricing. This would allow them to attain more users. Some of our clients are considering moving to a different solution called Encapture which is similar but offers more competitive pricing."
"Pricing needs to stay competitive."
"You save a lot of time and money, but the benefit is you have people who are able to run the systems, check to see if there are any errors at all, and there are a lot less errors than a human system."
"This solution is the most expensive in the market."
"Pricing depends on how much we use it. We pay per bulk quantity. We pay as you go. Therefore, it sort of depends on our usage of it."
"This solution offers seamless integration with other enterprise products, which is my area of responsibility, focusing on government sector projects. Larger enterprise projects don't pose problems. It might be suitable for small businesses as well."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Construction Company
17%
Insurance Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business157
Midsize Enterprise83
Large Enterprise553
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Appian RPA?
I didn't handle payments or costs. We recommended infrastructure stacks to our clients, who implemented them, and we ...
What needs improvement with Appian RPA?
In my opinion, Appian RPA can be improved. We are planning to conduct a proof of concept on volume because we are sti...
What is your primary use case for Appian RPA?
We have been working with Appian RPA along with the entire workflow case management suite. Recently, Appian released ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Datacap?
Pricing is in the mid-range but could be more affordable, rated at four point five.
What needs improvement with IBM Datacap?
IBM needs to improve on scanning and reading accuracy for unstructured documents. Additionally, an important missing ...
What is your primary use case for IBM Datacap?
I primarily use IBM Datacap ( /products/ibm-datacap-reviews ) for data capture and scanning documents with OCR. Speci...
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
Jidoka RPA
Datacap
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
empark, talan, liverpool, ayesa, aeromexico, teknei
Turkcell, PowerSouth Energy Cooperative, Central Nacional Unimed, Conqord Oil
Find out what your peers are saying about UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Microsoft and others in Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Updated: June 2026.
902,988 professionals have used our research since 2012.