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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
6.8
Number of Reviews
666
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 (2nd), 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.
Ashish-Chopra - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Architect at Westpac Bank
Automation has reduced manual errors and now needs better high-volume data handling
In my opinion, Appian RPA can be improved. We are planning to conduct a proof of concept on volume because we are still not entirely certain about how well the record type feature performs on Appian with high volumes of data. After conducting client calls with HSBC, Santander, and a few of the Big Four, we learned about use cases where Appian has been used for high volumes of data. We are planning to conduct a proof of concept to test that hypothesis. Additional features that could enhance Appian RPA in the future would include AI on Azure. Currently, their AI is only AWS-based, and we are in discussions with the company about this because we are an Azure shop. I believe this would be a good area for them to concentrate on.
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

"After using AA for some of the flows, we identified that the execution time was reduced by 70% when compared to the other automation tool that we have been using for 8 years."
"The IQ Bot is the most valuable feature and a significant market differentiator."
"Automation Anywhere IQ Bot is very strong in comparison to other vendors because Automation introduced this intelligent document processing product a long time ago, which is one of its unique features."
"Implementation of Automation Anywhere (AA) allows us to automate business processes and has brought productivity gains, error reduction, and speed of execution in multiple HR and Finance operations."
"Automation Anywhere helped us to reduce the work time on data operations."
"We had an old ERP which required human interactions because of the lack of a system, and what we did is have the robotics read an invoice and plug it directly into our ERP, avoiding the extra steps, saving about an hour-and-a-half a day and 20 percent of an FTE."
"The Bot Store is an online library where anybody can find variously developed, production-ready bots."
"With Automation Anywhere you can read and extract CSV data easily. You don't need multiple commands to read it."
"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."
"Appian RPA is super easy to use, offering low code, no code capabilities."
"Our clients have significantly improved efficiencies when opening accounts for end users."
"The feedback from our clients that this solution has increased their efficiency and their turnaround time on opening any account for end users, thus attracting more customers."
"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."
"It reduces human error and saves time."
"An example: In the state of Connecticut, we implemented a solution which was forms based, but inspired by IBM technology, and we were able to eliminate a process which normally took 60 days and cut it down to six hours."
"The big thing these days is really the Insight Edition component and being able to build annotators to extract from literally unstructured content: paragraphs and information where there's no start anchor point to define where that data is located. There could be a number of entities in that which you have to draw information from. Being able to extract from them is really the differentiator today between that product and many of the other products..."
"The solution automates manual data entry."
"This tool can be easily integrated with the Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or IBM cloud."
 

Cons

"Sometimes the tool is timing out, which would be a good thing to have resolved."
"To achieve a perfect ten, I would want to see new features working as expected and further advancements in automation."
"If I were to mention one area for improvement, it would be on advanced AI commands, such as advanced coding. While this is not critically needed since Automation Anywhere is doing great, improving in that area could be beneficial."
"IQ Bot is useful but the price is not friendly."
"The IQ Bots need more out-of-the-box models to lessen the time required for model training. Their competitors provide more built-in models, which enhance capabilities in document processing."
"Cloud API vision and OCR engine integration should be more effective."
"Automation Anywhere can be improved by offering more integration with many more applications."
"The workflow has a complex drag-and-drop interface that is not user-friendly and requires a good technical understanding, which can be challenging for users."
"There are not any areas that need improvement off the top of my head."
"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."
"We had more experience, and we knew a lot more about the product than their first-line support did, and that's a really bad sign."
"Datacap is not that difficult to set up, however, there are some limitations. For example, it's supposed to only be used with Windows, it will not support a Linux platform and has been built on top of .Net technologies."
"Third-party integration is slow especially through API calls because if you want to integrate between Datacap and BPM, it can only be done in that direction (and not BPM to Datacap)."
"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."
"The user interfaces for exception processing can be tweaked. I commonly find that we try to tweak and customize some of those components to more of what the industry standard is. The product is still trying to play catch-up a little bit in those areas."
"We used an integrator for the deployment, and our experience was very bad. They gave us an unreliable, broken solution which did not work, then they would not work with us."
"Datacap's technology seems a little behind the industry. It's still using the old .NET framework. They should move to .NET Core and start integrating some machine learning. You can do some integration yourself, but you expect a solution to include the latest machine-learning approaches if you're paying reasonable money for it."
"Our main language in Egypt is Arabic, and IBM DataCap does not support it perfectly. All our documentation is in Arabic. It's not English or any other language. However, we have overcome this problem by using QR codes in the document to extract the data from it. They should have better support for Arabic."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The initial setup and licensing fees are high, and although it saves costs in the long run, reaching the break-even point can take at least six months."
"Automation Anywhere's price is considerably better than UiPath's."
"I am using that Automation Anywhere Master Certification for version 11. Recently, this has been updated in Automation Anywhere University. Until this month, it's free to use. There are no charges. That's why I would like to complete it this month."
"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's a bit expensive compared to other RPA tools on the market."
"We generally follow the Gain-Sharing Pricing model, which enables the customer to start getting the RPA benefits right from day one of their implementation."
"The current pricing for Automation Anywhere seems a little higher compared to competitors Power Automate or UiPath. Automation Anywhere is perceived as pricey due to the support model charges ranging from 20% to 30% based on the plans."
"In terms of pricing, this is a good product."
Information not available
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"In Egypt, we have exchange rates that change year to year, and currently, we're facing an increase in the exchange rate between our Egyptian pound and the dollar. Since we have been using IBM DataCap two years ago we had a good price, it was not expensive. However, I cannot say now if it is expensive or not because of the exchange rate. Additionally, I don't have the data of other competitors and I don't know the prices."
"If you want IBM Datacap on cloud, which is a service run by IBM, the price can be quite expensive, but if you want to just purchase the licenses and own those yourself, then the price is very competitive."
"It is an expensive solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Construction Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Insurance Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business161
Midsize Enterprise85
Large Enterprise561
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
Demo not available
 

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: October 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.