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Automate vs Tidal by Redwood vs UiPath Platform comparison

 

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:
 

Mindshare comparison

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Automate2.0%
UiPath Platform18.7%
Microsoft Power Automate17.3%
Other62.0%
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Workload Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Tidal by Redwood4.7%
Control-M19.1%
AutoSys Workload Automation10.2%
Other66.0%
Workload Automation
Agentic Automation Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
UiPath Platform44.2%
Automation Anywhere38.9%
Moveworks5.2%
Other11.700000000000003%
Agentic Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Ibukun Shweta - PeerSpot reviewer
Automation optimizes scheduling, but improvements needed in error reporting and script execution
In my particular use case, for session management, it would be better if I could get a more granular view into connectivity issues to servers. Sometimes, although your flows or tasks are running as scheduled, connecting to the servers can hit a snag without alerts or error logs to check. Some servers might need patching or could be affected by network issues or latency. The workflow sometimes gets stuck without clarity on the errors. An explicit error report would be helpful, especially when the connection fails unexpectedly. It's complex to analyze problems that might arise from firewall issues or other anomalies that could hinder the flow from executing as expected. The depth of these connection challenges would benefit from better debugging capabilities. As for improvements, if Automate wasn't designed primarily for script execution, that's understandable. However, for Linux, I would prefer to see less complexity in workflows to achieve a natural completion of scripts. There are features, such as 'wait for terminal output,' that should more intuitively detect completion based on the shell prompt. Improving those aspects would make Automate more efficient for my needs. Regarding error reporting, I think Automate should offer better error reporting when connecting to servers. Currently, there are many instances where I see empty logs, indicating that, while tasks are scheduled, commands are not executing successfully. This is a significant concern, especially with critical workloads where visibility into errors is essential.
Steve Mikula - PeerSpot reviewer
Very reliable processing engine, and scheduling is flawless—crucial elements in our financial transaction processing
Because we've been on it for 20 years, it's pretty easy for us to automate jobs with Tidal at this point. It has become second nature. It's pretty simplistic to set up and get going, although there are different levels of complexity you can have within the product. It depends on how simple you want to keep it. If you just keep it: Job A, Job B, Job C, Job D, that becomes pretty simple. But when you start integrating some complex calendars that use sub-calendars—and you can go three, four, or five deep to set up schedules—it becomes more complicated. The beauty of it is you can go as deep as you need to. We can get really complex or we can keep it simple. We have some use cases for both scenarios. The thing that I like the most is the reliability of the engine. The actual scheduling part of the product is pretty much flawless, but the stability of the product is what I find to be reassuring. We are a financial company, we move billions of dollars a day, and if we don't have our transactions processed in a timely manner we can be penalized and our clients can be penalized. It can have a serious financial impact.
Amjed Al-Tayyan - PeerSpot reviewer
Automation streamlines onboarding and reduces the load on customer service agents
As the head of the division, I do not use UiPath myself. However, I am the decision-maker, so I review the features. The combination of both full-attended and half-attended automation, where you can automate tasks and still interact when required, is very useful. It provides efficiency by freeing staff from unnecessary tasks, resulting in a balanced workload and more productive use of an employee's time. The tool has a noticeable ROI, and the investment is worth every penny as it reduces tedious tasks and improves scalability. It is very easy to use. During the COVID lockdown, my son who was 11 at the time attended a UiPath and Automation Anywhere training with me. He has already automated his school tasks requiring saving data and uploading some documents to the portal. If a kid can do this, it shows how easy it is.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We have tried other RPA solutions like UiPath or Automation Anywhere. They are fantastic products but complex, and it's hard to understand everything. It would be best if you had a skilled developer or several. Automate is easy to implement, administer, and use. It's appropriate for us because our cases are simple and easy to automate. We don't need complicated tools with many features; We prefer to get a significant ROI quickly."
"This tool has machine learning and voice recognition and computer vision, which are both quite useful aspects. These aren't available in other tools. It's a good addition to this tool and it gives the solution an edge on the market."
"The product effectively handles all the tasks we require."
"The licensing of the product is very good. You only need to license it once and then you have it forever."
"This product is quite easy to install, learn, and use, with our new employees being able to start using it in projects for clients after only two weeks of internal training."
"I like the interface; it makes managing automation easy. We can set different schedules and templates for each task."
"The solution is continuously adding more integrations to help with workflows and bot and task creation."
"We have found the pricing to be very reasonable."
"From a management standpoint, when using the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads, I've never had a problem with the application. It's very interactive, especially with the different security levels that they offer."
"The most valuable feature is the job scheduler, where you can schedule thousands of jobs to execute at specific times."
"We use the solution for cross-platform and cross-application workloads. That's one of the core reasons we chose it. It's one of a few things in the industry that can be used for cross-platform integration."
"Tidal Automation’s most valuable feature is customization. It can work and connect with any app."
"Especially in the newer versions of Tidal, the segmentation of user permissions enables us to give people operator permissions for their jobs, to rerun jobs, but view-only for other groups' jobs. We're able to keep people from hurting themselves or other groups accidentally. The permissioning is really good."
"We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads. The solution’s ability to manage and monitor these workloads is very easy and accurate. We have file dependencies for running jobs. The job does not start until a file exists on a completely different server, then where the job will run. So, it is cross systems."
"For us, the calendaring system is very robust. Some of the teams have very specific requests for when they need jobs to run. That's been really valuable, because a lot of times, when people run scripts, if they run on a holiday, they're going to fail... A couple of times a month it probably saves us work and the necessity of logging in from home and checking to make sure everything's okay."
"Tidal Automation is very efficient and can quickly automate most manual and repetitive tasks."
"UiPath's OCR enables data processing of handwriting, which in turn allows us to automate elements of the billing process from incoming customer checks, which is a fantastic feature for us."
"AI functionality enabled our clients to automate more processes overall. It helped with end-to-end automation in the way that if you automate more processes, you save more time, and save more money for the company."
"The product helps achieve efficiency that will create ROI and the training and support are very good."
"It is very stable."
"The UiPath community is helpful because you can ask questions and get tips from other people on best practices. Many of the problems have already been resolved by others so you can get advice from those people. You can also see how other people use the system."
"The initial setup is good. There are no problems."
"The most valuable feature of UiPath is document understanding. AI is also a valuable feature, as that is the current trend, so it's one of the most essential features of UiPath."
"The UiPath community has grown and is active. It is definitely helpful to be a part of it because others can assist us."
 

Cons

"The documentation is not that great."
"They do not encrypt passwords, so this is an issue with HIPAA compliance."
"Fortra's Automate is not as reliable as I would like it to be."
"Sometimes when we communicate with the ERP system and there is an issue, we are not always aware of the specifics of Automate and the source of the problem."
"I would like the updates to be easier to deploy. Integration with Amazon S3 is somewhat lacking."
"The documentation for errors needs improvement as many of the error messages we receive are very vague."
"The technical support could be better. We suffer from language barriers, as we are in Argentina."
"While this solution is continually improving, as it is now, the user interface could use improvement when I compare it to a product like UiPath."
"We've had some quirky stuff happen on an occasional basis where a job does not take off. For example, a job we expected to be finished by 3:00 a.m. is sitting there and not executing when we come in in the morning. We have to go all the way back to the dependencies and then we can see that one of the dependencies has become unscheduled, for some reason. No changes were made to the schedule but this prerequisite job has, all of a sudden, become unscheduled. I have brought this up with Tidal's support but they have never had an answer for it."
"The product’s UI is outdated. They should work on this particular area."
"I don't know if Tidal wants to get into the business of monitoring long-running jobs, but that could be a feature for the future: a job launching and monitoring tool. Using Tidal for monitoring doesn't seem like a good fit, but if they could offer something that did that as an add-on or include it, it might be helpful."
"I would like more involvement with the cloud."
"From an administrative point of view, I wouldn't give really high marks to the solution. I actually entertained getting the JAWS application at one point. One of the shortcomings with the scheduler is the reporting capabilities. At least at the time, JAWS was the best that they had for a third-party integration. I think they've got things in the pipeline to help alleviate that gap."
"Tidal's adaptability and user-friendliness could be increased by integrating it with additional programmes and platforms."
"The drill-down into details using the Graphical Views feature is a bit difficult and not that helpful. If you want to go into the details, you have to go to the Job Activity. Graphical Views is not that easy for getting that kind of information."
"With the client, we have had certain issues. The user interface for Tidal is a little slow. A lot of people would love this tool if they had a faster user interface. The drill-down functionality should be much quicker than what it is pulling out now. If I fill out some data, then it takes awhile to get that data back onto the screen. It's not as fast as we were expecting."
"There's room for enhancement, particularly in the support department and in the area of reporting, to provide a more robust product for gathering insights."
"One of the 2018 projects was built using version 18.2. We then got a report from users that it was not working. Most of the time, it failed on multiple use cases. When we took the process from the owner to repair and troubleshoot, we found that many packages were not being recognized by the new version, which is 2020. So, we had to upgrade to the latest package, then do a repair. It took a good amount of time for us to repair the package. We had to go back to the UAT environment, then do testing and get approval from the UAT. We then had to sign-off and deploy pre-production and post-production Hypercare. So, the automation cycle being repeated by almost 40% is quite costly to the business, but this is rare."
"It's a complex environment with all its moving pieces."
"UiPath is an RPA solution, but I have never explored the AI part of it. I am unsure if it has an AI element or not. Merging RPA with AI and ChatGPT would be beneficial."
"To improve this solution, there could be increased transparency over licensing and consistency regarding what it costs for on-prem and what it costs for the cloud."
"The solution should offer more AI-driven services that are outside of the finance industry."
"One thing that would be helpful is if the support team could quickly help us when we raise a ticket. It takes them at least one or two hours to get back to us. With Automation Anywhere, if there is a Severity 1 issue, their support responds within 15 minutes."
"The performance could be improved, and it is especially noticeable on older hardware."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"While solutions like UiPath and Blue Prism cost around $11,000-$12,000 for each license, this product costs around $7,000 and you can keep it forever."
"Compared to other products, the pricing model for this solution is much more convenient, flexible, and adaptable to the Portuguese reality."
"It comes with a package that costs approximately $20,000 USD per year."
"It has gone up in price. The price of Fortra's Automate has increased since we first started using it. It does a lot but also costs a lot. It was a lot more affordable before Fortra owned the software."
"Once you buy the software, you just pay for the support for backend help."
"From a distributor's perspective, one of the biggest selling points of Automate is its price point."
"I like the way this solution is priced because you can buy a license, or you can buy the software outright."
"The cost is a bit high for a small business like ours, but we manage with Fortra's Automate."
"Their pricing seems very fair. It is more than the other solutions, but the functionality and the support are very much there. You pay for the job scheduler, and then they have certain things that are built into it, such as the FTP processes. If you then want to do JD Edwards jobs, you need an adapter. If you want to do SQL jobs, there is another adapter. Similarly, if you want to do Oracle jobs, there is an adapter. It is like there is the base and then there are the adapters for the jobs that you want to do, but it seems that's also how they pay for each of those adapters and keep them up to date."
"Our yearly licensing costs are between $10,000 to $20,000. They have always been reasonable with us. I like that non-production licensing is about half the cost of production licensing. Licensing is by adapter typically. We have had scenarios where we have had to take an adapter from one environment to another, and they've allowed us to do that. They have made it a very reasonable process. There's definitely a feeling that they will work with you."
"This solution is a bit expensive in the current world where everybody is trying to cut down on certain things."
"We think the pricing is very fair. We have been happy with the pricing compared to some of the other solutions in the space."
"I have had no issues with the licensing."
"The licensing model's flexibility is awesome. The way it's licensed for us is that it's licensed per master and then per agent. We have an enterprise agreement, so we have unlimited agents, and we have it on 500 devices."
"The pricing is pretty reasonable. That seems to help a lot versus other companies. There are no other fees aside from the standard licensing fees. There are other products out there where you pay based on how many jobs you run and so on, and I know that's very frustrating for users."
"If you are willing to shop around to other vendors, you can possibly get a good price on your support license."
"It is cheaper than Microsoft Power Automate and saves us between 50 and 70 percent on costs. UiPath's pricing is moderate and something everyone can afford."
"We would like to see improvement on the ROI, as we need to free up resources. Too many man-hours are being spent on trivial tasks which could be automated."
"UiPath pricing is high and sometimes it's quite complicated as well, because there are loads of components and loads of product portfolios."
"Our licensing fees for this solution are €68,000 (approximately $75,000 USD) yearly."
"Given how cheap it is to initially buy the product, the licensing methodology that they have in terms of renewing every year is appropriate. Later on, if they start charging more early on, for deployment, buying the license, and deploying it initially, then having a lower maintenance fee might be more appropriate. Now, with the scale they are at, it is an appropriate way to do the licensing."
"UiPath is expensive."
"The way that the licensing is structured is confusing for some because there is different licensing if you're on the cloud versus if you're on-prem. There are unattended licences and then there are non-production licences and people get confused by that."
"The cost depends on how many licenses are needed and how bots are used. Right now there is no solution that is less expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Performing Arts
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
9%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise38
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business233
Midsize Enterprise142
Large Enterprise619
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about HelpSystems AutoMate?
We use it for specific cases, mainly secure file transfers, which are vital for us. And it works for us.
What is your primary use case for HelpSystems AutoMate?
The main purpose is for automation. That has been the purpose why I have been using it so far.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortra Automate?
Regarding pricing, it is very friendly. I would not say that it is really cheap or very expensive, but it fits within...
What do you like most about Tidal Automation?
Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Tidal Automation?
The price is reasonable in terms of the product’s functionality.
What needs improvement with Tidal Automation?
Initially, it is complicated to understand the functionalities as there is limited product documentation. The setup a...
Best RPA tools for IBM iSeries
I can only speak to UiPath since that is the only RPA solution that I have used. I know that there are specific packa...
RPA that Bots can run without centralized control?
Yes, Attended Bots which can run without centralized control Module. RPA Tools like Automation Anywhere, uiPath ,Pow...
How do I choose between UiPath and Microsoft Power Automate?
Microsoft‌ ‌Power‌ ‌Automate‌ ‌is‌ ‌intuitive‌ ‌and‌ ‌easy‌ ‌to‌ ‌integrate‌ ‌and‌ ‌use.‌ ‌I‌ ‌like‌ ‌that‌ ‌there‌ ‌...
 

Also Known As

HelpSystems Automate, Automate
Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Aldergrove Financial Group, Preferred Health Professionals, Mindbeam Technologies, First Credit Union in British Columbia, Vestcom International, Prime Liberty Benefits, University of Tampa, CNLBancshares, World Precision Instruments, BJ's Restaurants, Globe Pequot Press, Accudata Technologies, Norton Healthcare, Pacific Toxicology Laboratories
Information Not Available
1. Accenture 2. Deloitte 3. PwC 4. IBM 5. Capgemini 6. KPMG 7. Ernst & Young 8. Infosys 9. Cognizant 10. Wipro 11. Tata Consultancy Services 12. HCL Technologies 13. Genpact 14. Tech Mahindra 15. DXC Technology 16. Atos 17. NTT Data 18. CGI 19. L&T Infotech 20. Hexaware Technologies 21. Mindtree 22. Mphasis 23. Virtusa 24. Syntel 25. Zensar Technologies 26. WNS Global Services 27. Hexaware Technologies 28. Larsen & Toubro Infotech 29. Persistent Systems 30. QuEST Global 31. Sonata Software 32. Zensar Technologies
Find out what your peers are saying about UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Microsoft and others in Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Updated: August 2025.
867,349 professionals have used our research since 2012.