No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

BMC Helix Discovery vs CA Asset Portfolio Management comparison

Why PeerSpot?
Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

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)
BMC Helix Discovery
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
IT Asset Management (10th)
CA Asset Portfolio Management
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
IT Asset Management (15th), License Management (3rd)
 

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.
JP
Presales Manager at HCLSoftware
Comprehensive discovery has populated our CMDB and provides deep insight into asset relationships
The applicability depends on the customer environment. Usually it is straightforward to apply the policies. BMC Helix Discovery is seamless and has many plugins available. It is a good feature that they offer. I have heard about it, but I am not currently using it, though I know that they have that feature available. BMC Helix Discovery provides a lot of information that can be obtained from discovery, including the relationship between the CIs and how many CIs are orphans. The analytics capabilities are strong.
reviewer1998918 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise systems management team lead
Integrates well, highly stable, and scalable
CA Asset Portfolio Management can improve the uploading of batch information. I have to upload large amounts of information and it can take a long time to finish. There are some other solutions that are better, such as Micro Focus. We have approximately 10,000 PCs that we are busy processing and we have to upload information to them but when we use this solution it is complex. When we use Micro Focus it is better.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation, with modern features to train documents ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time."
"When considering all the facts, this is one of the most user-friendly RPA tools that I have worked with."
"If we count the integrations that we have done with Appian, which is where a lot of our savings is from, we are well over a million dollars in savings."
"Several manual, repetitive, time-consuming processes were automated, giving back time to the process owner, and for most of them the process now follows a single standard with additional controls created."
"The product has improved our organization cost-wise and bank savings in transactions. Everything has been changed for the better."
"Customers also are looking for the kinds of solutions that help enable their workforces to be more effective."
"The most valuable part is that it have the integrated OCR solution within it. All the other solutions do not have the right integration of the OCR solutions. You need to go to two different places to get one solution. Whereas, in IQ Bot, there is one area where you get all these solutions together in one area. That is the most important and beautiful point that I like about IQ Bot."
"Automated data processing is the most valuable feature of Automation Anywhere."
"A valuable feature concerns the ability to integrate with different solutions."
"BMC Helix Discovery comprehends the infrastructure you've procured and deployed within your environment."
"The solution is a giant when it comes to enterprise service management."
"The speed at which it's able to collect a wide-range of information, then make it useful for you, like asset management, knowledge management, and incident management."
"I'd recommend BMC Helix Discovery to others because I've been working with it for the last eight years and my experience with it has been good."
"It provides comprehensive dependency mapping, which is essential for reducing the time spent and addressing problem-solving between data centers."
"BMC Helix Discovery is very intuitive."
"The initial setup was quite easy."
"You build the items one time and then you have your discovery that's coming in and the system will let you know whether or not you're out of compliance."
"Also, the software you have, you can monitor for end of life. If you have software that is end of life, then you can have it uninstalled and buy the new software, so you can make sure that you're not running into vulnerabilities with unsupported software in your environment."
"They're staying up to date as vendors make changes to how they want to manage the software. CA is usually really quick about getting those updates in the system."
"My organization now understands what type of products they have: warranties, how long the warranties last, depreciation; we never really knew what our depreciation values were, so it was really nice to have that on hand as well, and it gives us a better view of our hardware, which is really beneficial."
"Cost, time, and risks that relate to auditing of compliance are greatly reduced with the use of IT asset manager."
"From an implementation standpoint, and what we've seen so far of what it can do, I'd say we're extremely satisfied."
"Enables me to know where an asset is at any point during its lifecycle: How old it is, who it belongs to, and where it's at within that lifecycle."
"Our organization really has improved quite a lot since we've been using this product."
 

Cons

"Automation Anywhere is headed in the right direction but they still have a good way to go."
"With the automation copilot, if I have any internal tool or application and I want to pass on variables, I don't have it. Maybe the team can work on it to make it more efficient to make it work better across all automations."
"Although Automation Anywhere is a GUI-based platform with drag-and-drop functionality, non-technical business users struggle to implement it due to the complexities of operationalizing automation within a business context."
"Automation Anywhere could benefit from more in-person support, as they currently maintain only a virtual presence."
"Maybe not improved but I heard that the 2019 version is going to look more like UiPath, which is not ideal for a typical/classic developer."
"The IQ Bot could use improvement."
"The version that we are using has been difficult for us to code."
"With Oracle and ServiceNow, there seem to be challenges. With SAP, it worked very well."
"A review of end of life data would be nice."
"It would be nice to see more updates to the solution."
"The improvement I want to see is a reduction in duplicate records."
"Resolution time is what's bothering me, as it's not always easy to get to the correct person or the right technical level needed to resolve the issue."
"An area that can be improved is the IoT."
"The interface is quite old and can be outdated."
"The product falls short compared to storage discovery mechanisms offered by Tenable or ServiceNow ITOM. In the market, there are various applications available that provide different sets of features. Its drawback is that it doesn't give the database configuration customers need out of the box. Additionally, the classification of storage virtualization is relatively lacking. Therefore, there is room for improvement, particularly in the database areas."
"The support from BMC Helix Discovery can improve, it takes a long time before we receive any feedback. It can take days to months sometimes."
"The UI, even though they upgraded the UI, it's still kind of dated, it's a little bit convoluted to use. It's not like something that you can sit down and automatically understand how to use it."
"Keeping the catalog updated and having more titles in the catalog is helpful, because the more items that are in the catalog, your process goes faster because you don't have to manually build all the entitlements."
"Needs a stronger reporting component, and more integration with CA Client Automation."
"As I'm looking into financial reporting and audits, new features to help with this would be good."
"Initially, each upgrade, the process for it was a little different. Having to go, this upgrade was going to be different from this one, going to be different from that one, that was a bit of a headache."
"I'd like to see more mobile. I'd like to have it actually manage mobile devices. It really doesn't, and I'd like to have a mobile application just for asset management."
"Accessing from roles can be effected adversely if searches are created and incorrectly assigned to roles."
"CA SAM is not a CA product. The vendor is Aspera and CA is the distributor, so support is difficult. It's more difficult to get a good response."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The control room access gives the ability to create different roles, which helps when purchasing additional licensing."
"The pricing and licensing of Automation Anywhere plays an important rule in the Indian market because in the Indian market $10,000 USD is too much. Hence, the pricing tends to go down depending on the customer relationship with the partner: A starter pack is $10,000 and an enterprise pack is $100,000. If you go through an implementation partner, you can get good deals. They can save some money."
"The pricing that we received from Automation Anywhere in the beginning was very economical for us. We've seen a lot of benefit from what we spent to what we're receiving. From the beginning, it's been a very low-cost implementation for us."
"There is a free trial so that they can get an overview, and there are different licenses that are very affordable and can suit every business model."
"We have established a CoE and we take our bot opportunities based on their ROIs. The best ROI opportunity goes to development first. Our ROI opportunities are compliance, profitable growth, productivity enhancements, productivity gains, number of hours the productivity saved, and resources not available that the work can be done by the bot. However, the single most important criteria that we use to measure ROI is how much time does the bot cut down from an analyst's work, as this has the best ROI. E.g., if an analyst is spending a 100 hours of work that a bot can do in one hour, we calculate the 99 hours saved as ROI."
"Our annual licensing costs are around $100,000 a year."
"If we talk about the automation RPA. it definitely has worked very well for us. I'm talking about giving good savings, about more than 180 FTE savings, after implementing more than 200 plus bots. It has worked well. As an organization, it has supported us very well, and also for our customers."
"Pricing is too high for small-scale groups. The Control Room yearly fee is high, making it difficult to break even."
"You need a license to use BMC Helix Discovery. The license is paid yearly, though I have no idea how much it costs."
"The licensing fee is very low."
"I rate the pricing an eight out of ten. All BMC products are expensive."
"We are on a three-year agreement with BMC Helix Discovery to use the solution. There are not any additional fees other than the standard license."
"The licenses are very complex and quite costly."
"I've heard that the solution was expensive earlier but is now much cheaper than its competitors."
"It's not a cheap product. But the benefits it delivers is that it's a fair price."
"The price was fair compared to competitors. BMC is very affordable. There are optional consulting services to assist with implementation."
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Asset Management solutions are best for your needs.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Outsourcing Company
24%
Construction Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business161
Midsize Enterprise85
Large Enterprise561
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise8
 

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 needs improvement with BMC Helix Discovery?
The interface is quite old and can be outdated.
What is your primary use case for BMC Helix Discovery?
BMC Helix Discovery is used for discovery of the assets and configuration items so that you can populate the CMDB.
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
Discovery, ADDM, Atrium Discovery & Dependency Mapping
CA IT Asset Manager, CA Asset Manager, ITAM, IT Asset Manager, CA SAM, CA Software Asset Manager, Asset Portfolio Management, Asset Portfolio Manager
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Windstream Communications, News UK, Mercator Group, Wageningen University and Research Centre (WUR)
First Horizon National Corporation, Logicalis, Racing and Wagering Western Australia
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC Helix Discovery vs. CA Asset Portfolio Management and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.