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BMC Helix ITSM vs Espressive Barista comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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
670
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 ITSM
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (7th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (9th)
Espressive Barista
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (37th), AI-Powered Chatbots (9th), AI-Agents for HR (4th)
 

Featured Reviews

Nadeem K. - PeerSpot reviewer
Rpa Developer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Automation has freed teams from repetitive finance and supply tasks and supports global operations
In the current organization, we had trouble initially because I think the documentation and support could be better than what it is now. This is one difference between Automation Anywhere and other RPA tools such as UiPath. In UiPath, if you have an issue, you go to the UiPath website and search for it, and you get lots of help materials. In Automation Anywhere, you do not get exactly what you are looking for. You get a very large number of results when you search for something, and from this large result set, you have to filter out what you need, or only partial information will be available. User handbooks are available for each product. In that regard, I would say Automation Anywhere is lagging compared to other RPA tools. It is difficult to get hold of their customer support team. I want to clarify that it is not a matter of us building logic on Automation Anywhere and it failing. When it is a product-related issue, they have to give us support because we only know how to develop within Automation Anywhere. We do not know how to fix Automation Anywhere itself. Whenever we have an issue, trying to get in touch with them always takes three to four business days.
KN
Senior Application Developer BMC at Balfour Beatty
Self-service portal significantly reduces resolution time and transforms service process with advanced features
We initially had a lot of tickets generated via the service desk through calls and emails. Now, we have almost moved out of email creations by introducing the DWP features on the Studio pages, with about 90% of the tickets coming in via our self-service portal. Recent upgrades offer different types of views for particular business lines, which was missing earlier. The new landing pages have allowed us to add banners, images, and internal videos, encouraging most customers to use these DWP self-service features. Resolution time has decreased significantly since implementing the self-service portal. Additionally, the availability of knowledge articles, chatbots, and the new Helix GPT feature has improved service processes.
Jim Lobao - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager for End User Support Services at Five9
Has helped enhance our support ability, reduced our resolution time, and reduced our service desk costs
Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement. We haven't yet found anything that resembles true AI that can learn autonomously without human intervention. However, Barista does help us identify and address some of these areas, allowing my team to step in and create intents and responses to questions. When a user asks a question that Barista doesn't immediately understand, we can recognize the pattern, capture it, and link it to a common intent. This is highly beneficial for acquiring such data, but it's a reactive approach and still requires curation. Natural language processing still has some way to go. One of our challenges is that our internal employees haven't yet adopted a natural way of interacting with Barista. Getting people to be concise and to the point, rather than being verbose as if they were interacting with a human, has been an ongoing challenge. While they may feel comfortable being conversational in Slack, expecting a human-like response, Barista is a different entity. Barista isn't interested in their recent vacation; it just wants to know they're locked out of their account. So, some users may assume Barista understands their intent when they say, "I'm back from vacation and locked out of my account." Barista, however, may interpret this as a request for the holiday schedule. Therefore, we're gradually educating our users to adapt their communication style for better success with Barista. Conversely, we desire Barista to adapt its behavior based on the interaction, the language used, and the way people communicate. I wholeheartedly desire an AI that can continuously learn and adapt to our organization's evolving needs. This is the most challenging aspect, as it involves understanding our organization's terminology, procedures, and toolsets. We've made significant progress in this area. However, from an NLP standpoint, we still face challenges with our nearly 3,000 Slack channel users, each with their unique communication styles. People ask questions in various ways, and sometimes there are misunderstandings. They want to interact with us naturally. However, we still struggle with natural language processing. People don't always realize that the bot is a virtual agent designed to be concise and efficient. Sometimes, less is more. It's been a difficult transition for people to grasp that they're conversing with a virtual agent, not a human. They still expect human-like interactions, such as discussing their weekend or holidays or simply pasting screenshots of errors. However, the bot can't interpret screenshots. If they provide the error code and some context about the application, the bot can better understand the issue. So, the key challenge is bridging the gap between human expectations and the bot's capabilities in terms of natural interaction.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the SAP application and the DLLs that Automation Anywhere provides. These DLLs help automate the SAP application."
"Automation Anywhere is scalable and capable of adapting to any new requirements and technologies."
"What Automation Anywhere is offering is amazing from a back-end office accounting standpoint."
"This solution is easy to use and generates a quick response."
"The ability to find objects easily through the 'Capture' option saves your time most significantly."
"Some of the key features of Automation Anywhere include the simplicity that enables developers to build bots very quickly in a standard delivery fashion."
"Bot Insights is neatly integrated into the platform, which enables us to develop rapidly and train the learning instances using pre-defined domains over the purchase orders, forms, and invoices that need to be processed."
"It is a great solution."
"Customer Service: It's very good. Technical Support: It's very good."
"It tracks all trouble tickets and provides a ticket history."
"It's a very integrated solution."
"Customer support is always fantastic and willing to help. No matter what time of day we have a problem."
"It’s a great product, I would highly recommend it."
"It has the power to automatize several different tasks in the ITSM world."
"The Helix chatbot is helpful, and we can use its workflow features to automate some of the use cases for our clients."
"MyIT is simple to use and its mobility is a big plus for our on the go users."
"This is one of the few tools that live up to the sales reps' hype when it comes to integrating with ServiceNow."
"We have the ability to alter phrases, create new phrases, or enhance phrases, or change paths. From the dashboard, we are able to get a lot of information we need about what people are asking, where they are dropping off from conversations, and where they do not get the information they need."
"I like Expressive Barista's integration with Microsoft Teams."
"The solution is available to support us instantly as required."
"Our developers have used the Barista Control Center to extend the platform by adding content, and they've found it fairly easy to do and manage"
"Our department received about a 70% deflection rate, so that was really great."
"The bot is pretty easy to update and keep up to date. Espressive itself is pretty easy to work with."
"The most valuable feature is its scalability."
 

Cons

"In the A2019 community edition, while running its taking time to run RPA bots and having few bugs related to IQ Bot server connectivity and other things."
"They need to improve the real-time data and analytics."
"They need to improve the REST Api documentation because it is not well detailed or clear enough for beginners, and they need to provide some out-of-the-box AI and ML functions such as image classification and object identification."
"The bot insides should come in the same package versus having it as a different bundle by itself. If we could have this product come with all the inside solutions altogether, that would help."
"I think the pricing model should be more flexible."
"Automation Anywhere risks falling behind by focusing solely on Robotic Process Automation when competitors offer more versatile and adaptable solutions that integrate AI for a more intelligent automation experience."
"For smaller teams and during the onboarding, it takes a little while to figure out how to make things work."
"Additionally, the user interface is quite outdated and could be more user-friendly. The licensing cost is also too high, which means many small-scale industries may not choose this product."
"If you want to have to migrate from on-premises to Helix or from Helix to a ServiceNow, or from cloud to on-premises, it's easy but it requires additional tools."
"I have customers that always would like to adapt and personalize BMC Helix ITSM more."
"It needs to be web based."
"The dashboard can be better."
"Support could be better."
"It doesn't allow a person logging a call to assign the ticket to a specific department, but only to update it."
"Their customer service catalog (where a customer can order some products) could be improved. This product is not the best, but they are working on it."
"The documentation could improve in BMC Helix ITSM."
"I would like to see improvement to the out-of-the-box verbiage, with the questions going to the right place."
"The knowledge management could definitely be improved."
"Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement."
"There aren't very many things that this product needs improvement on."
"I would like to see the continued expansion of all of the automation capabilities."
"Expressive Barista could improve by adding native integration with WhatsApp, one of the top communication channels in South Africa. When we're trying to sell Barista to customers, we have to tell them that the solution doesn't have out-of-the-box support for WhatsApp. We can develop it, but then we need to have a conversation about how much that will cost."
"Although they've done some work on their metrics dashboard, there is some fine-tuning to do for people that just want to go in there at a glance and see their metrics."
"My only comment would be if they wanted to use this as an IT service management tool, maybe they could think about Barista making tickets and having change management and problem management capabilities."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Automation Anywhere's price is considerably better than UiPath's."
"The pricing strategy for us is one license for development. It is more complicated than that depending on the options you choose."
"The pricing and licensing are definitely moderate to costly but easily recoverable by achieving ROI quickly."
"The enterprise version is expensive for small businesses and individual users."
"The product’s pricing is reasonable."
"The licensing needs to be made simpler or shortened."
"I think it's $5,500 per license."
"Based on what I've heard, it's costly, but I don't know much about its pricing."
"The cost is relatively high, especially for the BMC Controller application. However, the expense is justified by the standard and reliable features it offers. This product's reputation in the market is strong, providing assurance in terms of data and other considerations."
"It is costly, but it is well worth it."
"There are licenses to use this solution."
"The price of BMC Helix ITSM is expensive."
"If you are looking for some kind of professional services form the OEM then you would have to purchase that."
"I rate the product price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive. The solution is expensive."
"I am not sure the exact price we pay for the solution but I know it is in the high seven-figure amount annually."
"It is not very expensive and not very cheap. It is somewhere in-between. Some of the features are more expensive. There are also additional costs. If you want to use most of the features, you need to pay more."
"It is expensive. It's not a cheap thing."
"The pricing isn't overly burdensome. It's going to be interesting to see how new models come in with new capabilities but, as it is, as a base system, it's pretty good."
"The price for the licensing is fair."
"User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant value from it."
"The solution is affordable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Construction Company
10%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business163
Midsize Enterprise86
Large Enterprise566
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business20
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise54
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise7
 

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 ITSM?
Although BMC Helix ITSM is a strong enterprise platform, there are areas where it could be improved. One key area is ...
What is your primary use case for BMC Helix ITSM?
My main use case for BMC Helix ITSM is validating and automating core ITSM workflows, such as incident, change, and s...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BMC Helix ITSM?
My thoughts on the pricing and licensing cost of BMC Helix ITSM are that it is flexible.
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Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
Remedy ITSM, Remedy, Helix Remedy, BMC Helix IT Service Management
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Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Brookfield, HealthSouth Corporation, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, Mercator, SAP, Stanford University
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Find out what your peers are saying about BMC Helix ITSM vs. Espressive Barista and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
921,714 professionals have used our research since 2012.