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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

"The pricing is excellent. I would give them perfect marks in that regard."
"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."
"I would recommend Automate because it has made my work much easier."
"The interface is simple, user-friendly, and very intuitive."
"I like the interface; it makes managing automation easy. We can set different schedules and templates for each task."
"The licensing of the product is very good. You only need to license it once and then you have it forever."
"I find it very user-friendly. Our IT department and other departments can seamlessly collaborate without requiring extensive training. As a business department, we particularly value this aspect, as our team doesn't consist of many IT users. However, we couldn't solely rely on a drag-and-drop approach to implement and utilize the solution within our departments."
"Overall, the whole product is really nice and provides significant benefits."
"The feature that I find to be valuable, as I'm working with other folks, is the ability to cross-schedule across platforms, and the flexibility that comes with that."
"The Graphical Views feature is also very good for helping us to understand a job stream. It's great for providing a visual overview of the status of a workflow, especially the Critical Path view. That is one of our favorites."
"Tidal Automation is very efficient and can quickly automate most manual and repetitive tasks."
"We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads. That's the biggest use for us and that's the biggest advantage."
"I like the fact that I have control, and I am able to monitor. If there is an issue, I would be able to respond to any jobs that may fail. With any other scheduler that I know of, a lot of times, when I have a very complex script, if there is an issue in the middle of it, I have to let the whole process fail and then figure out a way to recover from it, whereas Tidal will stop the process, and I can resolve that issue. Once I resolve the issue, I can continue the process. This is very important for invoicing, accounts payable, accounts receivable, or any kind of financial reporting. It allows you to recover from an issue much more effectively than anything else that I have seen."
"The most valuable feature is the job scheduler, where you can schedule thousands of jobs to execute at specific times."
"It's the most efficient tool in doing repetitive tasks and saves a lot of time with minimum possibility of error."
"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."
"The initial setup was pretty straightforward."
"I appreciate the simplicity of the interface as I am learning to be a developer."
"UiPath has an excellent GUI. It's an easy platform to develop on. They have lots of existing code that you can download and use. UiPath is strongly oriented toward intelligent automation, which is where we need to be. Their roadmap looks promising."
"UiPath has freed time for our employees. With the shipping label robot, for example, we basically replaced two jobs and now they're able to do other things. They can take on other more vital responsibilities."
"The biggest benefit that we have from UiPath comes from using the API."
"Ease of use and speed of development are the most valuable features."
"Customer support is a bright spot and helps give users confidence in the solution."
"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."
 

Cons

"The technical support could be better. We suffer from language barriers, as we are in Argentina."
"It would be an improvement if Automate had better stability tools, whether by recommending a certain amount of memory because it can be a memory hog at times."
"The solution has a very weak knowledge base."
"We really need a free development environment for customers. Building and testing automation on production isn't ideal."
"The workflow for variables could be better. The input and output of task-level variables could be made a little clearer in terms of passing those around from one task to another upon success, etc. Things like that could be a little easier potentially."
"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."
"I would like to see some better web automation, a wizard like the one in the product WinAutomation would be very nice."
"The OCR for Hebrew text needs to be improved."
"The GUI, the graphical user interface, gets a little bit busy."
"The user interface is the place that needs the most work. If and when we find issues with the product, they are usually in that area. If I had to choose, that's where I'd want issues, as opposed to in the engine. But the UI is average. It's a little sluggish at times and there are some bugs in it."
"The product’s UI is outdated. They should work on this particular area."
"Tidal's adaptability and user-friendliness could be increased by integrating it with additional programmes and platforms."
"Setting up the initial product was a little hard."
"The solution needs more advanced reporting and data visualization capabilities to enable deeper analysis of job performance and trends."
"To better fit their unique needs, the solution should give more customization options."
"One area for improvement is the command-line interface and the API to bulk-load jobs. It's a little bit kludgy, but we still manage without it. They're working on it and it's getting better all the time. In addition, the documentation for their API for creating jobs needs to be updated. It's a bit of a learning curve."
"The only thing missing is something to track the development cycle. We use third-party tools to do that."
"UiPath has to run on some infrastructure, and that infrastructure and security is not scalable yet."
"The OCR technology needs improvement, particularly for reading invoices, especially scanned invoices."
"UiPath's processing speed is a little slow. That's its only drawback compared to other tools."
"Computational text recognition has room for improvement as it is not 100 percent accurate."
"What could be improved in UiPath is the release or update because my organization noticed that a few minor bugs occur from time to time, mainly on the development side. UiPath releases need to be improved."
"We have had some problems with processing errors, but these are largely due to our legacy system and UiPath is working to help resolve the issue."
"Our challenge with UiPath is getting the infrastructure assets up to speed, particularly on the Orchestrator side. However, I just now came from a demo for UiPath Web, and it seems to be to enable serverless robots, which would definitely be a lower barrier to entry."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"From a distributor's perspective, one of the biggest selling points of Automate is its price point."
"From a distributor's side, one of the biggest selling points is its price point. Without going into any numbers, compared to UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism, we're significantly cheaper. The main difference is that other competitors usually charge you per process. However, in Automate's case, it's priced per bot. So, a bot can run multiple processes at the same time, but you are only priced for a single bot."
"I'm only involved in running the product and maintaining the systems, so I can't speak to the cost."
"I believe the price falls within a reasonable range, which significantly influenced our decision regarding the product. This aspect is crucial for any technological solution, especially in our country where enterprises might be hesitant to invest heavily in something untested or uncertain about its practicality and potential returns."
"It comes with a package that costs approximately $20,000 USD per year."
"The pricing is quite reasonable. We can run the process with one bot. The limitation is at the server level because they have some resources, and sometimes that is enough. It isn't too expensive, so you can get a good return off of one, and you can also have a pack of five bots that is quite competitive."
"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."
"The cost is a bit high for a small business like ours, but we manage with Fortra's Automate."
"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."
"The solution’s licensing model in terms of its flexibility and transparency regarding costs is pretty good. A person can buy the license, and if you decide to stop support, you can do that but still have the product. So, it's not like you're paying constantly to keep that license alive. Certainly, you want to keep support going too. Once you buy it, you own it. It's not like I have to keep paying somebody to keep using it."
"Our licensing model for Tidal is on an annual basis. It is very good and works well for us. Tidal's licensing is very transparent and simple. It lets you know, for the amount you use, that's the price that you pay. So, we buy X number of licenses, and we know that this is where we are. I'm very happy with that. I saw the licensing modules on other platforms, and I didn't like them. Other companies and solutions would calculate the connections, adapters, and instances. I think that's the reason that BMC was pretty expensive: They just didn't understand what our needs are."
"The solution has no hidden costs. It helps me to plan forward into the future. I know that I can add another 100 or a thousand jobs, and that's how much it will cost me today."
"There are project, system, and server costs. Some of the things that they are doing is introducing new products. They are introducing what they call their Repository, which is a way for you to move a job. That doesn't cost anything to us, because it is reusing a tool called Transporter. The repository is the successor to Transporter, so we already own it and are sort of grandfathered in. But that new product requires a server and database, so now we have to go out and get a server and database. So, there is a cost there."
"We pay maintenance annually through Blue House of about $9,000. That's for our two environments: production and test."
"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 new prices that we've received seem reasonable and comparable to the marketplace."
"UiPath pricing is high and sometimes it's quite complicated as well, because there are loads of components and loads of product portfolios."
"I think the pricing is reasonable. I don't think it's too much of a stretch, and I think it's where it should be."
"It is expensive, and now it is getting more expensive. They are the number one in the market, and they are taking advantage of that. It is hard for the companies that have the full infrastructure supported on UiPath to change it. They have to keep it. UiPath is taking advantage of it."
"I hope in the future the costing will be trimmed down, especially on Studio."
"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 might be a little pricey for some small businesses. When we were getting started, we had a difficult time deciding to go for it because of the pricing. Our company wasn't generating as much revenue, so it was a little high for our budget then. We can handle it today."
"It costs much less and it does much more than the competitors' solutions."
"The main thing that could be improved is the cost. I have worked with other tools and the licensing cost of UiPath is slightly higher than the others."
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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.