GEP SMART vs SAP Ariba Procurement comparison

Why PeerSpot?

GEP Worldwide and SAP are both solutions in the Procurement Software category. GEP Worldwide is ranked #3, while SAP is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.5. Additionally, 100% of GEP Worldwide users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 80% of SAP users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between GEP SMART and SAP Ariba Procurement based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Procurement Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed GEP SMART vs. SAP Ariba Procurement Report (Updated: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

GEP SMART vs. SAP Ariba Procurement

September 2026

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Helped 914,262 peers since 2012

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

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash

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.

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it_user1709418

Senior Product Manager at a university with 10,001+ employees

Doesn't require a background in analytics to run reports

SMART has been helpful for sourcing and public bids. For regulatory purposes, our university posts bids, depending on the scope of the bid. We get a lot of value out of SMART's ability to post to a public site and have suppliers see that information, register in the tool, and participate. SMART features for collecting information and its timeline capabilities are highly useful. Then on the contract side, the reporting capabilities are the most valuable. Our use case focuses primarily on post-execution and lifecycle management, so it's essential to be able to report accurately especially compliance-related reports. SMART is easy to use, especially when reporting. It isn't designed for a hardcore analyst. You don't need to have a background in analytics to run reports, which is huge. I realized I hadn't touched too much on the spending side, but we use SMART for all spending analytics, and any commodity manager procurement professional can go in and run a spending report. That was a business decision to restrict who can run reports since that data can be exported and used. But the reporting capabilities are incredibly easy to use.

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Argy Soudi

Senior Procurement Consultant at Ps digital tenders limited

Has connected procurement and contracts efficiently while setup and support still require improvements

Support could be faster for critical issues with SAP Ariba Procurement. When patching happens and new releases come out, it can be hit and miss, though mostly it remains reliable. The on-time response is 99.9999%, but the main issue over the years has been with releases and patching. The initial setup of SAP Ariba Procurement is not straightforward. We have been trying to set it up for two and a half years for the council I work with. The personal account login is ready-made and allows landing page adjustments, but the overall software implementation can take forever and requires multiple teams to work on it.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Comparing Automation Anywhere with other tools for RPA, in my opinion, it is better because it is easier to use for both the final user and the developer."

"With automation, you can reduce that effort to half an hour or an hour, so it will improve your efficiency and save you a lot of time, so you can improve your time in other work."

"The integration of Automation Anywhere into our clients' workflows, APIs, business applications, and documents was seamless, but it was a bit of a struggle until we realized that it has a built-in integration platform."

"We have leveraged automation to increase economies of scale and value-added work while reducing operating costs."

"The object cloning is its most valuable feature."

"My experience with the deployment has been very good."

"The solution has helped us increase productivity."

"We have seen a positive return on investment with Automation Anywhere mainly through the time saving and reducing manual efforts."

More Automation Anywhere pros

"I have seen that the sourcing process in GEP SMART is easier than in Oracle, SAP, etc."

"The one we use the most is the sourcing module... It's really easy to use. You don't have to train vendors. You can add a new vendor at any time, and that vendor will get an email saying, "You've been selected to participate in our RFP, and you do X to get your ID set up." That works really well."

"In terms of ease of use, GEP has done a lot of work through its enhancements over the years to make the user experience more intuitive. There is a more standard-Amazon-like experience, where manuals and tutorials are not really required, simply because the user experience and what's on the screen are pretty intuitive."

"From a contract perspective, in my opinion, SMART has improved things a hundred-fold."

"On the spend side, it's integrated with our accounting system and has bimonthly uploads of data. So we have pretty current spend information that we can access and build reports on."

"The spend module is really amazing and lightning-fast. It can give even the most novice of analysts access to the information needed and the ability to tweak it the way they want to see it. It has a lot of flexibility."

"Their tool has become a much better tool over the years."

"Through using GEP, we've been able to gain respect; the other departments in our company have come to rely upon us even more, and we have become a more trusted department within the company, among our peers, because we can speak to their spend at greater depth."

More GEP SMART pros

"The PunchOut functionality is fantastic as it makes shopping very easy."

"It is a stable solution."

"The best features are the ease of use and the workflow management that allows me to understand every step in the approval process so that I can forecast the time through my request and its approval."

"SAP Ariba Procurement is worth the money as a tool because it connects all departments in one."

"Salesforce.com stands out as the leading ERP solution in the industry."

"SAP Ariba Procurement has impacted my organization in many important ways that have been prolonged benefits."

"Salesforce provides me with the ability to create reports based on various parameters."

"We made custom enhancements to suite our business process."

More SAP Ariba Procurement pros

Cons

"Some things that I do not see as of today are interactive chat or video interface. These are things that I will look for in future. I saw something like picture recognition, but something like a video or voice recognition is something that I'm looking for in the Automation Anywhere platform as an end user and even as a reseller."

"We looked at the Bot Store initially and didn't find much."

"Automation Anywhere should improve its OCR command, as it's my observation that I have faced data loss or improper data being extracted."

"When I used this tool in the bot, it did not work. I got this issue when using the document automation learning instance."

"The AI centricity is a bit behind compared to the way we see Microsoft and AWS doing it. This is the feedback that I have also given to them. They need to expand themselves to provide more services than just RPA. Only RPA may not be enough for us, and it would not be our preferred choice for an automation tool."

"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."

"If we are getting input from a CSV file, we have to add one more layer of automation that first saves the data to an Excel file."

"I need high value products to be created, so I need integration with other solutions. Machine learning and AI need to be integrated with Automation Anywhere. While IQ Bot is a good beginning, our company does not work with manual paperwork since we are already digital. We would like to see more integration with cognitive tools going forward."

More Automation Anywhere cons

"One of the areas where they could do better is by creating more standard templates when it comes to IT cost. IT cost has various components to it and if I want a vendor to be able to reply about cost related to IT, I would have to create that template. If I want them to tell me the hardware costs, the software costs, the professional services costs, the cloud or subscription costs, etc., I would have to build that template myself. Once I built it, I could save it and use it again and again. But sometimes building a template takes a lot of time."

"We had 50,000-plus contracts in Ntracts that had to be migrated to SMART. It was a big ask and it went horribly wrong, and we ended up having to do a second migration."

"While it captures all the fields and requirements, when any supplier updates or new supplier registration happens, then the supplier needs to update their bank details. Our IT team has made it so every half an hour the GEP SMART system will push the supplier to the Oracle Database. So, we have faced some problems, like bank details, etc. We addressed this issue with GEP. They are working on it to make bank details a mandatory field for any supplier and match our requirements. Their engineering team has taken up creating a customized process for us."

"One of the areas where they could do better is by creating more standard templates when it comes to IT cost."

"The loading of the contracts could be a little bit easier."

"The manuals, especially the ones for the suppliers, are currently available only in English. If these can also be translated into different languages, that would be excellent."

"Quite frankly, we're tired of informing GEP. They should be scrubbing from the left and right and from top to bottom to make sure that anything that they're releasing is fully tested."

"Their contracts module is kind of clunky and It took a while for them to correct some of the basic functionality, some of the "Contract Management 101" functions, but it seems to be coming around. It wasn't working the way we'd expected."

More GEP SMART cons

"Salesforce is expensive, with a subscription-based model."

"SAP could make it easier for people to become SAP Ariba consultants within the SAP ecosystem."

"The initial setup of SAP Ariba Procurement is not straightforward. We have been trying to set it up for two and a half years for the council I work with."

"During the initial setup process of SAP Ariba Procurement, there were a couple of challenges integrating the same system on our SAP platform."

"I would like the solution to be more automatic."

"Integration: SAP Ariba's integration has not matured yet, there is lot of scope for improvement in terms scenarios, error handling, data update intervals, etc."

"Gaining access to the sourcing project by the supplier needs improvement."

"They should make the solution more user-friendly."

More SAP Ariba Procurement cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing costs range from $50,000 to $200,000."

"It is one of the most affordable RPA solutions, and as for licensing, they offer a community edition that greatly helps anyone who aspires to learn about the product before buying the enterprise solution."

"I've seen the price vary by whether the client is going to scale and adopt a tool."

"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."

"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. This is from only doing development for about a year and a half."

"Automation Anywhere is somewhat expensive. The prices are slightly higher, but if you need something, you must pay for it."

"Annual licensing costs would be about $100,000."

"It's an ideal pricing model to customize the components based on everyone's needs."

More Automation Anywhere pricing and cost advice

"My advice is to think wisely when it comes to estimating the number of licenses that you will require. If you settle on a number too early and you need additional ones, then the extra licenses might be quite expensive."

"If our organization could use it as a full-fledged solution, then it would be valuable and give a return on investment. However, since we are not currently using it as a full-fledged solution, even facing some bugs and problems with the synchronization with some of the internal software, we are not able to use it in a full-fledged manner."

"The licensing cost depends on the customer."

"The license is expensive."

"It is an expensive solution."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Outsourcing Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Outsourcing Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

University

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	161
Midsize Enterprise	82
Large Enterprise	560

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	14

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	8

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...

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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...

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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.

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What needs improvement with SAP Ariba Procurement?

At the moment, I don't have any specific reasons for improvement areas in SAP Ariba Procurement. The main improvement...

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What is your primary use case for SAP Ariba Procurement?

I am a customer of this tool, and I use SAP Ariba Procurement for my regular procurement roles. This software is used...

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What advice do you have for others considering SAP Ariba Procurement?

In managing supplier relationships and mitigating risks, SAP Ariba Procurement has a very strong role to play. It giv...

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Comparisons

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Compared 11% of the time

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Microsoft Power Automate vs Automation Anywhere

Compared 5% of the time

AutomationEdge vs Automation Anywhere

Compared 3% of the time

Appian vs Automation Anywhere

Compared 2% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

JAGGAER Spend Director vs GEP SMART

Compared 7% of the time

PayShepherd vs GEP SMART

Compared 6% of the time

Zycus iSource vs GEP SMART

Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

PeopleSoft eProcurement vs SAP Ariba Procurement

Compared 6% of the time

Oracle E-Business Suite iProcurement vs SAP Ariba Procurement

Compared 6% of the time

Procurify vs SAP Ariba Procurement

Compared 5% of the time

ePlus Procure+ vs SAP Ariba Procurement

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Automation Anywhere

September 2026

Download Automation Anywhere product report

Buyer's Guide

GEP SMART

September 2026

Download GEP SMART product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP Ariba Procurement

August 2026

Download SAP Ariba Procurement product report

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)

SMART by GEP

Ariba Procurement

Interactive Demo

Automation Anywhere

Demo not available

GEP Worldwide

Demo not available

SAP

Overview

Automation Anywhere offers ease of use, robust system connectivity, and GenAI-driven document automation through a cloud-native platform, significantly enhancing productivity across multiple industries with advanced AI features.

Delivering a comprehensive suite of tools designed for easy integration and rapid deployment, Automation Anywhere drives efficiency by reducing costs and automating repetitive tasks. Its cloud-native platform supports broad industry adoption, including advanced AI features like process automation and Co-Pilot, streamlining complex workflows with minimal technical skills required. Users benefit from robust integration capabilities, which facilitate seamless interaction with multiple systems. However, there is room for improvement in areas such as user-friendliness for beginners, stability, flexible licensing, and enhanced OCR functionality. Organizations in sectors such as banking, finance, manufacturing, and healthcare gain from the improved operational efficiency and ROI Automation Anywhere offers.

What are the important features of Automation Anywhere?

Ease of Use: Simplifies automation tasks with a user-centric interface.
Robust Connectivity: Provides seamless integration with multiple systems.
GenAI-Driven Document Automation: Leverages AI to automate document management.
Process Automation & Co-Pilot: Enhances workflow automation with advanced AI.
Cloud-Native Platform: Enables rapid deployment and integration.

What benefits should be evaluated in reviews?

Time Savings: Automation drastically reduces manual processing time.
Cost Efficiency: Decreases overall operational costs by automating tasks.
Productivity Enhancement: Streamlines workflows with AI-driven tools.
Improved Integration: Enhances ability to work with multiple systems.
Scalability: Supports growth with a flexible cloud-native architecture.

In the insurance industry, Automation Anywhere is utilized for automating processes such as enrollment management and compliance checks. Its applications extend to supply chain management, financial transactions, and business performance monitoring across sectors like banking, finance, manufacturing, and healthcare, helping organizations to automate routine tasks, improve efficiency, and reduce costs.

Automation Anywhere

GEP SMART is a comprehensive procurement platform offering a centralized contract repository, intuitive spend analytics, and AI-driven opportunity identification.

GEP SMART provides a user-friendly interface that enhances procurement transparency and efficiency. It accommodates electronic signatures, supports streamlined project management, and enables effective regulatory compliance. Its flexibility and consistent advancements improve user experience, accessible to those without extensive IT expertise. While challenges exist in supplier management scope and search functions, improvements are needed in contract handling and data integrity.

What are GEP SMART's key features?

Centralized Contract Repository: Easy access and management of contracts.
Intuitive Spend Analytics: In-depth analysis for better decision-making.
User-friendly Interface: Simplified navigation with efficient reporting.
Electronic Signatures: Streamlined procurement processes with digital verification.
AI Tools: Assists in opportunity identification and data consolidation.

What benefits do users gain from GEP SMART?

Enhanced Transparency: Improved visibility across procurement activities.
Streamlined Procurement: Efficient handling of RFQs, RFPs, and RFIs.
Improved Compliance: Supports adherence to regulatory requirements.
Cost Efficiency: Reduces unnecessary data entry and streamlines system configurations.
Flexibility: Consistent updates and enhancements improve the overall experience.

Organizations across industries implement GEP SMART for procurement activities such as sourcing, contract management, and spend analysis. They utilize its SaaS capabilities to facilitate sourcing events and manage contract lifecycles without needing full P2P integration. The platform is used to report on spend, diversity, and savings, ensuring efficient procurement processes.

GEP Worldwide

SAP Ariba Procurement streamlines procurement by integrating supplier management and contracts into a unified platform, enhancing productivity while allowing for seamless configuration and spend analysis.

SAP Ariba Procurement centralizes procurement activities, providing dynamic pricing tools such as reverse auctions and PunchOut functionality for simplified shopping. Its spend analytics improve decision-making and supplier visibility. The platform is configurable without third-party reliance, ensuring cost-effectiveness and quick ROI through online auctions and RFPs. Workflow management offers insights into approval processes, with guided buying and data analytics improving cost-saving and supplier performance. However, integration with non-SAP systems and user-friendliness can be improved, with additional focus needed on setup complexity and enhanced vendor management capabilities.

What are the most important features?

Supplier Management: Seamless integration and control over supplier interactions.
Contract Integration: Centralized management of contractual information.
Dynamic Pricing Tools: Includes reverse auctions for cost efficiency.
PunchOut Functionality: Simplifies the purchasing process.
Spend Analytics: Enhances decision-making and supplier transparency.

What benefits should users look for?

Cost Savings: Achieved through competitive bidding and auctions.
Quick ROI: Faster returns with streamlined procurement processes.
Improved Supplier Performance: Guided buying enhances supplier assessments.
Configuration Ease: No reliance on third-party solutions simplifies adoption.

Industries such as digital strategy and financial services implement SAP Ariba Procurement for sourcing, contracting, and vendor management. Its deployment in SAP Cloud supports the RFx process from analysis to supplier evaluation, facilitating contractual data management and indirect procurement tasks.

SAP

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics

Exxon Chevron Macys

Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT)

Buyer's Guide

GEP SMART vs. SAP Ariba Procurement

September 2026

Free Report: GEP SMART vs. SAP Ariba Procurement

Find out what your peers are saying about GEP SMART vs. SAP Ariba Procurement and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.

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