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GEP SMART vs SAP Ariba Procurement comparison

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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
641
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 (1st), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (1st), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
GEP SMART
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Procurement Software (3rd), Contract Management Software (8th)
SAP Ariba Procurement
Average Rating
7.6
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Procurement Software (1st)
 

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.
CJ
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.
Argy Soudi - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is really helpful that this solution is deployed in the cloud."
"Automate Anywhere can just mimic what a human does."
"The ability to customize added automation to a lot of situations where human judgment and interpretation are not required."
"The product has improved our organization cost-wise and bank savings in transactions. Everything has been changed for the better."
"Features such as MetaBot and IQ Bot are very advanced and capable as compared to reading PDFs using OCR."
"I realized that Automation Anywhere is much easier, more reliable, and has value for money with good and vast customer support."
"Manual efforts have been reduced and the accuracy has increased. In the processes I have done, the accuracy has reached 100 percent, and manual load and time has been reduced."
"Automation Anywhere has presented us with a platform that is easily accessible from a web interface, enabling us to write code for RPA scripts without having to download a dedicated software application."
"The sourcing module is a place we can always go to find all the information we submitted to a vendor and what they submitted back to us, and it is really meaningful and effective in getting that information out to the vendors."
"It's user-friendly, in terms of the design of the tool."
"I have seen that the sourcing process in GEP SMART is easier than in Oracle, SAP, etc."
"The AI tool definitely has learned from the information we've given it but also from some of the corrections that we've made. It may have auto-applied a classification and then we have gone in and corrected it, given it some feedback. With that, more and more, we are not having to touch the information once it gets processed. It's classifying it from the get-go in the correct category."
"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."
"It's a huge efficiency tool and it has really accelerated our ability to drive the procurement business case in terms of cost savings."
"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."
"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."
"SAP Ariba's Sourcing cloud based solution has the greatest quantifiable ROI of its solutions, which typically occurs within the first six months after acquisition for most companies."
"SAP Ariba Procurement is worth the money as a tool because it connects all departments in one."
"The PunchOut functionality is fantastic as it makes shopping very easy."
"I like the guided buying features."
"Salesforce provides me with the ability to create reports based on various parameters."
"Salesforce.com stands out as the leading ERP solution in the industry."
"It is one of the best tools in the market."
"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."
 

Cons

"There is definitely some room for improvement there. It is sort of a hit and miss with their support engineers, you have some really good ones and some that aren't."
"Debugging can be particularly tricky; identifying the exact reasons for bot failures can be time-consuming."
"I am looking forward to seeing writing on Linux in the web and WorkBatch in the next release."
"We could use more accuracy with IQ Bot."
"However, the AI Sense Recorder is too slow, so they can enhance its features for easier user experience."
"We have a challenge in our front office automation where capturing details from a table within a table does not happen in the existing AA Enterprise client version 11.3.4. The AA team tries various methods like using an Excel spreadsheet to capture the tables."
"Attended automation sometimes might go into exceptions, thus we need to monitor it in-between, then check whether it is working properly. This way, we ensure the bot is working properly."
"It would be better to make it more user-friendly so that individuals with no experience can pick it up pretty quickly."
"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."
"I'd like to see drag-and-drop reporting. They have the old model for reports where you have to click the "run" button. The thing runs and then you have to export it to PowerPoint."
"One of the areas where they could do better is by creating more standard templates when it comes to IT cost."
"Very recently, they implemented a customer success team to manage our expectations and communicate them to their technical team. That function is relatively new and some work needs to be done to build that connection so that it's a little more seamless."
"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."
"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."
"There are no mechanisms for them to check up on how they refresh their data. So oftentimes, when we go into the tool and we don't see something, we alert them and they say, "Oh, the data hasn't been refreshed, so we'll go ahead and refresh it," and then what we're looking for pops up. We should not have to be the ones to tell them they need to refresh. There should be a mechanism in place for that."
"The loading of the contracts could be a little bit easier."
"On the sourcing, it could be easier to import the documents you want, so if you want items to be bid on, it could be a bit easier to import that from a spreadsheet."
"Gaining access to the sourcing project by the supplier needs improvement."
"The SAP portion of the procurement is not always obvious or user friendly."
"They should make the solution more user-friendly."
"Ariba Procurement tends to integrate best with other SAP products and is harder to work with if you have non-SAP products in your architecture."
"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."
"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."
"SAP could make it easier for people to become SAP Ariba consultants within the SAP ecosystem."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The certifications are free of cost."
"The price is very reasonable."
"With the rebate processing automation that we did, it has provided us a savings of around an hour or two a person on a daily basis, which is quite a lot of savings."
"We purchase on a bot basis. Our costs are approximately $5,000."
"I do not know the price, but I am told that it is cheaper than UiPath."
"Because it reduced the time duration of our processes, our costs went down."
"We only deal in annual licenses. There are no pay-as-you-go licenses."
"Approximately, for a developer, it is around $750 for a license a year. For Bot Runners, it is about $550."
"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."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The license is expensive."
"The licensing cost depends on the customer."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business154
Midsize Enterprise82
Large Enterprise536
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
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.
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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...
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...
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...
 

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

Demo not available
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Exxon Chevron Macys
Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT)
Find out what your peers are saying about GEP SMART vs. SAP Ariba Procurement and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,417 professionals have used our research since 2012.