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NICE Robotic Automation vs VisualCron comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 4, 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

Automate
Sponsored
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NICE Robotic Automation
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
32nd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VisualCron
Ranking in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
19th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Managed File Transfer (MFT) (15th), Workload Automation (16th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) category, the mindshare of Automate is 1.6%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NICE Robotic Automation is 0.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VisualCron is 0.9%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
 

Featured Reviews

Anabel Marco - PeerSpot reviewer
Automates processes efficiently with cost-effective scaling and robust customer support
Web scraping is quite good since it offers a lot of possibilities. Another important feature for me is its compatibility with MBI, the Power that is ISEQUADO Centers. I appreciate the ability to scale and increase the number of bots or studios without additional expense. Automate's non-reliance on additional orchestrators makes it quite cost-effective.
Sigal Svilim - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides great automation features that save us time and money
We use this solution for our customer representatives and also for robotic automation. We primarily use this NICE product for making automation processes. I'm the Chief Information Officer and we are customers of NICE.  Robotic Automation has saved us time and money by moving our processes away…
Sourav-Dutta - PeerSpot reviewer
It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process
We use VisualCron for all our automation needs, like connecting to FileZilla, calling APIs, generating PGP keys, creating encryption files with the PGP key login to Azure, etc. It can automatically log in to SQL Server and execute SQL script jobs in bulk. We had 2,000-3,000 users at my previous…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The best feature of Automate is its ease of use, which is a major selling point."
"This product is quite easy to install, learn, and use, with our new employees being able to start using it in projects for clients after only two weeks of internal training."
"I actually quite liked the no-coding functionality."
"The ability to connect to websites and pull data is the solution's most valuable feature."
"I like the interface; it makes managing automation easy. We can set different schedules and templates for each task."
"It's very easy to use. That's a big selling point for it. It has got a drag-and-drop interface, so you can quickly deploy bots."
"Compared to other vendors, it's the scheduling tool because a lot of vendors want to charge you extra for their enterprise-level license to have a scheduling tool built in to give you the ability to set up regular schedules to run and do certain data checks."
"We use it for specific cases, mainly secure file transfers, which are vital for us. And it works for us."
"It is easy to deploy. To do the automation in NICE, you really need to use your programming expertise. There are no inbuilt features in it, and you have to create all the required features, which can be very interesting for a programmer."
"Through interfaces called Callout (created with HTML code) it is possible to create a strong interactivity with the user. These interfaces can be extremely dynamic in relation to the behavior of a local or remote robotic flow."
"What we've done with the RTI client is that we've brought it into a bit more of a 21st-century feel. Our agents have the ability to move around when they want, click into stuff. They use it according to how their conversations go with the customer."
"The deployment of NICE Robotic Automation is easy."
"NICE is one of the only vendors that does attended and unattended out-of-the-box. Using the unattended processes we've been able to build a "feature library." We break each process down into workable chunks that we can save into a big library. The next time we come to automate a task, we already have chunks of that automation built."
"It is a kind of desktop automation. Its licensing model is a little bit different. It tends to be individual automation specific to a role. It excels at that."
"Provides good automation features."
"What I like about VisualCron is that like its name, it's a very visual tool. In my previous company, there were a lot of scripts for all kinds of services, and through VisualCron, you get to group all flows and get a nice visual overview. VisualCron also has an alerting feature, so you receive alerts from it. VisualCron makes everything clearer and easier to maintain. Every other solution that I was looking for almost always needed a programmer, but with VisualCron, you can do what you need to do without programming skills, so this is another valuable feature of the tool."
"'ve only had a few cases where I've had to request support in the past 12 years of use, but the support response time and resolution were was extremely quick."
"The most valuable feature of VisualCron is its ability to schedule interactive jobs so that you can have interdependencies within the job and interdependencies of a job on another job, and so on."
"The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%."
"I love VisualCron because we previously spent a lot of time writing Power switches to connect to SQL Server. VisualCron makes it easier to execute services or connect to FileZilla by only adding the credentials to the master credentials stored in the solution."
"It has improved our organization with more automation within the business departments and less administration and development in the IT department. Usually, as the IT department, we are the bottleneck for many requirements within the business. With this tool, the business departments are able to perform many task themselves."
"The ability to clone jobs to shorten the time it takes to implement a process has been invaluable, but its flexibility also gives us the ability to create a job that can handle a multifaceted process with a complex workflow."
"What I found most beneficial from VisualCron is that you can directly connect it with different databases, user accounts, and credentials. You can run queries from one machine to another using the credentials, unlike PowerShell, that's run by the machine itself. With VisualCron, you can directly ask other machines and run requests through user credentials. Suppose you have an AWS or Azure environment. In that case, you can maintain the connection between on-premises and cloud-based machines, which is the type of setup in the organization I'm working for. You can directly call some of the services via VisualCron on your local on-premises machine, and I found that an excellent feature of the tool."
 

Cons

"It's possible that they could use a stronger community for seeking guidance and help."
"I would like the updates to be easier to deploy. Integration with Amazon S3 is somewhat lacking."
"I find that most important features are strong, however, there is a lack of good development for artificial intelligence, such as machine learning."
"Error messages should be better. For error status, there should be better documentation because a lot of times, error messages that you get are quite vague. For example, you get a message saying that the workflow has run into an unknown status, which is vague. It just tells you that it failed, but you don't know how or why it failed. It makes debugging difficult."
"I would prefer not having to log in to update a ticket; being able to respond via email would be beneficial."
"There is a lack of good development for artificial intelligence, such as machine learning."
"I currently have three bugs open with them that I don't know if they are addressed in the new release."
"There is room for improvement regarding cloud functionality; there are a few missing features, and the logging could be better, especially air logging. We can go into logging events and create our own task, but it would be nice if this were more detailed."
"There is a need for NICE robotics to be more user-friendly."
"[During the upgrade] any issues, where it couldn't remotely connect to upgrade, I needed the floor plan so I could go to that PC and have a look at it. Often it was either that the PC was switched off or had a bug or some other application needed to be reset."
"There are a few areas for improvement in the installation phase"
"Its connectivity with other applications should be improved. In the version that I was using, it would just stop interacting with the other application. Its graphical interface should also be improved. It should have a user-friendly interface. Sometimes, people find it very difficult to understand. One of the obstacles that I faced while programming was that if I needed any kind of help, there wasn't much content on the internet. It can be very difficult to find a solution for a particular issue."
"The one thing I'd like to see, and NICE is already heavily investing in it, is improvement in the user interface itself. They call it the Designer and it's what the developers use. It is a bit clunky; that is the polite way to put it. I'd like to see it be a bit more user-friendly, a bit more intuitive, and to move to something a bit more web-based..."
"The solution is not as intuitive as it could be and integrating took a lot of time."
"We haven't found it to be as powerful as some of the other platforms. From a true RPA perspective, it is pretty far behind some of the other solutions. It has emerged as a more desktop automation kind of tool, but it lacks a lot of enterprise features. It is not really a true RPA because of its licensing, which is kind of user-initiated. It would be nice it can be deployed at a more enterprise licensing model versus a user-based model. It didn't have autonomous automation so far, and they have just released this feature. They have kind of hodgepodged a bunch of products together to get there, but it is not as seamless as other solutions."
"The only problem I face when I use the tool is that it doesn't contain much documentation or it doesn't have many video tutorials on its features."
"I want to improve the UI in VisualCron, as it's not as user-friendly, particularly when setting up the task scheduler. If you're familiar with the tool, then no problem, but if not, you'll have a problem typing text because sometimes, the cursor points to other places, so there's an issue with text box alignment in VisualCron. That was painful for me when I was just a VisualCron novice, but when you become used to it, there won't be a problem."
"VisualCron is software, and you will experience performance degradation when you scale up. VisualCron takes too much memory or CPU power. We have to increase the hardware resources of a specific server or system."
"VisualCron seems to operate like an efficient machine when it comes to improvements and enhancements and new features. I always appreciate the quick response I get when bringing up an issue or coming up with suggestions. I've mentioned before that it would be great to see a move away from SQLCE and XML configuration files."
"The documentation is a bit weak."
"There are some conditions in the mail trigger, but you can only use them as an "AND" condition, not as an "OR" condition. This is an improvement that could be useful. For example, some people put "invoice" in the subject and others put "invoice" in the body. If I want to make a trigger for everybody whose sending invoices, I have to make two jobs for this now."
"VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve."
"The error timeout and info could be better. When making web request calls, it will time out sometimes and we won't get any useful info out of the error response."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I like the way this solution is priced because you can buy a license, or you can buy the software outright."
"Once you buy the software, you just pay for the support for backend help."
"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."
"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 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."
"It has gone up in price. The price of Fortra's Automate has increased since we first started using it. It does a lot but also costs a lot. It was a lot more affordable before Fortra owned the software."
"It comes with a package that costs approximately $20,000 USD per year."
"From a distributor's perspective, one of the biggest selling points of Automate is its price point."
"As per my understanding, UiPath has a much lesser cost than NICE, but I am not sure."
"ROI is 95 percent."
"The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
"VisualCron is correctly priced because it wasn't very cheap, and it wasn't overly expensive, so the price for it was set correctly. When my previous company bought VisualCron, it was €800 per server per year. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing for VisualCron a five because it was just right. The tool was affordable, and it has one of the most competitive pricing in the market."
"The price is a bit high."
"ROI is one month."
"We are fine with a rather cheap setup. Licensing with VisualCron is fair. You have a simple one-year licence in different sizes. There isn't a licensing jungle with hundreds of options and opt-ins."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
24%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Real Estate/Law Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
27%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Insurance Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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?
I am a consultant and I am making a lot of processes in human resources, payroll, certifications, trainings, web scra...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortra Automate?
The pricing is quite good compared to its competitors. Competitors are often more expensive than Automate. I would ra...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about VisualCron?
The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%.
What needs improvement with VisualCron?
The documentation is a bit weak. The tool must provide a better set of documentation.
 

Also Known As

HelpSystems Automate, Automate
No data available
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
HelpLine, Telefonica Spain, Banca Popolare Di Sondrio
7 Eleven, ABB Sécheron SA, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Amazon Europe Core, Apple, Assa Abloy, Aston Martin, Banco Santander, BMW (Australia)
Find out what your peers are saying about NICE Robotic Automation vs. VisualCron and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.