Fortra's Automate Reviews

With Automate, as an example, if I have a supplier that provides me with items in bulk, the bot of the system will take the bulk order and divide it into individual units for sales. If the company that supplies me also charges for transportation, the system will divide those costs among each item so that I am invoicing and charging correctly when I am selling items on an individual basis. It does this based on the rules I set up on my end. It basically takes the work of many people and automates it.

The solution integrates well with Microsoft Azure. We get AI, artificial intelligence, resources from the solution and it's working very well for us. 

The pricing is excellent. I would give them perfect marks in that regard.

The deployment is not too complicated. It's pretty easy.

The forms are very good.

The technical support could be better. We suffer from language barriers, as we are in Argentina.

The OCR (optical character recognition) capacity could be improved a bit.

I have about two years of experience with the solution. It hasn't been too long.

The stability is very good. As far as I know, we haven't had any issues so far. It's very reliable. The performance is good.

The scalability has been very good so far.

We have been using it in a Home Depot-like organization in Costa Rica. It's deployed in over 42 stores there, across different servers, and it is working very well for them. They love the solution and plan to use it more and to increase usage as well.

Typically, we work with medium and large-sized organizations.

Technical support is a bit of an issue.

We have our technical support team from Argentina. We can't even speak the same language. That aspect is quite bad. 

However, we have been trained by them, and we had some RPA experts. We were given very good training and they provided it to us.

I found the initial setup to be quite straightforward. It's nice and easy. It's not an overly complex process.

The deployment is pretty fast. We got it done in under one day.

The pricing of the product is reasonable. We don't find it overly expensive. It's very competitive.

We've compared the solution to, for example, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath. And we have done a lot better with HelpSystem. It offers much better pricing, for example, and offer very good forms.

We are a representative of the company. We are integrators and HelpSystems partners and we sell the platform to companies in Costa Rica, Central America, and Puerto Rico. We do the integration for clients. Therefore, we do the mapping, and we do the bots also.

We are using the latest version of the solution. However, I'm not sure what the exact number is.

I would advise others to have an expert that understands the solution assist in the onboarding process. The platform can be very good. It is really good. However, if you don't have experts to train your people and also to implement the solution properly within your company, it's likely the project will fail.

Overall, I would rate the product at a nine out of ten.

We didn't actually deploy the solution. It was basically testing the product. It was just some simple testing we were doing. We've tried downloading reports from the new RP system, using RPA, and doing some manual uploading from some PDF files into our ERP. It was just used for some super simple operations to try it out and get a feel for it.

I actually quite liked the no-coding functionality. You don't have to be too technical or be a coding expert to utilize the solution. 

The platform was fairly user-friendly in terms of designing the bot. I was able to make it do what I needed it to do.

It's difficult for me to answer as I'm not really an expert on HelpSystems and I don't know it well enough to really give great feedback just yet. I'm not really that comfortable critiquing the platform. I'm sure there are some of those issues there. 

It's possible that they could use a stronger community for seeking guidance and help. For example, I know with Automation Anywhere or UiPath, there are strong community areas where I can ask questions and search for information. I don't know if that exists for HelpSystems. I find, for example, it's helpful, if I'm using UiPath, to go onto some of the community pages and I have found answers to my questions fairly easily. I don't know if that's something that exists with HelpSystems. 

The user interface could use a bit of an improvement.

I've only been working with the solution for a short period. I've only used it a little bit for about a month or two, however, I don't have great experience in RPA's.

The solution was quite stable. We didn't have to deal with bugs or glitches. It didn't crash or freeze. We found it to be reliable for the most part.

We were only using the free version and not the paid option. However, that said, I did find it to be fairly flexible. It could scale if you needed it to.

We haven't really used the solution for too long at this point. There aren't too many people using it in our organization.

I haven't really had much experience with technical support, as I haven't used the product that much or for that long. I wouldn't be able to critique their level of service.

I tried to download and use Micro Focus. However, it was too complicated for my skill level and I gave up before I really got too far into the process.

The installation of HelpSystems was not difficult at all. I'm not technically strong, however, I could do it myself without too many problems. It's pretty straightforward, even for non-technical users.

I don't remember how long the deployment took, to be honest. It was one of the easier installations I've dealt with on the platform. When I've looked at other platforms, I've found that some of their rivals were very difficult to install for a person with my lack of experience. For example, Micro Focus was one I tried to download and install and I gave up due to the fact that it was just too complicated. I can compare this experience to Micro Focus where I just found I wasted a lot of time and got very poor feedback. I found HelpSystems refreshingly easy to install. 

I handled the implementation myself.

I was not using a paid version. I was using a free version. We didn't have to pay for any licensing.

We're evaluating RPA at the moment, and therefore we haven't made any payments yet, or we haven't made any purchases to commence operations. We are looking at that, however, we haven't started anything officially. I have a good idea of the pricing of the HelpSystems and UiPath solutions. We're comfortable with what it would cost if we decide to continue with either option.

I've been looking at UiPath for a couple of months, however, I don't have a great amount of knowledge in the topic and I'm not an expert in the area.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using.

So far, from my limited experience, I would recommend the solution to other organizations.

However, based on my limited understanding of the product, as I haven't used it for too long just yet, I would rate it at a seven out of ten.

We are a service provider and we use this solution to automate processes for our clients. Our customers are in a variety of businesses including banking, insurance, energy, and healthcare. There are lots of use cases, especially in the insurance and banking industries, but we are expanding into other industries as well.

An example use case for our clients is the automation of invoice payments.

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.

Compared to other products, the pricing model for this solution is much more convenient, flexible, and adaptable to the Portuguese reality.

Key automation features: email, FTP/SFTP, OCR, ODBC, terminal emulation. 

Main benefits: Full Client-Server Architecture, Multi-Machine Execution, Centralized Management Interface, Graphical Workflows, Intuitive Task Development & Debugging.

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. Specifically, the Automate Enterprise interface needs improvement. 

When you are promoting packages within the environment, it is easy to extract an import, but it would be better to have it all in the same console. As it is now, you have to extract the package separately. The environments should be able to communicate; you push the button, click on deploy, and it goes straight to the production environment.

Increasing the integration with other databases would be an improvement.

Sometimes my team reports situations where there are some unexpected errors from the tool. For example, if a Java error is reported then it doesn't mean anything at all to the end-user. This is an area that may also have room for improvement, although, at perhaps two or three times in a project, this does not happen often.

In my opinion, so far, the scalability seems to be good. However, I would not say that the scenarios I have seen are very difficult.

We have seven or eight clients using this solution, and only one or two have more than fifteen or twenty processes that have been automated. Having this number of processes with three to four robots, running twenty-four hours per day, is not a difficult test.

The roles of the people using this product vary depending on the client. In the Portuguese market, it is common to have one department that manages the robots for the entire organization. Normally, this is not the IT department. I know of only a few cases where robots are spread across different departments. Usually, a dedicated team or four to five people will manage, evaluate reports, corrects errors, and implement new requests.

So far, I am really happy with the technical support. The delay is between one and two days.

In all of our requests so far, we have had a response in one day's time. Sometimes the response is not final, but then they put us in contact with somebody who has the right knowledge, so it is good.

At my previous company, I worked with UiPath and Blue Prism. My experience with UiPath is between two and three years, and I worked with Blue Prism for a long time as well.

My reason for switching was one of personal opinion. In my previous company, we always used one of the big four. In my current company, I wanted to approach things a bit differently. I believe that there are many players in the market that also have good tools, and are more competitive. All of these tools are growing together, and we ultimately settled on this solution.

The initial setup is quite easy for us, although this is in part because we have been working with the partner for a long time. We have lots of direct connections for support, so if we have a problem that is a show-stopper, or something urgent, then we have a direct channel that bypasses the usual help desk.

We handle the integration of the solution from beginning to end.

The pricing model is the biggest advantage of this solution, and it is opening a lot of doors.

This solution is quite easy to install and to manage for most processes between environments. Everything related to usability and automation is really quite close to the leading candidates, and using this product has been a good experience.

My advice to others who are implementing this solution is to start small. This is something that we always tell our clients. Rather than look at the larger responsibilities, start small to test and to gain confidence from several areas within the organization. Once you have three, four, five, or even ten processes automated, start looking at everything that is related to governance. At the same time, do not be afraid to start, even if you don't have everything planned from the beginning.

I would rate this solution an nine out of ten.

It's difficult to say which feature is the most valuable as there are so many, each a must-have for any automation system. A great feature that you seldom see in these kind of systems is the ability to use a database as trigger to launch a task. This is something I asked for a few years ago and that was added.

We use AutoMate to interface different systems with each other, as an EDI tool, as an FTP tool, to automate AD reporting.

I would like to see some better web automation, a wizard like the one in the product WinAutomation would be very nice. Showing the global variables of a workflow in a task when you select it, which variable some result should be stored in. Now, you can't see the global variables but have to type them, which works but isn't ideal.

About eight years I think.

In some older versions there were some instabilities, but the latest version (v.11) seems very stable.

No, you can scale very easily by adding agent licenses and deploying these agents on different computers. You can see these agents as small runtimes of the actual BPA server. This way you can deploy the workflows across the agents and spread the load between the different computers. You can also add development licenses to allow more concurrent developers connecting to the AutoMate console.