UiPath Platform Reviews

I implement UiPath for other companies. My specialization is software integration and digital transformation. I also manage UiPath for some organizations. We're a digital marketing agency that helps companies undergo a digital transformation for data and analytics. We help them automate marketing and data analysis for researchers and the organization itself.

The primary use case is to help the marketing department collect data about user experience and interaction. We also automate repetitive IT work and connect it with marketing. In other words, we extract data from the IT operations to use for marketing purposes. UiPath is also used in every department to reduce manual work.

UiPath has workflows and templates for every use case. We use nearly all of them in all departments with pre-configured templates and workflows, but we mainly use UiPath for IT operations, marketing, and finance. And the three are our primary use for it. We build the procedures and generate automation. We use public, private, and hybrid clouds, but we mainly use public and hybrid clouds for our services. It depends on the client, but sometimes it's private. 

We previously did everything by hand because we had no automation knowledge or experience before we started using this product. Before we started implementing it for others, we began using it ourselves, and we saw a 200 percent increase in performance in the first three months after launching UiPath automation. 

At that point, we realized we could do the work of twice as many employees without hiring more. With UiPath, we can build, monitor, manage, and do many things that used to take so much time and account for a lot of our operating costs. The most important benefit was a reduction in the risk of human error. In addition to saving time and money, we can grow much bigger daily. We can automate more as we gain more experience, collect more data, and amass more insight. The benefits are compounding as time goes on. 

We only had two or three clients when we started working as integrators and service providers two years ago, but we've grown significantly since then. It became harder to handle as we started getting more clients and revenue. That's why having an easy-to-use solution that allows end-to-end automation without much effort is crucial.

You need end-to-end control and easy management when doing this work for multiple clients or providing support to other teams. It's vital to have end-to-end capabilities without complications, making things harder for us. UiPath is helping the company grow faster and making our operations more efficient. We can automate the specifics of finding out how much everyone is working, enabling us to recognize and reward hard-working employees. Without automating the process of understanding every employee's impact, we could never find this out. For example, some employees may work longer than others, but they might be less effective. It's challenging to discover this without tools driven by AI and machine learning. 

Overall, it has streamlined how we generate, use, and store business data, saving thousands of hours of manual work. This Automation Cloud app feature doubles the benefits of UiPath by enabling us to generate apps from the data we collect and the automations we create. Ultimately, this translates into considerable savings in time and money.

Automation Cloud has helped tremendously by turning complicated, complex coding work into drag-and-drop templates, so we can build automated processes in minutes. It has enabled us to realize a lot of value from our employees who lack coding knowledge. They can now participate and create apps for us and our clients. 

Most other tools lack enough documentation, or the onboarding experience has a steep learning curve. It's hard for junior employees who lack coding or data experience. The fact that UiPath is accessible is crucial for our employees and those who work for the organizations we help monitor and manage. UiPath is an industry leader in enabling everyone to learn, and they provide rich visual courses that take you from A to Z. I usually don't have to hold a junior developer's hand and answer lots of questions. I only need to send the links.

The material UiPath provides is enough for them to get started. With other tools, we always have to turn to the community and YouTube videos or Google how to do something. They also don't get the complete picture of the use cases or what to do. After using UiPath Academy courses, they have a comprehensive understanding of everything and can easily find whatever they are searching for in the documentation or the academic studies. So it's a very mastering point for them to provide these courses and enable it for everyone.

We like how UiPath is designed for low-code or no-code users. It's less complicated, enabling everyone to use it with only a basic knowledge of automation or data. Generally, I also like UiPath's ability to mine processes and analyze user interactions to generate analytics.

Through task mining, UiPath can generate AI-powered analysis, and it has a Document Understanding feature that enables it to extract information from submitted images and data. We also appreciate the added value UiPath provides for customer service and user experience. It can automate ticket handling and responses. This has saved thousands of hours. Document Understanding has made a massive difference by analyzing and extracting everything from user submissions, then putting it into tickets and generating customer satisfaction scores. 

A task capture feature enables you to capture the workflow from a process and record it. This feature isn't as specific as I would like. It should be able to capture every detail. The same goes for process mining when it comes to system loads. It's already the best, but I think it could be better. 

I need all details of a log file from every software and ERP to discover the pain points and bottlenecks. It usually understands where the most automation value is delivered but could generate more valuable information. Sometimes it's the same data from a different ERP, but it doesn't generate the same insight from it 100 percent. There's a slight difference, whereas they are supposed to be practically the same.

I also think the UiPath community needs more attention in terms of how they engage with the community and what they recommend. I find that they hardly engage with the community compared to others. To be clear, I think they are doing well, but they could do better at engaging with the community and encouraging community members to engage with one another. I feel like it's not the most active community with the most active management. At the same time, there's also much information in the community, and they're always sharing information with us. Still, I think UiPath could achieve a better experience by putting a little more effort into the forums. 

I have been using UiPath for about four years.

I rate UiPath support a seven out of ten. 

Neutral

I have previously tried IBM Process Mining, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism. I think the ease of building automations is the main thing that differentiates UiPath from the rest. There's a single-user interface that gives you the ability to create automated processes without much advanced data or logical knowledge. We can find pre-configured commissions for specific use cases for our clients, but we also build custom services for specific users. 

Compared to other automation tools, it's much easier to build and manage workflows and find an opportunity for more automation within the interactions. And I barely plan for automation by myself. UiPath's end-to-end automation also separates it from its competitors, which tend to have separate tools for each operation. Mining is separated from RPA, but UiPath provides an all-in-one end-to-end automation tool. 

I rate UiPath an eight out of ten.

We're doing a lot of accounts payable automation and accounts payable invoice automation. 

We have about 70 bots in production right now. They are unattended.

It's helped us to dramatically cut down on the number of people having to key in invoices manually. We've been able to repurpose some of the staff into other jobs and have the bot do all this work for them. It's really changed things. Our staff likes it since they're doing more meaningful work and not keying in invoices all day. I'd say it greatly impacts our staff, and our dealers love it as they're getting paid quickly. The invoices are getting paid much more quickly now.

We know that it's increased the speed of payment dramatically. I'm not sure of the numbers. However, we've processed about 40,000 invoices to date using the bot. We started in January and do about 5,000 invoices a month. That's saved a lot of hours. Our guys were doing this all day, every day, and we've cut back on it dramatically. It's a considerable amount of hours saved.

We enjoy using the AI functionality. The document understanding is the tool we're using to do the invoice automation, so it has an AI piece and machine learning built in. 

The invoices are probably our most complex as there's a lot of information that has to be scraped off the invoice that DU is doing. We started with the hard ones, and we're easing into the easy ones now. We worked backward a bit. We were a little concerned going in that this was a little bit complex; however, in a very short time, we got a lot done. Looking back, it was probably a good decision to start there. With AI, we're looking to do more. We'd like to bring on more invoices and continue to use this throughout the whole organization and in Latin America as well.

Just seeing all this manual work being automated, and seeing how the staff is thrilled that they're actually doing interesting jobs now has been great. They come in the morning, and they're actually excited about coming to work, not keying in invoices all day. That's the biggest benefit I've seen. The staff is really excited about the product, even though, in the beginning, they were a little nervous about bots doing their work.

The goal of the project was to get 75% of our invoices done with no human intervention. We actually hit 90%.

We use the UiPath community quite a bit. We find it very helpful. Most times, when we're having an issue, other people are having the same issue. We have gotten very good insights and have found other use cases. It has helped us a few times to fix an issue. It's a great feature.

The UiPath Academy courses are great. When we rolled out, we did a project with UiPath. We put a lot of their courses in our Academy so that our users could take them through us, and have actually had a very good response. A lot of people in the company took it, and the completion rate was very high.

The Academy teaches people what RPA is, and how to use it. It could be as basic or as complicated as you want. They have a wide range of classes. The fact that people can get in there and start learning for free is also very good.

Maybe we need to rely on our rep a little bit more to find out what's out there and start asking a lot more questions. We don't understand its full potential. However, that's a little bit of us not asking the right questions. What they've been terrific about is coming out with fixes. Every time we have an issue with something, they're quick to fix it immediately or in the next release. 

They're spending a lot of time and effort on unstructured documents or core quality documents. Sometimes things don't pick up right away, however, it is my understanding that they're working on it, and it has improved tremendously. Even since the beginning of the year, we've already seen some improvements.

I've been using the solution for two years. 

The stability is great. What they've done is pretty impressive. They're going to be here for the long haul.

We found it to be very, very stable. We have not had any issues since we went live, so that's also been very impressive for us that it's extremely stable.

From our perspective, there's really no issue with scaling. We're looking to expand, even by putting more invoices on it, and we don't anticipate it being an issue. We're not concerned in the least about how much it can handle. We're looking forward to expanding it a little bit.

Technical support has been terrific. 

They're very quick to react to us, and even if they aren't, our rep is always very quick to help us get a response. 

Positive

This was the first RPA solution I've used. 

I work in finance and accounting, and we were chosen to be the proof of concept to use UiPath. We were in very early, so we did a very early proof of concept, built five bots, and presented them to senior management. We gave feedback that we thought it was something that could be beneficial for the company.

The initial setup was very straightforward for us. UiPath worked with us. They were great in helping us out; the reps really helped us through the whole proof of concept. It was very new to us, and we had their full support - even when we were presenting to senior management.

We're looking at ROI on one project right now, and we estimate we will begin to see a return in year two, which is great.

The pricing has been fair. They've been very good to us with the pricing. They let us choose what we needed. They build packages that fit us, whereas maybe the competitors aren't doing that. Others don't give us the ability to buy what we need. We kind of would have had to buy in bulk, and we didn't like that either. UiPath gives us the ability to be flexible with what we need.

We looked at Automation Anywhere. We just had a better feeling about UiPath. Even from the proof of concept, we had a better feeling about UiPath.

The biggest thing we found with Automation Anywhere, for example, was we asked for a demo license so that we could do a proof of concept; we had a very difficult time even installing the demo licenses. In contrast, with UiPath, it took us a matter of minutes to get going. We were on and building bots within a matter of minutes. Therefore, very quickly, we realized UiPath was the right solution for us.

We're on the latest version, I believe.

While our company is very socially and environmentally aware, we're not yet leveraging UiPath on projects that work towards good causes. RPA is starting to get some acceptance into the organization now, and we'll do something in the future. 

I'd advise potential users to set expectations with users. Talk to users. With RPA, people always fear when they hear robots. Setting expectations for your user base. Also, if you're not sure, find a partner that you can trust. We found a very good partner. They were very good to work with, and we really felt like we could trust them. We wouldn't have been able to do this without them. They really brought in the expertise. 

I'd rate the solution a ten out of ten.

The software's terrific. The support's terrific. All the people that are assigned to our account are very attentive to us. Our current rep is amazing. Every time I call him, he always helps. If he can't answer it, he always finds us an answer. They're quick to respond to us, even if they don't have the solution immediately. It's never gone more than two days without us resolving any issues. They've been very, very good.

We're very happy with the overall solution.

We have about 180 bots we're doing now. I think the most interesting one we have is an underwriter bot. It collects information about a person who has just applied for a product, and it does research for the underwriter. It does financial research and medical record research, and it compiles all that into notes for the underwriter. It actually gives them a recommendation on how to proceed with the application. We do all sorts of use cases, including financial and claims, and have a hand in everything that MassMutual does.

In terms of the ease of building automations, we have processed millions of cases through UiPath. It has saved hundreds of thousands of hours for our employees and freed them up to do other tasks. At MassMutual, we have people lining up to have us make a bot for them. So, it's been well accepted.

I like the tie-ins to other languages. Being able to use Python, C#, and VB has been very valuable because I can get a more diverse developer skill set on my team. If somebody's interested in a particular language, I can push them in that direction. If they want to get more into C#, for example, we can do that.

We put all new developers through the UiPath Academy courses. We're trying to get more into attended automations as we're almost exclusively unattended right now. I'm trying to get all my developers to go through the attended automation course. It's only 16 hours, so I can upscale them all on how to build attended automations better. I'm also sending some citizen developers to that course. It's pretty easy for the developers to pick up, and the citizen developers can try it.

We struggle with handwriting recognition. If we had something, maybe in Document Understanding, that would work well with handwriting recognition, it would help us out a lot. Right now, we use an outside vendor for that.

I've been using UiPath for four and a half years.

We've been using UiPath for almost four and a half years, and we've had one outage so far. The stability has been great.

We've grown a great deal in the last four years, and scalability hasn't been a problem.

We have a really talented development team, so we haven't used technical support much. However, they've been useful when we've run into problems. I'd give them a rating of ten out of ten.

Positive

I was not involved with the initial setup, but all other deployments and upgrades have been seamless.

We measure the ROI by how many full-time employees we would need to do the work the bots are doing. I think we're at 90 to 100 covered. It's working well.

The cost of UiPath is much less than that of Blue Prism. They've been very flexible and willing to work with us with our new contractors we just signed on. It's worked out well.

We looked at Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. We chose UiPath because of the technology that we can use to build things. I like that our developers have marketable skill sets when using UiPath. They can use their SQL skills and their C# skills, for example. With some of the other products, the developers aren't really stretching themselves or making complicated solutions, which is just what they really want to do. It just seems like the other programs are more drag-and-drop only, and I don't think that's great for my team.

My advice would be to start slow and small. Big bots sound like they give you a great ROI, but the complexity and the amount of time you have to spend on them burn through your ROI quickly. We've learned that building small 10-week projects for bots is better.

On a scale from one to ten, I give UiPath a ten. It is very simple to use and easy to pick up, like I'm learning with my new citizen developers. It can get really complex with my advanced developers being able to build some pretty unique things. I like that flexibility.

We have quite a few use cases, and a few big ones are creating purchase orders, reviewing invoice PDFs and extracting information from them, and creating customer orders from forms that are emailed in.

UiPath Orchestrator is a valuable feature for us. We started with all attended bots without Orchestrator, on-premises, or on the cloud. It was almost like a very low-cost way to prove that we needed this technology and that we could use it. So, for our first year, we did that. For the second year, we got Orchestrator, and it gave us the ability to utilize the bots more effectively. I thought we were going to have more attended bots, and we didn't because the process owners wanted things to happen in the background and wanted to be able to schedule them. Being able to do that and not have to have someone worry about triggering the bot or babysitting the computer while the bot runs, etc. have been the biggest game-changers for us.

The biggest benefit we've seen from using UiPath is time savings. Since June, when our fiscal year started, we've saved 8,000 hours so far. We're measuring everything in terms of hours saved, mainly because that's where we see the most benefit. I haven't really seen a big cost reduction, like replacing people with automation. Our teams are pretty slim right now.

A lot of the time what we found was that people were working extraordinarily long days. Now, they're actually able to do their job because they don't have all these other things that they had to take care of before. With some of our use cases in customer service, we've been able to avoid costs by not having to hire temporary staff. This is because a lot of the transactions that they would've taken care of are now done by the bots. They are doing it faster and more accurately. We have automated 36 processes so far. We have three attended, but most of our processes are unattended.

The biggest value of the UiPath Academy courses has been the ability to point new citizen developers to it. They are self-guided and require very little oversight from the team, so it provides the ability to grow a citizen development community with very little time from our team. The UiPath Academy is also useful for onboarding new team members; you can point them to some of the basic courses and have them get an idea of what RPA is all about, what we have, Orchestrator, etc.

UiPath Insights needs improvement. It's been almost five months since we got it, and I'm yet to see a business impact dashboard, which was the selling point.

Trying to get Insights support has been really tricky. The documentation that's out there is not detailed enough, and it doesn't really tell you how to make it happen. I've paid for a product for five months that I still can't present to my senior leadership.

I've been using UiPath for about two and a half years.

The stability is good overall, and we haven't really had any issues. We do have certain processes, especially with certain systems, that are very finicky, and we have to go back and keep updating. I don't know how much of it is UiPath versus just the nature of automation.

We got premium support, but getting the attention of the person that is dedicated to our account has been really hard. It shouldn't be that hard, especially not when we're paying $12,000 a year for it.

We've also had a lot of issues with Insights. When we get to the right person, it's helpful and easy, but getting to the right person is way too complicated, especially considering that we're paying for premium support.

So, I would give technical support a rating of seven on a scale from one to ten.

Neutral

We went with UiPath because they are a leader in the robotics industry.

The initial deployment was complex. We started with all attended, and transitioning from attended to orchestrated was not easy. Nobody understood that we had been operating robots without any orchestration, so whenever we talked to UiPath, they would tell us to get our on-premises Orchestrator and migrate it to the cloud even though we didn't have an on-premises Orchestrator. They should've already known that because they had all the details. It wasn't straightforward, but we did it.

Transitioning to Orchestrator in the cloud, probably, took us three months. 
We had to recreate workflows because the workflows were attended to.

We did it ourselves.

I talked to the CIO of a medical company, and they had implemented Automation Anywhere. They had a good experience with it, and it was good for their use cases. However, their use cases were very different from ours. So, I talked to some of our partners, and one of our partners had a relationship with a UiPath partner, so we did the proof of concept with UiPath. It worked, and so we just went from there.

Understand what your goals are with RPA, and make sure that UiPath is the right vehicle for it.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would rate UiPath at nine.

We have implemented a couple of use cases. One is with our creative collection scenario. We are also working on order automation. That will go live in October.

Since we are fairly new, I will say we have only two scenarios running right now, and they've been going on for almost a year. It's definitely saved us a lot of time. We haven't rolled out too many scenarios yet. When we'll be rolling out our order automation for 15 countries, I will see more benefits in the uses as we go.

The most valuable feature is definitely the document understanding. We have started using it for the order automation project that I'm working on. It definitely has some challenges also, especially dealing with other languages. However, so far, it's good.

We only have our Cash App or our credit collection scenario. We save around one-tenth of the time we typically spend where a lot of transactions happen. We save around 60 hours every month, at least for now.

UiPath's user community is definitely helpful. Usually, I'd look it up there first when we run into a problem.

Our team has used UiPath Academy courses. Academy courses were really helpful in giving us a good start to have a good foundation. Although we use UiPath to develop our scenarios, having that Academy access and going through the training definitely helped us get up to speed very quickly.

I definitely want some improvement on the documentation of the understanding side.

Maybe they should build more out-of-the-box apps rather than companies building their own implementation from scratch and maybe build them as a product on top of the platform. That would save time in implementation.

We're a SAP shop, so I'm looking more at what scenarios can be pre-booked using UiPath. I know there are some escalators that are there in SAP. However, they are not production ready, in my view. That area definitely can be improved since they're all Excel-based, and they're more proof of concept rather than production ready.

I've been using the solution for almost two years. 

Stability is one area where I'm really concerned. Sometimes it does behave erratically and I have to stop everything, and deploy it again, and it works fine. Therefore, I have some concerns about how it's going to scale out when there is a very high volume.

I'm concerned that we may have issues with scalability as it can behave erratically, and I have to stop and redeploy it.

For example, right now, we have a very small implementation. We will be implementing this order automation for 15 countries with a lot of customers. So I have concerns about how UiPath will scale out to these countries plus even more countries that I am planning to implement as well. What will be the process, what will the performance impact, and how is it going to behave? I do have concerns there right now.

I have dealt with technical support a few times. That said, most of the time, I could figure out the problem myself. There is one problem that I'm still dealing with in terms of technical support, and it's been ongoing. They have involved the product team to help resolve that particular issue. I have to say that I'm not thrilled with the support that I got.

Neutral

We did not previously use a different solution. We used to do everything manually.

I lead our automation implementation. For our treasury, it was easy; however, for the automation we are going live with in October, the process is a bit more complex. 

Our implementation strategy involved starting small and starting with a couple of use cases. I decided to use UiPath as our partner to cover our bases since I wanted to ensure we have a good foundation with best practices before we start doing anything in-house.

We had UiPath assist us with the initial implementation. The experience was pretty good. There were some challenges to deal with in terms of having a robust solution with good logging and notifications. That definitely didn't happen right off the bat. That said, overall, it was an okay process. 

We are definitely seeing an ROI. For example, we are saving 60 hours every month, and it's a small implementation. With order automation, we are going to save a lot of time. I don't have the exact numbers yet. However, we are positive about the outcomes we expect.

I was quite surprised at the pricing. We decided to implement action forms, and at that time, I was not aware that there is a separate licensing. It's difficult sometimes when you have to go back to your finance team or the sponsor and tell them that you need more money. Any licensing requirement has to be clear up front rather than being revealed later. I'm not worried about the cost, it's more about knowing what license we need, and in my implementation, we had quite a few mishaps related to licenses.

We looked at a couple of other products.

I don't want to go into what products we looked at. However, I can definitely say the main criterion behind selecting UiPath was its ease of use. We did a proof of concept in-house without any help. That was my main criterion for making a decision. 

Also, there's a good product path in terms of what they're doing next. UiPath is a market leader. We wanted to go with a solution that not only meets our needs for now but also is taking the effort, time, and money in building the product and bringing new capabilities.

We're fairly new to the process and have yet to get into using UiPath for a good cause.

We aren't using the AI functionality yet.

I'd advise potential users to do their homework. Look at other products and make the decision based on what capabilities you are looking at. I will say don't look at only one scenario. Look at the overall picture. Look at what your future plans are. I still believe UiPath is the best product when it comes to RPA. However, you have got to look at the whole picture at the outset.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. There are a lot of good things happening. It's very easy to use, and UiPath has a very good product roadmap. That's the key for me. Especially with AI, process mining, cost mining, et cetera, they're really going to help any company that signs on.

We're currently rolling out some of our first few automations. So far, it's been in finance and procurement. We're just automating some of their inventory processing workflows.

The automation will be unattended. We have three that are in active development and another six in backlog awaiting development.

The first few automations have definitely had an impact already. One that we're rolling out, we anticipate having a great impact. One that I'm currently working on should probably have the biggest impact so far on one of our departments. It will save us time and therefore cost. It's a very manual process with lots of human error opportunities. Between how much faster it's going to happen now and how it will be 100% accurate, we anticipate seeing a huge benefit from that.

I appreciate the infrastructure. There are numerous platforms through which we can perform automation. We are in the Microsoft sphere, and so we have the opportunity to use the Power Platform to do lots of automation. However, I've been impressed with the infrastructure that UiPath provides in developing, publishing, and rolling out these automations and then being able to monitor and manage them effectively.

The community can be helpful. In the public forums, I have seen some forum threads that are very active with lots of people that respond with great answers and great context, and multiple options. That said, there are just as many cases where no answer is ever provided, and it just disappears into obscurity. I've had multiple of those types of approaches myself, where I've posted questions and gotten no response. The community can be helpful. For somebody like me that wants to get something out of it, I would also need to be willing to put something into it and help others answer their questions, as that's how the community works.

For the most part, I was impressed with the Academy courses. They did a great job of introducing me to a new piece of software I hadn't seen before and establishing some familiarity with it. The instructor-led training from UiPath, allowed me to put into practice some of the things that I had learned in the Academy. 

The biggest pain point we've seen so far is that we have trouble identifying best practices in certain areas and circumstances. There is no shortage of resources in the Academy and on the forums that have great information. That said, a lot of them are specific to use cases, or they're too generalized, which makes it difficult to know exactly how we should be handling a certain scenario or just some basic things about how to best set up the folder structure for our given environment.

It's been difficult to navigate that as it is still so early in our implementation of RPA. We want to ensure we're doing it right to establish a good foundation from which we will build all of our future automation. We are constantly concerned that we're not doing something the right way.

During a UiPath conference attendance, I really appreciated having access to experts directly. I can just ask them, "Here's our scenario. In this context, what's the best practice?" And I can get a straightforward answer. We don't have access to them outside of this conference. I don't always have the time to watch the videos or go through the multi-hour-long training to get to the one best practice that might be nested inside a larger training.

Finding some of the answers ourselves is difficult since they are contingent upon our scenario and the context we're building. There's not a one size fits all. To that end, it's no surprise that there's not going always to be a single solution that can just be published to say, "Always do this, this way." Without that context, we really do need to be able to talk to somebody, and we haven't had that yet.

In terms of the UiPath community, I probably can't answer a whole lot of questions since I'm so new; however, for a community like that to function and succeed, there have to be enough people with the expertise that are willing to put in that time for free. In a realm of automation that touts itself as a solution for people who have no time, it's no surprise that there are not always people that are willing to sacrifice what time they don't already have to begin with to give out free service.

Once I have automation ready for production, I don't see a way to deploy that to a production tenant environment without manually recreating everything. In a typical development environment in software development, you develop in one area, and then when it's ready for deployment, it's packaged up with all of the assets and everything that it needs, and then you deploy it to the production environment. You do some final testing to ensure the deployment takes, and you're done. Whereas here, it seems like I'm having to recreate everything manually. I can import the automation, yet I need the whole structure and orchestrator and all of the assets (75), and I have to recreate everything manually. It seems something is missing. 

I just started using the solution three months ago. 

The solution is pretty stable. That said, that'll be a question better suited for me in about three months after we've had our bots live. Since we're only in development and testing them in pretty controlled environments, it's harder to tell. It seems like it would be pretty stable. However, I can't answer that fully.

From what I understand, it scales well. I understand that's one of the directions that we see ourselves going. We'll be taking on more and more automation and scaling up quickly.

I haven't had any technical support directly from UiPath yet. I've only learned that we can request a technical account manager, and I understand that we don't have one right now. I'm not sure what additional cost that may incur, either. It's always that question of the cost versus the benefit. That's what we need - that technical expertise from somebody that can have a short conversation with us and help steer us in the right direction.

I have worked in the Power Platform with Microsoft. That is not specifically for RPA, per se. However, I've worked in it and have familiarity with it. 

One of the biggest pros for sticking with Microsoft would be that we're a Microsoft shop, so it would keep all of our solutions in the same realm. We wouldn't have to export and import data across services and databases. It would just all be under the same umbrella. That's a huge benefit of sticking with Microsoft.

With UiPath, there's a stronger infrastructure that supports the development, maintenance, and scale of automation versus Microsoft. However, Microsoft is still pretty new and young to the RPA development environment, and they move very quickly. I would expect that they are not done developing their RPA suite either. I imagine that we'll see future iterations where they become a stronger contender to what UiPath provides.

I was not involved in the initial setup. That happened before me. 

We have yet to see an ROI since we don't have any of our automation fully live. We anticipate an immediate return as soon as these are in production based on the countless hours that will be saved from people's workdays.

The licensing is a headache. Luckily, I don't have to deal with it directly. That's above me. As a developer, I have to deal with the licensing just in trying to build new automation and ensure that there are licenses available to be allocated at runtime. That alone is just obscure enough to make it complicated and leave me unsure as to if I've set it up correctly.

I'm an RPA developer.

We do not yet use the AI functionality. 

I would advise potential new users to make sure they know what it is that they want. In our case, we need to choose between the options of sticking with the Microsoft Power Platform or going in a new direction with UiPath. Even though the Power Platform could potentially do everything we need to automate, it's not apples to apples against UiPath. If what your need is better suited to one or the other, don't force your solution into one product.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I'd rate it higher. However, there are technical issues that I've encountered and a steep learning curve. We've had difficulty in finding the specific answers we're looking for and lack access to technical experts that can answer complex questions, pricing, the ambiguous nature of the licensing, and how those get provisioned. There are some core features still missing.

Our company uses the solution to understand documents, process invoices, move data from one system to another, conduct background investigations, and other day-to-day use cases for federal and state offices. 

For one use case, we built a sandbox for malware analysis using the bot. 

For another use case, we scan thousands of resumes to find an individual with a specific skill set. 

We have completed 90 automations with mostly attended bots that we have built. We are not using AI much right now, but plan to use it to solve problems in the future. 

The solution can be used across systems or with more generic use cases. 

It is easy to go to the code level and write automations that only require a couple of lines of code.

Training materials should include behind-the-scenes information such as what goes on underneath the infrastructure and how components interact with each other. This type of information matters more to solution architects than high-level buildings or components. 

The solution has a few bugs that need to be worked out. 

I have been using the solution for three years. 

The stability has been good so far but we do not have much volume. We handle diverse implementations that include five to ten bots. We do not yet have the load to fully rate performance. 

The solution is a good platform for scalability and accommodates multiple nodes. 

Technical support has been pretty good and we have a direct contact who is very responsive. It sometimes takes a day or two to make contact, so technical support is rated a nine out of ten because there is room for improvement. 

The user community is helpful and it is easy to find answers or at least a direction for solving issues. 

Our team utilizes the Academy for certifications and finds it useful because it provides high-level information about features. 

Positive

We did not use another solution. 

The setup is cumbersome for on-premises because documentation is outdated or instructions are not clear so we have to get clarity from support. 

The setup for SaaS is easy because you can log in and start using it immediately. 

We implement the solution in-house using a hybrid model. Some federal government offices are very particular about exposed data so we use on-premises for them. Others are more open so we prefer to use the SaaS platform. 

We also work with many business groups to promote RPA and set up their infrastructure environments in the solution. 

The solution's ROI is that it saves time, eliminates errors, and reduces repetition. Tasks that used to take days are now completed within seconds or hours. 

The solution is more expensive than Power Platform which offers many connectors to third parties. 

For example, an unattended bot costs $50 per month on Power Platform so it makes sense for developers who work on the Microsoft Platform. 

The solution can run $10,000 per year. 

Prior to using the solution, we looked at Automation Anywhere but did not enjoy developing with it.

Many other products such as ServiceNow, Pega, or SAP have RPA but use their own domains. They also require many blocks of code to automate. 

We will be looking at Power Platform's next iteration because we are not sure about the future of the solution's partnership with Microsoft. 

When implementing the solution, go small first. Do not jump directly to the most complex case for automation or you will get lost and think the solution is ineffective. 

Start by building small workflows, realizing the gains, and slowly increasing performance. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

My domain and expertise are in life sciences. In life sciences there is a process called pharmacovigilance, which involves monitoring the effects of medical drugs after they have been licensed for use. I create end-to-end automations, for case processing and full data entry. The customer will store details in an Oracle-based pharmacovigilance platform called Argus, where clinical data from the client and the product are stored. The UiPath bot has to capture the cases from Argus. Once a case has been input into UiPath, a mandatory status check, duplicate search, and case processing have to be done.

It then needs to perform full data entry in Argus. The full data entry consists of more details like patient information, product information, event information, and so on. The bot needs to validate and input those details into Argus and save the case. 

Some days there will be 1k records and on other days, there will be 2k records. On average the bot will process 12k to 13k records.

Pharmacovigilance is a big process. It would take almost 45 minutes for a human to complete a single case. By implementing UiPath robots in the customer's environment, the case processing time has been drastically reduced. The bot processes cases, end-to-end, within 20 to 25 minutes, depending on the case complexity, so that the customer is saving 20 minutes per case. The savings are equivalent to nine or 10 FTEs, which is huge. As a result of those savings, they have requested us to build more bots for them, for other processes.

The most valuable feature in UiPath is the UI interaction with UI Explorer. I have worked with other automation tools and UI Explorer is the standout feature of UiPath. For web-based applications, we can interact with every HTML element, from head to tail. UI Explorer is a valuable addition to UiPath for creating complex, web-based automation.

The AI Computer Vision and Orchestrator are also outstanding features. They make it very easy for developers.

In addition, the introduction of drag-and-drop APIs to UiPath enhances the development processes and decreases the time it takes, as well as the processing time. For example, if you wanted to read an email from Microsoft Outlook using UiPath two years ago, it would take about five steps or activities. Now, with the Graph API within UiPath, you can read an email message from Outlook within a span of five to six seconds, maximum. This API functionality is pretty easy for us to handle.

Along with this, UiPath also introduced Orchestrator access via API. It's not mandatory to log in to Orchestrator to create an asset manually in UiPath. Rather, you can use the Orchestrator API to call a bot process and the assets. This API functionality helps developers to develop components effectively, as well as reduces bot processing time drastically.

I have been into RPA for almost six years and I have worked in the three major tools: UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism. I have been using UiPath for four to five years. I'm an RPA developer and do development for my clients. That includes designing and deploying bots in the clients' environments, and making sure the bots are running well.

It is stable. We are using the 2019 version. The versions are continually upgraded with the latest being the 2021 version. There are frequent updates but the version we are using is stable. We don't have any errors or bot crashes or other unexpected system exceptions during development. The stability is good across all versions.

It's pretty scalable. It can be used across all major providers. If you want to automate Windows, web-based or PDF-based interactions, or do email or Excel automation, you can. We can also do terminal automation, mainframe automation, and Citrix automation. It covers almost every possible scenario for real-time data handling. 

We only have a couple of challenges, when a customer says we need to do this or that and UiPath doesn't have built-in functionality for that. We need to think differently and add some additional .NET components, for example. 

But UiPath is pretty scalable, and we can use it across all technologies for automation.

If you don't find a solution in the Community Forum, you can raise a technical support ticket with UiPath. The support team works 24 hours a day, and we can get a resolution immediately. Both the Community Forum and the technical support play a major role and both help developers.

UiPath also has partners. Cognizant is a high-priority partner and they have their own SLAs for everything. If I raise a ticket regarding UiPath, if something is not working, the response time is very quick and the resolutions they provide are pretty standard. We haven't faced any difficulties in raising a ticket. Everything has met our expectations with respect to the technical support.

Positive

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.

Also, UiPath has a built-in functionality called Computer Vision to extract values from a PDF. If we want to use Computer Vision, UiPath has one drawback. The cost is based on how many documents we are using Computer Vision on. That makes it difficult to estimate ROI. Computer Vision has a dynamic cost. To propose a project to a client, a project that includes Computer Vision, we need to have some kind of standard cost so that they can calculate the ROI effectively. Computer Vision should not be based on usage.

This is one of the main drawbacks that I have seen in real-life situations, when quoting a price for a client. If UiPath improved in this area, they might have many more customers who want to automate PDF interactions based on Computer Vision, because it has huge scope.

The advantage of using UiPath over Automation Anywhere is the UI interaction. Automation Anywhere doesn't have a specialized feature like UI Explorer, or any other options to click on an image or interact with UI elements. Automation Anywhere has a Capture command and we have to work with that one command to interact with all the UI-based elements. But it's completely different in UiPath. UI Explorer enables multiple clicks and interactive activities. You can mimic the HTML per your project's needs. You can't work in the same way in Automation Anywhere. With respect to web-based automation, UiPath stands tall. AA has limited functionality.

The disadvantage of UiPath is in the PDF interaction. Automation Anywhere has a bot called IQ Bot, which is included in the licensing of Automation Anywhere. It's pretty easy to train it for a PDF document within the span of a few seconds. UiPath's Computer Vision has the same functionality as IQ Bot, but Computer Vision is pretty costly.

Other than that, Automation Anywhere is cloud-hosted and it has multiple ways for a developer to code. If you want to code RPA, or you want to code in a flow-based manner, you can do so with Automation Anywhere. But UiPath has only one mode, a flow-based automation. UiPath doesn't have code-based automation.

From the developer's point of view, if you have a code-based structure then what AA offers is as good as UiPath. 

A major advantage of UiPath is that since it is a .NET-based application, you can use all the methods and the properties that are available in .NET. You don't have that functionality in Automation Anywhere. If you want to read or manipulate a string, you need to use separate activities in Automation Anywhere, but with UiPath you can use the built-in .NET methods to read a string in a single line. The complexity of the code is smaller in UiPath.  

Because I have worked in all the major RPA tools, I can say confidently that UiPath is very developer-friendly. If you are coming from a non-technical background, or you don't know coding, they have a separate portal for you to develop in, called StudioX. It's a low-code platform, a "citizen-developer" platform. Anyone who wants to use UiPath can use it without any background.

From the development, design, and testing points of view, I rate UiPath higher than other RPA tools for automation. Go directly to UiPath, rather than trying all the other tools. UiPath is number-one for development and testing.

It is mandatory in our company to use the UiPath Academy to do RPA certification. Almost everyone has completed advanced professional certification in UiPath. The Academy covers every topic extensively, as far as what developers need. I don't come from an IT background but I learned it. UiPath teaches everything from scratch. With a little bit of coding knowledge, it's very easy to learn development using the Academy portal. The major advantage is that, since it is a video-based series, you get a clear idea of the modern-day functionality. They explain everything with an example and they give you use cases for practice. 

If you want to be an architect, they have a course for that. If you want a developer diploma, they have a course for that. And if you want to learn a specific topic, like deployment or testing, they have courses for them.

For anyone with experience in another technology who wants to learn UiPath, or wants to do RPA projects, it's a matter of 10 to 15 days to go through all the videos and you can start working. That's a big advantage of UiPath. The Academy makes learning easy.

They also have a Community Forum. If we have any doubt, we can interact with other developers around the globe. It's very interactive and we can learn what things are intended to do. About 90 percent of the time, you can find a solution using the forum.

Other than the Computer Vision cost model, the features of UiPath are pretty awesome to use. As a developer, there aren't any drawbacks or difficulties when using UiPath.