UiPath Platform Reviews

My company's major use case for UiPath is to create automations for web and desktop applications. For example, we use it to automatically download content from another page or PDF. It's creating automatic programs to help us download data from the website or application.

For our organization, it has made our work a lot easier. Before UiPath, the tasks that we are automating were done manually and they were very time-consuming. Things were inefficient and many errors and bugs popped up. With the automation that UiPath has provided, the time required for those tasks has dropped significantly. A task that required four or five hours is down to 15 or 20 minutes, with zero or a minimal number of errors. That is one of the major impacts that UiPath has had. It has improved our overall efficiency.

The time we have saved can be invested in other aspects of our business, like lead generation or preparing the website. UiPath automation has saved us a solid amount of time.

Within a week of deployment, we were able to see results.

Another feature is the ease of creating programs with UiPath. Other RPA solutions are not that easy to use. Any person who is a beginner using this platform can learn it very easily. The deployment time and implementation time are greatly reduced when it comes to training our employees on this software. We are able to do our work much more quickly and efficiently with UiPath.

One thing that I personally like very much is the drag-and-drop capability in UiPath. I don't have a coding background. One of the major selling points of the solution is that it requires very minimal coding to create a program. It's very easy to drag and drop to create the required fields from the tool. That is one of the key and interesting features. The entire user interface and user experience is enhanced because of low-code and no-code abilities.

Other similar software solutions that involve coding take a lot of time because once you start coding there are errors that pop up. With the drag-and-drop feature there is nothing like that. It's instant. When you drag and drop you can see an immediate preview of what the output will look like. Work that would take two to three hours is done in 10 to 15 minutes, so that much amount of time is saved when creating a workflow.

Another feature is the Activities menu. It's a type of log system in which I am able to check what activities have happened. It keeps me updated.

The things that I use in UiPath are very comfortable for me and I find it very useful. I'm pretty satisfied with the current feature list. I don't think anything else is required.

There are two editions of UiPath. One is the free Community version and the other is the paid Enterprise version. I have used both. The feature updates in the Enterprise version are very regular and the support is quite fast. That's not replicated in the Community version. They could bring both versions to an equal level so that people who are just starting, with limited staff and a minimal budget, can use the entire feature list of UiPath in the Community version. 

Apart from that, in terms of the features and the simplicity of the product, it's on par with all the other top solutions out there.

I've been using UiPath for 15 or 16 months.

They do monthly product updates and, after an update, the system doesn't lag or crash. It's pretty stable for the updates that they provide. 

Until now, I haven't faced any bug, software, or performance issue with UiPath. It has been a smooth ride and I hope it continues like that.

I believe it is a scalable solution.

In our organization, it is deployed across multiple departments. Different departments use UiPath for different purposes. In our department there are 12 end-users of UiPath, but I'm not sure how many users there are in the other departments.

I don't think, in the near future, we plan to increase the number of users because, for our bandwidth, these people are using it concurrently. But when our business grows beyond a particular limit, obviously, the number of users will increase, but that won't be for another six or seven months.

For the Enterprise solution, the technical support is a 10 out of 10, but for the Community edition it's a six out of 10. It's not that quick with the Community edition. They respond after 48 hours when you raise an inquiry, but with the Enterprise edition, it's instant.

Positive

We didn't use a different solution. We took a manual approach before.

I wasn't part of the deployment, but since it's mostly a cloud-based product, I don't think maintenance is required. All the updates are over the air.

We have definitely seen a return on investment by using UiPath. We have saved a lot of time with it and that has ultimately resulted in our employees focusing their time on other important aspects of growing the business.

The main reason we went ahead with UiPath was the pricing. As I mentioned, they have a free version as well as the paid version. And the pricing of the paid version was not that high. It's low- to mid-level pricing. They maintain the pricing to cater to small and medium-level companies.

Aside from the standard licensing fee, there was an additional training fee but that was optional only. UiPath has its Academy where we could attend courses on how to use the software, but if you want additional training, you have to pay extra. We did that and took some additional training on UiPath to feel confident.

I don't use the machine learning and AI capabilities in UiPath because they require a little bit of coding, which I'm not very familiar with.

But one thing that I have personally taken out of my experience with the solutions is that people with less coding knowledge or with no coding background should definitely consider using UiPath. It reduces a lot of the dependencies needed to produce automations. In the past, people like me who are not from a coding background, had to be dependent on others, and a lot of manual work was required. But with UiPath, I get to do it myself. I'm not depending on anyone else. That way, there is no time constraint for me. That is the major piece of advice that I would give to people without a coding background: You have complete control and can get things done in your own time. It is much more efficient and simple.

Try the Community version as soon as possible and get used to the entire workflow of the product and then make a decision. It is pretty easy to understand the entire workflow. Play around with it and you will fall in love with the package.

All the features are very good. It's a cool application to use and it's one of the best out there in the marketplace.

We use it mainly for automating customer management processes and to speed up team collaboration. We use many different kinds of software, ranging from cloud services to legacy. We need our team to work between those applications and sometimes data has to be actioned. We were doing those processes manually and, as we grew our business, we realized robotic processes could intervene. We heard of UiPath, we tried it, and we were able to automate our process of working with the legacy system and other software.

We have a mix of attended and unattended processes. We are able to run some of our processes end-to-end, but some processes need moderation. We need someone to attend those processes to complete them.

Our invoicing system is a very old system but we cannot replace it right now. At the same time, we also have the latest cloud application for data analytics and manipulation. It is not possible for the legacy system to export data from that system. We use UiPath to extract and copy data from that old system and use it in our new system.

We have been able to automate the contracts portion of our business processes. Automating has saved us a lot of hours and given our team more freedom to be more creative and more productive. Overall, it has improved our business efficiency. It has increased our production capability. It has helped our business a lot.

It has saved our employees nearly 35 percent of their time so that they can work on other tasks. They have that much more time.

Attended automation is mostly used in our QA department and by certain parts of our marketing department. They include moderation by our supervisors and that has helped a lot. We are able to work efficiently with those processes.

We have been able to transform 25 percent of our processes to automation. That has created a lot of efficiency in our business. It has transformed our business to become more productive. That transformation did not require the purchase of expensive upgrades or IT support. We did not require any other software licenses.

And we have definitely seen cost savings because we are more efficient and we have more time to do more things. 

We have also been able to provide more reliable services because we have eliminated most of the human error that we used to have. Almost 90 percent of our errors have been eliminated.

It's quite easy to build Automations. They have plenty of resources. Furthermore, they have this new AI feature for process mining and task mining. It can record our manual processes and then it can suggest automations for them. Because of that feature, it's also relatively easy to implement UiPath for automation.

Some processes are very complex and very long, and sometimes it is very hard for a human to implement them manually. AI has enabled us to automatically solve those processes that would not have been doable by a human. It has given more meaningful information to our business and services.

When we have difficulty knowing what features are most applicable and how to apply features to particular processes, or how to solve specific problems regarding automation, we find answers thanks to a lot of the senior people in the UiPath community. They are really supportive when we are implementing automation in our business. 

Some of our employees also use MacBook devices for their daily work, mostly for high-graphic projects. UiPath doesn't have a complex set of features for OS X systems. If they could add more complex features for MacBooks, that would be good.

Also, it is quite slow sometimes when running very heavy and complex processes. It would help if they could improve their base speed.

I have been using UiPath for a little over two years now.

So far it has been very stable.

The support is good, very active and reliable. No problems so far.

Positive

We have been using UiPath for two years. When we see our financial results for the last five years, we have not seen that much increase in our business because there are other factors involved.

But we were able to automate our processes and be more productive in those last two years. We have many applications and projects going on. I think we will also see a financial increase in a couple of more years.

The pricing is transparent, and the best part is that they have the Community version, so there isn't anything to hide. You can try the cloud version. They offer plenty of time, two months, for a trial. There are other pricing models that are good. We have not used all of their services, but we have UiPath Studio and that has good, fair pricing.

We were considering Automation Anywhere and software from IBM, but we found that UiPath fits our needs better.

It was really fast and easy to get started with the UiPath. They had a Community version that I could just sign up for, download, and start using. There were plenty of resources online, on YouTube, to learn and implement it. Also, the community was active. The other RPA software was not like that. You had to phone, request a demo, and the way they worked was quite hard. We found it very flexible to use UIPath.

We are using UiPath as our RPA solution for finance, supply chain, revenue cycle, HR, and IT. At the moment, we're using it mainly for unattended automations of big jobs.

In the healthcare field, where systems often don't talk to each other, UiPath helps data to be shared between systems. My colleagues have been talking about that and there has been an improvement. That's important because it helps us to keep in line with one another.

Also, security and compliance are a big deal in our organization, especially because we are in healthcare, and we keep it as secure as possible. UiPath assists us with that in terms of credentialing and separation of duties. We don't take security lightly.

The tenant concept, where you can have everyone working in their own space, is valuable.

We're just starting to implement UiPath on a larger scale. We've been using it for about nine months maybe, so we're new to it.

We really have not had a lot of hiccups or anything that's been difficult. The stability has been good. On a scale of one to 10, I would give it an eight right now and that's only because we haven't really tested the boundaries.

The scalability is good. It's easy to do. It will get pushed a little bit more as we get more mature with the product, but so far so good.

We had a different solution prior to UiPath, and what we've really liked so far with UiPath is the way that they interact with us in terms of customer support and satisfaction. They're very in tune with what we need. They have a lot of experience in the RPA world.

Our TAM is Micah de Boer and our sales engineer is Mick Taylor. Our account manager, Garet Wright, has been outstanding.

Positive

We previously used Automation Anywhere. One of the reasons we switched was that it didn't seem to be as mature as UiPath. Another was that it does not have a citizen developer program or even the concept of a citizen developer. In addition, it didn't seem to be as stable. We had a lot of issues with the system going offline or having problems. And when it came to customer service, they were not responsive to our needs. It would take days for them to get back to us on questions or issues that we submitted.

Right now we are an on-prem model, but we are switching to a SaaS-based model in the cloud.

From what I have heard from my team, the deployment of UiPath has been much easier than the deployment of Automation Anywhere. It is much more straightforward, clearer, and easier.

The team that supports the platform is a team of just two people. Both are senior analyst programmers and they are responsible for the deployment and the infrastructure set up of everything related to the UiPath product. We have two other individuals on my team who are the RPA developers, the ones writing the bots.

The deployment has been pretty lightweight so far in comparison to what we had to deal with when we used Automation Anywhere.

We did it ourselves.

It's returning hours back to employees so that they can do more tasks that involve thinking, and not have to do so much mundane, repetitive work. That gives us a good return on investment because something that might have taken an individual an hour to do can be done by a robot in five minutes. It's definitely freeing up some actual work time for people.

We've saved the equivalent of five or six FTEs, and that's in the short amount of time that we've been using UiPath.

It has also improved our employees' joy at work because they aren't having to do some of the mundane activities that they had to do in the past.

Licensing allocations are easy. We also have the ability to have a robot license be fully utilized, meaning it can do more than one thing. If it's idle, we're able to use that robot for some other automation, rather than having a one-to-one relationship between automations and robots.

We just moved to their Enterprise licensing model and it seems fair at this point. It will be interesting to see where we are over the next three years and if we're able to show a return on that hefty investment.

One area that is challenging for me is tracking licenses. It would help to have a license dashboard so that we would know how many licenses have been allocated, who they're allocated to, and when they were last used. Right now, to gather that information, I have to go to four different screens in UiPath and then consolidate all that. A licensing module that we could look at from administrative and management perspectives, would be awesome. That's the main thing I have been hearing from my staff.

When we first chose our initial vendor, Automation Anywhere, we had done an RFP process and had gone through pilots. It was close in terms of which was number one and which was number two. When we discovered that Automation Anywhere wasn't meeting our needs, we contacted other folks who had used Automation Anywhere and had switched to UiPath and asked them for feedback and what their experience had been. We did some benchmarking with others around us to see what they were doing.

Comparing UiPath to what we had before, it has been a cakewalk. Be sure that you work with your leadership and with your IT areas to pick the best deployment solution for your company.

We haven't had an opportunity to use all the features and functions, but in terms of the robustness of the product and the communication we've received from our teams at UiPath, we've had an outstanding experience with them, and we really look forward to keeping that going in the future as we build out this program.

We work as a center of excellence and we develop automations centrally for other departments. All our deployments are unattended bots that are deployed and managed by us, centrally. They are all running on a virtual machine. Nothing is running on client computers or laptops. We do not have any attended use cases. The process owners are interacting with the bots.

We use the bots for a lot of reporting, including monthly and weekly reports. We are a construction company and we have a lot of reports for all kinds of things, such as construction projects, different construction sites, and various subsidiaries for regional departments. A region like Bavaria, for example, needs its reports. And there are plenty of controlling departments in all of the subsidiaries.

We also have some ticketing use cases. One of them is for IT services, meaning internal ticketing. That bot regularly checks our ticket software and automatically processes some of the tickets. For example, when an employee needs rights to a specific system, the bot checks whether they fulfill the requirements and approves or declines the ticket.

Another type of ticketing use case is more about processing customer tickets. As a construction company, we also do facility management, and that means there are a lot of external customers with their own systems in which they record tickets. The tickets are not visible in our local systems so someone has to go to the external systems, export the tickets, filter them, and then tell everyone what they're supposed to do to their buildings as a result. The tickets might be about small repair jobs, for example. We run this daily and, in the morning, everyone receives an email with all the tickets that have to be done within one day, three days, one week, et cetera.

Both of the ticketing use cases are connected with SLAs. If you miss a certain time frame before processing a ticket for external customers, you have to pay a penalty fee. For the internal tickets there are SLAs for internal tracking purposes. Because those tickets have to be processed within two hours, that bot runs every two hours and checks for new tickets.

Another IT services use case is for getting access rights to local drives.

We also have many recurring processes. For example, in HR they have to go to the system and confirm a process. It’s a necessary evil which is probably due to the legacy systems we have. Someone defined this process a long time ago and it still has to be done.

We also have use cases in finance and treasury. They are not tickets, but they process requests from employees. For example, they can request cash on a specific card and the bot will check the emails and then basically transfer data from an email, or from a PDF form attached to an email, and enter it into the finance system.

One last type of use case is where the bot works as an interface between systems. Data has to be exported from one system and imported to another system and there is no existing API. The bot exports and imports the data. We have one bot that exports PDF documents and sends them to an email interface. It defines a specific subject and then attaches the file. That file will automatically be uploaded to another system. Or the bot may log in to a system and upload the document. These use cases are due to the fact that there is no interface between two systems and they're either not big enough to develop an API or they may involve an external customer system and the customer has no interest in providing an API.

UiPath has freed up our employees' time and that's its main purpose. We don't have huge use cases, but for our bigger use cases it could be saving us 35 to 40 hours per month. With the smaller processes, people save about two hours a month. We have 23 use cases that are live at the moment and the total time saved by them is about seven or eight person-days a week. The big processes account for 50 to 60 percent of all the savings.

Employees have more time for more important things, but there are no direct cost savings from our automations. What we do have are a lot of efficiency gains and some time savings. Any cost savings are on the lower end of the scale.

The solution also definitely reduces human error. We have some processes that involve penalty fees if there is human error, so the reduction in errors has probably affected the business on a very small scale.

In terms of the cost of automations, before UiPath the whole automation process was much more complex. There might have been software providers involved in that process, charging us and providing APIs. And the whole process took way longer. Now that we have a UiPath license, the cost of implementing any automation is zero, other than our salaries, which would be paid anyway. The automation creation process is definitely a lot faster. It's also cheaper because there is no involvement of an external software developer, which is probably the most expensive part.

I like the REFramework. It's one of the unique selling points of UiPath because it gives you a framework within the software to structure your processes. It's perfect in terms of error handling and it provides a lot of functionalities for processing multiple transactions. It makes the whole solution more robust.

I tested the Process Mining at my previous company and I don't think it's suitable for RPA processes. It operates at a way higher level and, using it, you may find an area in which you can optimize a process, but it doesn't just give you a defined process for automation. It doesn't necessarily help you to identify the processes.

The Task Capture component offers the ability to record a process and it will give you process documentation. It tells you how many clicks are being made, and it will create screenshots. It tells you the basic activities that are being done in the process. When we tested it, the quality of these documents was very low. It took more time to take the output and make it useful than it would have taken to analyze and document the process ourselves. 

We are not using any of that. Together with the customer, we are manually defining and documenting processes. We are doing the actual automation, of course, with UiPath. In terms of monitoring it afterward, it's 50/50. Standard Orchestrator definitely offers you some ways to monitor your processes. It tells you how many processes failed and why they failed. You could also define a process that sends you an email when it fails.

UiPath also offers some BI components, but that requires a separate license and costs. We are not using them. The whole BI reporting functionality of standard UiPath is not that great. We use external dashboards in Power BI.

We also have a calendar application because, with standard Orchestrator, there's no overview about when you have bots running and when you have free slots. So it's also not great for planning license usage. The whole visualization piece, out-of-the-box, is not so nice. UiPath is mainly the automation tool for us, and it's definitely great for that. But in terms of analysis and monitoring, there's definitely still potential for the software.

I have been using UiPath for two and a half to three years.

Their tech support replies quite quickly. But when we had technical problems, most of the time, we had to have multiple calls. It's not that great. They definitely provided us with all the experts, but they just didn't immediately find solutions, most of the time.

It often took two to three days to fix our issues. We would have to explain the issue one or two times and then they say, "Okay, we need to do a call." After the call we would try out the solution but it wouldn't work and there would be another call. Support is another potential area for improvement.

Also, we bought our licenses from a UiPath partner. We are actually supposed to talk to them for support, but they charge for their consulting services. They are the reason we didn't have constant communication with UiPath. From my experience at my previous job, where we worked with UiPath, we were in close communication with the UiPath success manager. There was way better communication and support because we always had a channel that we could talk to regularly. And they already knew what our issues had been. If you are working directly with UiPath, the tech support is good, although not great.

Neutral

We did not have a previous solution.

I started in RPA with my previous company. My boss just told me to get into this topic. I started with the UiPath Academy before we were even using the software, but I could follow all the courses. It's all video training, so it's easy to follow. The Microsoft training often consists of long sets of text and it says "expected reading time is 23 minutes," but it's 23 minutes just to read the text. Now, UiPath even offers training exercises. 

And because they offer the Community version, you can download the full-featured software without actually having a license, for personal use and for training purposes. That way you can try out whatever you learn. That makes the learning very practical. And the Community version is not limited to 30 days like test versions of some other solutions. It's a version that you can use for testing forever and you can use all the functionalities. That definitely helped me when I did the training. That's how I got from knowing nothing about RPA to knowing a lot about RPA, before working with it.

If you have a basic understanding of the software, the most important thing is to develop with it, because that gives you practical experience.

They also have very specific, deep-dive courses, for working with Orchestrator, among other things. They're easy to find. You can invest two hours and learn the most important aspects of the UI and look for what you need.

With the Advanced RPA Developer certification, there is an exam. That is where I got the most practical experience. It's not just quizzes, it's also practical projects.

Overall, the Academy is great. It has training paths as well as very specific courses. 

UiPath is quite expensive and whatever additional components you want to use will have additional costs. We are not using the Document Understanding feature because of the cost. For Document Understanding, the cost may be per transaction.

Compared to Power Automate, UiPath is quite expensive to set up. What we are trying to do, and likely everybody tries to do this, is fully occupy one unattended-bot license before getting another one. So it's not just a matter of buying a few licenses, because they are quite expensive. That definitely also affects the return on investment, especially if you automate smaller processes.

Also, we are currently working with centralized automation development, but we are planning to decentralize it with citizen developers as well, for smaller processes. For that, we intend to use Power Automate Desktop because in that scenario the pricing disqualified UiPath. If you give a UiPath Studio license to many people—to fulfill the vision of a bot for every person—or even to one person per department, they would have to work quite hard to see a positive return on investment. 

For UiPath, you need Orchestrator, which is already quite expensive, although you can use just one to start with. But if you have multiple unattended-bot licenses and multiple Studio licenses, it gets expensive quite fast. 

Also, the whole pricing structure is very unclear. You can't find out anything about prices before talking with UiPath or with a partner. At that point, you're still not sure what kind of price you're getting. Of course, they offer savings when you order many licenses, but there's no fixed reference point if you haven't talked to UiPath before. There is no real information about what you actually need and how much you can expect it to cost. 

With the Microsoft platform, you can directly see the kinds of packages they have and whether they're charging per process or per transaction. You see the price. It's very transparent.

When I compare UiPath with other providers' solutions, UiPath offers a very structured development interface. It is more structured than the interface of Microsoft Power Automate, for example. It offers a very visually appealing way of structuring the processes in flow charts as well as in sequences. It makes it easy to see an overview of a process. I definitely like UiPath's development interface.

UiPath Orchestrator is definitely great, and better than what competitors offer because it enables you to use queues very easily, which again helps to create robust automations.

In addition, the UiPath community is the best among all the software communities that I've seen. There's a great forum. Whatever question you have will either be answered by other developers or even UiPath employees who participate in the forum. Also, there is already a huge stock of questions and answers about automation. Usually, you will get an answer to any question within hours or even minutes. Together with the training platform, the whole ecosystem around the community is much better than that of any other software I've ever seen.

In my previous company, we evaluated the big ones at that time: Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath. 

In my current company, we mainly evaluated two solutions. The first was UiPath, because it's probably the most powerful solution. The second was Microsoft Power Automate, which is now becoming more mature. Power Automate is probably also the easiest to implement because we are Office 365 users. We could just provide a Power Automate desktop license to any of our employees. It's definitely much easier to acquire Power Automate licenses and provide them to the users. It's directly integrated. There's no need for IT involvement.

In my opinion, UiPath is easy to use. Once you have been using it for a while, it's pretty easy. If you're using it as a citizen developer, meaning that you want to automate your own processes, it's probably a bit complex. It offers a lot of functionality and properties that can be edited per activity. You have to have a basic understanding of variables, arguments, et cetera, if you want to build a robust solution.

The macro recorder is not that nice. It's not like you can just record a process and then run it over and over again. It definitely requires some experience to create a robust process. All in all, I think it's easy to use. 

I also tried the StudioX version, just for testing purposes, and that may be a bit easier to use, but it's still not a tool that you can give to someone and they will be able to start developing on their own. In particular, they will not be able to run something unattended because that requires a lot of testing. It requires basic knowledge, which comes with experience, about the HTML selectors.

In general, UiPath is the most powerful solution there is on the market right now for RPA, mainly because of the easy structure provided by UiPath Orchestrator for larger transactional business processes.

We are working with automation, and it is very useful for my enterprise and our clients. We are using UiPath for building applications for automation purposes. Some of our clients are in the banking industry. They ask us to create applications to automate their processes, and we use UiPath for that.

Our overall productivity has increased because the bandwidth of our people has increased. Previously, when we were manually doing a particular task, it used to take us two hours, and after building the application with UiPath, the same task is taking around 10 seconds. From two hours, the time has come down to 10 seconds, which increases our bandwidth and productivity.

We are moving into robotics, and in robotics, advanced NLP and AI are being used. As tasks move from being manual to being automated, it definitely reduces the effort and improves productivity. The saved time can be utilized in a better way.

Its ease of use is valuable. For building an application, if I give this product to a newbie, he or she would be able to easily use it and build an application with minimum knowledge. No extra training is required. Its features are self-explanatory, and anyone can understand them, which is the main feature of this product.

I extensively work on the automation part, and I like the drag-and-drop functionality for workflows. Its graphical workspace or visualizations make it a unique product. It provides good visualizations, which are helpful in understanding the workflow. I am very impressed by its drag and drop functionality, and I would recommend it to everyone.

It can be improved in terms of platform integration. It is platform-independent, but it should be easy to integrate with different platforms, such as Windows, Linux, Cloud, etc. If I am using AWS for my server response, I should be able to integrate that into UiPath. 

If I can get some manuals along with the product, it will be good to see all the features that are available in it.

I have been using this solution for the last eight years. I have been in the software industry for about eight and a half years, and I have been using UiPath very regularly for my day-to-day work. 

Its stability is good. In the last couple of years, I didn't have any problems. I would rate it a nine out of ten in terms of stability.

We have a team of 30 to 40 people who use this solution. At this time, we don't have plans to increase its usage. If the usage of this tool grows, it would definitely be better. It will increase productivity and more efficient use of our company.

I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have used Visual Studio previously to build applications. I switched to UiPath because I like its interface and the drag-and-drop functionality. When I am building an application using this, it's very easy to edit the flow. I am very impressed with UiPath.

I'm involved in the development and deployment of applications. I have the knowledge, so for me, it is straightforward. Most of the features are self-explanatory, but there are certain features for which a newbie might have to refer to the manual.

The duration varies from application to application. It can be anything from 30 minutes to six hours. For the development of applications, we use the SDLC model. When our testing is complete, we deploy the application. We have a team of six to eight people for implementation. They are from the product team and the support team. They are software developers at different levels.

In terms of maintenance, it requires upgrades. It is a timely activity, and it happens once or twice a year. We do not have a separate team for maintenance. The same team involved in its deployment takes care of its maintenance.

We are able to build applications for our clients, and they are also buying them. So, we have definitely seen an ROI.

We are an enterprise. So, its price is bearable for us,  but I am not sure about the small industry. It might be expensive for them.

It is a promising tool. It is very helpful for my day-to-day work. For automation applications, this is the best solution. Its drag-and-drop functionality and visualizations make the work easy. It is a very good tool for me.

I would rate it a nine out of ten because I'm very impressed with this tool.

My previous company was in the banking sector, and we had done automation with websites, UI, SAP, Excel files, and PDF. In my current company, it is being used for finance and HR. We have ERP, CRM, chatbots, etc. We are using this solution to integrate different systems.

I use UiPath Studio to develop the code, and I use UiPath Orchestrator to publish my work. We have our own UAT systems to test the code. We can install the UiPath in the test environment and find all the compilation errors in the debug mode and fix them. We also have version control. If we upload a version and it doesn't work, we can downgrade the version. Everything is tracked in UiPath Orchestrator.

We are using it on-premise. In my previous company, it was on the cloud, and we accessed it through the cloud. 

UiPath Academy courses have been helpful for me. There were lots of activities that I didn't know about, and UiPath Academy was helpful for that. There are multiple ways to do an activity, and UiPath Academy helps you to find out those activities. When you start using it, you can find out which activity will work the best for you. The courses are interactive and not boring with just videos or PDFs. They have a mix of PDFs, videos, and interactions. It is fun and interesting if you have a passion for it.

I found the UiPath community very helpful. At the beginning of my career, I had lots of doubts, and I posted them in the community. We had got an unknown error, and we posted our query there thinking that there must be at least one person who has had the same issue. They solved the issue quickly. It was a quick response. If you post a question, sometimes, you can also get a response within five minutes.

I use attended automation, and it has helped to scale RPA benefits in our organization for processes that require human-robot collaboration. We have a process for reconciling bank statements. When the finance department is done with their files, they send them over to me by email, and I have to start the process manually from UiPath Orchestrator. It needs human interaction. It is a monthly process, and we don't want to automatically trigger based on something.

We use its AI functionality a little bit. We have automation for processing invoices that are in different formats. We are using an ML model to train and replicate the output based on the incoming PDFs. We don't have to manually identify the PDF format and process it. Its AI is very helpful in the case of dynamic files where when a PDF is in one format, we want to process it in a certain way, and when it is in another format, we want to process it in a different way. We have automation to automatically identify the fields and then process the documents accordingly. It is helpful in the case of dynamic files. 

It has reduced human errors. We have a process to send emails to the end-users based on the training they complete in our LMS. I did the automation, and the SME was very happy with that automation. She used to have lots of manual errors where she might miss one email id or put an incorrect email id. With the bot, we automated it and added exceptions, etc. It is more stable now, and there are fewer human errors. It is also very helpful for data entry work where there are lots of chances of human errors. All this can be avoided with a bot.

It has freed up employee time. The time saved depends on the complexity and the length of the process. For our LMS use case, the SME used to take around one hour every morning, and now, she doesn't have to do that. Even if she is on leave, our bot is available 24/7/365. 

The UI Explorer in the UiPath Studio is valuable. We can get a unique and dynamic selector for every element in the UI, which is helpful for me in finding out a particular UI element. Most of my automations have had UI interactions. So, I found it the most helpful feature.

It is pretty easy to build automations. I am from an engineering background, but even if you don't have much coding or programming knowledge, you can easily learn and use this tool. I used UiPath Academy to learn about this tool, and they have got a detailed explanation about everything. So, even if you don't have prior experience, you can easily use this tool.

They give updates every year. Before the new features go live, they put them out in the Community edition. When the features are stable, they release them. They have got a helpful community forum. If you have any roadblocks, you can post your question there and you will get a response, sometimes even within five minutes, depending on the complexity of the question.

When I started working with UiPath, there were no activities for SAP, but in the version that I'm using right now, there are SAP activities or SAP modules. Previously, I had to code everything from user login to user logout, but now, all the activities are available. I just have to drag and drop and give the username and password. I don't have to do it from scratch. It would be great if they can include activities for all of the most common CRMs and ERPs. They can integrate it with different activities for the most common systems.

I have been using this solution for around five years.

It is mostly stable. We recently upgraded our UiPath Orchestrator, and we stopped receiving the emails that we used to receive in the morning about the status of our bots and jobs. I created a ticket, and they said that the particular version or update that I had wasn't stable. They provided me with a different version that was stable.

It is great. In my previous company, one single bot was doing all the processes. In this company, we have six bots, and every day, around 50 processes are running. So, it is scalable.

For the email issue that we had, we created a ticket, and they responded the next day. The response time was less, and they also provided me with the correct solution.

Positive

When I started my career, I started working in Python and website development with Django. When I heard about UiPath and RPA, I felt that it is going to be the future. So, I switched to RPA. UiPath is the first tool I used, and I'm still using it.

I have used Power Automate from Microsoft, but I found UiPath much better because it has a single package with UiPath Orchestrator, Studio, etc. It has everything in a complete package.

I have also used Blue Prism. Blue Prism is more expensive. I used its Community Edition recently because I wanted to explore other tools, and I felt that its UI is not as good as UiPath Studio. They both have drag-and-drop functionality, but Blue Prism is not as user-friendly as UiPath. I have never used Automation Anywhere, but I have heard from my peers who are from the same background that it needs programming knowledge.

It was a bit complex because we have two virtual machines, and each one had three robots in it. We had to do remote desktop on the virtual machine to run the automation. We have recently improved all the processes in our company. They are now dynamic, and they can run in the background. Even if the virtual machine is closed, they will run.

It was implemented in-house.

We have definitely seen an ROI. It replaces the manual work and allows us to do other productive tasks rather than doing repetitive and manual tasks every day. If someone costs $50 per hour, and we are able to save one hour of manual work every day for that person, it is a substantial saving.

It is a bit expensive, but it is cheaper than Blue Prism. We have six robots in total. There are no other costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

I love this tool. They have been improving it every year based on the user experience, or they have been releasing a stable version for any bugs.

I would rate it a ten out of ten.

We implement automation for clients to create savings by cutting the number of FTEs. We've used UiPath for various kinds of automation, including mainframes, browsers, Excel, account payables and receivables, fixed assets, healthcare projects, HR projects, reporting robots, and IT services projects. 

Recently, we did a massive US taxation project that spanned eleven months and covered enterprise and individual taxation extensions. It was a huge project that yielded a lot of savings. 

If I want to leverage a specific UiPath use case, I build small use cases around that particular feature and try to envision a product out of it. I've had several hackathons and general discussion calls because I'm a solution architect. Everybody wants to work on apps, and UiPath is comparable to the blank canvas apps that Microsoft PowerApps provides. 

When we had an automation program that involved 200-plus automations, we created around 100-plus libraries, saving us thousands of hours of development time. UiPath is designed to save time. The object repository was liberating because it enabled us to move from simple to extendable libraries. UiPath's apps increase our business by helping us leverage the UI layer in a way we couldn't in the past.

It gives us the ability to share data between systems in healthcare applications.. However, it's still tricky because so many system controls are in place. That's not a limitation of UiPath per se, but every department has restrictions on passing data to other departments. They have their own due diligence in place, limiting data flow from one system to another. UiPath gives us the fluidity and freedom to do it, but the limitations within each domain often get in the way.

Let's use claims data, for example. The data regulation team won't be too keen on allowing the marketing department to use data from the claims division to generate new business. The data flow from one department to another isn't that fluid. Organizational controls rather than system controls bind it.

We should look at each separately in terms of AI and machine learning. If we want to do data analysis, we have to call an inverse Python script, which is a little difficult. However, we can host our own model, and that's good. The ability to use that opened some doors. 

At the same time, it's helpful to have out-of-the-box features like Document Understanding and an ML passer there. The integration is quite fluid. We can directly call a Document Understanding model and then give it to ML passer and then get the results out. It's smoother for integration. The client has to focus on one particular software or multi-stack that they're comfortable with. UiPath has opened some opportunities in that sense. It made life easier because the capability is sitting inside the platform itself. 

UiPath is a separate solution, but it can talk to other services and doesn't restrict you to the passer, but that's how the ML features within Document Understanding help us. Custom model hosting and the AI center also help. We don't have to host the custom model somewhere else and call that service then pass it and do the post-processing within the system. It isn't a third-party service, so we know it's sitting within the system. If any issues are also there, we know where to diagnose and deposit them.

UiPath Orchestrator is a treasure, and UiPath Studio includes various packages to integrate with solutions like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Excel. They also have mainframes, web automation, and the API package. 

Orchestrator contains a lot of useful apps, data services, and machine templates. From a usability perspective, the most valuable aspects are its custom activities, libraries, and object repositories. In terms of integration, I like the ability to use APIs and call automations from UiPath apps. The most valuable feature from a human-in-the-loop perspective is the action center. 

Our customers appreciate the support that UiPath provides, and they don't want to go with a third-party vendor like Microsoft Visio, Form Recognizer, or Google Cloud. They're hesitant because some integration is required. The lead times for closing queries are longer with third-party vendors. For instance, it takes me about two or three weeks to set up Document Understanding in my project. But it took us three months to establish Form Recognizer with a client.  

In addition to the out-of-the-box functionality UiPath provides, it can host our custom models. That's something that comes in handy when we need a custom model. So far, we haven't taken it to production yet, but we are still baselining the technology. At the moment, we are doing a baseline project where we try to perform four POCs simultaneously. We are baselining Google Cloud Platform, Azure, and AWS with UiPath's AI center and machine learning services and comparing the four.

UiPath's performance could be improved. UiPath's framework was built on top of .NET Core. It was a 32-bit platform initially, but they recently introduced a 64-bit version. Let's say I have a huge machine with 64 gigs of RAM. If I have a server machine and want to use multi-threading to extend my automation and multitask, the design won't allow me. I can't separate things into multiple processes. 

The platform is designed to go step by step. Parallel activities are not truly parallel, but it creates the impression that it's running in parallel. For example, if you're on the left segment within a parallel activity, and there is some wait time, it doesn't stay there. It goes to the middle and then to the right. It schedules tasks based on a time-to-completion window and then takes them from end to end. 

UiPath optimizes the time and doesn't let the CPU idle, but it doesn't give you multi-threading or asynchronous methodologies. These are available in the C# and .NET framework but absent in this platform. It's a step-by-step process where you go through each activity. A casual developer or coder who wants to leverage UiPath should be able to. I'm not saying that the working code is not there, but it's quite basic. It doesn't support functions or asynchronous methodology. 

UiPath is attempting to make it easier for a citizen developer to automate processes. They don't have to know how to code, but a citizen developer can't do it when the use case becomes more complex. When they advertise that one doesn’t need to know coding to program bots, that's only true for easy or intermediate use cases. We still need a programmer for anything beyond medium complexity.

The marketing could be improved because the methodologies went from waterfall COE to an automated operation model. However, people are trying to do automation in an Agile model, but it's not exactly executable that way. When customers see the demos from UiPath, they expect that the results will be significant, and they are. However, we might try to automate something, and we’re unsure whether it can be automated because there's a gray area. There's always a 20 to 30 percent chance automation might fail. And that gray area is something that I want UI to focus on.

They have tried this with StudioX by adding checklists. The industry is not following this practice, though. I'm not sure how they should ensure that it gets followed within the platform, but the delivery model needs to improve. It's still niche. 

Another thing to consider is the work-life balance of the developer and the solution architect. The overall challenge of automation tends to become exponentially complex over time. For example, let's look at one aspect: the account tables. I can go to the account tables from a simple PDF perspective. The PDF is readable by the board, and the solution can extract all the data and do the account tables within SAP or Ariba and mix all of it and then submit a report to the business.

This can be extended to intelligent document processing using form recognizer and custom models, then passers, pre-processing, post-processing, and sending the report to the business. The complexity of it can be extended quite a lot. There should be a framework or methodology in place to hedge the bet so that it's not too complex and doesn't disrupt the life of a developer, solution architect, or business analyst. 

If the automation becomes too complex and challenging, our support team won't be able to sustain it in the long run. Once the development team is gone, the automation will die two or three months down the line. It's a balance to manage the complexity and extent of our automation.  

We've been using UiPath for a little more than four years. 

Resource utilization is one area where UiPath is lacking. UiPath says that the solution will run fine on a machine with four gigs of RAM, and they recommend horizontal scaling, but I suggest a mix of horizontal and vertical scaling. 

I've seen implementations on giant machines with high-density VMs and five users logged into the same VM. Therefore, the resource utilization isn't optimal. The RAM and CPU are not completely utilized. It only executes processes on a segment of the resources. I think that can improve. 

I rate UiPath's support nine out of ten. UiPath's support is excellent. They triage issues based on severity, and there is a clearly defined close time and lead time. Their support engineers will follow up with you 24/7 over phone, SMS, or email. 

The scope of support isn't limited to problems with the UiPath platform. We can reach out to UiPath if we are having problems automating a third-party application. They will help us if they have experience with the app. If they don't have experience, they baseline the issue and go through the log to do whatever they can to help us. We've had a great experience with UiPath's support, and our clients feel the same. Support is one reason UiPath is dominating the market. 

Positive

Most of the RPA solutions are fairly similar. The inspiration for UiPath's object repository was taken from Blue Prism. UiPath's integration services are like the connectors in Microsoft Power Platform. I'm not saying that UiPath is exactly copying everybody, but they're taking the best features from every solution and bringing them in-house. 

Other platforms are dominating in some areas. For example, Power Apps is more mature than UiPath Apps. I'm trying to add value based on my experience, and Power Platform's connectors should also bring value to UiPath. In the end, it shouldn't be redundant.

Every time we deploy the solution, we use an automation operation model. It's a massive document with policies defined on every level, from design to development, UATS, prods, escalations, business, teams, team leads, Agile boards, and reporting. 

All of that is documented from the start. We use that model to layout deliverables needing to be fulfilled. Once deployment progresses from one step to another, we have a way to document our progress. We've gone from a theoretical model to a UI model. It's not purely Agile or KanBan, though Agile framework and KanBan breakdown structures are there. However, it doesn't follow a scrum methodology. 

We're not on a two or three-week release cycle. One sprint is the entire use case from build to development and then from development to UAT to production. It's a custom delivery model, and it's working. Still, I feel it can be improved. 

Our clients have seen significant returns using UiPath, but their marketing could be improved. 

I'm aware of how UiPath's pricing compares to other tools, but it's hard because the offerings are different. It's not apples and oranges per se, but it's comparing an average tool to an excellent one. UiPath provides enormous value, so the licensing is justified.

I rate UiPath nine out of ten. It isn't perfect, but they constantly improve and surprise me. At the moment, I give it a nine, but it might be eight in the future. If you feel like some process will cause a lot of headaches, position it later in the cycle of automation. If you can save resources by automating, you should go for it, but you should be smart when deciding your use cases.

If you're thinking about implementing UiPath, I recommend having a design team that understands automation. You need people with some experience who know how automation is done. It requires some business analysts with at least a month of experience on UiPath from a citizen developer perspective. It would help quite a lot in terms of establishing automations that are relatively complex. Try an 80-20 approach operating principle when planning your automation.

Our primary use case for UiPath is the automation of some of our processes. The main departments that have been affected are accounts payable and accounts receivable.

We are developing expertise internally. At least for the first year, we worked with an outside consultancy to provide us UiPath development. They were working with the business team here closely, but also helping to train our people.

The main parts that we've got are in the area of invoice automation, but we also have some bots that deal with the automation of some of our engineering applications within Oracle.

We run six bots, primarily dealing with invoice automation from our suppliers. That is working in conjunction with Abbyy. So, part of the process is UiPath and part of it is Abbyy FlexiCapture. We also have some engineering applications in Oracle that we also use it for. Examples of this are updating bills of materials, or printing out invoices.

The key savings and kind of the real business case of the project were to do with invoice automation.

UiPath allows us to implement end-to-end automation. We utilize the Task Capture functionality for some of the initial parts. Then, building the bots is done with Studio, and Orchestrator is used for monitoring. It's complete, end-to-end automation.

The invoice reconciliation has been very useful. We now process 80% of our invoices automatically, of which 80% of those get no human contact. The remaining 20% of the ones that are automatically processed are either exceptions or they are certain expense items or the price doesn't match up. In this case, there's some human intervention, but we are getting a high percentage of things going through automatically.

This automation has enabled us to move some headcounts into different, higher value-adding activities instead. We have freed up approximately 10 full-time employees by using UiPath. We didn't let anybody go. Rather, they've been moved into other more creative roles.

The most valuable feature of UiPath is its usability. It's very easy to understand. I think in general, some parts of the process were difficult to grasp, and there were challenges along the way. But now at this more mature part, it's definitely increased employee satisfaction. People have been able to move into higher value-added, more enjoyable tasks.

We've got a group of citizen developers that work on UiPath. These are people that weren't developers but given a bit of training and its ease of use, they have been able to utilize it.

Both members of my team and I have used the UiPath Academy, and the training has been really good. It has enabled us to utilize the citizen developer approach. It is because of the conciseness and quality of the teaching that we have been able to employ citizen developers. We didn't really envision that as something that was possible, but given the ease and usability of the tool and the quality of the training, that's been possible for us.

UiPath has definitely helped to reduce human error. The main process that has gone through automation is the accounts payable process. Now, some of our suppliers may offer discounts and stuff like that. So, it's reduced the time for us to get things into the system. We've got increased visibility, and we've reduced the number of people working on this process, ultimately meaning cost savings as well.

The one negative that this solution has is its reporting. I found it a bit confusing because it was suggested to us that we use Elastic and Kibana for reporting. To me, this seems a little bit fragmented. I understand that UiPath has the Insights feature, but it wasn't what they recommended for us and I think the reason is that it isn't powerful enough for what we want to do. Ideally, we should not have to utilize other tools for reporting.

When it comes to speeding up our process, it has not made any impact. This is because the licensing and agreement part is quite time-consuming. Where we may have wanted to scale up quicker, we've been limited by signing contracts or getting things moving in that regard. As such, it's not really sped up our procurement process or enabled us to scale as quickly as we'd like when we wanted to.

We scale up some parts of the system quicker and we were seeing large delays in processing some of the documents that we wanted. This problem was that we didn't have the hardware or software ready for us to scale. So, in that regard, we've not found the ability to scale beneficial.

The error handling is in need of improvement. We'd had a problem tracking when errors occur, and troubleshooting how things are captured in production.

I have been working with UiPath for between 18 months and two years.

My impressions of the stability are largely positive. However, I'd like to see more emphasis placed on error handling for production.

With respect to scalability, I'd like to see it be made more fluid. It was a bit slow for us to be able to scale. If it was more elastic or there was a different way of billing it instead of having to sign up we had to sign up for a year-long license, it would have been useful. It wasn't that we minded the length of the contract or the cost. Rather, it meant that there were contracts that had to be signed, etc. 

With the processes that have already been implemented now finished, we're actively looking at where else it can be deployed. There is even interest from the executive team. They would like to see it used further.

UiPath has an active community but we've not really engaged with them very much. When we were in need of help, we contacted support and our account executives, but not the community.

The technical support has been really useful. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

In general, they've been very responsive, and easy to get them on a call if required. I've been really happy with the SLAs they've provided to us.

Positive

This was our first RPA implementation.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. As we are using the on-premises solution, we've had to invest in additional hardware.

We used a consultant to assist us with our deployment. We definitely found it beneficial because it gave us experience. We didn't have any experience with RPA, and they helped us to get off the ground and provided some best practices.

There are three members of our team that are responsible for bot deployment and maintenance. One is a UiPath developer, another is a support developer, and the third is a business analyst.

We have definitely seen a return on investment.

UiPath has helped to both speed up and reduce the cost of our digital transformation. Compared to traditional automation approaches, it's been a lot quicker and less costly to implement. It very minorly affected us in terms of needing IT support. For example, we've had to work with our Oracle applications team, as well as our infrastructure team, in getting some of those parts set up. Overall, I've not found it to be burdensome.

UiPath has definitely saved on costs for the organization. I think that initially, there was some skepticism. Obviously, there were significant implementation costs but now, we're definitely seeing the fruits of that. 

Our total savings at the moment is between 50,000 and 100,000 per year.

The licensing fees are billed annually.

The company evaluated Automation Anywhere and Microsoft Power Automate before choosing UiPath. I can't speak to the pros and cons of the different options because the decision was made just before I became involved.

Overall, in terms of ease of building automation, our experience has been positive.

UiPath has features available for attended automation, although all of our automations are unattended. Similarly, we don't yet use the solution's AI functionality but it's something that we're really interested in starting to use.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing this product is to ensure that the processes they want to automate are standard and standardized. That was a key barrier that we realized, and it delayed things for us by quite a bit.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.