Blue Prism Overview

Blue Prism is the #3 ranked solution in our list of best RPA tools. It is most often compared to UiPath: Blue Prism vs UiPath

What is Blue Prism?

In this digital era where start-ups are constantly disrupting markets, only the most agile and innovative enterprises survive and thrive. At Blue Prism, we pioneered Robotic Process Automation (RPA), emerging as the trusted and secure intelligent automation choice for the Fortune 500 and public-sector market. Now we bring you connected-RPA supported by the Digital Exchange (DX) app store—marrying internal entrepreneurship with the power of crowdsourced innovation.

More than 1,000 major enterprise customers leverage Blue Prism's Digital Workforce, empowering their people to automate billions of transactions while returning hundreds of millions of hours of work back to the business. Visit www.blueprism.com.

Blue Prism Buyer's Guide

Download the Blue Prism Buyer's Guide including reviews and more. Updated: March 2021

Blue Prism Customers

Coca-Cola, Walgreens, American Express, Royal Bank of Canada, Pfizer, Shop Direct, O2, Siemens, Ascension Healthcare, Jaguar Land Rover

Blue Prism Video

Pricing Advice

What users are saying about Blue Prism pricing:

"The pricing is really good for an enterprise-level solution. It's quite scalable and it's quite comparable with the market."
"We really don't bear the costs. The cost is borne by the customer. It runs into about $100,000 per year per customer for Blue Prism. We normally budget around $30,000 for the first year for the hardware, setup, and people cost."
"It is a bit higher in cost as compared to Automation Anywhere and UiPath. The rate also differs from client to client. Margins are also important when it comes to costing and licensing. There are some additional costs involved besides the standard licensing costs. You have the development team cost, which includes the project manager, development team, analyst, and testers. You also need a team manager. You also have the tools cost, architecture cost, platform cost, and the licensing cost of each bot."
"With Blue Prism, there are no additional fees"
"The billing is on a yearly basis. They send us the bill every year. My business unit is billed by the technology team, so I don't know exactly how much they pay. In my business unit, we have our first-year license costs, and then we have our ongoing costs. Our bots cost projected per license is $8,600. Our projected support cost for every year is about $38,000. Our operation agent costs anywhere between $50,000 to $55,000, so the saving is there, but it is still kind of expensive for us, but I'm looking at it from the technology kind of billing us for it. This is the cost that we have for our technology team, which is different from the licensing of Blue Prism."

"Other than your infrastructure, in terms of servers that you have to set up, I don't think that there are any costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."

"Our licensing fees are approximately $5,000 USD per year."

RPA Blue Prism Reviews

Nancy_Sachdeva

Process Automation Lead at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

May 12, 2020

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Helps us with quality-control, compliance, error-avoidance, and time-savings

What is our primary use case?

Across different business areas, the use cases differ. The back-office, for example, are more along the lines of reconciliation of data, the back-end operations. We have use cases in our dispatching department as well, where use cases can be like data is gathered for traders to make intelligent decisions, or nominations power plants to the website. Some use cases in our procurement area and our financial services. Our goal is to free our employees to do more value-added tasks, while the robots do the manual activities. That way, employees can move on to more sophisticated tasks. The robot does… more »

Pros and Cons

"The ease of use is really good because a lot of business people, who have some idea about logic and who can think in logic, can configure things, because there is no coding."

"Blue Prism has been a little bit slow when it comes to the commitments on their roadmap. They had some delays last year, so I hope they make it up this year... For example, they were launching a Decipher tool. It was delayed by more than a year. It has still not launched."

What other advice do I have?

My advice is "go for it." It's good. We are satisfied that we have achieved with the tool, and we are continuing with it. Having said that, I would advise that you are free to explore the market and do a study, but in the end all the tools are very similar. It's more about how you will handle it in your organization. That is what is more important. There is not just the tooling around it. There is also the people management aspect, and process management. So there's a lot that goes along with it; more than just the tool. One of the things that I like about Blue Prism is that their operating…

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Sharad Soni

Director Of Innovation at Quantum AI

May 25, 2019

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Assists us in risk management through our compliance to regulations

What is our primary use case?

I use Blue Prism mainly for backend operations where I don't need a lot of manual intervention coming in. Blue Prism is mainly for backend operations like auditing, reporting, compliance, and regulatory requirements.

Pros and Cons

"If there is a task that Blue Prism cannot do out of the box, Blue Prism provides me the facility of designing one and integrating it into the application. This process is called Visual Basic Objects."

"I believe that there could be more community support, or there could be more support for developers like us from Blue Prism. Blue Prism provides a lot of documentation, but there is a lack of support."

What other advice do I have?

Most of my customers, which are large financial services/institutions, supply chain, and logistics companies, are now looking to scale up by a factor of 10. We have a customer who is a bank in South East Asia. We have developed about 32 bots and now they are looking at around 200+ more to be deployed. It depends on how much it costs them to automate, how much budget they have, how much time they have, and what the benefit is that will come in. Most of the time the benefits are huge as long as they are able to create the budget for it. There's only one piece of advice, and it's not dependent on…

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Free Report: Blue Prism Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Blue Prism. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2021.

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Vijay Moorthy

Senior Business Analyst and Consultant at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Dec 21, 2020

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A valuable enterprise-level tool with the highest level of security, good scalability, and an option to code separately and write a script

What is our primary use case?

Our use cases are account receivables and account payable. In insurance, our use cases are for vetting beneficiaries, upgrading client portfolios, and updating customer's policies.

Pros and Cons

"The entire tool is valuable because it is an enterprise tool. It is on par with other tools like Automation Anywhere or UiPath with the OCR/ICR facilities, analytics, and the entire package for enterprise-level security. It has the highest level of security as compared to any other tool."

"There are a lot of things coming up, such as Discovery Bot and Process Discovery. A lot of other aspects are also maturing. We have definitely started using it for our clients, and it is maturing as a solution, but it is all about how you integrate the enterprise with all the automation projects, such as your chatbot, Conversational AI, and robotics. How they are integrated and talk to each other creates a very good business case with all three aspects. The next level should be about integrating it with other automation tools as well. It can have integration with other tools or automation projects, such as your chatbot, Conversational AI, and robotics."

What other advice do I have?

You should suggest a tool only after you study the architecture of an enterprise. Every tool has its own features, upside, and downside. It is not about necessarily going for Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, or UiPath. For implementing a solution, you definitely need to look in the market to find out what suits you. You can then go for it. Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, or UiPath are on par. There is not much difference in those tools at an enterprise level. The early development cost and the cost of the platform differ in these three tools. There are some clients who say that "We want only…

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reviewer1348122

Sr Mrg, IT at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Aug 23, 2020

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Has a lot of flexibility to integrate with other enterprise applications but it should be more web-based

What is our primary use case?

We are a relatively new company, which specializes primarily in finance. I believe roughly 5% of our company uses this solution, which is quite low. Some fields in our company require the use of this solution daily, but other fields use it only monthly. So, we use it on-demand. When we initially started using Bue Prism, it was actually acquired by the financial department in our company, but soon after, it was put across as a legacy to IT. We then expanded our use cases to other areas of IT throughout our company, but primarily, our major footprint in Baxter has been in finance. Blue Prism… more »

Pros and Cons

"Blue Prism has a lot of flexibility to integrate with other enterprise applications"

"I have been speaking directly with Blue Prism's engagement manager about making the solution more web-based. It's not quite there yet. Currently, the latest version is still under the beta version, so, as a customer, we don't have access to it. They are making it much more web-based, but for now, everything you have to log into requires an enterprise server — It's still more client-based than web-based."

What other advice do I have?

I think it's very important for an organization to evaluate what kind of use cases they have: what's their roadmap and how long is the journey that they're looking at. As the market says, most organizations are looking for this digital transformation, and Blue RP is only part of it. For any organization that needs to adapt to a digital transformation, automation RP does play a good role. They need to evaluate what exactly they want to do and then engage with Blue Prism about how to go about doing it. Remember to always bring in the experts in the market at the beginning of your journey, and…

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reviewer1488525

Business Consultant at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Feb 15, 2021

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Eliminates repetitive tasks and can interact with different systems, but it is expensive and not very easy and intuitive to code higher intelligent actions

What is our primary use case?

We use it mostly to mimic what our operation agents are repetitively doing so that they don't have to do the same thing over and over again. We are using it to eliminate the repetitive tasks that require no thinking or intelligent decision making. We are using the latest version of Blue Prism.

Pros and Cons

"Its ability to talk to different systems that we have is a valuable feature. We use Pega, which is like a credit card processing system. We also use a Debit Process Manager, which is like the Visa debit application. In the bank, we have credit card and debit card sections, and we need to kind of investigate some of the transactions when customers are complaining about the charges. Blue Prism can log in to a different system to perform the exact actions that the agents are doing. This feature has been very helpful. Its ability to engage with external systems and websites is also very valuable. Each of our RPA projects could go across different systems. We have an in-house banking system. We also use the Visa network, and we have to go to different sites to do a lot of data scraping to ensure the data in our system matches the data in the Visa systems, and we just deal with some of the charges."

"It isn't very easy or intuitive for our developers to program the bot to make intelligent decisions. A bot, for the lack of a better word, is stupid, and it can only do what we program it to do. It cannot make intelligent decisions. For example, if we are reviewing Uber charges, they could be posting their transactions under different corporation names, even though they are under the same parent company or group. A human can easily understand that it is the name of the same company, and it just has an asterisk or space, but a bot cannot do that. When a bot cannot complete the transaction, it sends out an exception rate, business exception, or system exception for a human to do a manual review. The exception rate has been high because the bots cannot make decisions that we think are very simple, which is understandable because that's how they were programmed. There is potential in utilizing the higher intelligence side of the tool, but it is not easy to code higher intelligent actions. It is a very lengthy process to get the provisioning to ensure that it is kind of doing what it needs to do. Provisioning involves multiple things, and it is quite complicated and not the best experience, but it is not just because of Blue Prism. Blue Prism is easy, but it takes a long time to onboard into our in-house system."

What other advice do I have?

I would rate Blue Prism a six out of ten, which I consider as a good rating. Seven is very good, eight is excellent, nine is outstanding, and ten is perfect as per my standards.

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Gowtham Thotapalli

Solutions Architect at ValueMomentum

Jun 3, 2019

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Integration with Outlook and OCR capabilities have helped reduce effort spent on mundane tasks

What is our primary use case?

We were using this solution for two main purposes. The first was to leverage the OCR capabilities, and the second was integration with Outlook to check email and retrieve attachments from email. We were also looking at the workflow component, and how to orchestrate the bot and the process flow within Blue Prism. This is all being done as a pilot project by one of our departments to assess the impact of implementing RPA.

Pros and Cons

"The way you design the flow and configure the activities for the bot is very useful if you are working with any of the BPM or local platforms."

"I would like to see wider integration with other products."

What other advice do I have?

We performed quite a few POCs to help understand the platform. One of the most important things while working with RPA is choosing the right process, understanding the process, and ensuring that you pick the right process for RPA activities. That was the key to our success. The process should not be too complex, and not be too simple. If it is too complex then it will take too much time to implement. At the same time, it should cater to your immediate needs so that you can demonstrate the tool's features to the leadership. My advice is to do a pilot project before adopting any RPA platform…

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Andrew_Wright

Executive Manager: Shared and Support Services at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 14, 2019

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Easy to use and has helped us to automate the majority of work in some areas

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use for this solution is to automate and run our mundane operational processes.

Pros and Cons

"The most valuable feature is the design studio and its ease of use."

"A feature that I would like to see in the next release is the ability to easily call on the robots to fulfill part of the process, and be run by the users in the business, where the robot can simply be activated rather than running mass processes from a control room."

What other advice do I have?

For anybody who is implementing this solution, it is important that you do not implement a process that is inherently flawed. Especially for more complex processes, you have to figure out how to solve those and re-engineer them. You want to enhance the processes. Secondly, ensure that your design team is allowed to complete the design and move onto the next process. You do not want to have them repeatedly called back to enhance the process, because that slows down your rollout strategy. You need to get buy-in from the business around what you're going to automate, and how you're going to do…

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reviewer1378623

Solutions Architect at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 9, 2020

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Easy to use, good debugging capability, and saves us time on repetitive tasks

What is our primary use case?

We are primarily using Blue Prism for automating repetitive Excel tasks and preparing reports. This involves downloading reports and data from websites, followed by data massaging. Most of the automation is within Excel.

Pros and Cons

"It is not just for coders, as you can have a diagrammatic representation of the process."

"The assisted automation functionality needs improvement."

What other advice do I have?

This is a good RPA product and definitely one that I recommend. When I want to automate stuff with the web site, perform web scraping, or interacting with Excel and SAP, it is quite stable. The bot does not just fail. Once you capture the underlying application control, it's there and will not just break. I've seen other RPA tools wherein you do the automation, do the recording, and once you replay it, it doesn't work because of some random lag in the timing of the application. Similarly, if something changes then it may not work. In Blue Prism, you have complete control over that. Overall, I…

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Robotic Process Automation (RPA)