Automation Anywhere (AA) vs IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Automation Anywhere (AA) and IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Automation Anywhere (AA) vs. IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Report (Updated: March 2024).
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: IBM digital business automation with UiPath vs IBM RPA with Automation Anywhere?
Answer: Sincerely we are just using UiPath, I haven't tryied Automation Anywhere however I've heard it's easy to use too.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The support team is good and is able to resolve the issues or any challenges we encounter.""Automation Anywhere is very good for rapid development. It has all the capabilities in terms of giving a stable automation framework. It has very cool technical capabilities, like MetaBots, dev controls, and object cloning.""The best part about A2019 is its ease of use. You don't need to be a coding champ or an expert to use and implement A2019 in automating tasks. It's very easy to learn, tweak, and implement in your day-to-day tasks, especially features like capture/record is completely marvelous.""Automation Anywhere is excellent for integrating with other solutions. It provides the ability to leverage the APIs of third-party solutions. We use some of the already built-in MetaBots to then scrape the data and manipulate independent data that we need in order to integrate with other third-party solutions.""The most valuable feature is IQ Bot, as it allowed us to train it to extract important logistical information from customer PDF documents, irrespective of the format.""it helps to save time when doing processes. E.g., when you do a manual process for eight hours, that time is saved because the bot will do that task for you. The process owners will be able to do the analysis part. The repetitive/manual part will be done by the robot.""It is one of the popular RPA vendors offering powerful & user-friendly RPA capabilities to automate any complex tasks. It is one of the "Revolutionary Technology" that changes the way the enterprise operates. This tool combines conventional RPA with intellectual elements like natural language understanding and reading any unstructured data.""The tool feature I found the most valuable is Metabot, as we can include the DLLs that are proprietary written code in .NET or other technologies."

More Automation Anywhere (AA) Pros →

"I think simplicity is key. One of the things that we've noticed is how our developers have been able to quickly adopt the platform; but not only the developers or the techy people, also the business.""It's user-friendly; even non-technical people can program bots using drag-and-drop functionalities.""If you have a business process, and once you have automated that process, you have a readily available workflow in place.""IBM Robotic Process Automation is very easy to use.""The most valuable feature is the ability to automate mundane tasks. This improves efficiency, reliability, etc. You can form critical operations which can be highly automated.""The initial setup is very easy.""The solution is very user-friendly.""It's not inclusive, in terms of automation, you can just do it standalone, in its own silo. It's not going to force your existing system or teams, your admin teams, to create new IDs for you or even force them to create new services or APIs for you or expose something from there. They can just keep the way they are doing it right now, but you still automate it."

More IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Pros →

Cons
"Product support for our customers needs improvement. They should increase the support personnel.""The IQ Bot could use improvement.""We have encountered some issues in the actions like Terminal Emulator-> Send Key -> Page Down/Up not working.""I am looking forward to seeing writing on Linux in the web and WorkBatch in the next release.""IQ Bot has some limitations that should be improved in future releases.""We run these bots in multiple environments from staging to development to production. We find usually in the production environment when we run the bots for them to be stable for a week or two. After a week or two, we see some glitches here and there, though the application doesn't change much. This is one feature which I want Automation Anywhere to work on: Increasing stability.""The OCR component should allow integration with 3rd party OCR. This way we can use the best of breed solution along with AA or allow better control over OCR packages to be customized.""The scheduling is a little difficult at times. Rather than setting up individual instances, it would be really nice if we had the ability to set repetitive jobs easily. Right now, if you want a job to run every 15 minutes, you have to schedule it a lot of times. I'd rather have the ability to just say 'run every 15 minutes.'"

More Automation Anywhere (AA) Cons →

"The users should be allowed to create folders in Control Center.""We would like more focus on understanding AI and how it can be used to manage exception handling.""There are certain limitations in the solution for screen reading.""The scalability of the solution can be challenging.""Capturing GUI operations is very easy, but capturing IBM Logistics automation is hard. It does not always work with browsers or automotive applications like SAP.""Extensibility is the key, especially in terms of the Recorders feature that we have. That should be browser independent. Enhance it because some people have Chrome, some have Internet Explorer, etc. Also, integration with PDFs: Not just the ability to read information from PDFs but the ability to write information from PDFs, make it secure, sign it, etc. Finally, if they can allow a token exchange inside the tool itself, that would help.""We can use its inbuilt activities, and it's a complete package, but just like ElectroNeek, a limitation is that we have to depend on its inbuilt activities. We can't include our own activities or we can't introduce other activities.""The product must be promoted more."

More IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Pricing is too high for small-scale groups. The Control Room yearly fee is high, making it difficult to break even."
  • "Automation Anywhere is competitive... Pega is somewhat comparable, but Pega also requires a lot more infrastructure and a lot more experience to get up and running."
  • "Automation Anywhere is costlier than the general competition. That is aligned with the share of the market it has."
  • "They're very flexible around pricing and licensing."
  • "They give us a good deal on the licensing because we bundle and customize things. If you ask to get a bulk business deal, you will receive more benefit. If you take other products from the suite, like IQ Bot, you can also receive a deal on the licensing."
  • "We just did a round of price comparison on a global scale and found it's so hard to compare the license prices. But, Automation Anywhere, in general, is on the same price level as the other vendors, a bit lower in some cases."
  • "If you look at the capital expenditure, Automation Anywhere is number two to UiPath. But if you take a long-term view, on a scalable model of a large number of bots coming out, it slowly goes on to become the costliest tool. There is something they can do about that. The capital expenditure goes out right at the point of buying the tool. For Automation Anywhere, I would need to spend $20,000. UiPath can give me something for $6,000, while Blue Prism will come in at $300,000."
  • "It's cheaper than other similar solutions."
  • More Automation Anywhere (AA) Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "IBM licensing is annual and based on Virtual Processor Cores (VPC). This provides flexibility as part of the containerization environment."
  • "The license is paid annually."
  • "The product has a yearly licensing fee."
  • "The pricing is reasonable for this solution."
  • "I rate the pricing ten out of ten. So, the pricing is very good for me."
  • "The product is reasonably priced compared to other tools."
  • "There is a free trial for one month, so you can use it to run your payloads or proof of concept. After that, you can pay for the license on a monthly or annual basis."
  • "IBM RPA is cheaper than other tools."
  • More IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Answers from the Community
    Walter Sitoe
    Daniel Robus - PeerSpot reviewerDaniel Robus
    Real User

    My question to you would be - Why are you mixing the two vendors? Do you have licenses for both and are trying to maximize investment? 


    If you have IBM automation you probably have other IBM technology - let the IBM automation run on that as its integration is a little more complicated than UiPath and may cost you time in execution. 


    If you have both IBM and UiPath then I would use UiPath for any areas that are not integral to the IBM technology or systems. 


    I would need to know a little more about your strategy before giving a definitive answer to your question but all 3 are good technical foundations depending on the scenario.

    Willem De Jongh - PeerSpot reviewerWillem De Jongh
    User

    RPA technology has been in the market for quite some time now. Benefits are quite common for all platforms. Every day a new platform is being introduced. You should check whether you want to automate the simple process(es), that does not consume 100% of an agent to execute, or you want to automate a complex End-to-End process, how many departments are involved, business/IT systems and data source needs to be accessed. For example the difference between a Question/Answer chatbot or a Cognitive bot that understands human language and access any corporate systems to solve the issue of the requester autonomously.


    Can you start really small, through a consumption model, or implement the full-blown system at once with lots of idle time of the agent while developing the processes to be automated. Many times the required infrastructure can be costly when growing the implementation.


    How are the processes implemented, how much can be done drag&drop and how much needs complex scripting. Ease of maintenance in the long term. What are the standard technologies that are available? Does it include ETL, AI/ML, API, or OCR as standard, optional or integrated with as part of the platform?


    Many technical and business factors come into play and should be reviewed before even looking at a platform.

    Celestine D. - PeerSpot reviewerCelestine D.
    Reseller

    If you are looking at a high level, IBM’s digital business automation looks like something that will work well for IBM products with pre-built integration packages. On the other hand, Automation Anywhere or UiPath also offers automation that support multiple technology. If you are looking for any specific guidance having technology in the center, I will be able to add some more view points. Fundamentally all the leading RPA products do not differentiate themselves much as of now in terms of capabilities. In licensing models products come up with variations. 

    Yasser - PeerSpot reviewerYasser
    Real User

    You don't need anything else to use besides UiPath. 


    The platform covers every area and you'll have the full capabilities to do whatever you need. I think you just need more guidance on achieving the full power of UiPath. 


    Good luck!

    Jack Frano - PeerSpot reviewerJack Frano
    Reseller

    Although I've worked with UiPath (not Automation Anywhere), my experience is now solely with AutoMate from Help Systems. 


    I would recommend aligning IBM's digital business automation with Robotic Process Automation and how it works. It seems to be a very different tool from RPA. If programming is required in the use of IBM's digital business automation go with RPA.  

    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is very good in certain situations but lacks in others. For me, it's more the team that… more »
    Top Answer:From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applications that AA has limitations for, such as the Oracle. For web-based applications… more »
    Top Answer:It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
    Top Answer:Integrating the tool with SAP, EBS, or other ERPs is easy.
    Top Answer:The product must be promoted more. There are no promotions.
    Top Answer:We're working with different clients from the manufacturing environment. We have implemented end-to-end solutions. We work on web automation and automation of invoices.
    Ranking
    Views
    26,931
    Comparisons
    15,435
    Reviews
    71
    Average Words per Review
    870
    Rating
    8.1
    Views
    3,892
    Comparisons
    2,812
    Reviews
    11
    Average Words per Review
    430
    Rating
    8.0
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise
    IBM RPA
    Learn More
    Overview

    Automation Anywhere is the leader in intelligent automation solutions that put AI to work across every aspect of an organization. The company’s Automation Success Platform is powered with specialized AI, generative AI and offers process discovery, RPA, end-to-end process orchestration, document processing, and analytics, with a security and governance-first approach. Automation Anywhere empowers organizations worldwide to unleash productivity gains, drive innovation, improve customer service and accelerate business growth. The company is guided by its vision to fuel the future of work by unleashing human potential through intelligent automation.

    Learn more at http://www.automationanywhere.com/.

    IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology that encompasses the use of smart robots in any process requiring efficiency, consistency and speed, with no risk of mistakes. In a nutshell, RPA simulates a human user working.

    Today, it is possible to automate processes through the use of digital robots, or bots, which execute pre-programed, repetitive tasks in a safe and mistake free manner. There are literally thousands of opportunities for Robotic Process Automation to make an impact on your organization today, including: automatic invoice emission, system integration, information reconciliation, report generation, intelligent email management to lead generation, and many others.

    Sample Customers
    Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
    The Hanover Insurance Group
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company29%
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Pharma/Biotech Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company44%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Pharma/Biotech Company11%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Educational Organization7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business16%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise74%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise68%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business50%
    Midsize Enterprise8%
    Large Enterprise42%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise63%
    Buyer's Guide
    Automation Anywhere (AA) vs. IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Automation Anywhere (AA) vs. IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Automation Anywhere (AA) is ranked 3rd in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with 483 reviews while IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is ranked 6th in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with 23 reviews. Automation Anywhere (AA) is rated 8.4, while IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Automation Anywhere (AA) writes "Automation Co-Pilot enables us to present details from CRM for business management on one page". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) writes "User-friendly interface and good stability". Automation Anywhere (AA) is most compared with UiPath, Microsoft Power Automate, Blue Prism, Tricentis Tosca and Pega Robotic Process Automation, whereas IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is most compared with UiPath, Microsoft Power Automate, Blue Prism, IPsoft 1RPA and ABBYY Vantage. See our Automation Anywhere (AA) vs. IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) report.

    See our list of best Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vendors.

    We monitor all Robotic Process Automation (RPA) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.