UiPath Reviews

My use cases are mostly in finance, including settlements and reconciliation processes.

UiPath has greatly improved the work we do for our clients. Because I work in consulting, it's crucial to see a reduction in the turnaround time for some of the high-end processes that we've worked on. We have taken down the time required for some processes from four hours to about 10 minutes. It's very important because of the time savings and the cost savings as well.

It also speeds up digital transformation and reduces the costs of that process. You might think you have to bring in a new system, but you don't actually change the system when UiPath is implemented. That reduces the costs of digital transformation.

Another benefit of UiPath is that it reduces human error significantly. In my experience, I would estimate the reduction at 40 percent. It has also freed up employee time and resulted in cost reductions.

The most valuable parts for me are the UiPath Studio platform and the Activities that it provides for automation. The platform is quite friendly and it's very easy to build automations. It's mostly drag-and-drop.

I can also implement end-to-end automation and that means that business owners can hand off these processes and focus on more high-value work. That gives them back hours as well. So it's very important that UiPath can complete automation processes from end to end.

Another advantage is that the user community is top-notch. One of the reasons I recommend UiPath is the knowledge you can get from the forums. And there are constant events that the community hosts around the world. You can be in the Lagos community, where I am from, and learn there, and you can also be in another community and learn things from them as well. It's really helpful.

And in terms of UiPath Academy courses, almost everyone I know has learned from the UiPath Academy. It's a great initiative from UiPath. It's accessible and has detailed content. It's great. You don't need to go anywhere else for training, it's all available in the Academy, and it's free, which makes it a no-brainer.

They can improve integration with other types of systems by giving us more connectors. That would mean UiPath would work natively with more applications. With that done, they will have built a fantastic solution.

I have been working with UiPath for three years.

It is very stable. I am coming from Blue Prism where the software crashes from time to time.

It's very scalable and can handle quite a lot of workload.

Technical support is quite friendly and prompt.

Positive

I've used Blue Prism as well. It was the first RPA software I worked with.

Most of our deployments are on-premises. Our deployment was straightforward. We had a guy who helped us implement and deploy it. It's a Windows Server deployment and it's deployed in multiple locations.

There isn't really any maintenance involved.

The pricing is reasonable.

UiPath is a great fit for enterprise-grade companies. It's user-friendly and speeds up the time to delivery.

We use it mostly for our sales and for our clients, with relatively simple, stand-alone robotic solutions. Some are attended and some are unattended. We use it for reporting in our finance and HR departments. 

We have automated processes for our clients that, before, took somebody three days to do, and now they're done in minutes. That says everything. It's extremely useful for saving time and avoiding mistakes. Those are the two main efficiency factors that we have seen with our clients. Repetitive projects, where someone has to copy a lot of data from one place to another and then work with the data, are very prone to mistakes. We can completely eliminate mistakes and save people a lot of time so that they can do more interesting tasks. We have developed programs that reduce human error by 100 percent. There are no errors, once they are automated.

And it absolutely accelerates the process of digital transformation. There is no doubt that it is getting faster and faster. We are thinking about combining RPA solutions from UiPath with ChatGPT or whatever else comes along, to see if we can make them work together. This will be the future.

It enables us to implement end-to-end automation. We have projects where it automates the entire process from one end to the other. Very often we have "human-in-the-loop" within them, because some decisions have to be made, but they are almost end-to-end solutions.

End-to-end automation is extremely important. Usually, when we start with a new client, we start with a smaller process as a type of proof of concept, so that they can see what is possible. Then, we extend it up and down until we have an end-to-end solution. We have seen that it's better to develop a process step-by-step, and not try to do everything at once. But in the end, we have an end-to-end solution.

The UiPath community is used by our developers. They ask questions and receive responses. They are definitely active there.

We have had issues with Ingram Micro. It happened that we ordered licenses and we received something else. It takes a relatively long time, two and sometimes even three weeks, after the order until we receive licenses, and clients are sometimes a little bit impatient. This is something that should be accelerated.

I have been using UiPath for almost four years.

UiPath is a stable solution. One of the reasons we left the Foxtrot solution was that it was unstable. If we had the same process running 10 times, we could get three different results. But with UiPath, we have never had any issues regarding stability.

It's scalable.

We have discussions sometimes with people from UiPath about solutions and things that we have done already. That is working quite well. The support is very good.

We participate quite frequently in UiPath webinars, especially when they are presenting new versions or components or pricing models for the software, so that we keep everybody up to date on the latest developments. They develop things very quickly. It's difficult to keep up with the speed at which they are developing new solutions.

Positive

It is very straightforward to implement. The setting up of a license is something that is done within an hour. It's the development that takes more time. Most of our clients are large, multinational companies.

UiPath itself does not require any maintenance, but solution maintenance is required if something changes for one of our clients.

Everybody is afraid of the licensing fees in the beginning, and because we are in Romania where salaries are still significantly lower than in Western Europe, that means that licensing fees have a bigger impact on costs for the company. But we are also working more and more for companies outside of Romania, where that is less of an issue.

When we come up with an offer in which the licensing fees are getting a little bigger, clients are more reluctant. That is another reason that we prefer to start with something a bit smaller until they get acquainted with the solution and see the advantages.

We looked at other solutions. We started with something called Foxtrot RPA, which didn't work well at all. We also compared UiPath with Automation Anywhere. But UiPath offers a better variety of possibilities, it's more flexible, and it's very easy to program if you are a developer and know other programming languages. UiPath offers StudioX for people who do not have any experience with development, but it's still a little too complicated.

We are not using a lot of the abilities that UiPath offers. We have made some attempts to use Document Understanding and we would very much like to do project mining, but we haven't had a client that is interested in that yet.

I would recommend that you start by implementing a small, standalone process, something that is not part of a big process. Automate that small process first to get used to how it works and see what can be done with RPA in general. And only then start with more complex processes. The latter take more time to develop, and clients don't like to wait.

We use UiPath to automate the processing of large volumes of data. The company has multiple sites, but the organization's data warehouse is at one location. Around 80 people use the solution. 

UiPath enabled the company to reduce staff. We can now perform more work with fewer people. We decreased our manual work by around 60 to 70 percent. UiPath freed up personnel to do other tasks. We still have people doing about 30 percent of the data work, but we hope to increase that to 100 percent. We've cut costs by about 40 to 50 percent.  

We are launching new products using existing UiPath workflows built for our older core projects. When we get new requirements from the client, we can easily implement them. UiPath has expanded our capacity to take on new clients. 

The most valuable aspect of UiPath is that it doesn't require much coding. We can do most of what we need using the basic functionality. We can implement the code with drag and drop and basic modular programming.

The user interface could be better. There have been advancements in UI design and user experience in recent years. UiPath could do a better job of keeping up with these trends.

I have used UiPath for about five or six months.

UiPath is stable.

UiPath is scalable because we can reuse our workflows. 

I rate UiPath support an eight out of ten.

Positive

We used Microsoft Power Automate for one or two months. UiPath has more capabilities, and we can do more with it. 

Setting up UiPath is straightforward and requires some maintenance. The deployment team does that.

We're getting more clients using UiPath, so the price we pay isn't an issue. 

I rate UiPath a nine out of ten. I would recommend it to my clients and colleagues. It doesn't require much coding knowledge to use. It's also much cheaper than paying human employees to do the same work, and bots are less prone to errors. 

It depends on the task that is assigned to me, but mainly, I'm using it for PDF automation and Java API-related automation. It is being used for extractions of PDFs and automation of the APIs to get a better and more rapid response.

UiPath helps a lot in everything related to automation. We have lots of tasks, and we need to get accurate results. Our experience of automating using UiPath has been good. It is easy to get good information or good output from the data.

Its AI capabilities are very helpful for automating more processes. If we want to extract something, we can easily use it. Its AI capabilities make it easy to automate a process and get accurate results.

It works well with all languages, such as Python, Java, C++, etc. It also works with APIs. It is helpful to understand the APIs to extract the data. 

It enables us to implement end-to-end automation. 

It has improved productivity and reliability and saved a lot of time. It has also reduced human error. It has reduced human error by 30% to 50%, and it has freed up employee time by 40% to 60% depending on the task or use case of an employee.

It has reduced our on-premises footprint a little bit.

It is a very easy and stable product. 

It saves a lot of time. It increases our productivity, and it also helps with project reliability and scalability.

The courses available on UiPath Academy are helpful if we want to go deep into the UiPath scripts or tools. UiPath Academy is also helpful when we want to learn something new that is available in the new versions or improve our skills and knowledge.

The user interface needs a little bit of improvement in terms of performance. Sometimes, it slows down, but it depends on the OS that you have. If you are running it on Microsoft Windows, it is slower than on macOS or Linux.

I've been using UiPath for the last two to three years.

It is very stable. I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of reliability. The tool is very secure. If a user wants to run it on a Mac, it works flawlessly.

It is very scalable. I would rate it a 10 out of 10 for scalability.

We are using it for multiple departments. We have IT consultancy and IT services, as well as product teams. In my company, there are about 5K people. Some of them are end-users, some are developers, some are admins, and some are testers.

For any issues, we can take the help of the UiPath customer support and the UiPath community.

When we have some issues with the deployment tasks and automation tasks, customer support helps a lot, and they always try to resolve issues in a short time. Their technical support is incredible. They are always ready to help with customer queries and they try to resolve them within hours, not days. Sometimes, they resolve them within 30 minutes, but it also depends on the issue or priority. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

This is the first tool that I have been using for the last two to three years.

It depends on the project size. If the project is complex, it takes time. In my opinion, it is straightforward if you know how to use it. If you don't know how to use this tool, it is very difficult. On average, it takes half an hour to one hour.

In terms of maintenance, it requires some maintenance, which is taken care of by the admin side. They have to make sure that it is up to date.

It is very cost-effective, and it gives an ROI. It saves a lot of time as well as money. It helps to build client relationships and improve customer feedback. There is a 20% to 30% saving on costs. It has saved $5,000 to $6,000 per year.

The time savings depend on the task and the size of the process. We can save 10% to 50%.

Its price is moderate. It is neither very expensive nor very cheap. Everything is good in terms of pricing.

I would recommend it to every developer or software engineer who wants to work on the automation review task. 

Overall, I would rate UiPath a 10 out of 10.

I'm using it for PDF automation.

It helps us save 60 to 70 percent of the time we used to take and provides accurate results. 

It also helps with increasing productivity. Now that work is automated, it has eliminated any manual work within these processes and reduced human error.

It also provides end-to-end automation, which is very important for getting results very quickly and saving time. We can use that saved time for other productive work. 

UiPath also helps us in reducing digital costs.

It provides various services such as PDF automation and AI capabilities that help in creating accurate results. We are using the AI for chatbot integrations and handling customer interactions. It helps eliminate manual work.

The email automations are also very valuable.

It also provides a user-friendly interface so that anyone can use it. 

Sometimes it takes time to provide results.

I have been using UiPath for almost a year.

It's very stable and provides accurate results for our organization.

It's very scalable, as more than 250 users in our organization use this tool, and we have not faced any issues with it.

The customer support is very good and resolves our queries immediately. It has been very good for us.

Positive

This is the first automation tool we have used.

It requires IT support.

It's saving employee time, which helps with ROI, but the cost is higher. But the results it provides are enough for the tool to give us ROI.

It's costly compared to other tools in the market. Other than that, it is very good.

As I noted, sometimes it takes time to get the results, but it depends upon the query or task I'm using it for. Other than this, it's very good and I'm happy with this tool. It works well for me and I would recommend that others use it.

We're in the supply chain industry and we use UiPath for automations for purchasing and selling and to make people's lives easier within the organization. We have 20,000 users in our organization. 

We do not currently use the AI functionality in our automation program but we have in the past. I've found Document Understanding in the AI Center valuable. In the past, the action center was slow compared to some competitors in the IDP sphere, which can be detrimental if you're dealing with millions of documents but this has since been improved.

We use unattended robot processes almost exclusively and this includes approximately 130 to 140 processes. We do have plans to increase this usage and create more core automations. Certain automations have a shelf life and need to be retired at a certain point. A lot of times we're working with systems that are eventually going to be replaced. The reason why we use UiPath over strictly APIs or something programmatic is that we don't have access to something programmatic. 

UiPath has improved our organization in the sense that it has reduced our manual hours by 200,000 hours per year. This is substantial especially given the size of the COE. We don't necessarily realize these benefits from a head count decrease perspective but we definitely realize it from a time-saving perspective. 

The automations that UiPath provide free up our team members for tasks and projects that they have always wanted to do but have not had time for. There has been a shift to more meaningful work and doing work that hasn't been done before.

The Orchestration feature has been valuable as well as Studio because it makes it easier for people to develop who don't necessarily have a coding background. The UI automation when using UiPath is the best in the field, as far as RPA goes.

UiPath will introduce new features and it appears as though there is an unspoken rule that what they have released is not where it needs to be, but it'll be there eventually. To improve this solution, there could be increased transparency over licensing and consistency regarding what it costs for on-prem and what it costs for the cloud. This would make it more enticing for people to switch from one to another. 

We have also experienced some difficulty with updates and making sure that everything runs consistently. Many times, new releases are not communicated and then are released. This is included in documentation but this documentation is not always stored in the same place. Having some clarity or upgrade assistance to highlight what we need to look out for would help a great deal. 

We have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution but stability is dependent on your configuration. If you configure your robots in such a way that every VDI that runs or every virtual machine that's able to run a bot has a backup, then it will be stable.

UiPath's support is quite good. Whenever I've submitted a ticket, I have gotten relatively good responses within a couple of days. If you say that something is urgent and critical, they do get back to you sooner. Sometimes you get stuck between L1 and L2 support, which can be frustrating. 

I would rate the support for this solution an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The complexity of the setup depends on what you're trying to deploy. If you're deploying only the orchestrator and setting up robots, it is pretty straightforward. If 10 is difficult and one is easy, I would rate the setup a three or four. 

The certificates needed to set up the orchestrator can be confusing and frustrating during setup. For the most part, what you need to do is straightforward. When it comes to installations that require a Linux virtual machine, Docker configuration, or Kubernetes, the setup is more complex. It is more complex to set up an on-premises configuration compared to a cloud configuration.

From what I've seen, organizations will have vastly different numbers as to how hours correspond to dollars. Our return on investment has been good, even from a conservative perspective.

The way that the licensing is structured is confusing for some because there is different licensing if you're on the cloud versus if you're on-prem. There are unattended licenses and then there are non-production licenses and people get confused by that.

There's a level of buy-in that's required that makes it difficult for people to get started. For example, "If we do this, we need to get this whole package" as opposed to, "Let's get a couple of licenses and see how it works for us." There's the community for these questions but if you want to do an on-premise installation, you can't really use the community in the same way to get clarity.

As far as strictly RPA and UI-based automation solutions are concerned, UiPath really shines over its competition. The most similar comparisons would be Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, and I don't think that they have the same level of ease when learning how to use their solutions. Not as many users in the market know how to use those solutions and they don't have the same level of orchestration which makes them more difficult to manage compared to UiPath. 

The UiPath's user community, in terms of the value that you gain by being a part of it, is hit or miss. A lot of times there aren't responses to the high-level questions. There are a lot of responses to people who are just learning how to use it, but for more complex questions, there are no experts to field responses. It is possible to find these answers but they are not necessarily contained on UiPath's platforms. That being said, I did find the user community and academy very useful when I first started using this solution.  

I have done 16 courses from the academy and continue to review what is released to see if it would add value to me to stay up to date with the latest features. The academy provides the ability for more people to learn UiPath and learn RPA and this makes it easier to hire new team members as they can easily gain the necessary skillsets. They still do have to learn on the job to some extent, but there's a basic skillset that's pretty well established and there are certifications that are associated with that. 

I would advise others considering UiPath to start with some use cases in mind. I don't necessarily think that you're going to get value out of evaluating the solution if you don't have at least a few things to get you started. I would advise having someone with a technical skillset to assist in this regard. 

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. 

We use it for everything. We use it for very simple things, such as moving data around in Excel, and bigger things that include using more advanced technologies, APIs, and some of the newer stuff that UiPath has had, such as Action Center, etc.

We have not yet used its AI functionality in our automation program, but we plan to do that in the coming months.

The company is growing so fast, and we've been able to use automation to keep up with that pace. We've started rolling out to individual citizen developers. We're trying to change the whole company in terms of the way people work by using this technology.

The way they stay on top of Orchestrator is really helpful because that has been the platform that controls everything. The dedication to that is pretty helpful. Every time there's a new release, it seems there are more and more features. It's also not hard to learn.

When it comes to the UiPath Community, everybody is helpful. If you don't know how to do something or you want to learn about something, it's pretty easy to connect with other people or talk to people at UiPath to get that knowledge or learn how to do something. You can also just point somebody to UiPath Academy. They go from knowing nothing to being pretty good with things pretty quickly.

One improvement that could be made is in terms of keeping the documentation updated. Some of the online documentation is outdated. Because things are always changing, it is understandable that information becomes outdated pretty quickly, but sometimes, when you want to go use something, deploy something, or troubleshoot something, the documentation says, "Do this," but what it says to do no longer exists.

I have been using UiPath for a little over four years.

Its stability has been really good, especially lately. It has always been relatively stable, but as they've added things, it still seems to be pretty stable.

Its scalability is pretty good. Orchestrator is able to handle whatever you're throwing into it. If you need to add a bunch of processes or jobs, it's pretty easy to do. The only thing that would slow that down is if you need new servers or something from IT. So, from the UiPath side, it's pretty easy, but there are other variables.

They're pretty helpful. If you submit a ticket, somebody reaches out to you pretty fast, but usually, I'm able to just reach out to our account managers and get help within a few minutes. I'd give them high remarks. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

UiPath was pretty involved with it. So, it was pretty straightforward. We're about to move to UiPath Cloud though, and our account managers are pretty involved in that, but it has been pretty turnkey and straightforward.

Our implementation strategy was to get a platform that works and start building things. I'm not sure of the overall strategy. Some of the decisions were made before I got here.

We worked pretty closely with UiPath. They've been great and pretty helpful. 

We have definitely seen an ROI. I don't know any of the specific metrics per se, but I know the values out there. We're just getting hammered with use cases everywhere. We did something literally last week that took us three days to deploy, and it saved a team 100 hours of work.

I came to the company as they were just starting to use UiPath. I don't think they evaluated other options.

My advice to others evaluating the solution would be to compare what UiPath is doing to all its competitors, and none of the competitors would scratch the surface of what the offerings are.

I'd give it a 10 out of 10. I liked UiPath so much that I went to get a job strictly in RPA. That wasn't directly UiPath, but before I started where I am now, I was working with UiPath just a little bit, and then I was like, "I want to pursue that for long."

We're a consultancy and I am the strategic architect. I have implemented the product at 25 different client locations spanning multiple industries. Their RPA requirements range from pretty standard, bread-and-butter workflows that navigate an application and follow some business rules, to more sophisticated ones that are integrating Document Understanding and a little bit of chatbot.

I have deployed it on multiple application stacks, including out-of-the-box SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and some specialty, third-party products like DNA, Encompass, LendingQB, and others.

We have helped companies reshape their resources. That's a part of the benefits. They want to put automation in place because they want to change their headcount and not have to do those rote, mundane business processes.

We have been able to show enhancements in resourcing. A very good example is that we built a process for a client who had to spend three or four days a month doing a really lousy process involving 3,000 payment transactions, every month. The robot is able to execute that workflow in a half day, so we freed up two and a half to three and a half days where he does not have to do it. To him, this was a huge lifesaver.

It has also reduced human error, for sure. That's a positive selling point. When we build workflows for our customers we include business reports and audit logs. We typically add a status flag for a record so that every record that is transacted has traceability through the audit log. We also have a status report, and that shows how many records the workflow executed, how many were successful, and how many failed. We see a range where between 65 and 90 percent of the records go straight through. That means all the business rules were met and the process was completed for those records. That shows that they're identifying a much smaller subset of errors and that they can rely on the robot to successfully complete the end-to-end transaction. And whatever is leftover requires human touch.

That changes the dynamic in operations. They don't have to concentrate on every single record, but only somewhere between 10 and 35 percent of all records may have to be handled manually. It shows them which ones had errors, the ones that did not meet the business rules, and they know which ones to concentrate on. That's a feedback loop that helps them decide if they need to add a business rule or change a business rule to get to a higher percentage of throughput.

In terms of employee time, I have documented situations where clients might have had 10 people working on half a dozen business processes. We've implemented IPA—intelligent process automation—and then they only need three or four people, so they can redeploy those other folks to other places. It saves them money because they don't have the FTE costs they had before for those processes.

From a development point of view, the Studio tool as the basis of componentized architecture has been a really critical part. You get out-of-the-box, componentized architecture to jumpstart or accelerate development and that's a very key feature. 

When talking about deployment, you have a very robust infrastructure to manage your automations, the robots, and how they can be configured, deployed, executed, monitored, and maintained. 

When it comes to process discovery, it has excellent front-end tools and capabilities vis-à-vis Task Capture and Automation Hub. 

And at the back end, the notion of botting sites to monitor and manage your robotic infrastructure and reporting on it is pretty great. These are all pretty good tools.

The ease of use is because of the UI's capabilities. The fact that it has a .NET Framework, from a developer's point of view, makes it a very easy product to jumpstart into. But what is key is the ability to do really fine development activities. You really can get to a nuanced level of development for complicated and robust workflows. The tools are definitely well constructed to allow you that kind of flexibility. 

A really good example would be if you are doing something with OCR to read a PDF. You can vary the OCR engines and test them out to determine which OCR engine will give you the best results. That's pretty good because you do get into situations where one engine may work better than another.

We can also implement end-to-end automation and that is critically important. We always strive for what I call "straight-through" processing, where we're trying to handle all the use cases based on business rules. We're not always successful, but that's not a bad thing. If we can take 60 percent of your processes and automate them with straight-through processing, where everything works, your exceptions are a much smaller work set. That has had a significant impact on clients. For one of my clients, where we have worked very hard, they have better than 90 percent "throughput," meaning that 90 percent of their transactions go completely through the automated workflows. The client has been incredibly pleased with that.

We also use the UiPath Academy all the time, in two ways. Internally, we avail ourselves of all the courses. It's especially important to understand new updates and releases. It's a great place to go to understand what those new features are. That is of real value. 

But the Academy is also a good starting point when I want my engineers to be certified. They can jumpstart that process by going to the Academy and making sure they know how the product works. They follow through on that program and complete the training. Once they finish that, we try to get a project or two under their belts, and then have them take the certification exams.

One of the chief problems in all of our implementations is "application sensitivity." If an automation involves a webpage or Outlook, every item on that screen—the menu bar, the actual document, an attachment, a field—has a selector so that workflow can work correctly. UiPath does a very good job, whether for legacy systems or newer systems, of using selectors so that you can build applications that have discrete functionality. 

But what happens when a selector breaks? That means that something has changed in the application. This is especially true with SaaS or third-party applications. They make one change to a field and the selector breaks and that means it has to be touched and fixed. 

UiPath could do a better job of enveloping selectors to make them less fragile. There are techniques that can be used to achieve that, even without a system-related improvement, but they are not out-of-the-box. That is the one area that is the biggest pain point. It happens all the time.

They should reduce selector sensitivity and improve remediation when one does break. 

I don't know how they would do it, but if the change that caused the break were a relatively minor thing, they should somehow have it automatically recalibrated. I'm sure it's a tough problem, but clients complain to me about that all the time. I have to explain to them, "Well, the application changed." They'll say, "Well, we're looking at it, we don't see anything." It's often true that you can't see it, but the selector underneath broke and that means something was done but, visually, an end user would not see it if it was a minor change. So I'd like UiPath to find a way to "desensitize" selectors.

I have been using UiPath for four years.

It is very stable. There are no questions about that.

There are absolutely no issues with scalability. We're using this with multiple clients.

The new robot polling is very helpful. We are using it effectively for clients and that technical capability is a great enhancement. The modern folder profile gets us there as well. 

We're very pleased with the cloud-enabled product sets. I push that with as many clients as I can because it's the easiest to implement. On the cloud side, there were issues at one point with their licensing management, but that has finally been smoothed out and that makes life easier. If you want to add another product, as long as it gets licensed, boom, it's there. I don't have to think about it. Overall, the scalability is great.

The environments that we work in are client-driven, but they can have multiple locations and geographies. We have a couple of clients where the implementation is in the US but it is supporting Europe. And we now have a client that needs to be supported in South America. We are cloud-enabled for them and the product works great. And while it has nothing to do with UiPath, there are some latency issues over the network, so we may have to rethink how we deploy in different hemispheres. But we know that UiPath tech can support that.

We will lean on their technical support when we have exhausted our capabilities. Most of our issues have been in the Document Understanding sphere, especially in custom model development, although sometimes there have been issues with it in out-of-the-box systems. For all of my IPA projects that include Document Understanding, I try to convince the customer to buy Premium Support, because regular support could take two to three days to finally get to the right answer. With Premium Support, I'll get it in a day or a day and a half, and that can make a big difference.

I rate their support at seven out of 10 because the initial triaging takes the longest time, and that's one of the greatest concerns for me. If you have regular support, as part of the triage process they will tell you to look at frequently asked questions, but of course, we've already done that. Overall, the FAQs are one of the weak points in the fabric of available resources. We're putting in a support ticket because we haven't found what we need. That level of support is very generic and you really have to knock hard on their door hard and say, "We've done that already. We haven't found our answer. We need to talk to an engineer." Level-one support is usually too junior, but when we get to the next level, we finally start to get better answers. Level two is good, but level one and that triaging can be painful.

We rely on the partner network, and UiPath has been an excellent partner. We do use the community as a reference point, but we don't get a lot of value from using the FAQs.

On the flip side, I have used the Community editions of all the products. That's a big plus, especially when a client doesn't want to put any money into it upfront because they're very nervous. We use the Community edition to prove the point. In that respect, the Community edition and the forums do become helpful.

Neutral

I started with Automation Anywhere in a previous job. I like both products. Both it and UiPath are excellent. Going with UiPath really had nothing to do with a problem with Automation Anywhere. When I came to my current company, they had already decided to go with UiPath. They had done a few projects with UiPath and that set the tone going forward.

As a consultant in a global practice, I do have a couple of Automation Anywhere projects going on. I also have a project that is using Power Automate. 

Our preferred IPA solution is UiPath, but clients drive that decision. I had one client who said, out of the gate, "No. We're using Automation Anywhere. No questions asked." And I said, "Alright. It's a good product." 

But as a company, we lean toward UiPath as a starting point and they've been an excellent partner, and I say that wholeheartedly.

Deploying the solution is straightforward. It involves a low level of complexity and less effort.

I have a separate DevOps team that actually does the build-out of the environment. They're separate from the developer team. DevOps does the implementation. They'll talk to the client's IT department directly and work on all the details of setting up the infrastructure and they'll get it ready for us. Then the developers take over.

We do lean on UiPath support in some niche issues areas, but for the most part, my engineers are pretty well qualified.

In terms of the solution's AI functionality, such as Document Understanding and chatbots, we no longer advertise ourselves as doing RPA. We advertise ourselves as an IPA shop—intelligent process automation. The focal point of that is Document Understanding and the DRUID AI Chatbot capabilities. We're getting an awful lot of Document Understanding projects and we use our sandbox to pump our clients' data into the Document Understanding frameworks and intelligent form factors to prove that the solution works. We really want to go for the bigger ticket items that require Document Understanding.

When dealing with Document Understanding, we are introducing a new capability to the client. We train them on how to use the tool. That is a definite change in the client's skill sets and it does pay for itself in the long run. There is a delicate balance. The investment cost is always the tricky part, but once clients start seeing their data coming through automatically, the light bulb comes on.

Since UiPath became a publicly traded company, the flexibility and variability on pricing have really gone down a lot. It's tougher to get a better deal out of them. I'm not saying it can't happen, but as a publicly traded company, they're not the same company that they were when they were private and first growing. It's understandable. They have stockholders to answer to.

The top vendors are

1. UiPath
2. Automation Anywhere
3. Blue Prism (which we don't do a lot of work in)
4. Power Automate, only because it's Microsoft.

I encourage people to look at the review and evaluation sites to help them start getting an idea of what is available. Then I say, "Here is some actual work we've done with UiPath. This is our actual experience. Check the marketplace data that's out there," because there's a lot of information they can avail themselves of. That way, they can be satisfied that what our company is recommending is valid.

I may point out some of the key questions for them to look into. If they're trying to scale, what are the business problems they're trying to solve? If they're thinking about a Document Understanding requirement, they should compare what's going out there with other intelligent document processing capabilities and take it from there.

As a partner, what has been helpful is that UiPath offers a not-for-resale (NFR) license. These are fully loaded licenses and ours is cloud-enabled. We're using them for PoCs very effectively. There is a lot of great value in them. I have a couple of projects now where we've asked clients to send us their sample data, their documents. We have our sandbox ready and I have one or two developers knock that process out with a turnaround of one or two days. We can bring it back to the client and say, "Here's your data and this is what we were able to do with it." That is very effective.

I really appreciate the way the product has been architected. It's a robust product set. We have built custom models with the UiPath toolset. We've had several use cases where we had to do so because there was no out-of-the-box solution, and the tools are great.

The AI functionality has enabled us to automate more processes overall. They are the more difficult projects to do because Document Understanding is not a pure, out-of-the-box solution. There is work involved in it but we've been successful at it. Once we get the models well-trained, the client starts to really see real value. They're seeing the straight-through processing that they're trying to achieve.

The client I mentioned earlier, the one with the 90 percent "throughput," is an example. That automation is the result of custom models. We worked hard on that and we were very successful. The client has been very happy.

Overall, the way I would rate UiPath depends on the support level I have to use. If it's Standard Support, it's a five or six out of 10. If I have Premium Support, it's a seven or eight.