UiPath Reviews

We are using UiPath for automation processes in an insurance company in the finance department.

The most valuable feature of UiPath is if you set a form and there's an interaction with the user, it's easy and fast to build than the other RPA tools. Additionally, it is simple to use the connectors.

In UiPath they should improve the input and outputs of processes. I found it very complicated.

In a future release of UiPath, they could improve the OCR engine to make it better. All the RPA tools use some OCR engine, while UiPath's is the best but it is hard to configure and set up for your projects.

I have been using UiPath for approximately six months.

The stability of UiPath is highly stable.

We have approximately four people using this solution in my organization.

I have not used the support from UiPath.

We previously used Blue Prism.

UiPath gives a return on investment, it does what it is supposed to do.

UiPath is an expensive solution but it is worth the money. You have a lot of features. 

The licenses need to be improved because when you have to use UiPath on another system, you have to set up the processes manually, and you are not able to change the process the time if you configure a process running at the system. You have to stop it and then run to the other system. It's not too easy to configure it according to the system. If you have a large deployment, for example, 10 to 20 bots, it's hard to configure.

UiPath has a lot of free training and a lot of free processes ready to go. You have to see the best practices in order to receive the best way of development. It is important to see the best practices guide.

I rate UiPath a nine out of ten.

UiPath is great because it's highly stable, it's fast to develop, and easy to configure. However, there are some improvements to be made.

We primarily use the solution for operations processes in our corporate investment bank. For example, screen scraping, querying from databases, or any transactional processes. Those are what we're really looking at the most.

The orchestrator is very valuable for us. The ability to have processes, especially transactional processes, be fed into and triggered from there is excellent. I really like the ease of use that allows not just typical developers to use the Studio version, but also StudioX, which allows citizen developers with little to no coding background to be able to automate their own process. Studio limits a lot of the coding you would generally do in Visual Basic and offers a pretty easy use case for people who want to get into development, who might not have that background.

I’d rate the ease of automating within UiPath at an eight or a nine out of ten. Maybe even a perfect ten. They make it very simple. It's a really good platform and for everything I've used it for so far, I can't think of how I would do this X, Y, or Z differently. I really like it.

In terms of our adoption of it, we just started using it this year. We haven't had a large volume of bots delivered and put into production, however, with what we're using, we have a lot of proof of account sets and use cases that are getting pushed along that are going to save the company time in man-hours.

It's going to save the company a lot of potential risks in terms of manual error. It's also something that can be used to automate processes that are very heavily related to compliance procedures as well, where you don't want as much manual touch for the same reason and you don't want to risk, even if it doesn't take that much time for a person. With automation, you remove the risk of somebody making an error.

We don’t have a crazy amount of metrics. We're really in the process of adopting it into the organization. I'd say within the next year, we're really going to be seeing a very large adoption of it.

We have seen direct savings in costs. Every project we deliver in time save has an associated cost reduction to it. If you're saving, for example, four hours a day on a manual process, you're saving that money. You’re also saving on anything that's related to risk. I don't have any hard numbers on the amount of time that's been saved, however, it’s been positive.

Our teams have used the UiPaths Academy courses. It’s helped make the process of getting employees up to speed with UiPath very straightforward. It's one of the better learning platforms I've seen. Between them and Alteryx, they both have very good learning platforms.

What's really important is that you don't need to wait for instructor-led training, which is infrequent. We have it sometimes, still, even when we’re having it a few times a year it gets expensive. The online training, which covers most of the same material, is a really good way for people who don't want to wait for the instructor-led training and want to immediately get their own feet wet.

The Academy is very comprehensive. It's well structured and training is easy to follow. I've used other tools that have been much harder to follow online. This one I really like.

The biggest values that we’ve seen From UiPath Academy are ease of use and ease of scalability. The solutions you make based on the infrastructure that's built around it can be made to be very scalable. There's so much that depends on other terms, such as the data that we have on our own processes, that it's going to be the yes or no, whether or not a process we build can be scalable automation for other teams. As long as we get the data and the processes lined up in the right way, we can make very scalable processes, which is good as that's more cost savings for fewer bots and that's really like what we want to see.

There are some external dependencies. When we have APIs available, UiPath does have that option that we can hook into APIs. That's really where I'd like to be down the line, more like hooking into APIs, data warehouses, so that you don't have to worry too much about the screen scraping functionality, even though that's a great big part of what it does.

I would really like the ability to bring OCR connectors into StudioX, if possible. Right now we're only using OCR and Studio as that's where the plugins are available. I don't know enough about the back end of what makes this feasible versus not feasible. However, at the moment, with StudioX, you can only really read and digitize PDFs. If they can bring in the OCR connectors, they'd allow citizen developers to be able to read in a larger breadth of documents that they would generally need Studio to do.

I've been using the solution for about ten months. 

The product is as stable as it can be for the processes we use to expand on that. We do a lot of screen scraping and web scraping a lot. I want to move away from this in the future. However, the stability of those bots is going to ultimately be reliant on how that webpage looks.

We're looking at very specific parts of the website, such as the HTML tags. If those stay stable and we build our identifiers on those sites to be relatively dynamic, the process will be fine. 

We do plan to increase usage.

The idea is to train up more citizen developers. We need to strike a balance between getting the tool out to the citizen developers and making sure that they're following the governance procedures as well. There's also a little bit of risk of it due to the fact that you give people licenses to build and then they can build something on their desktop. They can just, without going through the proper governance, run it. Therefore, you need to make sure things go through the correct governance. That's why we're trying to make sure we have a very good system in place so that when we grow and are training system developers, everything they do goes through the correct controls and governance process.

We're planning to keep building the users over time. We really want to start looking in the next year from more of a top-down perspective, across larger organizational issues where we can make more scalable bots rather than strictly or mostly automating one-offs. We're looking for where there's more commonality across different businesses that do similar processes, and maybe access similar data sources.

I'm not sure exactly how many people are using it across the organization currently. My guess would be at this point there are 75 to 100 users. However, I could be completely wrong. I'm just guessing, as I don't know all the citizen developers, and who in the operation's teams are using it.

I have not used technical support, however, some people who work for me on my team have. I manage a small team of developers. They have worked with UiPath consultants who are on contracts with our COE. They've been extremely helpful with working out some kinks that they've come across in their projects. 

I haven't used blueprints on my Automation Anywhere. We used to use Automation Anywhere and we are moving off it in favor of UiPath, though I never used those other tools myself. I use ALteryx and it has some RPA abilities, although I use it much more for just basic data transformation workflows. I have coded RPA bots and Python before. What I like, with UiPath, is it's still a tool that's based on code - Visual Basic, VB.NET. However, the coding is really for the most part restricted to your data manipulation, working with variables. The control flow that you normally would need to code in Visual Basic is all drag and drop. I really like that versus straight coding. It still gives you that flexibility of a lot of development environments, however, you can have that drag and drop canvas that allows you to really not need to program as much of that control flow. 

We moved towards UiPath as it's cheaper per bot and it enables more of a citizen development model as well. Automation Anywhere bots were only developed by our COE at the time and UiPath COE's going to use them also, however, they're allowing users in operations to use both Studio (if they have the taste for it) and StudioX. It gives a lot more citizen development capabilities for more advanced functions and automation-type stuff, whereas previously, you would normally need somebody on your team who happens to know BBA to do it. 

In the past, if you have someone from the team who knows BBA and makes something, and they leave and their code breaks, you're screwed. However, if you have a StudioX bot, if it breaks, it's going to be much easier to look into the issue and fix it. It's also supported by our C0E's tech infrastructure. Those are the main driving points for shifting off as well.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I've interacted with UiPath only as a user. I was one of the first users, however, I had nothing to do with deploying the tech infrastructure and developing the governance and controls. I'm just a developer.

We have seen a return on investment. Every project we've delivered that has some sort of time savings to it has had an intrinsic ROI. I don't know the total ROI across the organization, however. I work in one specific part of the company and it's been adopted in a few places. I don't know the total ROI that's been delivered yet.

It's my understanding that it's delivered close to a full headcount so far, in terms of productivity of capacity. There are approximately eight hours a day of time-saving for every workday of the year. That's where we are right now, as we've really just begun adopting it. We're not really deployed into production, and the larger-scale projects aren't in place yet. So far, the projects have been smaller tactical builds that we've been using and it's been delivering up around eight hours of time saving a day. 

I don't know the pricing enough to really comment on it. I know we're getting a better deal in automation than what we had with Automation Anywhere bots, at least per bot deployment. However, I don't know what the licensing costs are.

We do not yet use the Uipath apps feature or their AI functionality in our automation processes. That said, with AI, we're bringing it in and we're definitely planning to use it in the future.

I'd advise new users to make sure you have the controls and governance structures, first and foremost, and you want to make sure those controls are going to be in place and understood before you start deploying licenses to users. I make sure that everything is going to be done and compliant with the audit. As somebody who works in financial services, which is a very heavily regulated industry, that's something that really needs to be kept in mind. You don't want to develop what are essentially just user tools that are not going through the proper controls and treat it like a lightweight software development lifecycle project. You need to make sure those controls are in place, and yet, don't do it too much to the point where it's going to deter the users. At the end of the day, we're not making software, however, we still need to strike that balance.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. Nothing is perfect. I know you UiPath wants to improve the stuff that has not been perfected. I'm not going to say it is a ten out of ten, even though I'm struggling to think of what I don't like. Something that would be very helpful for UiPath is to go back to try to build OCR in StudioX. That would be ideal. Also, being able to implement different types of loops in the Studio would be great. Right now, you can only do a four-loop in a repeating loop. If we could implement wall loops, that would be nice. 

My experience in using UiPath, in general, is in developing traditional bots, assisted bots. There are the typical mundane applications that we're trying to remove in order to add value to customers. 

The solution is used for extracting information from documents and consolidating data, maybe from various Excel sheets. I've used applications, such as PDF, Tableau, and a number of different entities as well. It varies.

I haven't really followed up so much in-depth, however, I know that a lot of the end-users that I've worked with and talked to, that have removed some of the processes, think it’s great. I've got many more strategic types of tasks to do. The one thing users look forward to when they come to work is when something’s been removed from their plate, one piece at a time.

Collectively, I find the UiPath features really complement each other. If you have one tool or another resource available, you're really able to get it into a solution.

They've implemented their stuff very well, considering how fast they've come up with new tools. Usually, it’s a messy situation, however, with UiPath, I've not found that to be the case. It's pretty impressive, the rate at which new tools are released and how well they're thought out, and how usable they are.

From an employee morale perspective, the company is getting positive feedback.

We’ve seen some reduction in human errors and time savings. Depending on what it is, your time savings could be two to three to ten times more in terms of time saved. It’s easy, too. Error reduction is absolutely almost down to nothing.

In terms of cost savings, some of this was done pretty casually, so the numbers are maybe not official. We’ve got 20 data samples, and we're timing it exactly. However, when it comes to time savings, there's always been a very significant amount.

When it comes to ease of use, some of the tools they're providing are in discovery or task capture. You can go out and send this off to somebody and it's pretty self-explanatory in a half hour. Prior to that, people might be using different steps with built-in Windows pieces, which is horrible for capturing automation. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Therefore, adding in this ability to annotate the screenshots with ease, that alone in the development process helps significantly. I'm really liking the discovery tools that complement the product.

All these discovery tools are making building automation easier, from an analyst perspective. It removes the wheat from the chaff and narrows things down, and you begin to see what you need. By clicking on different elements, you can see where they can annotate. It saves a lot of back and forth and time. Not only does the subject matter expert not have to spend time away from their work, you're also not going back and forth and trying to clarify items any longer. It makes things more compact and it’s easier to get to the end goal.

I completely trained on my own as a developer with the UiPath Academy. I was able to do it for free. It's the only onboarding I received. I had nobody else to go to, except for the videos and the forums.

The greatest value of UiPath Academy is that it is free. Now, it’s completely about motivation, and not cost-prohibitive. You just need to be motivated to learn and you can jump in. You don’t have to spend something like $800 and have maybe a company sponsoring you to get started.

People, in their careers, can become relevant again. If they are in a dying industry or disrupted industry, they can get into something that's growing rapidly. If you have a computer, and a decent internet connection, you can have a new career in a fairly short amount of time.

The forum's a great place, however, for a new person, it was better some years ago. It's grown too fast, and it's not that nimble. Previously, if you asked questions, the response time was quicker.

Since I've learned UiPath, there's so many more people rushing and getting into it. With the demand for RPA jobs, the ratio of expertise to novices is very, very low. Before you had a small community and you had a lot of experts and just a few new people trickling in at a time. The influx of new people, it's just growing factor by factor. Where previously there was one person that only had a few questions to answer, now maybe that ratio is now 20 or 30 people. You're not going to get the answers that you need as fast. Luckily, the quality of the Academy is so good, if you look around, you can eventually figure things out.

The issue is that, with so many people, a lot of questions are getting asked before anyone even looks to see if an answer is already there. It tends to make it harder to find relevant, real questions that need to be answered. There are people who are not doing the due diligence and looking at the tags and spending a little extra time before throwing the question out. It makes that part hard to manage.

With people that have already been up-skilled, or already been skilled in the past, UiPath needs to find a way to send some sort of notification to them when items update or change. They need to send out a message to experienced developers to say: “Hey, look at this and push it out."

If you're not going to the Academy and looking for something new, there needs to be some sort of way to say: “Hey, you've been certified. You haven't been in this course. You should look at these things.” I started looking at the Academy and found new elements. When I mentioned something, like, "What's that?" the new guys were aware due to the fact that it was in the Academy from when they started and was not there when I finished.

Basically, just having some sort of mechanism for spreading awareness to existing developers, or pushing something out to them, maybe even through the interface, would be helpful. Whether it’s a little highlight or a little icon to alert users to “hey, here’s something new, something pushed out.” And it’s not just something where you have to go in and read some boring five or six pages of notes, to know that this thing is there. It needs to be visual.

I started using UiPath, which started with training, in the fourth quarter of 2018.

It's a very stable product. I haven't had any issues. If I found or thought something was unstable or something, it usually ended up being me, or an operator error.

I've seen UiPath scaled. Personally, I haven't had issues one way or the other, however, I've heard good things. That said, I can't speak too much on it from the perspective of personal experience.

I have had some interaction. They had a pretty good SLA, in terms of response time. Of course, that has nothing to do with actual solution time. That said, what I remember with everything was that nothing stood out. Usually, you remember some anger or something. I didn't have anything like that.

I'm certified in Automation Anywhere as well. Right now, Automation Anywhere always has two products out, in the sense of getting ready to move into their A360 with the newer product. They're just trying to get that product to maturity. Right now, we have different deployments. Automation Anywhere is cloud-native. 

While they're both RPA, they each have I think a different niche, depending on what the customer needs. 

As a developer, the learning curve in version 11, the prior version, had an easier learning curve compared to UiPath. Automation Anywhere has an edge, in terms of ease of learning for business users and citizen developers.

360 has made the learning curve harder. It's going to add more features, more flexibility. And with that comes a learning curve. Still, the learning curve might be a little easier. 

My deployment experience was not just through UiPath. If anything, I'm pretty agnostic to any platform. I was an analyst, and I was involved with, in general, putting items into production, and going back and forth with developers, and seeing if there were any issues or problems.

I've talked to other developers, and I haven't heard of any particular issues or problems, with UiPath, or anything that was more than just human error or an oversight.

If you're smart about it, you understand what your needs are, you can get an ROI out of it without having to go get the full-blown solution. You don't want to drop $20,000 on an orchestrator unnecessarily. You can ease into it, into adoption, without dropping a lot of money. Maybe some attendant bots, and an unattended locally on a large scale, in a small area.

If you do that and start easy, you'll get a return on investment. Eventually, when we start scaling, we'll pay for the orchestrator. You'll need that when you start getting a lot of bots, and it becomes like herding cats. It gets crazy. That's what you need an orchestrator for. While you can avoid a cost at a certain point, you're probably getting diminishing returns, and then it's going to be more costly to manage something all over the place. It's best to start small and then add on. 

We haven’t been using an orchestrator. It’s a bit like having your hands tied behind your back, as you're not using some of the features that are available with that. However, it still provides these workarounds. You are able to still do some really robust work. It's been great.

We are using, more or less, the more recent versions of the solution.

Before starting with UiPath, a company needs an understanding of the culture at their company. You need to ask if your employees are resistant to change. Certain companies where people are entrenched in their ways, or scared of bots taking their job will be worried. A company needs to lean in and give them an understanding of expectations and pay attention to them before starting. Just pushing it might throw people off.

The personalities of people are the biggest factor. I used to come from a lean Six Sigma background. When companies bring in these Six Sigma programs, it's the same thing - resistance. People say “oh, you're the job cutter.”

People throw that out as automation, and I say, "Hey, people have been automating since steam engines. It's been consistent. It's just the face has changed a little bit. It finally hopped back onto computers. However, automation has been nonstop." 

You just have to realign and adjust yourself. You can’t be resistant to change. Change could be a good thing. Not all things are, however, workers need to be rational and think about it. If your company doesn't move faster, adapt quicker, then your company's going to go away, and everyone will be gone. It’s competitive. That's sports. That's business.

Overall, from what I've used, and what I've touched, and some of the things I've seen without actually putting my hands on it, I'd give UiPath a nine out of ten.

I'm just not the type to give out tens so freely. I haven't gone deep and wide enough to touch everything. From what I've seen before, if you span that out overall, I'd probably put them up in the nine range, personally.

We are using the solution to create application reports. What we've done is take all of that information, where somebody was initially doing everything as it happened, and create templates that work in another application. Due to our business model, we have multiple applications that are similar but very different. Rather than have somebody go into this application and update it and then go to another application and put in the same information, we've developed bots. We'd go to the template, input the information one time, and let the bots go in and open up the other applications.

The solution has improved the organization just by freeing up the resources to do that MBA work so that the bots can actually do things for you.

We use the solution's UiPath app feature. It has helped to reduce the workload of our IT department by enabling end-users to create apps. That said, I myself am in IT and not a developer.

The UiPath’s apps feature has increased the number of automation created while reducing the time it takes to create them. We're just now starting with that. We’ve only got 10 bots in production. We've got another eight in development right now.

Likely, the automation we’ve created has saved us probably in the neighborhood of one full-time person.

The solution’s ease of use and the UI is great, specifically for the users. Not necessarily the developers. The people actually using it find it very easy to use.

In terms of the ease of building automation, from what I've seen, I'm very impressed. We're using a partner. We built the COE and everything that they're developing right now. Obviously, we're just starting down this path. This means we're going to go work with a partner while we're developing our own guys. We can get to market quicker.

We've got our own VA. The next step will be looking into building our own developers.

The solution has reduced human error. There are still errors in the templates. People still have errors with bigger things, however, we're able to catch it before it gets into any of the applications. Reading the information across the other applications, you can stop it before it gets synchronized into the applications due to the fact that it is the same source. It doesn't go into "A" if it's not going into “B”, for example.

This has had a big impact on our business. In our model, it's a little complex as our customers are our clients. For example, in the ATM business, they charge us a fee, so we partner with a large retailer like Walgreens or CVS and we share the revenue. We actually pay our customers as they use our services. With the help of UiPath, we’re able to keep everything synchronized. We’re not sending stuff to the wrong site, or to the wrong corporate headquarters.

The solution has freed up employee time due to the amount of work that it's doing. We’ve got just one bot and it can do triple the work, covering three full-time employees in a week. Likely, existing employees now can focus on higher-value work, including more customer-facing tasks. We're getting a lot of financial requests and maintenance. They require human interfacing rather than doing manual transactions.

I can’t think of any direct places where improvements need to happen. Whatever I need, it appears to be there. That said, any app could use some form of improvement.

I've been using the solution for a year now.

The stability is very good.

I don't see an issue with scalability. We are nowhere near capacity yet.

While I have not dealt with technical support directly, I have not heard anything bad from anyone.

We did not use a different RPA solution beforehand. About two years ago, in the second quarter, that's when we started opening our eyes to the possibility of automation.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We have a partner that assisted in the implementation. 

From the time we signed up until the time of setting up the COE and then getting going, it might have been a few days to deploy the solution.

We have a partner that has assisted us in the implementation process. 

Everything that we've done so far, due to the fact that we run everything through COE and then submit semi-annual budgets, has been good. From the perspective of everything we submitted so far, we've been pleased.

Over and above the subscription fees, we're paying probably $51,000 a year right now.

The pricing is okay. It's not out of balance with what it offers. We are definitely getting value for it. 

We didn't really evaluate other options. We were new to it, and we had a partner that steered us towards UiPath.

At this time, we do not use the solution's AI functionality in our automation program. We also have not yet used UiPath’s Academy courses. We may in the future.

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

I am a software developer and I am a full-time RPA developer for my company. We create automation for internal purposes as well as for our clients.

I have implemented 15 to 16 processes end-to-end that cover use cases including Excel, front-end web-based applications, backend Windows applications, and sometimes Citrix. I have also done some Adobe Flash Player automation.

The REFramework (Enhanced Robotic Enterprise Framework) is what we use for most of our use cases.

We are using Studio for development on-premises and we use Orchestrator in the cloud.

UiPath has helped to improve our organization in several ways. Prior to UiPath, the company was using legacy methods of automation. These were time-consuming and required that more code be written. With the ease of use and speed at which automations can be developed using UiPath, the company is bringing on new clients and therefore, more business.

UiPath and the automations that we create help us to better utilize our resources. For example, a manual task that used to take between seven and eight days can be completed in one or two days with automation.

This product is bringing new clients to the business and nowadays, all of our clients require something to be done in the domain of robotic process automation. 

With respect to ease of use and building automations, UiPath is very good. I would rate them at least a four out of five in that regard, especially when compared to other products on the market. The ease of building automations makes them quick to create and it can be accomplished by people in the business sector.

UiPath enables and helps us to create end-to-end automations, and it divides all of the subtasks up in a good way. For example, monitoring processes is different from developing code, and each of these is separated such that they are independent, but we can link them together for the benefit of the process. This is important because I am a complete process developer, so having all of the different subtasks available in one tool allows me to best develop automation for our clients.

This solution has helped to decrease our time to value, which is something that is evident when you look at the automation we were doing previously. Our technologies included Python, VBScript, and other ways. These approaches took more time to develop and are a little bit more complex. With the help of this tool, it takes less time to build the same automation. It allows us to focus on building the logic and algorithms, without having to deep-dive into things like syntax. By allowing us to focus on the business logic for each process, it leads to significant time savings.

We use the attended automation feature and it helps us when it comes to tasks that require interaction between user and application, such as the necessity to enter credentials. It is quite helpful, in particular for BPM processes, and this is something that is important to us. The typical case is when somebody is doing repetitive work as part of their task. In other words, they are working on one task, and the bot is working beside them but needs the occasional input from the user. In these processes, the bot is doing 80% of the work and the user is doing the remaining 20%.

We use the AI functionality because it makes it feasible to automate processes that are quite complex. For example, Document Understanding and NLP from the UiPath Cloud are things that we use. 

The AI features enhance UiPath's capabilities and allow us to automate more processes overall. Previously, when we were doing a specific task, we may not have been able to fully automate it. With the help of AI, we can do more.

In previous iterations of our bots, before the AI features were used, we were not able to get all of the information that we needed from PDF files. This is specific to certain use cases, to present an example. The AI functionality generally gives us more data, whether from document understanding, computer vision, or otherwise.

UiPath has helped to reduce human error because the bot is doing everything and eliminates the opportunity for people to make mistakes in the process. UiPath has had a positive impact in this regard, although we have had successes with other similar tools as well.

UiPath and automation have helped to free up employee time and nowadays, they are more creative because of it. With many of their tasks automated, they have time to work on things that are more creative and have a higher value.

For example, for a task that used to take an employee 10 hours, they are now spending between three and four hours on it. In the remaining six hours, they can be more productive and work on more important tasks. This not only helps the employee but adds value to the company as well.

The selectors work to help automate at the front-end or backend of applications, and they are quite useful. If you use selectors correctly then the automation can be done in a systematic way. For example, selectors can be used for clicking tabs in an application, and what we do is create an algorithm with the correct logic to go with them.

UiPath has good recording features that help to create automations.

We use the REFramework as a template, which divides things such as the opening of applications, applying the business logic, using the queues, and closing applications. As part of this framework, UiPath provides a systematic architecture to us. We just have to understand and work with it by applying our business logic and coordinating effectively to create end-to-end automations.

I would like to see more AI-related features added. Improvements could be made to the models so that they are more compatible with data science and machine learning.

Better support for databases should be included. For example, interacting with SQL Server and SQL Developer would be beneficial features.

I have been working with UiPath for more than three years. The company started using it before that.

Stability is something that UiPath is working on. The new versions have added more stability and important features like test suites and the workflow analyzer. Adding features and improving stability is a continuous process.

In my previous company, which is a large MNC, there were between 700 and 800 people working regularly with UiPath. In my current company, we have between 400 and 500 people working with RPA using UiPath. As we continue to take on more clients, we will expand our usage.

There are a variety of roles for the people that work with UiPath. Some are developers, whereas others are set up or support teams. Our company is very heavily focused on this domain.

The number of people required for deployment and maintenance depends on the size of the process. A larger and more complex process requires a larger support team to maintain it. For example, a simple process can be deployed and maintained with a two-person team, whereas four people are required for a medium-sized process, and a six-person team would be used to handle a complex process.

I would rate the technical support between seven and eight out of ten.

In general, we express whatever concerns we have and then within a few days, we get updates from them. However, sometimes we have to elaborate a lot before we receive an answer. The documents and repository that they use for analyzing and improving our processes could be organized in a more systematic fashion.

We were using a variety of legacy tools that were more time-consuming and needed code development to a greater degree. These included things like Python code and Visual Basic scripting. There are still other tools that are being used, in addition to UiPath.

Prior to UiPath, approximately 80% of our costs were spent on developing automations. With the benefits that come with UiPath, the RPA costs are now only 45%. As the costs have decreased and the volume of automations increased, it improves company profit.

I have worked with Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, and I find that UiPath is easier to use. However, to capture more market share, UiPath has to continue expanding its machine learning and AI features.

Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism are still being used for some processes in the company. We have switched away from them in some cases, opting instead for UiPath, because in general, it is easier to implement automation tasks using UiPath.

We have a setup and deployment team in-house that is responsible for implementation. They take care of the deployment for our clients and bring things into their production environment. 

The team does their best to keep updated on what UiPath features are available and what the current version is. If updates are pending then they will be aware of them.

The company is experiencing quite a good return on its investment in UiPath.

I began learning UiPath with the Community version, which is available free of charge.

Before choosing UiPath for any particular job, the company examines the process to see how complex it is. Based on the time that it will take to implement it, as well as the number of resources, whether in UiPath, Blue Prism, or something else, the decision is made. Different tools are used for different processes based on these assessments.

I started my UiPath journey using the Community Edition, version 2018.4. After I spent some time learning UiPath personally, I began using it full-time in my company.

We have several different teams that use UiPath in different ways. First, we have the developers, who do the coding and create the bots. Then, we have the testing team, who ensure that the bots perform correctly. Next, we have the deployment team and after that, there is the support team.

My advice for anybody who is implementing UiPath is that they need developers who are good with logic. They should come from a coding background with experience in logic, algorithms, have some knowledge of C#, and have some knowledge of HTML tags.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using UiPath is that technology can be made more efficient by using these tools.

UiPath has all of the features that are required to make automation successful. It is currently just ahead of other similar tools on the market and if they continue to add features then it could be the market leader.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We mostly use UiPath in the healthcare and banking/finance sectors. Our use cases depend on the different sectors we use it for. A typical use case would be an Excel file with lakhs (hundreds of thousands) of records that we need to filter and apply some business rules to. We may have to check whether numbers are in integer or alphanumeric format so that they can be accepted by a particular application, or whether date data is formatted correctly.

We use it for end-to-end automation. We take all the input from users, regarding the full life cycle of a process, and use UiPath to create a business solution. An end-to-end project can include taking an Excel file and putting the data into a data table. Based on that, we create some business rules, check things with validations, and then create some templates. We upload the templates for different legacy applications so that they can be automated. A bot will run these scenarios in the backend, in either attended or unattended mode.

We may take student records and place those records into a particular template which we then upload to an application, whether a web application or a desktop application. If a human was involved in doing this, it would take days to filter the Excel and create a template based on a particular record. But by setting up some business rules through UiPath coding, it automatically applies those rules to create the template and upload it to the application. We can then send a notification to the user by email, because we have connectivity with Gmail, Outlook, and SMTP.

A human being can work eight hours or nine hours per day on average, but a robot can run 24/7. With automation, we can save time and money by continuously running things on the same machine without any errors. The accuracy can be 90 or even 100 percent, depending on the logic of the code. It also helps the communication between clients, users, and our organization, improving the partnership. It definitely reduces human error because it's automated and well-tested. It increases work volume because it's very fast. In terms of the amount of time it saves, for repetitive tasks it can save 90 percent of an employee's time. Employee satisfaction has definitely increased.

UiPath is also helping us to increase the number of tasks we can do. For example, if a human being is reading an Excel, doing some operations and validations within it, it will take hours or days to complete. But using a UiPath robot, we can simply create the set of necessary instructions in our code so that it will run within minutes or even seconds sometimes. It is very fast.

We use every component of UiPath, from Studio to Orchestrator. It's very helpful and it is very fast. Orchestrator is very beneficial because we only need to create a particular robot once and then we can simply connect it to machines. It definitely saves time because we only need to maintain the versions of a package and the code, and that can be done locally or via Studio. Because there is a chance code could be deleted on a local machine, the fact that Orchestrator is in the cloud means we can definitely retrieve it from there.

Orchestrator also helps save time because there are scenarios where we have multiple stages of input, where something depends on a value. As developers, we don't need to provide the particular input and again publish the same package. We just go to the cloud, check the process, check the assets, change the value, and it will automatically update. It's a robust solution. Like its name, Orchestrator really does help us orchestrate things.

Also, non-technical people, the users, can see what is happening in their jobs. They can check the status of particular scheduled jobs and see whether they are running or busy, and how many bots there are.

Attended robots are also helpful because sometimes we have a scenario where a user cannot share credentials because everything must be secure. In that type of situation, we need attended automation that can be run on a particular machine in front of the user. While it's running, they can do other work on the same machine. That kind of implementation enables us to automate while keeping things more secure. This is important to us because security is a main concern. It allows users to keep their information safe, rather than making it available on other machines. It's their intellectual property and we respect that.

The most valuable features are some of the panels in UiPath Studio. For example, there is a debugging panel and a Designer panel. The debugging panel is useful because without it we could not solve any problems. The debugging panel provides functionality such as Step Into and Step Out, and we have highlight buttons. It helps us to analyze our code, what is wrong in a solution, and debug from the start to the end, to make the solution better.

The Designer panel is where we create a workflow or step-by-step process, the place where a developer develops the code.

Within UiPath Automation Cloud, we are using Orchestrator in which we can

• deploy the bots and maintain services
• create attended and unattended robots for different versions of machines and manage which robot runs in a particular environment
• use the queue to manually configure the times that bots repeatedly run. Using Orchestrator, we can simply schedule the target application. The queue also has a retry mechanism so that it will automatically take input, and we can specify the number of retries
• store a user's ID and password credentials in the Orchestrator database
• check the Orchestrator home page for what processes and jobs are running, and see any feedback on them, as well as the output
• see the logs in Orchestrator.

They are currently working on most of the things I have thought about that need improvement, such as connectivity with other software and AI/ML capabilities.

But one area for improvement is connected to the fact that it's completely based on Visual Basic .NET and C#. I would like to see some more basic activities that are particular to the VB.NET code, as well as activities based on LINQ queries because that is one of the fastest and most integrated languages. I would like to see pre-written activities so that we could simply drag and drop them into place and use them frequently. It would be better to not have to go into the syntax for that particular language code. I would prefer if we could use activities from the Activities panel, and just provide the input and output, and they would work in the backend.

I have been using UiPath for the past two years. I have very good experience in this particular tool, as an RPA developer. I have created enterprise solutions and business solutions from end-to-end.

The solution is stable because it has been developed precisely and it's already optimized. It depends on the user's input and on the architecture and the environments. We have very good stability.

UiPath is very scalable. It depends on the user's requirements and on the approach we follow. A modular approach makes it more scalable. For example, if we have different VMs, different accounts, or different licenses for the machines on which we are running, we can simply create one package and we can deploy it on the various machines, if we have the licenses for those robots. 

You can create one set of code or a package and run it anywhere, if it is suitable and the requirements are met. That's one reason the scalability is very good. 

We have a huge market and a huge environment. We can continuously run with a multi-bot architecture. If the code is developed that way, it will definitely increase the scalability.

UiPath is used by many users in our company. Their roles are varied. They could be in data analytics or they could just be doing some tedious task.

The business side is happy with the solution because it is decreasing tedious and repetitive tasks. They are happy with the time and money savings. As a result, they want to do other things via UiPath robots. They want to find other processes where the work can be done more productively.

UiPath support enables us to manage issues by creating non-production and production tickets. We can discuss issues in calls and show them examples of the particular issue or activity under discussion. They provide us with support. Sometimes, when activities are not working, we can upgrade and downgrade the version of that particular activity. We can even send logs to them so that they can analyze and troubleshoot issues. It definitely helps.

I have only used UiPath for RPA. I have read about tools like Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere,  but I cannot compare them. They all have their own advantages and disadvantages. I like UiPath because it's user-friendly and it has a very big community in the forums. We can learn from the community. And the UiPath Academy provides training, certification, and diplomas so that a person can learn and develop the ability to create a solution.

The initial setup is a little complex. You need high-end knowledge. You need to create the Studio setup on the different VM environments, deal with the licenses, and the Orchestrator setup. All of that requires good knowledge. You need to understand infrastructure and how things are set up. It's complex for regular users. The installation itself is relatively easy, but understanding the infrastructure is challenging. With guidance and training, it definitely becomes easier.

Licenses are costly, but, in the long run, UiPath will definitely help the business. Developing a solution is a one-time investment, which can be completed in a couple of days. But that work will be done next month, and again and again for the next 10 years. It definitely helps with digital transformation because it can connect solutions and create better opportunities.

UiPath is a good investment and return on that investment is very good. We can create robust solutions with UiPath.

Some licenses might be costly but it depends on the type of work involved and the turnaround time required. If you want to include AI/ML bots, it will definitely cost you more. If you want to use some of the latest features, like UiPath Insights, that will cost more.

But for low-level bots and automation and normal use of Orchestrator, the cost is per-bot.

Overall, pricing of the Enterprise Edition is pretty good. And for practice, we have the Community Edition, which is free. They also provide trial robots for two months so that we can use them for learning.

When it comes to implementation, we think about how to make a solution robust so that it can be controlled and configurable. That way, if something changes in the future, we can work on it accordingly. It should be a modular approach.

You need to focus on requirements-gathering so that you can focus on exactly what the user wants, how the application behaves, and what kinds of errors might happen. You need to check all the environmental factors. Those are all lessons I have learned from creating UiPath automations. You also need to analyze things from the business perspective and think about how much money and time is being invested and what the ROI will be in the end.

End-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring of the automation, is a very important aspect of UiPath. Rather than starting directly with the coding, we analyze the business process so that we know how the business is manually doing something and understand their problems and how much effort they are putting into it. We then start to think about how we can use a bot to save time and money. Each phase of the process life cycle is important because, phase-by-phase, things need to be passed from one to the other as input. After delivering the automation to production, we need to provide monitoring services so that if there is an error or downtime, we can make changes. That is why each phase is important in the life cycle of RPA.

From the business perspective, we check what kind of automation is involved and how much time and money we can save by automating, as these kinds of projects are high-budget. The main goal is to run the business as fast as we can. We analyze whether it is suitable for the business and how it can be profitable. We look for processes where we can save 85 to 95 percent of the time or money involved. We also consider how much human error is involved in the process as it is.

Currently, we are not using the AI/ML functionality. But because I use the Community Edition of UiPath in my personal work, and it has the latest features, I have attended the training for AI Center provided by the UiPath Academy. I tried some analysis with these models, as well as the checking of words by AI/ML, in the Community Edition, and it is one of the excellent features. It's very useful. ML models are amazing. They are using APIs which are connected to Orchestrator and they are running those kinds of models. We can also deploy our own custom models if we know the AI/ML tools.

UiPath is one of the best tools available in RPA and it's currently booming. It's the perfect tool because the UI is very friendly. It is widely used. I believe pretty much everybody in the IT industry is working on an RPA solution, many with the help of UiPath. It depends on the particular business and whether they have the capacity, but everybody wants to increase use of UiPath because it provides cloud-based automation and it's a robust solution. Everybody is happy with the solution. They want to create more automated processes so that they can decrease that time and costs in their overall projects.

The primary use case is the automation of many reports, dashboards, and tables that were created manually by some of my colleagues. The tasks involve collecting information from SAP Solution Manager, manipulating some of the data based on business rules that have been implemented, and then storing the data in a specific way that can be used in the next part of the workflow. This includes using Excel and the aim is to create a PDF report that is sent to the top business line managers.

UiPath is the perfect tool to implement a solution like this, with continuous operative tasks between Microsoft native applications such as Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint.

Before our UiPath implementation, the organization spent approximately two junior FTE on these tasks, and another 0.2 senior-level FTE in order to guide junior resources.

This process runs every day and if these tasks are executed manually, it means that two resources need to be staffed forever. At the end of the project, the organization gained a boost of two FTE saved and released, able to move on to other projects. This produced real value for the organization.

The efficiency of the process was the key success factor.

UiPath has the simplest low-code user interface that I've seen in my professional life. You simply drag and drop the activity on the flow, in a clear way, with clear names, and manipulating clear variables/arguments based on parameters. These are the key points in my humble opinion.

The library creation platform is really simple to use. Basically, it works like a normal flowchart application and once you've published packages, you can use and re-use these packages like activities in another workflow.

Last but not least, official Microsoft office integration is really useful, although all of the official integrations are very easy to use.

The UiPath Connect! and UiPath Go! communities come to our support every time we need to implement something challenging.

There are features that could be implemented on the coding side; for example, automatically assigning a unique ID for the "activity" used during the flow. As of now, if you use an activity via simple drag and drop, the activity keeps the original name. If you don't change the name of the activity manually then you will lose some information during logging. It would be useful to put a simple incremental ID on each activity, so even if you don't change the activity name, you will know where the process becomes stuck.

During the last update, the connection between robots and the Orchestrator (cloud) changed a lot. It would be a good idea to provide an easy way to use a single type of robot, regardless if it is a standard robot, floating robot, connected user, etc. Basically, have a simpler way to deploy robots in development, testing, and production environments.

I have been working with UiPath since 2017, and I plan to continue.

This product is really stable, and this is true for the on-premises deployment as well as the cloud version.

This solution is really scalable. It can be used in other organizational departments or on other robots in order to boost your automated tasks.

The vendor provides really good support; fast response time and great quality!

UiPath was my first RPA solution.

During the initial setup, care should be taken when configuring the robot connection. If you choose the "modern folder" setup then you could be struggling.

I am part of the vendor team, implementing RPA for other clients.

We have a 300% return on investment.

The price and setup costs need to be supported by a strong business case.

We evaluated Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, WorkFusion, and Selenium (for web automation).

We primarily use UiPath for end-to-end automation. We develop both attended and unattended bots and we use the Orchestrator module, hosted in Azure.

Some of our typical use cases involve automating operations like downloading files online, analyzing and capturing details, saving them in another location, transferring them, and uploading them in other forms.

The app studio feature has increased the number of automations that we create while reducing the time it takes to create them. For example, we have a limitation when it comes to transferring files from one server to another server. However, we were able to resolve it by using a remote desktop on the UiPath server. I don't need to log into another system or another server; instead, I log in and use the remote desktop from my PC. It's really cost-efficient and it saves me a lot of time. It's superb.

UiPath helps us to implement end-to-end process automation starting with process analysis through to monitoring, and this is very important to us. Whether we are automating processes for external customers or internal purposes, there is an automation lifecycle that we follow. The end-users do not have much knowledge about automation, so we have to complete it from end-to-end.

It starts with analyzing the process to see if automation will work. We then develop it by trying to replicate what the user does manually. Once it has been developed and the functionality replicated, we test and tweak it for approximately two weeks. If everything goes well during this time, the process moves to production. In production, processes are continuously monitored.

The testing is a detailed process that involves finding the problems, then implementing error handling using try/catch statements and other methods. It is done in a continuous, agile fashion where we develop, publish, trial, error handling, monitoring, and then it starts again. When a process is pushed to production, when a change is made, it does through this lifecycle again.

How UiPath has improved the way our organization functions is clear when we look at one of our use cases. We need to have notifications about documents that describe the release of products. Our bot will start by filtering documents online using keywords, download the appropriate documents, then check to make sure that each is complete. If there is a problem then emails are automatically sent to the appropriate department.

From this point, we transfer the file into another folder and upload the current version to the release team. They will only receive what they need, rather than having to go through the document themselves. Prior to this, they needed to check it on their own and analyze everything. With this work being done by the robot, it relieves us of two person's workloads. What used to take three people to complete, is now done with one.

In terms of saving time, for our use case that involves the release documents, we save between 80 and 100 hours per week, so monthly, you can multiply that by four.

The time saved by our employees sometimes allows them to focus on higher-value work or in other cases, when we don't need the persons, we can reduce the workforce and then hire people in different roles, such as new developers. Overall, this helps us to improve our workforce. For example, we can branch into more areas, rather than do the same thing for many different customers.

With respect to employee satisfaction, if somebody loses their position then they may not be happy. However, it is important to remember at the same time that we may open a new position because of this opportunity. This allows the person to move, find new opportunities, focus on new things, and develop themselves. To me, this is a win-win because we are more focused on generating new types of business.

UiPath has definitely helped us to reduce human errors. This is a benefit to us because, before this, we used to get customers complaining quite often. However, we have reduced the complaints. We still need to have the customer complaints section but now, we have reduced it from five people to one. The robot is not 100% error-free, but it's between 90% and 99.9% error-free. With so few complaints, we don't need as many people to deal with them.

Overall, UiPath's process analysis and optimization have increased our productivity.

The most valuable feature for me is the UiPath Studio.

It helps a lot. I wouldn't really say it's code-free; however, I would say that it's 90% code-free. It's very easy to use, with most of the actions performed using the drag-and-drop interface. When you do write code, it's a very small amount of the time.

The library activities are really helpful. With the help of the library and with the help of the forums, developers can focus and it is easy to learn. It helps in terms of time-to-value.

I also find Orchestrator to be helpful. The Studio and the Orchestrator together are like your body and your soul. Without both parts, it won't function. You need to have Orchestrator to run the Studio. Right now, today, we have a problem with our Orchestrator and it's not working. I can't use Studio because it's connected and without access to my Orchestrator, I can't do anything.

The academy courses help in the process of getting employees up to speed with the solution by providing them with the fundamental knowledge and the opportunity to practice. When you start doing it, you may face errors and again, with the docs, you may gain more knowledge. When you start to use the forums, you get more knowledge, and it all helps. But, if you only rely on the forums, I would say that it would help only 60% or 70% of what you get compared to taking the academy courses. In the end, you will only get better by doing it, and then going to the forums when you have problems.

The testing and release schedule for Studio should be improved because we find that with two releases per year, one of the versions is stable and the other one is not. It would be better to focus on a single release, but make sure that it is stable. We have had problems in the past with this and we don't need any unstable versions. For example, version 20.4.2 was not stable but version 20.10.2 was very good.

Technical support and customer care are areas in need of improvement. 

We have been using UiPath for between six and seven months.

We are in Switzerland and normally, we use local support. When they cannot resolve an issue then it is transferred to the US team and we get support from them directly. In our experience, the support in Europe is not sufficient and we prefer to speak directly with the UiPath headquarters. We find that here, the people do not have enough knowledge.

We have had a lot of problems and for example, we have an issue right now where our Orchestrator doesn't work. We have had to wait about a week for the ticket to be escalated to headquarters, and because of delays like this, we are not always happy with customer care. The product is good but the technical support can improve.

We had issues where the first person tells us one thing, but a second person says that it's wrong and it needs to be done another way. Then, a third person speaks and presents another idea. This all takes a lot of time before a fourth person explains that everything is wrong and it has to be done another way. A lot of the time when you have these kinds of problems, you just have to start from scratch.

It can be frustrating because we had spent almost three weeks upgrading our system to the 20.10.2 version and now, we face the same problem. We have not been able to properly run our system for between three and four weeks.

I have not personally used another RPA solution but I have colleagues who have experience with Automation Anywhere. We primarily use UiPath but there are some developers in the company who regularly work with Automation Anywhere.

We did not switch from one product to another. Rather, they are used for different reasons. For example, I have heard that when it comes to performing file transfers, Automation Anywhere makes it quite easy and they do not have the limitations that UiPath does.

On the other hand, I feel that the AI in UiPath is doing better. We have lots of workflows and activities in UiPath and I strongly prefer it as a product.

I wouldn't say that the initial setup is complex, although when you are just beginning with a new environment, it is not that easy, either. Because it is a new thing, you will need to learn in the beginning.

We followed the guide and found that the installation was not very tough.

UiPath saves us costs, but there is more to it than that. It saves us in terms of time spent on manual tasks, but on the other hand, we pay UiPath. On yet another hand, with the money we save, we are open to new opportunities and new business.

Overall, I am very happy with the ROI.

The price of UiPath is a little bit high, although there are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. Overall, it is not too costly, but slightly high.

We have not yet used the AI functionality but we are trying to. We have not developed any uses cases yet but it is something that we are working on. We will be taking some courses on it first and after that, we may try some internal use cases.

We have advanced our technical knowledge by using this product. For example, we now use JSON config files, rather than using Excel.

One of the biggest lessons that we have learned is that it is nice to have a good solution design before starting development. There were times where we tried to do something one way but a problem occurred, so we had to solve it by trying different features, then testing and running it again. A lot of time is spent during this process. Now, we have learned to focus more during the design, then start to develop it.

My advice for anybody who is implementing UiPath is that it works really well in Windows, so they have to have a Windows machine if they want to start developing.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.