Higher efficiency, lower operational costs—it’s hard to think of a better way to pique any business owner’s interest in just five words. This phrase is a pretty accurate description of the benefits of Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
What can RPA do for finance and banking? Find out here.
The promise of handling manual and repetitive but essential tasks speak to the imagination, convincing more and more organizations to hire RPA developers. To no one’s surprise, massive demand has led to the industry’s rapid growth, projected at over 38% per year, and to the emergence of new tools.
Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, UiPath, Power Automate… These are just three of dozens of major RPA platforms out there. And that’s a good thing—competition spurs improvement, forcing each RPA provider to go the extra mile with their product.
All that sounds great, but there’s one major headache: with so many different RPA vendors, which one should you choose?
Today, we’ll investigate UiPath and Blue Prism, two leading RPA solutions. We’ll go through their respective strengths and weaknesses and see how they fare from the perspective of businesspeople and tech folks. The goal is to answer the ultimate question: should you choose Blue Prism or UiPath?
UiPath: overview
UiPath is an RPA tool from a Romanian company specializing in process automation. The first version of the platform launched in 2013, and since then, the tool has occupied the top position in the RPA market. Designed to automate manual and repetitive back-office tasks, UiPath offers users access to pre-built automation components that can be leveraged and enhanced to streamline routine processes. Agile, modern, and user-oriented, it is especially popular with business users (it ranks #1 in Gartner’s RPA Peer Insights ratings).
Discover SAP automation with UiPath.
By now, the platform has expanded into a broad ecosystem of products and services that span low-code application development software, AI orchestration, document management automation, chatbot builder, and many other useful tools. Over the years, UiPath has built a name for itself and garnered a large and active user community. There are a couple of reasons for that:
Automation Hub
You may have dozens of automation ideas from various people within your organization. That’s a good thing, but it all can start going downhill if you don’t prioritize and control how these ideas are implemented.
Designed to serve as a cornerstone of all automation pipelines, Automation Hub was created to prevent that. It’s a tracking and management panel that allows you to take the front seat during RPA implementation and prioritize opportunities and ongoing automation tasks.
Process Mining
While some companies struggle with catching up with the plethora of automation ideas, others have difficulty identifying them. Process Mining helps you discover automation opportunities by looking into current processes and turning that knowledge into improvement insights. But it doesn’t stop there—once a process is optimized, Process Mining monitors it to see how impactful the automation was.
Community
Everyone loves good tools, especially when they can handle your most mundane tasks! UiPath has thousands of devoted and involved users thanks to its popularity and quality. As a result, there’s always someone to ask for help, and it’s easier to hire UiPath developers than specialists proficient with other RPA platforms.
The company realizes that its user base is a massive asset and puts a lot of effort into engaging with customers through its community. Hence, the community forum, free, time-limited Community license, regular updates, self-learning resources, and insider previews show that UiPath gets its users.
Task Capture
Process documentation is just as crucial as it is difficult—and boring—to create. It needs to be consistent, understandable, and not too detailed to serve its purpose.
Task Capture allows you to easily create and edit workflow diagrams or record the entire process step-by-step. You can then save documentation in one of many formats available or upload it directly to Automation Hub. Neat!UiPath—disadvantages
UiPath—disadvantages
The perfect RPA tool doesn’t exist, and even though UiPath gets pretty close to it, it has one significant disadvantage: pricing.
The initial license price is beautiful but does not include all modules. As a result, the costs can quickly increase if you decide to get them all. To reach ROI, smaller companies may need to be more careful about extra functionalities or hire RPA consultants to help them choose the most beneficial ones.