What would you rather use to nail a photo of your baby (or a baby pet) to the wall? A pneumatic drill or a good old hammer?

This question doesn’t seem so absurd when you think that the right tool makes a huge difference in both home improvements and Robotic Process Automation. And just as there are numerous utensils in one’s DYI kit, many RPA tools serve various businesses, goals, and needs.

At Flobotics, we mainly use three RPA technologies: UiPath, Robocorp, and Python. How do they differ? What use cases do they excel at? Which one’s the drill, and which one’s the hammer? Let’s find out.

Founded in 2005, UiPath has become a household name in the automation industry. It is consistently named an RPA leader in the yearly Gartner RPA Magic Quadrant report and for plenty of good reasons.

UiPath boasts a full set of automation discovery, management, monitoring, and testing features packed in a user-friendly interface suited for non-technical users.

Python is an interpreted, open-source programming language known for its flexibility. Thanks to its accessibility and customizability, it’s become one of the most popular programming languages, with readily available libraries and modules for all purposes—including automation.

Another thing that makes Python so successful is its simplicity and applicability to repetitive tasks. Data operations, web scraping, processing spreadsheets, moving files, and similar tasks are all good candidates for Python RPA automation.

Robocorp is an automation platform that relies on Python-built bots. As a more developer-oriented solution, it promises users more control over their RPA deployment.

Robocorp combines the flexibility of open-source solutions with compactness by keeping all automation efforts on one platform. With Robocorp, Python developers can build RPA bots efficiently, and business users can handle them without coding skills.

As you can see, all three solutions are either made with RPA in mind or can be applied to automation. What makes them different? That’s where we go back to our intro: the difference lies in which one is a drill and which is a hammer.

The primary consideration when choosing RPA tools is what they are capable of. What are the standout features of UiPath, Python, and Robocorp?

As a leading RPA platform, UiPath has much to offer regarding features, which fall into three categories:

• Discover (identifying automation opportunities),
• Automate (RPA development and implementation),
• and Operate (analytics, management, and monitoring).

These categories encompass a broad selection of automation-related tools, such as task and process mining, AI-based features like intelligent document processing or GPT functionalities, ROI and KPI analytics, and visualization.

To help these functionalities connect seamlessly to the rest of your applications, UiPath has over 1400 integrations with various software, such as Google Cloud or Microsoft apps, all available on the UiPath Marketplace.

UiPath is well-suited for automating modern software and legacy platforms. It offers many ways to integrate with older apps, including computer vision and useful tools such as application mapping.

Thanks to that and all its out-of-the-box features, UiPath allows you to automate virtually any process in any software.

• On its own, Python is as barebone as an RPA tool can be, which is both good and bad. If you opt for Python, you’ll need a custom setup and development, including tools for post-deployment activities like analytics, monitoring, and management.
• On a positive note, thanks to the many libraries and modules available, Python allows you to build automations that fit your needs like a glove…
• … as long as you want to automate a newer, web-based app. Desktop apps and software not designed with automation in mind can be more tricky or even impossible to automate using Python.
• As an interpreted, dynamically typed language, Python allows for rapid prototyping and iterating. This allows developers to quickly adapt the code to changing business conditions and remove bugs in automation.
• Finally, Python is relatively easy to learn compared to other programming languages. It is less accessible to non-programmers than the other two tools but allows faster adoption by users who already work with Python.

• Robocorp helps users automate desktop and browser applications by emulating human behavior. This is done thanks to several features enabling bots to interact with app interfaces such as OCR and integrations with popular business apps like SAP, Microsoft Office, NetSuite, AWS, and more.