UiPath vs. GCP (Google Cloud Platform): Which to Choose for Your Next Automation Project?

Imagine you’re a financial officer responsible for employees getting paid on time. However, you don’t use payroll software and run all processes by hand.

This means going through timesheets and vacation times, calculating payroll hours, filling out forms, and sorting out tax deductions and contributions—person by person, file by file. And once you’re through with calculations, you still need to print and distribute checks, make money transfers, and update payroll records, usually kept as spreadsheets.

That sounds like a lot to handle, right? Let’s discover together what processes can automation handle and see the fight of two automation tools: UiPath vs GCP (Google Cloud Platform).

Now, contrast that with Robotic Process Automation Payroll Processing. RPA works 24/7, automatically collecting and standardizing data from different sources and formats. In addition, it can quickly complete complex calculations and update all documents and databases to keep them current.

All that and more results in time-savings from 60-95%, depending on the task. This translates into hours that can be spent on more advanced jobs. Such a productivity boost also saves thousands of dollars monthly.

Taking advantage of RPA is a true win-win, so the question shouldn’t be whether to use it for process automation but which solution to choose. And we’ll get to that in a minute, setting side by side two technologies you may consider for your next automation project—get ready to delve into the details of UiPath vs GCP (Google Cloud Platform).

But first, let’s get a little refresher on RPA. If you don’t need it, you can skip immediately to section UiPath as an automation tool.

UiPath is one of the pioneers of Robotic Process Automation and the current market leader. The end-to-end platform provides comprehensive features essential to create automations, execute them by bots, and keep them under control.

The first core component of UiPath’s RPA platform is UiPath Studio. Your robotic automation development starts here.

An advanced but intuitive tool, Studio offers a powerful automation canvas for developers and business users. They can build automations based on a rich collection of pre-built activities and templates. All work is done by dragging and dropping visual components and diagrams, so many projects don’t require software programming knowledge. Of course, professionals can take advantage of more advanced features to supercharge their automations, for instance, by adding custom code integration.

Once you’re done designing automation, you must execute them. For that, you’ll need UiPath Robots.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, you may use UiPath’s existing smart bots. They can execute various tasks, such as reading text or image input, interacting with third-party apps and databases, or making decisions to move the workflow forward. Depending on the level of assistance from a human agent, they fall into two categories:

• Attended UiPath robots – bots that cooperate with humans, operating in the background
• Unattended UiPath robots – bots that can work independently, taking charge of more complex, long-running workflows

Finally, another core element of UiPath automation is the orchestrator. This user-friendly interface lets you keep track of your robots and manage their performance. Using UiPath Orchestrator, you can deploy and provision bots, distribute, schedule, and monitor workflows, and manage integrations with external solutions.

And how about practical applications of UiPath? Those are unlimited. The solution’s scalability and versatility allow virtually any industry to enjoy its benefits. Let’s consider a few amazing examples.

Out of numerous use cases featured on UiPath’s website, those within the public sector industry particularly stand out.

Just look at this success story of the West Midlands Police Department, which used RPA by UiPath to automate back-end processes and serve the public more effectively. One of the key areas where bots provided immense value was uploading witness statements—thanks to automation, police officers can fill out a digital statement on the spot without having to make a trip back to the base. Another important area where bots help the police preserve their professionalism is recruitment, ensuring candidates from underrepresented ethnicities aren’t falling victim to cognitive bias.

→ See more RPA use cases for the public sector.

UiPath automations also immensely contribute to energy and utilities. In the case of Morrison Utility Services, the company’s RPA solution has helped save more than 320 person-hours per month on 27 automated processes.

Among other workflows, UiPath’s robots helped optimize the risk assessment process, gathering relevant data, generating reports, and distributing them among key decision-makers. The bots have also helped eliminate typos and errors from data inputs, improving service quality and speeding up delivery.

→ See more examples of how UiPath helps energy and utility services

The UiPath platform is also a great match for the media and entertainment industry, as demonstrated by RedPeg, a marketing company providing digital services. In its case, robot automation has shortened the time needed to kick off online poker games and assign players to tables by 15 times!

Another notable example comes from Spotify. The company has launched a business-wide citizen developers program to upskill employees and allow them to develop their automations. So far, it has deployed over 100 RPA robots to simplify and improve business processes, saving over 45,500 hours to date.

When mentioning all these remarkable examples of UiPath in action, we must, however, flag one important thing. Even though the solution is designed for non-technical users, a person without programming experience is unlikely to deliver highly complex use cases.

Sophisticated scenarios require coding skills and automation knowledge, usually involving custom integrations and features. Fortunately, our team of experienced UiPath developers can provide them to you.

For more use cases in media, entertainment, and other industries, check out UiPath’s resources page.

Learn more about SAP automation with UiPath!

Now, on to another useful tool that helps businesses capitalize on automation. Google Cloud Platform allows professional and citizen developers to quickly build, deploy, and automate business apps, websites, and services running on Google infrastructure. The platform belongs to Google Cloud and provides a catalog of services, including storage, hosting, database, big data analytics, networking, and AI and machine learning.

And if you are wondering what it has to do with robotic automation, let us explain. In 2021, Google partnered with a well-established RPA software producer Automation Anywhere, to expand its GCP products like AppSheet or AI Platform with RPA capabilities.

As a result, GCP provides access to numerous AI-based models and services enhanced with automation features. Users can access and deploy them through the Google Cloud Platform. Examples of such solutions include Document AI, used for smart document reading and processing, Product Discovery, which provides personalized product recommendations, or Contact Center AI, a virtual help agent to streamline the customer support experience (jump to GCP automation use cases to learn more).

Moreover, the AI team at Google shares a trove of data with the public through extensive datasets. Using them helps train and improve AI and ML models to tap into bottomless resources stored across the web.

Regarding the business benefits of GCP’s AI and other services, most align with the key advantages of other Google cloud products.

Getting services from a leading cloud provider in the world by default comes with heightened security. A global mega-enterprise with hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue cannot afford to compromise on data safety and protection. That’s why when choosing automation services from Google, you can rest assured that your data are safeguarded by the most elite security experts and top-class, robust solutions.

Google is committed to ensuring high availability and reliability, guaranteeing 99.99% service uptime or above. While downtime and outages may happen, they are rare and shouldn’t affect your automations. Moreover, Google collaborates with various system integration partners providing backup and disaster recovery services. So in case anything happens and you lose access to your service, you’re still safe knowing that your data will be fully recovered.

Pushing the envelope for cloud innovation, Google regularly updates its platform and services. This not only helps deliver improved protection, but also provides regular service improvements. As you continue using the existing automation services, new ones are coming out frequently, so you can continue to innovate and improve your processes.

Google’s automations are delivered as ready-to-deploy services in the cloud. Moreover, to install and launch them, you often don’t need to involve your IT department (or their engagement will be peripheral). This translates to immense time savings, meaning you can take advantage of your new automations in minimum time.

Google Cloud Platform services can help automate all sorts of tasks, from more sophisticated and detailed to primary and general. For example, companies can implement speech-to-text and text-to-speech functions or cloud vision for image recognition. These services can serve various purposes—here are a few examples:

• Automated mobile events. One tool we can’t skip when discussing GCP’s automation capabilities is Cloud Functions. It’s a serverless environment for building and connecting cloud services. It lets developers run code in the cloud to automate various tasks triggered by Google’s Firebase platform, which is used to develop mobile apps and games quickly. Examples of jobs that Cloud Functions can automate include sending out mobile notifications or email confirmation upon a trigger action (an event, a subscription, etc.) or automatically moderating images in an app.
• Task management. Another interesting automation feature from GCP is AppSheet Automation. This service combines the power of AI with no-code capabilities to let business users automate their tasks efficiently. It helps optimize processes related to project and inventory management, data retrieval, job tracking, team management, and more. You can build automation triggered by SMS messages, calls, emails, file creation, etc.
• Document processing. As already mentioned, Document AI is a universal platform that transforms unstructured data into structured, easily readable information. As such, it can be used across a variety of industries, from banking (document verification and pre-assessment) and healthcare (faster processing of patient records) to retail (bill, invoices, purchase orders scanning and input) and travel and logistics (tracking labels and receipts or fast-tracking passport and visa processing).
• HR & recruitment. In terms of more specialized solutions, companies can, for instance, accelerate and improve talent acquisition with Cloud Talent Solution. It is an ML technology that helps match eligible candidates to jobs faster and tweak job descriptions for more accurate searches.
• Customer service. Another example of more specialized automation from Google would be Contact Center AI, which refers to virtual agents that can enrich and speed up customer experience interactions with contact centers.

These are just a few famous examples, but GCP offers other functional automation beyond AI/ML. Some of them, like Recommendations AI or Cloud Life Sciences, were created specifically for a given industry (in this case, retail and healthcare).

UiPath is a top RPA product, while Google Cloud Platform is a cloud service suite that includes simple and more advanced automations. Depending on your use case and project, you may consider either to get the most out of automation. With that in mind, let’s see UiPath vs GCP battle.

Thanks to the visual drag-and-drop workflow builder, pre-defined tasks and tools, and clear distinction between the Studio, Robots, and Orchestrator components, UiPath is among the users’ favorites regarding ease of use. Getting a solid grip on the platform’s essential features takes one to two days, and even citizen developers can build fairly complex automation with the tool. Additionally, the platform has a robust marketplace where users can get various tools and connectors to upgrade their projects without having to program.

While the Google Cloud Platform comes with a familiar interface, it might be difficult to learn because of the multitude of features and options available. There are plenty of training videos and certification paths, including ones for cloud novices, but still, to use GCP cost-effectively requires a more thorough understanding of its services. Because of that, user reviews are mixed, and many voices appear talking about GCP as a complex tool professionals best handle.

The winner: UiPath

UiPath’s extensive capabilities make it the leading RPA solution on the market. The platform provides thousands of automation, covering all stages of their development, from creation and provisioning to testing, monitoring, and managing robots. Moreover, the company constantly innovates its product, expanding beyond traditional RPA capabilities to offer data science and AI automation solutions. Finally, UiPath also offers excellent scalability thanks to modular and reusable components that speed up the development of even the most complex scenarios.

Still, putting GCP also provides a scalable infrastructure that quickly adjusts to the current demands. In addition, it comes with auto-scaling features, scaling up and down based on predefined thresholds. GPC is extremely versatile in capabilities, offering nearly 200 services (although only a minority are for automation). Because it’s primarily a cloud computing platform, GCP provides storage, computing, and networking capabilities and enables automated app deployment and scheduling. And products like Cloud Functions or Workflows help developers automate backend processes. They can be used to connect services and manage the underlying infrastructure to address the current service demand.

The winner: GCP, due to the better scaling capabilities

UiPath offers specific plans that depend on the number of licenses and available features. A free plan is available for individual users building simple automation for personal use, while professional plans start at $420/month and can serve up to three tenants. Enterprises need a custom plan that provides access to all functions and can accommodate unlimited users. With all that in mind, UiPath is considered an expensive tool, especially for small companies and beginners.

While comparing UiPath vs GCP, in contrast, Google Cloud Platform offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model with $300 worth of free credits. When spent, the costs rise progressively, depending on workloads, services, and even location, which may sometimes create confusion. Monitoring tools are available to keep spending under control. Still, as always, with this type of pricing, it’s easy to go overboard when you’re not careful enough. The platform also comes with some free services.

The winner: UiPath; despite the steep prices, it makes it easier to control spending

UiPath has been designed to seamlessly integrate with all major enterprise apps like AWS, Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft, and many others. The platform supports over 1,400 automation integrations via API and user interface, in many cases making it possible to connect to other tools even for non-technical users.

GCP’s integration service connects automatically to third-party apps, databases, and internal Google Cloud Platform services. The platform also comes with a range of connectors, which enable fast integration with platforms and data sources, including Magento, HubSpot, Salesforce, Jira, various SQL databases, and FTP and HTTP servers. However, users are polarized regarding the ease of GCP’s integration. While some praise vast integration capabilities, many complain that it requires technical support.

The winner: a slight win for UiPath

UiPath is an excellent choice if you need a fairly accessible tool that will help you automate repetitive tasks in web-based apps easily. The solution’s biggest advantages include:

Suppose you are wondering why choose Google Cloud Platform over UiPath. In that case, these might convince you:

UiPath vs GCP: tools that come from entirely different worlds, so that we may have just compared apples to oranges. However, considering that the process automation market is expected to reach a CAGR of 5.1% by 2025, it’s no wonder that technology companies want to partake in it.

And such is the story of the Google Cloud Platform, which provides more and more automation and AI/ML-driven services to meet the ever-increasing demand for process optimization. And in some respects, it might be a better choice than traditional RPA solutions like UiPath, especially if you only need to automate individual processes. However, where long-term, large-scale automation is required, UiPath vs GCP, the first one is the way to go as it offers greater flexibility and selection of RPA bots than its Google counterpart.

But if you are still unsure which of the two would be a better option for you, we will gladly help. Thus, if you don’t want to get stuck in the nightmare of slow, manual processes, contact us, and we’ll recommend the best software for your scenarios. And in the meantime, if you’re wondering how UiPath ranks against other popular RPA solutions on the market, check out our Python automation guide or comparisons: UiPath vs. Automation Anywhere, UiPath vs. Blue Prism, and UiPath vs. Power Automate. Hoping to hear from you soon!