RPA Tools Comparison

RPA has been quite a buzz word in the Industry and there are many RPA tools. If you are new to RPA, I would suggest checking What is an RPA article before moving ahead.

As we have seen in What is RPA, the main goal of any RPA tool is to automate the easy, repetitive tasks which can be done based on certain rules. This is done by bots (software driven by rules).

There are many RPA tools in the market and based on your requirement you should choose a tool intelligently as that may impact the final outcome of RPA implementation.

Before choosing the right RPA tool, let’s see what features any RPA tool should have mandatory:

1. 1. A bot should be able to make decisions and determine its actions based on inputs gathered from other systems.
2. 2. A bot should be able to interact with various other systems either through screen scraping / API integrations.
3. 3. A bot should have an interface to program the bot

You may wonder why I need to use RPA tools when I can do automation using Excel, macro or any other traditional automation tools. If you see all these traditional tools are  not very much reliable and scalable. For automation to succeed, it should be easy(less time consuming), flexible and it should be intelligent (rule based). Below is the checklist for selecting RPA tool:

Now as we know the selection checklist as well as what to look for in any RPA tool, let’s analyze top RPA tools and see how they fit into your requirement.

Various RPA tools available in market

As per Forrester Wave 2017 Q1[1] report below are the Leaders and Strong RPA vendors

• Automation Anywhere
• BluePrism
• UiPath
• NICE
• EdgeVerve
• Pega / OpenSpan
• Workfusion

Market Leaders

As per report below 3 are the strong market leaders with various attributes

• Automation Anywhere is the current market share leader
• Blue Prism is an innovator that first saw RPA as distinct from BPM
• UiPath provides an open platform well suited for complex automation

Let’s check the market presence of the RPA tools and their current offerings

The graphical representation is according to Forrester Wave report: Robotic Process Automation

RPA Tools List:

The below table shows the RPA tools’ comparison of various parameters.

There are many RPA tools in the market but we will cover top 3 RPA tools in this article:

• UiPath
• BluePrism
• Automation Anywhere

RPA is an application of technology, directed by business logic and structured inputs, aimed at automating business processes and to implement RPA we need RPA Tools. Here the list of top three RPA tools.

1. Blue Prism

Blue Prism connects enterprise technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning, and sentiment analysis to enable companies to create efficacious digital business strategies.

• Supports several languages like Japanese that enables users who speak and read languages other than English to work comfortably with the application.
• The application can run both on-premises and in the cloud via Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, providing companies with flexible infrastructure choices.

Blue Prism group is a multinational software organization based in the UK. They pioneered RPA to reduce the high risk and low return processing work and data entry job manually.

The technology used is based on Microsoft.net framework and it supports any type of platform and applications. It allows the design automation process that too within IT governance. The tool supports the internal and external decryption and encryption keys. The users are provided with audit logs enabling. The customized code of .NET provides a high rate of robustness.

2. UiPath

UiPath is a feature-rich and intuitive robotic automation platform(RPA) designed to help business analysts and administrators to automate processes within their businesses.

• Unmatched Citrix capability and robust computer vision which deliver extended integration and high precision automation.
• Helps you to automate faster thanks to the point and click drag & drop, and MS workflow foundation technology.

UiPath is a global software company based in New York City. With the help of UiPath tools, it is easy to manage automated business processes and the virtual workforce.

It is based on an on-premise and cloud deployment method which makes it capable to deploy and manage all things in one particular place. The main advantage of UiPath is that it offers desktop contribution and Citrix environment which is good for BPO automation. It is based on Microsoft SharePoint workflow, Kibana elastic search.

3. Automation Anywhere

With automation anywhere enterprise, companies can create smart bots that perform tasks in different areas of the business.

• Can be deployed even in the front-end for rules-based processes as well as in the back-end for a true and complete RPA solution.
• Has an analytics and reporting feature that provides them with intelligence regarding the performances of their bots and their impact on the business at large.

Automation Anywhere is based in California, US. It caters to businesses looking to deploy a digital workforce composed of bots which can offer complete end-to-end business processes. Be it cloud, data center or desktop, automation anywhere can be deployed in any environment. It can protect all the architectures and control the processing. Microsoft is its base technology.