You may be in the phase of looking for an RPA (Robotic Process Automation) provider and may be looking at UiPath platform. Here is some feedback:
We have been using UiPath for almost 2 years now, and I believe an article like this one may have helped me during the phase we struggled finding the correct platform and tooling for the RPA work we had to do.
1 -UiPath Pros
. REF
UiPath offers to Bot developers something called REF: "Robotic Enterprise Framework". This is a kind of library, giving you the skeleton that your bot needs. It includes the logic you need to have to plug the bot to an orchestrator and all the good practices you need to follow too. I strongly suggest you use it if your bot need to perform retries and loop over multiple data.
. Support
As a developer, you will probably get blocked plenty of times in your RPA automation journey. Not finding how to do something in particular, how to set up your bot… Feedback we had, was always fast and efficient. This is an excellent point here, as sometimes when the bot fails in the middle of an execution, you do not have much time to fix things with nobody around you that can help.
. Certification
As mentioned in this article: ' New to RPA? Few mistakes to avoid…', I strongly recommend getting certified first (Advanced Developer) before starting any UiPath work. Certification is cheap and will force you in understanding how a bot should work, how to plug it to an orchestrator and will give you a good idea about all the features you have in your hands with UiPath. Time you will be spending on that will save you a lot of time later on I can tell…(see article)
. Cloud Orchestrator
We first installed the 'On-premise' version of the UiPath orchestrator in our own infrastructure. Installation and set up are not complicated but still, it is time-consuming, so you may better choose the Cloud orchestrator instead as you do not have anything to install. This is what we did and by moving from on-premise to cloud we also got the reliability, redundancy that we did not have in house.
Also, when you have multiple bots running being critical for the company and generating a lot of revenues or savings, you may feel better if the orchestrator piece is not in your hands but in the hands of people knowing such platform much better than you do.
Even if we saw some downtimes on the Cloud platform, I recommend it instead of on-premise.
** -UiPath Cons**
. Pricing
UiPath is expensive compared to Blue Prism and some other tools. You will need to work in a medium, large size company to be able to pay for this kind of platform. If you do not, you need to expect of a lot of savings from your future bots, so you can get the needed budget.
. Reports
The orchestrator managing and running the bots will allow you to report on executions very easily with nice graphs. But something annoying is that you cannot get very detailed reports of your execution. Even with the Elasticsearch module on On-Premise, the parameters of each execution are encapsulated into a block of JSON, which makes that you cannot build reports based on these parameters. For instance, let's say you need to send emails to customers and the customer ID information is one parameter of each run, then the issue is that you will not be able to build a report to understand how many emails have been sent to a specific customer ID.
. Contracting help
You may find, depending on where you are located, more available external contractors familiar with Blue Prism than with UiPath. Good thing is that if you don't find any, UiPath provides their own contractors.
I hope this article helped you
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