UiPath and Blue Prism serve the great purpose of automating business processes yet their offerings differ in many ways.

The acceleration in demand for automation technologies like robotic process automation or RPA is giving a tough time to various tech vendors to prove their worth and relevance in a highly competitive market. High valued automation companies like Blue Prism and UiPath are extensively innovating their services to stay relevant in such an ambitious market. As noted by Crunchbase, UiPath designs and develops robotic process automation software. The UiPath Enterprise RPA platform offers an easy-to-use automation design tool and supports on-premises and automated cloud deployment. The platform supports both attended and unattended robots is known for high scale, secure, resilient operations. This enterprise came into existence in the year 2005 and was founded by Daniel Dines. In the year 2018, a sum of US$153 million was given to the company as an investment from the capital, Accel and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. As noted by a report, it is really easy to manage automated business processes and processes a virtual work workforce with the help of UiPath. This will help you by increasing the benefits of Robotic process automation. Such things are possible in UiPath because it is based on an on-premise and cloud deployment method and due to this, you will be able to deploy and manage everything in one particular place. It also has a wide range of productivity as UiPath provides with extensible and standard that will give you a new level of automation which is used for the minimal cost of operation and also provided better care of usage of resources of IT. If for various Business units there are for different users then you will be able to make one server that is secure, private, and also autonomous. It also provides a great level of security. It may provide you with the option of global deployment but security is not compromised. It has the feature of the lock screen. Blue Prism, on the other hand, has the vision to provide a Digital Workforce for Every Enterprise. The company’s purpose is to unleash the collaborative potential of humans, operating in harmony with a Digital Workforce, so every enterprise can exceed their business goals and drive meaningful growth, with unmatched speed and agility. Fortune 500 and public-sector organizations, among customers across 70 commercial sectors, trust Blue Prism’s enterprise-grade connected-RPA platform, which has users in more than 170 countries. By strategically applying intelligent automation, these organizations are creating new opportunities and services, while unlocking massive efficiencies that return millions of hours of work into their business. In the year 2010, and a group of experts in the field of process automation founded blue prism to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of a company. The technology that is used in this case is based on Microsoft.net framework and any type of platform and applications are supported by this. The customer or user owns and manages the digital workforce of the blue prism. It is also built by them. This technology is used in various industries like consumer packaged goods, public sectors, finance and insurance, utilities, and healthcare. All types of investment applications, enterprise, and infrastructure data repositories, the legacy system need to co-exist and easy sharing of data is enabled by the blue prism. Blue Prism helps in removing IT initiatives that are rogue from the business operations. It performs such functions without making any repository of new data. This is considered to be a complete technology for rapid business process automation.    

Features of Blue Prism and UiPath RPA and Their Respective Pros and Cons

Blue Prism Features: • Robust – It provides some of the best features, like data encryption, load balancing, and auditing. • Security & Accuracy – A user can run an “N” number of processes and will get secure as well as accurately automated results. • Less Workforce Requirement – The tool can run 24×7, and no workforce is required to monitor it. • Data Management – Automation helps this tool to store data in data centers, which provides a defined way to abstract data and secure the whole process. • Dashboard Support – This RPA tool offers a dashboard so a user can quickly analyze data and can monitor the process.   Pros • This tool can develop and control • Operational scalability is good with excellent execution speeds • It has a client-based server architecture • Highly reliable and accurate • Image and text recognition is present • Debugging capability of the tool is good • This tool can handle infinite processes at a time.   Cons • This tool is expensive, and no free version is available • Does not contain open forums • A user cannot do advance scheduling • Supports back-office automation only • Recorders do not exist on the tool • Only app-based access • User will need training regarding the tool   UiPath Features: • Compatibility – UiPath offers a good range of applications, be it desktop-based or web-based. • Hosting – A user can host UiPath RPA on the cloud as well as on virtual terminals. • Library – This tool offers a dynamic library which helps users to use drag and drop feature. • Licensing – This tool uses server-based licensing that uses a centralized server, which makes it easier to use. • Integration – UiPath provides third-party integration. A user can use OCR technologies from various companies at the API Level. • Debugging – It also offers powerful debugging, which is flexible and intuitive.   Pros • This tool is expensive, but a free version is available • Contains open forums for public • A user can do advance scheduling • Supports back office and front office automation • Recorders are present in the tool for faster process mapping • Both mobile and app-based access • Image and text recognition is present • The user interface is easy to use • Implementation and development speed of the tool is fast   Cons • It has a web-based architecture • Reliability here is not so good • Operational scalability is average • This tool can handle a maximum of 10,000 processes  

Comparison between Blue Prism and UiPath

Robots Supported In terms of robot support, UiPath features attended and unattended robots and Blue Prism features unattended robots only. The former’s ideology of having attended robots is to facilitate all workers to have a robot to be more efficient and effective, while the latter is only designed to work in a corporate environment with only unattended robots.   Debugging While UiPath has less effective debugging, Blue Prism has easier debugging. Debugging in the former is difficult therefore one cannot make changes during the debugging execution. Users can only see the values of variables during the process and cannot change them for testing. Blue Prism lets users interact with variables and scenarios dynamically to test and resolve issues.   Exception Handling UiPath works on traditional ‘try-catch’ activity, whereas while working with Blue Prism, resizable blocks can be used and altered easily to cover around steps to use try-catch functionality.   Readability of Process Where UiPath has fixed size and limited positional activity elements, Blue Prims has custom-sized, positioned, and color-coded process elements.   Deployments In the case of UiPath, a process in the studio can only relate to one orchestrator at a time, so you have to reconfigure to switch between Staging and Production while import-export of packages makes deployment easier in Blue Prism.   Developer-friendly One of the fundamental differences between UiPath and Blue prism RPA tools is usability. If need be, these tools can be implemented by any business insider, but they do require some level of coding. Any developer with basic coding knowledge can implement UiPath RPA solutions, however, Blue Prism requires a developer to have an intermediate level of coding experience.   Implementation Cost One of the key benefits of RPA implementation is low operational costs. But to achieve that level of cost-effectiveness in business operations, a company has to implement RPA in the first place. Whilst Blue Prism offers a cost-effective pricing structure for RPA implementation, UiPath could get a little too expensive for new-age startups, or businesses looking to automate processes on Budget.   Process Readability For RPA automation to run smoothly, it requires a little human input and interaction. That said, it is indispensable to offer an intuitive, aesthetic sense of readability. Blue Prism takes the upper hand here, since it offers visual elements and customization options, unlike UiPath where the process flow is fixed with no options for added customization.   Development The development aspect makes up for a better part of RPA development. If development is tedious and time-consuming, automation becomes yet another standalone process. With Blue Prism RPA tools, developing automation is a simple process. All you’re required to do is create a new package, and export and import accordingly. However, with UiPath RPA tools, the development is simple but requires you to connect the assigned studio, trigger processes, and publish them inside the orchestrator.   System Integration What makes RPA appealing and accessible is easy integration. Implementing RPA doesn’t require you to install new infrastructure in place; instead, it sits on the top of existing processes and legacy systems. Blue Prism offers excellent integrations on both the server-side and the client-side, with added support for REST calls. Although, you need the support for REST calls to start RPA processes in the system(s) outside of the UiPath environment.