Many RPA tools have sprung up in various niches thanks to the hype and investment in RPA. Here is a summary of the top RPA tools. I keep adding to this list as I discover new tools.
Top 3 RPA tools
Uipath
Uipath is an RPA tool that is easy to learn and get started. Your team can download the tool, learn from their academy and get going. There is a decent community and many programmers if your team like to take external help. Uipath has a comparatively easy licensing model and is easy to procure as well.
UiPath Go! brings everything together to get started quickly. It has the Academy, Components and Community.
Automation Anywhere
Automation Anywhere has a good depth of functionality and features while being mostly user-friendly. You can get started fairly quickly and scale with this decently robust tool. Automation Anywhere has a complex licensing model and is perceived to be costly.
Automation Anywhere has a bot store that provides an elegant list of bots that you can get started with.
Blue Prism
Blue Prism is the most robust tool in the pack. If you are looking for a safe bet, Blue Prim is the tool. They are one of the pioneers in the field and even claim to have coined the term RPA. Blue prism has an object-oriented architecture which helps manage reusable components better. Overall is a great tool if you use a developer but lacks a recorder if your team is less technically savvy and like to get things moving quickly.
Other RPA tools
Workfusion
They came into limelight for offering completely free RPA. With the free RPA Express version, you can write scripts to automate tasks. The free version is missing key features though and you usually have to upgrade to Smart Process Automation (SPA) for Enterprise level use.
Pega Systems
Pegasystems is a business process management (BPM) provider that added RPA with the acquisition of Openspan. OpenSpan uses robotic automation to ease the burden on customer service representatives (CSRs) by automating routine desktop tasks, thus increasing employee productivity and job satisfaction.
Nice
NICE is an Israeli enterprise software company – one of the largest technology organizations in Israel. It started its RPA journey with the acquisition of Eglue in 2010. NICE started as workflow automation business for Contact centers. It continues to be strong in that space with a chat based automation.
Kryon
Kryon has tools to mine processes within the organization highlighting the processes that can be automated. It has strong integration with ABBY, the leaders in OCR. Kryon uses computer vision to support Citrix which is a traditionally weak area for many RPA vendors.
Kofax
Kofax has a bunch of products one of which is Kapow RPA which was acquired in 2013. One of the strengths of Kofax is the ability to bring these various products with BPM and OCR capabilities to power the automation. Kofax is strong in the content management space and Kofax RPA is a tool that is used to enahance Content management smarts.
Antworks
AntWorks’ is a new and interesting company that claims to have an integrated Cognitive machine learning and autonomous automation in a single stack. Their main product, ANTstein is designed to understand structured as well as semi-unstructured data. The tool also has broader cognitive capabilities that include pattern recognition, photos, and images.
Redwood
Automating inefficiencies in Oracle and SAP ERP is what Redwood Software focuses on. It reduces manual labor in the supply chain, logistics, forecasting, eCommerce delivery, and financial posting. They have a catalog of Oracle, SAP, and other automation for faster deployment.
Softomotive
Softomotive is one of the pioneers in automation even before RPA was a thing! They have been in the automation space since 2005. They provide standalone server less product called WinAuotmation (attended automation) and a comparatively new server-based RPA called ProcessRobot (unattended automation).
New and Upcoming Tools
Fortressiq
A new RPA (ish) tool that records processes and then automates them with AI. It seems to be an automation tool that watches how we work, then uses AI-driven insights to configure the automation and also tell us how to work better on the fly.
They apparently have an agent that gets deployed and integrates into the video card. It captures everything going on, as a person interacts with a Windows desktop. With AI and Computer vision, the tool transcribes the captured “movie” into a series of software interactions.
Catalytic
Catalytic is niche RPA player that concentrates on unstructured data, like pulling information from documents or emails. It uses both OCR or natural language process (NLP) to “read” the document, depending on requirements. The platform provides a variety of Actions, which business users can assemble to build out complex automation.
Catalytic is offered on a subscription basis as a cloud service.
