RPA tools comparison: Pega vs UiPath vs Automation Anywhere

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is one of the most popular and fastest-growing digital transformation technologies that helps businesses boost their productivity by automating various repetitive tasks. The RPA market is booming at the moment, reaching an impressive $1.89B in 2021. It is expected to grow to $2.32B in 2022 and maintain a 38.2% CAGR between 2022 and 2030.

Since a rapidly growing market is prone to spawning lots of different solutions, shortlisting the best RPA tools and picking the one that suits your needs may be quite a challenge. Popular RPA tools usually have excellent scaling capabilities and core RPA functionality to satisfy the needs of any enterprise but may be quite expensive. Niche tools, on the other hand, can offer immediate ROI for smaller companies but are difficult to scale to larger infrastructures. Therefore, to help you make the right choice, we will make an RPA tools comparison, picking the most prominent and popular solutions on the market, namely, Pega vs UiPath vs Automation Anywhere, and outline their strengths and weaknesses. Let’s begin.

Automation Anywhere

Automation Anywhere is one of the leading service providers and most popular RPA tools on the market. Its platform is equipped with all core features that enable effective RPA implementation, such as analytics, AI/ML, process discovery, marketplace integration, and more. Let’s take a closer look at what makes Automation Anywhere one of the best RPA tools:

• Focus on the cloud. Automation Anywhere allows its users to take full advantage of the benefits of cloud development. Being a cloud-native RPA platform, it offers seamless integration with all leading cloud providers, including Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. By putting microservices architecture at the center of every platform component’s design, Automation Anywhere can package its services into containers and use Kubernetes to host and orchestrate them in the public cloud.
• Smart automation. As mentioned before, Automation Anywhere is capable of integrating Machine Learning algorithms that can automate processes that handle large amounts of unstructured data. These algorithms are highly accurate and require minimum supervision from your engineers. 
• Robust security. The platform comes with a variety of data protection features that can help you ensure that all your sensitive data remains safe. 
• Innovation. Automation Anywhere constantly develops and implements top-of-the-line features, such as screen capture augmentation, multi-persona UX, low-code platforms for creating bot control applications, guided navigation, and more.
• Convenient pricing. One of the key characteristics that puts Automation Anywhere among the most popular RPA tools on the market is its simple fixed-cost pricing model. Customers can purchase bundles that include the features to cover their needs and at the same time offer simple and flexible scaling of their RPA capabilities.

No technology is perfect, and Automation Anywhere also has several challenges that you need to be aware of:

• Upgrading to the newer platform. Automation Anywhere is not immune to one of the most common challenges faced by platform providers, namely, upgrading legacy platforms to newer versions. Gartner has reported that some customers find it challenging to upgrade from the Legacy Automation Anywhere (v11) to the new Automation 360. 
• Processing documents. Some platform users have reported that they encountered difficulties when trying to accurately extract data from images. Therefore, if image processing is one of your main requirements, you may want to consider other options among top RPA tools. 

UiPath

UiPath is one of the best RPA tools on the market used by large enterprises, as well as small and medium-sized businesses across the globe. It's a cloud-based platform that offers rich functionality, such as cloud-based RPA orchestration, computer vision, AI-powered automation, developer-friendly UX, etc. Here are some of the main advantages offered by UiPath:

• End-to-end automation. UiPath focuses on developing an integrated low-code platform that targets various branches of the process automation lifecycle, such as IT engineers and business technology experts, to establish effective end-to-end automation and enable enterprise-level governance. 
• Low-code UX app builder. UiPath Apps is a low-code UX tool that allows creating and sharing custom business solutions for interfacing with both on-premise and cloud-based systems (for example, ERP). Solutions built with UiPath Apps have the necessary business logic and workflow capabilities to optimize and automate all business processes.
• Seamless UI, API, and AI integration. The platform’s dedicated service allows combining various UI, API, and AI integrations and deploying them within a single environment to expand automation capabilities. 
• Massive ecosystem. Being one of the top RPA tools on the market helped UiPath establish a massive community of customers, partners, and contributors. UiPath marketplace is booming, currently offering over 1,300 reusable components that every user can take advantage of.

Despite all of its benefits, there are also several challenges that you will face when using Uipath:

• Limited web development capabilities. Despite being primarily a cloud-based RPA platform, UiPath lacks a dedicated environment for web-based RPA development. The good news is that UiPath is planning on addressing this issue and creating an environment for web development soon.
• More complex pricing. UiPath has changed its pricing strategy on multiple occasions. This had a direct effect on their pricing models, making them a bit more complicated, especially for new customers, as compared to their competitors. However, they are working on introducing special starter packs and consumption-based models which, hopefully, will make life easier for all customers.  

Pega RPA

If you are making an RPA platforms comparison of Pega vs UiPath or Pega vs Automation Anywhere, the latter ones have an advantage in popularity and market reach. Nevertheless, Pega is also an excellent platform that is rightfully considered to be among the top RPA tools. It offers many useful features, such as CRM, AI, and a unique proprietary computer vision solution called X-Ray Vision. Pega RPA offers several substantial benefits:

• Seamless native integration with other Pega tools. Pega RPA platform offers many useful features, such as a bot manager, design studio, and orchestration manager. They integrate perfectly with the rich portfolio of solutions offered by Pega systems, allowing customers to create end-to-end automation platforms with the functionality to cover every business need. 
• Innovation. Pega regularly develops and integrates various innovative solutions. Some of the tools that are already implemented in the Pega platform include computer vision technology, prebuilt AI/ML decision automation models, serverless orchestration capabilities, and more.

Pega RPA platform has its challenges, and you have to be prepared to handle them:

• Lack of product focus. Pega’s rich product portfolio requires significant configuration and integration skills to truly shine. Therefore, if you are looking for a quick ROI on your RPA integration – it would be better to look for simpler and less expensive alternatives. 
• Premium pricing. Pega offers premium solutions at a premium price. Even though they occasionally introduce changes into their pricing model, their focus remains the same – larger enterprises with substantial budgets. 

Choosing the right RPA solution

Picking the right tool is one of the key factors that guarantee success when it comes to RPA implementation. Making the choice by yourself can be quite overwhelming, therefore it is highly recommended to seek help from tech experts who have significant experience with tools for RPA. At N-iX, for example, we often start cooperation with our clients with a thorough Discovery phase during which we examine our client’s business and choose a technology stack that would satisfy all their needs.

Using one of the top RPA tools to improve operational efficiency: a success story

Let’s take a look at how using one of the best RPA tools (in this case, UiPath) can benefit a business. The company in this success story is a large IT service provider (NDA) that needed to boost the efficiency of their hiring process. 

The challenge

The company needed to optimize their recruitment process by reducing the amount of manual work required for creating, publishing, and updating job postings. With over 400 active job openings and only 100 available slots on an external job posting platform, the recruitment team had to spend lots of time monitoring and prioritizing each vacancy.

The solution

The flexibility and broad functionality of UiPath were the deciding factors for the N-iX team when the choice for the best RPA platforms had to be made. We built a solution that allows the recruiting team to prioritize and update all job postings, and at the same time serve as a single source of truth that tracks all changes and helps make more informed decisions.

Additionally, with UiPath our team was able to create complex integrations between the internal applicant tracking system, the website, and the job posting portal. Integration with the platform provided an additional challenge that our team had to overcome, since the platform did not have a dedicated API. Our team built complex logic that covers all use cases and works smoothly with all elements. 

The value delivered

The new solutions helped automate the job posting process and significantly reduced the amount of required manual work. As a result, the number of errors caused by the human factor has decreased dramatically. The communication overhead has also been reduced and the communication between different departments has been streamlined. Finally, the company was able to increase the number of managed job postings that required virtually no human involvement by 50%. 

How can N-iX help you benefit from the best RPA tools?

• N-iX has 2,200 employees and over 21 years of experience in providing high-quality IT services;
• We have significant experience with delivering enterprise solutions, including ECM, OpenText, and SAP;
• N-iX has formed long-lasting partnerships with leading companies from various industries, including telecom, manufacturing, fintech, and more;
• We offer a wide range of services and expertise, including cloud development, data analytics, IoT, and more.