Report:

Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation

Top Vendor Products for Robotic Process Automation in 2024

• Automation Anywhere
• Microsoft
• SS&C Blue Prism
• UiPath

Robotic Process Automation Vendor Product Comparisons 2024

• Appian - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Pricing: Appian offers simple per-user product bundles that include access to more RPA bots and complementary automation capabilities like LCAP, process mining and IDP. Appian's Premium package includes unlimited RPA bots, which can be a great value for customers running a high number of bots. Appian has also launched a free, multitenant Appian Community Edition to expand access to more users.
  • Vertical strategy: Appian has released an on-premises bot orchestrator. This feature is a key requirement for customers in verticals with high data security requirements such as government, financial services and manufacturing.
  • Innovation: Appian has a dedicated engineering innovation hub that focuses on RPA. The innovation hub has developed RPA migration tools and AutoScale for process orchestration, which adjusts processing capacity in real time to match workload demands.

  Cons:

  • Composability: Appian bundles RPA into its larger platform and does not offer out-of-the-box connectors for third-party BPA, low-code or IDP tools. Appian Cloud operates exclusively on Amazon Web Services (AWS), while only offering general web service connectors to other cloud platforms. Due to this, Appian provides limited flexibility to customers that wish to integrate Appian with their existing BPA, low-code or IDP tools.
  • Visibility: Appian has relatively low engagement on social channels, and a low volume of searches on gartner.com compared to other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Despite its investment in marketing and education to attract new customers, Gartner rarely receives inquiries about Appian RPA, unless the client is already using the Appian Platform.
  • Automation design and development: Appian's multideveloper environment is not as conducive to collaboration when compared to its competitors. Appian's bundling of RPA inside the larger platform can drive developers to use Appian's native DevOps tools or store different parts of a robotic process as subtasks. Developers might find this different from their existing DevOps processes, requiring additional training and adjustments on how multiple developers work together to build in Appian.


• Automation Anywhere - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Innovation: Automation Anywhere has a reputation for developing innovative features, including strengthening governance with enforcement of code analysis, API tasks for full cloud-based integration and Automation Copilot for Automators, which provides natural language development of automations.
  • AI strategy: Automation Anywhere is clearly focused on driving an AI-enabled RPA future. It is investing heavily in GenAI to enhance its IDP and prompt-based automation development capabilities, and is building partnerships with leading AI vendors like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Automation Anywhere also plans to hire more AI experts and release an AI development studio.
  • Customer success: Automation Anywhere excels at gathering feedback from its customers and helping them to solve complex automation challenges. Automation Anywhere has created programs like Voice of Customer, Customer Advisory Boards, Key Account Program, Automation Anywhere University and the Pathfinder Program to help customers get more value from its platform.

  Cons:

  • Pricing: Automation Anywhere offers a base package and an enterprise package, the latter is at a higher price compared to competing offerings. Automation Anywhere claims this package is for customers with greater scale or maturity. Both packages include the products that customers need to get started with RPA, but some features — such as COE Manager — are not included in either package.
  • Geographic strategy: Automation Anywhere's global footprint has decreased over the last few years in Asia/Pacific and parts of Europe, and the organization has no near-term plans to expand into new regions. Automation Anywhere has pivoted toward a partner-first business model in certain regions, and potential customers may prefer vendors with greater local presence.
  • Visibility: Some of the software industry's largest providers have entered the RPA market in the last several years. The reach, spend and customer engagement from these newer competitors, combined with those from tenured RPA providers, have overshadowed Automation Anywhere's market awareness efforts. If this trend continues, it may affect Automation Anywhere's customer adoption and partner support.


• IBM - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Global presence: IBM is a globally recognized company with offices and partners in every region. Its vast geographic reach provides customers with access to local resources for sales, support and implementation. IBM has demonstrated the ability to deliver its solutions on a global scale via its sales channels.
  • Product execution: IBM's RPA product provides good screen-scraping capabilities, which serve as the product's foundation. Its task-mining capabilities are especially strong and serve as a valuable add-on to its RPA platform. The RPA product's integration with IBM Watson provides AI-augmented capabilities for end users.
  • Customer support: IBM's experienced global support team provides a positive customer experience. It has created a joint team of business development executives and technical leaders to guide customers through all stages of their automation journeys.

  Cons:

  • Visibility: Gartner clients rarely mention IBM in inquiries about RPA. Despite IBM's attempts to attract new customers with a low-cost pricing strategy for its RPA product, it is still not well-known. IBM RPA primarily appeals to organizations that extensively use IBM products and want to add automation and integration capabilities via IBM Cloud Paks.
  • RPA features: IBM RPA lacks several features that are commonly offered by its competitors. While it supports Citrix and other VMs via its vision drivers, it does not offer connectors to automate applications running on Citrix or machines based on Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). IBM RPA does not enable remote developers to work on the same script in parallel, nor does it offer a web-or mobile-based development studio for RPA script development.
  • Marketing strategy: IBM's RPA division targets large enterprises with its marketing. Before IBM acquired its RPA capabilities, the acquired vendor (WDG Automation) focused on selling RPA to SMBs. Existing IBM customers may need to verify if its RPA offering still fits into their long-term roadmap for automation development.


• Laiye - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Market understanding: Laiye introduced a new multimodal, multichannel conversational interface that provides users with numerous automation capabilities in a unified low-code platform. Within that platform, Laiye Automation Creator offers user-friendly interfaces for RPA development to both citizen developers and IT professionals. Laiye caters to its users by releasing all new products in Simplified Chinese and English.
  • Offering strategy: Laiye's product team regularly interviews customers, and Laiye has an active community of more than 800,000 developers. Its RPA product is compatible with Linux-based OSs such as Ubuntu, Kylin and Unity Operating System, which enables Laiye to serve a broader range of customers.
  • Business model: Laiye's Work Execution System (WES) is an integrated platform that combines automation technologies such as RPA, IDP and chatbots. Customers can purchase Laiye's RPA capabilities as stand-alone products or as part of WES. Laiye is working with partners to jointly develop utility-based and revenue-sharing pricing models.

  Cons:

  • UI connectors: Laiye does not provide UI connectors for business process automation (BPA) or low-code workflow orchestration engines such as Appian, BonitaSoft, Camunda, Flowable and Pega. It has a few direct UI connectors for commonly used applications like Microsoft 365, Oracle, Salesforce and SAP, but it lacks other UI connectors that customers may need.
  • Product features: Laiye does not support some regulatory compliance protocols for its bots. It only supports the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), SOC 1/2/3, and ISO-27001, which limits its appeal for some organizations. Laiye does not integrate with third-party IDP tools, and it does not natively offer any tools for planning automation projects.
  • Geographic strategy: Laiye has a limited global footprint compared to other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Laiye mainly focuses on China and Southeast Asia and has a limited presence outside of China, as indicated by its small number of RPA-related staff, net new customers, reseller partners and delivery partners in other regions. Customers outside of China and Southeast Asia may find their coverage limiting.


• Microsoft - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Visibility: Microsoft is the second-most frequently discussed RPA vendor in Gartner client inquiries, and the fastest-growing vendor in terms of RPA revenues from Gartner's market share research. Customer interest and adoption of Power Automate continues to rapidly grow, and Microsoft continues to expand its network of partners that support Power Automate.
  • Pricing: For smaller deployments of Power Automate, Microsoft's prices are often 30% to 50% lower than its RPA competitors. Many customers are drawn to using Power Automate due to its low starting price and its widespread availability (a limited version is preinstalled with Windows 11). Many large organizations use Power Automate as a complementary RPA tool to deliver automation within Microsoft applications.
  • Microsoft product integration: Power Automate excels at automating and integrating across Microsoft's expansive product portfolio, including Microsoft 365, Dynamics, Power Apps, Power BI and Edge. Organizations that use Microsoft products extensively, especially those that use Microsoft Azure and Copilot, will benefit most from Power Automate.

  Cons:

  • Product capabilities: Customers that have migrated from other platforms to Power Automate have voiced concerns in Gartner interactions about its relatively limited capabilities, especially its Citrix/RDP bot execution, queue management and real-time monitoring of bot execution. Also, customers and partners said that Microsoft Copilot's prompt-based RPA development capabilities were limited and sometimes generated inaccurate RPA script objects.
  • Licensing: As customers expand their use of Power Automate, they have reported additional costs that add up over time. Customers may end up paying for Azure, premium connectors, Dataverse, Azure DevOps and additional licenses for Microsoft products. Customers have also said that they struggle to discern Power Automate access levels provided by E3 and E5 enterprise licenses.
  • Product usage: Large organizations rarely use Power Automate as their primary RPA tool, instead reserving it for use cases focused on Microsoft applications or citizen development. Large organizations that are evaluating Power Automate should compare their needs against this market adoption trend.


• Nintex - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Market understanding: Nintex differentiates itself by strategically targeting midsize enterprises (those with revenues between $50 million and $1 billion). Customers from midsize enterprises may benefit from Nintex's low barriers to entry, especially in terms of pricing and ease of use.
  • Workflow ecosystem: Nintex RPA includes a web-based interface with strong security controls and specific features to automate processes in SAP ERP. It supports bidirectional, end-to-end process orchestration between RPA bots and workflow capabilities via Nintex Gateway. This application connects Nintex Automation Cloud to on-premises RPA and other third-party systems.
  • Customer ecosystem: Nintex has more than 10,000 automation customers, including more than 1,000 RPA customers. Nintex has built hundreds of prebuilt automation templates and connectors for RPA and workflow automation that are tailored to the personalized needs of its customer base.

  Cons:

  • Product features: Nintex RPA lacks several of the developer-centric features found in most competing products, such as a developer marketplace and support for continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD). It has limited collaboration features for developers and limited native IDP capabilities, although integrations with third-party IDP products are available. Nintex RPA is only available in English, but support for German, French and Spanish are on its roadmap.
  • Visibility: Nintex RPA has yet to gain much visibility outside of its existing customer base. Gartner client inquiries about Nintex mainly come from customers of its other automation solutions, although Nintex claims the majority of its RPA customers are net new clients. Nintex's RPA product also has few publicly available customer reviews to inform potential customers.
  • AI capabilities: Unlike most RPA vendors, Nintex did not accelerate its specialized or generative AI capabilities. Most of its generative AI features are on its 2024/2045 product roadmap or present in other components of its Process Platform. Customers should evaluate if Nintex's AI capabilities can meet their requirements.


• Pegasystems - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Automation capabilities: Pegasystems' RPA product goes beyond tactical automation with process fabric, intelligent decisioning, low-code capabilities and workflow automation. Pega Robotic Automation has especially strong attended automation capabilities. It enables users to run automations in the background using any desktop accessibility UI configuration while also detecting and resolving common UI changes in applications at run time.
  • Platform ecosystem: Pegasystems has built a strong customer community and marketplace. The Pega Community platform offers training, support resources and career advancement tools, and has more than 300,000 active members. Pega Marketplace provides customers with applications, add-on components and utilities from Pegasystems, its partners and community contributors.
  • Market execution: Pegasystems has succeeded in cross-selling its RPA product to its existing customers with flexible licensing for the Pega Infinity Platform. Pegasystems has also attracted new users through tools like Blueprint, which facilitate collaborative automation development. Pegasystems has further expanded its market presence through Pega Launchpad, where other software vendors can sell products built on top of the Pega Infinity platform.

  Cons:

  • Sales strategy: Several current Pegasystems customers have received renewal proposals with a minimum contract value that is typically higher than most of its competitors. Given these higher-priced proposals, Pega may not be ideal for net new RPA customers unless they are existing Pegasystems customers.
  • Business model: Pegasystems primarily targets large enterprises and mostly sells RPA as a complement to the other features of its Pega Infinity Platform. Customers seeking an RPA solution for tactical uses may find other solutions provide simpler capabilities at a lower price.
  • RPA migration: Pegasystems does not offer any services or tools to help customers migrate RPA deployments to its platform. While Pegasystems can manually encapsulate externally coded script libraries, source code and other projects, migrating to Pega Robotic Automation from a different platform may be difficult.


• Salesforce - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Market understanding: Salesforce is democratizing automation development by investing in its GenAI technology, Einstein GPT, including a range of security and privacy guardrails known as Einstein Trust Layer. It plans to embed automation within its Einstein Copilot digital assistant so that Salesforce Einstein customers benefit from automation actions across CRM and Salesforce Industry Cloud.
  • Product: Salesforce claims the ability to orchestrate across multiple RPA platforms and provide aggregated analytics. This multiplatform orchestration will simplify the transition and management of bot operations for customers that want to migrate to Salesforce from another vendor or use a multivendor strategy.
  • Product portfolio: Salesforce Flow extends beyond RPA capabilities, which can enable customers to deliver automation across their organization. Salesforce continues to be a Leader in Magic Quadrants for adjacent technology markets that complement RPA, including integration platform as a service (iPaaS), API management and enterprise LCAPs.

  Cons:

  • Product strategy: Salesforce does not install components to run in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and relies on computer vision to automate UI interactions in those environments. Customers may find that this approach produces more brittle automations with a limited ability to capture application metadata. Salesforce's RPA products also support fewer industry regulatory compliance standards than many of its competitors.
  • Ecosystem: Salesforce's RPA systems integrator partners are largely small or midsize providers that focus on Salesforce. Customers that want deep industry experience to support multiple RPA platforms may struggle to find a systems integrator that meets their needs.
  • Sales execution/pricing: Prices for Salesforce's entry-point offering tend to be higher than some of its competitors. Although Salesforce's entry-point solution is consumption-based, with metric ratios associated with its wide range of automation capabilities, its price may still deter some organizations. Also, Salesforce still does not offer a free trial, although this feature is expected by 2025 and customers can request proofs of concept.


• Samsung SDS - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Market understanding: Samsung SDS has a unique strategy for targeting different customer segments. It offers small-scale, tactical automation capabilities for smaller organizations while also providing larger enterprises with the ability to use on-premises LLMs that enable complex automation. To further differentiate its offerings, Samsung SDS has built partnerships to integrate advanced GenAI capabilities into its RPA product, including GPT on Azure and Gemini for Google Cloud.
  • Partner ecosystem: Samsung SDS's RPA operations team partners with service providers to offer a broad range of services for its RPA customers. For example, Samsung SDS works with its consulting partners to offer a paid service that diagnoses and recommends AI-based automation across business functions.
  • Customer experience: Samsung SDS has established key support groups such as a dedicated customer success organization, Brity Automation COE, global contact center and product development teams. Samsung SDS customers can use its portal to measure the ROI of their RPA deployments. It also allows customers to upgrade their orchestrator without interruptions.

  Cons:

  • Visibility: Samsung SDS has a limited geographic presence outside of Asia/Pacific, which may deter customers in other regions. Gartner clients do not typically shortlist Samsung SDS when evaluating RPA products, and Gartner receives relatively few inquiries about its RPA products.
  • Connectors: Samsung SDS does not offer prebuilt integrations or UI connectors for certain enterprise systems such as Oracle and Salesforce. However, through API connectors, Brity Automation supports customers in establishing connections as needed. It does not offer prepackaged adapters for large-scale data migration to ERP platforms like those from Oracle or SAP.
  • Product upgrade focus: Samsung SDS provides infrequent product upgrades compared to its competitors, which may limit access to new capabilities in a fast-changing market. It offers minor upgrades to Brity Automation twice per year and a major upgrade every two years. Samsung claims this release schedule is intentional to minimize the burden of on-premises updates. It implements functional improvements and corrections through hotfixes.


• SAP - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Sales execution/pricing: SAP Build is included with SAP S4/HANA, SAP SuccessFactors and SAP BTP. It does not incur additional digital or indirect access fees, which is a significant benefit for existing SAP customers. Customers can also purchase additional capacity and capabilities on a pay-per-use or subscription basis.
  • Customer experience: SAP engages with customers extensively including through user and developer communities, a strategic customer program, a customer executive advisory board, and co-innovation and early-adopter programs. SAP continues to invest in a global postsales organization that provides customer support for the entire SAP BTP portfolio.
  • Product execution: SAP Build Process Automation offers strong automation, integration and collaboration. It enables users to create end-to-end process automation from natural language inputs, provides a governance model for citizen and professional developers, and includes industry-specific packages with SAP Business Accelerator Hub. It also integrates with SAP Integration Suite, Signavio, Business AI Services and Build Apps.

  Cons:

  • Product strategy: SAP Build Process Automation has some limitations. It does not provide on-premises RPA orchestration. SAP only supports public RPA cloud platforms. SAP does not support UI connectors for most BPA platforms and LCAPs or third-party IDP tools. Also, SAP does not allow customers to control which cloud orchestration version they use.
  • Market understanding: SAP's product roadmap and stated differentiators emphasize SAP's focus on building a broader automation platform. While this strategy may appeal to large and midsize enterprises that use SAP's other solutions (ERP, for example), this approach may not appeal to buyers that only want RPA for tactical automation needs that don't involve SAP solutions.
  • Customer experience: In Gartner inquiries and Gartner Peer Insights, customers have reported complexities in SAP's RPA product deployment. Some customers have also reported frequent product updates (particularly through its cloud offering) that can create issues with the stability of automation workflows.


• ServiceNow - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Now ecosystem and AI: ServiceNow Automation Engine is augmented by numerous Now Platform capabilities such as AI, low-code and orchestration. ServiceNow's RPA uses GenAI to optimize automation processes and outcomes. It can recommend the most appropriate next action to complete a flow. GenAI can also provide users with insights and analytics on the performance and impact of an automation and identify areas for improvement.
  • Viability: ServiceNow is a well-established vendor with a strong presence across multiple technology markets. ServiceNow claims that 85% of Fortune 500 companies are its customers. ServiceNow has a high renewal rate of 99%, and it targets existing customers of its low-code automation, AI and integration solutions.
  • RPA Product: ServiceNow's RPA product offers robust unattended and attended bot capabilities coupled with strong security features. ServiceNow's RPA effectively supports key capabilities such as queue management, retry mechanism, schedule configuration and debugging, testing, versioning and governance features. ServiceNow RPA integrates with various systems using its Universal App Connector and other connectors.

  Cons:

  • Visibility: ServiceNow entered the RPA market in 2021 by acquiring Intellibot. As a relatively new player in this market, ServiceNow has not yet established the same level of visibility for its RPA product as the Leaders included here. Gartner receives few inquiries about ServiceNow's RPA, especially compared to its workflow, ITSM and low-code products.
  • RPA focus: ServiceNow does not offer its RPA product as a stand-alone offering. Instead, it only sells Automation Engine to existing ServiceNow customers by bundling it with Integration Hub. Also, the RPA product is not prominently featured on ServiceNow's website.
  • Pricing: Gartner clients report that ServiceNow's SKU price levels are complex and lack flexibility. ServiceNow bundles its RPA capability with Integration Hub. This means that only customers who have existing ServiceNow subscriptions can use its RPA product. ServiceNow states that this packaging is intentional to guide customers toward an automation solution that includes IDP, process mining and integrations.


• SS&C Blue Prism - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Product portfolio: SS&C Blue Prism has extended its capabilities beyond its core RPA product by launching Next Gen. This cloud-native platform supports a range of features, including Smart Vision, which enables digital workers to recognize application elements based on visual cues; Process Repository, which stores processes and objects to support automation development; and Enhanced Application Modeler, which offers improved user interfaces and new capabilities for automation design.
  • Business model: SS&C Blue Prism delivers value to customers via a strong core RPA product that integrates with its full product portfolio. SS&C's 'one platform' strategy brings together AI, orchestration and automation capabilities to help customers solve end-to-end process problems.
  • Value bundles: SS&C Blue Prism has packaged its product into multiple value bundles that provide different levels of infrastructure and functionality. Customers can select the bundle that best fits their organization's needs, which simplifies the purchasing process. SS&C Blue Prism also plans to introduce consumption-based pricing models later in 2024.

  Cons:

  • RPA user interface: In Gartner inquiries and Gartner Peer Insights, multiple customers have stated that they found the user interface to be outdated, slow and cumbersome to navigate. Other customers mentioned the lack of version control and some bugs in the design studio.
  • Citizen development: SS&C Blue Prism lacks a development environment dedicated for citizen developers, unlike some of its primary competitors. Some customers have reported difficulties when attempting to use untrained citizen developers for developing processes using the SS&C Blue Prism Studio. SS&C Blue Prism does offer free online training, community support and partner-led training classes to support managed customer citizen development programs.
  • Visibility: Among Gartner clients, SS&C Blue Prism does not currently seem to generate the same level of interest when compared to its peak in 2020. Since the last Magic Quadrant was published, Gartner received a significantly lower number of requests for SS&C Blue Prism contract reviews. When the vendor is mentioned in inquiries, it is typically brought up by existing customers.


• UiPath - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Product strategy: UiPath is uniquely focused on using GenAI specifically to enhance its RPA product. Its proprietary UiPath Autopilot uses specialized LLMs that are designed to support RPA development, operations and integration across its portfolio. UiPath provides its customers with a strong platform for AI-augmented automation development, making it a compelling option for customers with both tactical and strategic automation use cases.
  • Customer ecosystem: UiPath provides its customers with the largest RPA-specific ecosystem of any vendor, with more than 10,000 enterprise customers and 6,000 systems integrator partners. UiPath also offers robust training and community programs, claiming to have more than 1.1 million UiPath Academy users and over 2.7 million UiPath Community members.
  • Viability: UiPath is by far the largest vendor in terms of RPA-specific revenue and continues to increase its dominant market share each year. With global customer demand and a large partner ecosystem, UiPath offers an enterprise-grade RPA solution.

  Cons:

  • Pricing: UiPath is one of the most expensive RPA solutions. Customers have voiced concerns about substantial price increases since 2022 due to UiPath's strategy of selling preconfigured bundles of products. UiPath claims that customers can achieve greater business value by leveraging the complementary technologies in its automation bundles.
  • Partner services: In Gartner inquiries, several customers of UiPath partners have expressed frustration with excessive process assessment times, poor automation development and high prices for managed RPA services, while other customers have reported positive feedback. UiPath is revising its partner program to place more emphasis on quality than quantity.
  • Customer feedback: UiPath's RPA product has received critical feedback from multiple customers in Gartner inquiries and Gartner Peer insights data. Some common challenges that customers report are the difficulty of migrating solutions across tenants, lack of best practices and guidance, inefficient customer support, and limited Linux support. UiPath is investing in operating model support, customer success programs and platform administration capabilities to address this.

Reference

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation, 7 August 2024, ID G00800237

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