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.
Features and Ranking
| Development Environment |  | AA is considered hard to use. Gartner rating for their development environment is medium. |
| Recorder | | AA has three types of recorders. Gartner rates AA “low” on recording functionality. |
| Bot Operations | | Good support for Orchestration, Logging, Upgrades, and Triggers. Can improve on Monitoring, Notifications and Exception handling. |
| Component Reuse |  | With the help of “smart adapter”, you can create unique automation blocks that are re-usable. |
| Security framework |  | Good Encryption, Credential, and User management comparable to other tools. |
| Unstructured data/OCR | | Provides a comparatively better OCR with IQ bot. It uses computer vision, NLP and ML for better recognition. |
| VDI / Citrix | | Pretty good support for virtual environments with AI Sense from version 11. |
| AI/ML | |
Computer vision, NLP, ML used for processing structured, semi-and unstructured data in IQ bot.
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| Process Discovery |  | Provides process mining through a partnership |
| Community Support | | Smaller community compared to UiPath. Will likely pick up after the release of the community edition. |
Top 3 advantages of choosing Automation Anywhere
- Scalable Solution: Has a strong control tower with good support for Orchestration, Logging, and Upgrades. Has Smart adapters for quick re-use.
- Embedding Intelligence: Has embedded AI, machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV)
- Bot Store: First off the blocks with a bot store with ready-made automation for all business functions
Top 3 challenges with Automation anywhere you need to be aware of
- AA is difficult to work quickly and efficiently, especially compared to the other big RPA players
- Understanding licensing costs is a challenge for several clients – many perceive it to be expensive
- Automation workflows are written in code that resembles psuedocode, unlike other top RPA tools that come with visual flow charts
Licensing and approximate cost for Automation anywhere
As per Forrester it costs between $50k and $150K to get started.