AntWorks RPA (discontinued) vs. Appian

ANTstein needs no code or minimal programming. This makes the assigning tasks to bots much easier without wasting time. ANTstein in very useful in performing rule-based tasks. For some tasks and special cases, human assistance is still needed to make decisions.

Incentivized

Appian works great for automating manual processes and integrating multiple systems through its toolset. It gives great flexibility for establishing rules for approvals, routings, escalations, and the like. Because of the low code toolset, it's very easy to deploy and make changes as needed as processes evolve and as the organization learns to utilize the system better. Minimal maintenance is required to support the applications build on the platform. Some of the automated testing integration with tools like Jenkins is limited so that may be an issue for some.

Incentivized

• First: Being accoladed by infomationweek.com as a cognitive tool for machine learning and analytics, challenges repeated tasks to complete within no time, thus called AI based RPA.
• It understands the category of data and segregates the data into structured and semi-unstructured. Thus, it helps in achieving cognitive tasks in Image and pattern recognition. OCR capabilities make it compete with other RPA in the market.
• Its business pillars lie in Business Process as a Service (BPAAS) and Technology as a Service (TAAS). I used to integrate Zoho CRM, SugarCRM and FreshSales CRM with YellowAnt bot. Oauth 2.0 and token management play an important role in Antworks.
• The best part of the Antworks is that they have queenbot™ which makes colonies and give birth to threads to work on different computers and machines to automate a single and repetitive task.

Incentivized

• Allows at a glance workflow documentation which assists in the need we have for information readiation.
• Drag and drop interface for workflow development greatly speeds our apps time to market.
• Using the advanced features of Appian, we are able to create working sites in a fraction of the time it would take to do so using "traditional" development.

Incentivized

• The OCR tool can be improved for multiple languages so as to recognize local fonts and for faster processing.
• Screen scraping is not accurate. Sometimes it shows special characters for unrecognized fonts.
• Computer Vision and Machine learning could be more accurate with training data and adaptive models.

Incentivized

• Search issues when type ahead and database search are used in the same field.
• Buttons implementation where user is require[d] to click on the button description - if clicks on the button outside that text - button will not work.
• Problems with using certain off-the-shelf performance tools like WebLoad or Neoload. That is because of different dynamic variables being used internally in Appian - which these tools are unable to correlate. We are still investigating using other tools like Jmeter to overcome dynamic correlation problem for performance testing.

Incentivized

We recently renewed our license with Appian. We are convinced that its flexibility, relative ease of use, the support they provide, there mobile advancements and their general willingness and desire to see us succeed all contributed to our reason to renew our agreement with Appian

Appian is a low code environment, because of this, a very good visual interface is required. Appian is providing a feature-rich dashboard [that] we can use for building the dashboards and other interfaces. Appian also provides patches and releases to enhance these features. A developer can start off development just by going through a basic course from the Appian learning community.

Incentivized

ANTstein is designed to automate the entire business process rather than merely a single
discrete task. Leveraging fractal networks, rather than neural network technology, ANTstein is able to use relatively small data sets to train the engine thus enabling faster training, testing, deployment and execution of business processes.

Incentivized

Appian is one of the leading low code business automation platforms that support RPA, decision rules, case management, workflow automation, and machine learning all in a single bundle. But it is also harder to implement and replace the traditional business process.

Incentivized

As analyst I participated in a developer boot camp. At times it was hard to keep up but most of the time it made sense. Trainer took the time to explain and slowed pace down to answer questions etc.

Incentivized

Very boring; hard to get through quickly, but rather effective in demonstrating the use of the platform.

Incentivized

It was really seamless. SaaS in the true definition of the word. We logged on and started using the product. Very easy.

Incentivized

Mostly we use data scraping tools and then take deep insights from the extracted data. Till now, we were unable to perform automation after scraping the data with the above-mentioned tools. But using ANTworks, we can automate the complete process. Our mainstream work process looks like: Twitter Hashtag extraction > Saving the scraped data to CSV > Importing the CSV in Python > Natural Language Understanding / NLTK in python > Creating pos/neg columns > giving positive and negative insights using analysis.

Incentivized

Appian has enormously transformed and keeps on updating the product every quarter to meet the latest needs of the world with new innovations & technologies being integrated within the platform. What gives more pleasure than a product that keeps on continuous[ly] improv[ing]?

Incentivized

• Positive: Robotics Process Automation with AI and self-learning eases repeated tasks. Even when data structure changes, ANTstein handles by itself
• Negative: It shoes special characters when input fonts are not available in the system. Sometimes it becomes difficult to handle local language fonts.
• Positive: Detect text and non-text content in screen scraping, and web scraping with replication accuracy using OCR and Data Scraping.

Incentivized

• I believe it has negatively impacted our release dates. There may have been a misunderstanding as to the learning curve, even though it is "low code."
• The look and feel of the applications created using Appian have uniformity and it's easier to have "reuse" between applications.
• There is less developer control when it comes to features. I think this mainly has to do with the amount of plugins available. I would think there should be many more available plugins. But again, our use case is probably different than most others.

Incentivized