<img src="https://ws.zoominfo.com/pixel/jFk6PDgyyU2wBGPuZQTg" width="1" height="1" style="display: none;">

What to Consider When Migrating Your RPA Bots Between the 4 Major Automation Platforms

4 min read
Nov 23, 2021 9:30:00 AM

At the beginning of 2021, we predicted that RPA programs would increasingly evaluate other RPA platforms with the objective of migrating their digital workforces over.

Looking ahead, we believe 2022 won’t be any different. In fact, we forecast growth in this space.

Several reasons are driving the desire for RPA platform migration, which we’ve spoken to in the following articles:

In this article, we’re diving into what you need to consider when evaluating RPA platforms for bot migration.

Despite more and more vendors entering the market, we’ve seen that most RPA programs are looking to move between the four leading RPA vendors: Microsoft Power Automate, UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere.

These four leading RPA platforms share similarities and differences in how you build automated processes. These similarities and differences impact the complexity of migrations. Below, we explore this further to help you make an informed decision as you consider switching your bots to alternative RPA platforms.

Currently, UiPath has the most activities available out of the box. Bot creation is done by dragging and dropping activities on a graphical canvas. With this drag and drop functionality, the structure is more sequence-driven.

Different best practices frameworks are available to design the automations, such as the RE (Robotic Enterprise Framework) that provides a state-machine-based template to start building enterprise-grade automations.

blue prism logo

Blue Prism follows a layered process and object model. All the applications that are part of the automation are first modeled in the Object Studio. Once there, application actions and interactions are also defined.

Blue-Prism-Studio

The process logic is created in the Process Studio, where all the automation logic is defined and calls to relevant actions are performed from the Process to Object Studio. Blue Prism, like UiPath, also uses a graphical canvas.

automation anywhere logo

Automation Anywhere has two platforms currently in production: Automation 360 (cloud web-based) and AA Enterprise (Desktop App).

Automation Anywhere (AA) was built to be very low code/pseudo code to appeal to those with little to no coding experience.

Automation-Anywhere

The actions or commands of Automation Anywhere run in a linear, step-by-step fashion. Each line of command can be constructed with simple drag-and-drop actions and by filling out highly guided parameters with fields and restrictions. Each command is tied to a window to ensure the commands sent are landing in the desired application.

To tackle more complicated or unsupported automations that are part of the regular set of commands, Automation Anywhere Client also allows the use of Metabots to record Screens(assets) and Actions(logic) separately.*

A critical difference between Automation Anywhere and other RPA platforms is that AA saves variables as a part of the automation file (Taskbots) itself rather than as a line of code. This allows the passing of variables across Taskbots and mapping them when one Taskbot calls another.

*Automation 360 disabled Metabots and allowed regular commands to mimic what Metabots could do

Microsoft-Power-Automate

While it is the newest member of the RPA platform leaders, Microsoft Power Automate Desktop leverages a similar structure to Automation Anywhere. Power Automate Desktop has a list of commands/actions that a user can select, and the construct logic and the parameter for each action is limited to specific fields.

Microsoft-Power-Automate-2

The main difference between Automation Anywhere and Microsoft is that the variables in Power Automate Desktop are designated as Input or Output types and are tied to the flows. A flow is a single group of commands for a given process. Each flow can call other flows and sub-flows, and, unlike AA, the commands can be configured to continue at different line numbers of its flow (non-linear).

Another significant difference is that PAD files are saved directly into a cloud repository and not into files like AA (.atmx files).

Naturally, these similarities and differences will not only impact your decision on which vendor you want to switch to, but also the complexity of a migration (how bots will have to be rebuilt to work in another platform and the time and effort needed to get them up and running).

Luckily, Blueprint has a migration solution that dramatically slashes the cost and effort needed when migrating between the biggest RPA vendors.

Blueprint’s RPA Platform Migration Solution

Blueprint has developed an end-to-end RPA platform migration solution that accelerates migrations by 3x and reduces costs by 75%.

Our migration solution is built on top of our proprietary mapping engine called COM (Common Object Model). This engine ingests bots from various RPA platforms and deconstructs the automation elements into generic representations enabling the conversion into other RPA tools.

Besides radically reducing the time and cost of migration, when you switch RPA platforms with Blueprint, you’re also able to centralize all automations in one visible repository, regardless of whether your RPA program has a multi-platform strategy.

To see all the other benefits you gain when migrating RPA vendors with Blueprint, download the Blueprint RPA Migration Assistant Technical Overview.

Blueprint RPA Migration Assistant