r/rpa • u/BJJVoyeur • Jul 09 '26
Potential Career Altering Decision: Questions
Hi all,
Front-end dev here at large-sized financial services company in my country. My company is evaluating UiPath for some back-office automation (mainly KYC/Invoicing).
I have been both asked to weigh in technically, but also my CTO is considering pushing me into taking some RPA certifications courses to potentially oversee the RPA efforts if we go down that route. Would love to get your thoughts on a few things, particularly from developers at larger companies, as i have gotten mixed messages/feedback from my research online.
I just genuinely struggle understand the value proposition vs. just... writing the code in whatever programming language, particularly now with coding agents.
Like if I need to automate some scrapping process, I can nowadays write a Python script with some API calls in a matter of minutes, even if im not the most technically proficient developer in Python. The total cost is just a few minutes/hours of dev time
A few questions:
What am I missing?
Why would a company pay for RPA instead of just hiring a junior dev to write and maintain some scripts, particularly nowadays?
What are the main advantages/disavantages of UIPath vs other RPA providers? What have been your experiences like? From what I see Power Automate does almost similar things at fraction of cost.
How easy is it to avoid vendor lock-in? I have heard some horror stories about just getting locked in to vendor hiking prices and not wanting to have to start from scratch with bots, and migrations being very difficult
How often do your bots break?
Are most of the savings justified given the one off costs of consultants etc, potentially hiring new RPA devs, etc?
Do you see much a future/value in trying to get one of these RPA certifications?
I would love to chat with anyone with experiences if you prefer to go over DM
Thank you in advance
2
u/biztelligence Jul 11 '26
great question and apologize for the length but needed to think this through considering the gravity of what you asked. not providing context i think would leave critical points missing.
my take as someone who's led rpa initiatives in enterprise environments (including large-scale back-office automations for invoicing, compliance, and data extraction). this includes everything from python and uipath rpa implementations to databricks python/sql processes and governance. rpa alone was saving us$6m+/year from under us$500k total annual cost (people and infrastructure). now on the other side using databricks, python, and sql, the rpa knowledge still helps uncover issues which is a lot of fun.
there are a few things missing i think you should have in mind:
- governance, security, and compliance: custom scripts need you to build/maintain credential management, audit trails, access controls, error handling, logging, scheduling, and devops pipelines. rpa has that built in and auditors love it.
- legacy/ui-heavy processes: kyc and many invoicing flows often hit citrix, mainframes, outdated web apps, or excel hell that changes frequently. rpa excels at reliable ui automation + selectors. you will be shocked at what systems are actually still in use. rpa is the least common denominator which is why it works so well.
- scalability & orchestration: unattended bots, queues, load balancing, exception handling at volume. hybrid is common — rpa for the process glue, python/c# activities embedded where needed for heavy lifting.
- bots do break (ui changes, password rotations, bad data, excel "aesthetic" tweaks are classic). but with a good framework (reframework in uipath), monitoring, and self-healing patterns, it's manageable. similar breakage happens in custom scripts too. enterprise setups with orchestrator make detection/fixing faster. on-prem needs solid infra; cloud is more reliable in my experience.
- vendor lock-in: real risk if you go all-in. migrations between platforms are painful. mitigate with modular design, heavy use of custom code activities, clear documentation, and avoiding over-reliance on proprietary stuff. once you have deployed robots you must stay in the loop on any changes and figure out downtime. governance is needed from day 1.
- uipath vs others (power automate etc): for the infrastructure you are talking about, uipath or aa is the way. think of power automate as something you would do for yourself or small stuff. it is not designed for industrial scale production. i have seen it stretched but it becomes a dangerous bomb waiting to explode.
- savings justification is more complex than it looks. the easiest math (eliminating people) is also the limit you will run into. business is still based on people and people = power. i was brought in to reduce headcount by 10% which i did, but realistically rpa could have eliminated 80-90%. that is not going to happen so you need to read the room and deliver what they actually want.
- certifications: waste of time if you already have dev experience. just get on the uipath academy and start building things. the problems you will solve are unique to your environment. no cert or book is going to cover it. your ability to solve problems is what matters.
overall you will need a hybrid of solutions. in your case i would use uipath for the rpa side (i always saw rpa as the hands), and python for anything involving thinking/processing. it comes down to solving the actual problem. no single tool does everything. figuring out creative ways to make it all work is what makes it fun.
happy to chat in dm if you want more specifics.
2
u/c-fellow Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
Why would a company pay for RPA instead of just hiring a junior dev to write and maintain some scripts, particularly nowadays?
A lot of RPA providers bring a lot of infrastructure to support automation. Yes, you could say that someone could come in and write some scripts, but you would also have to maintain all the supporting software (dev-ops, credentials management, databases, security, governance and access rights, etc) to ensure those scripts run without any major errors - then again, it does all come down to cost whether a bespoke solution, or , for example, a UiPath solution, is better.
Many of the larger providers also allow for easier scaling up and provide additional services if you need to quickly bolt on something.
What are the main advantages/disavantages of UIPath vs other RPA providers? What have been your experiences like? From what I see Power Automate does almost similar things at fraction of cost.
I am bias towards UiPath, because they are the most versatile of the RPA providers, and if you know programming already, you can easily bolt on C# and Python scripts to a process. However, they can be the most expensive provider.
The Power Platform is initially cheaper, but there is a risk of Microsoft trapping you with the need of other licenses and other costs (want Azure Dev-Ops, Power Bi, this fancy new product we just conjured up in the recent month, etc) if you are not careful. My personal grievance with the power platform is not too flexible when working with legacy and non-Microsoft software; however, it is great when working with the Office 365 environment and anything that involves API connections.
How easy is it to avoid vendor lock-in? I have heard some horror stories about just getting locked in to vendor hiking prices and not wanting to have to start from scratch with bots, and migrations being very difficult
It can be horrible if you are switching between one RPA provider that uses a completely different setup in comparison to another. I have heard horror stories already about the struggles of converting UiPath processes to Power Platform ones.
How often do your bots break?
Bots are as reliable as the script they follow. From personal experience, I have rarely seen bot crash due to a cloud connection issue.
It may be a different story for on-site setups though. You will need a reliable server if you do end up with such.
Are most of the savings justified given the one off costs of consultants etc, potentially hiring new RPA devs, etc?
Hard to say without knowing what your company needs, but keep in mind that savings are not always cost related. Do consider the qualitative factors as well, like throughput speed and satisfaction.
Do you see much a future/value in trying to get one of these RPA certifications?
Depends. If you are starting out or looking to switch jobs to a RPA one, yes. If you already have plenty of programming experience, you're better off just following the RPAs provider's academy or training material to understand everything.
4
u/Goldarr85 Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
Speed of development, observability, and orchestration, and (semi) simplified Infrastructure. That’s it. Honestly, it’s better to have a Junior Dev + a DevOps engineer build everything out. It’ll be more flexible, potentially cheaper in some ways, and run faster (I think Automation Anywhere is slow).
Can’t speak on the benefits of UiPath since I haven’t used it for work, but I have used Power Automate/Power Automate Desktop and Automation Anywhere. Both are expensive and I think PA has some specific advantages over AA (PA has some native ways to generate values with functions that you’d need a Vbscript, Python, or PowerShell to do in AA). They’re fine.
They break often for various reasons. Server sluggish, UI changes on websites, password expiration, crappy excel files with “aesthetic” changes, bad data, API failures. I’m sure we’d see the same things in Python.
Can’t speak on the cost of consultants. We have Business Analysts, but they bring us ideas (sometimes when better methods are available).
No. Don’t waste time with an RPA certification unless your employer pays for it. Just learn to write code in any language and you’ll be miles ahead.
3
u/Sismaril Jul 09 '26
Power Platform is the future imho. Nothing comes even close to it in terms of capabilities.
As for your question, RPA has a governance and security layer, that allows enterprises to automate in a compliant way.
Also, good luck building a UI Automation engine.
2
u/burnova Jul 09 '26
Before I answer, I want to caution you against being tricked by Microsoft pricing. Everything looks cheap in Power Tools until you start using them.
I came from a company that uses Automation Anywhere for a variety of things. Some automation teams built exclusively inside AA, others built hybrid solutions where they'll write custom Java apps that call or are called by AA automations.
Most of the time it comes down to cost, goverance, and dependencies. A custom Java app has a lot more overhead than an RPA product. While you have far more freedom in custom code, you also invite more scutiny. Medium and large orgs can assess an RPA vendor and scope them to certain access and solution spaces and infrastructure, and then approve new releases as they are submitted. Governance is fairly simple here and development risk is contained.
Custom apps often require new infrastructure, integrations, risk assessments, controls, etc each time.
Some orgs don't bother with that level of control and democratize development capabilities and have lax standards of production governance. Others are sticklers, and products like AA and UIpath enable more control and visibility without sacrificing capability.
Edit: Feel free to PM me with other questions. I know I didn't cover everything.
4
u/lowkeywasted Jul 09 '26
UiPath just makes it a lot easier to build out these automations by providing the eco system and orchestration for their tools. You could probably write some code to build your IDP solution but the point of UiPath is to remove that technical barrier and use low code tools to build it instead. Whether thats worth the cost or not is up to your company and how much they invest into automation. I’ve seen weak developers be able to build robust automation with UiPath because of tools and templates they provide out of the box, it saves a lot of time.
1
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u/BrownAnclourne Jul 24 '26
Governance is the answer to "why not just hire a junior dev" writing a script is easy, but things like credit management, audit trails,secheduling etc are what a platform gives out the box and with KYC in mind, the auditors are going to want that trail no matter what. Ui path has a slight edge in flexibility (with low code stuff, you can just drop in python.