Magic Quadrant for Robotic

Process Automation
Published 2 August 2023 - ID G00776666 - 52 min read

By Saikat Ray, Arthur Villa, and 4 more

Robotic process automation (RPA) remains a popular software

market for improving operational efficiency with tactical automation.
This Magic Quadrant evaluates 16 enterprise RPA vendors to help
application leaders make the best choice for their enterprise’s task
automation needs.

Strategic Planning Assumption

By 2025, 90% of RPA vendors will offer generative-AI-assisted automation.

Market Definition/Description
This document was revised on 24 August 2023. The document you are viewing is
the corrected version. For more information, see the Corrections page on
gartner.com.

Gartner defines robotic process automation (RPA) as the software to automate tasks
within business and IT processes via software scripts that emulate human interaction
with the application user interface. RPA enables a manual task to be recorded or
programmed into a software script, which users can develop by programming, or by
using the RPA platform’s low-code and no-code graphical user interfaces. This script
can then be deployed and executed into different runtimes. The runtime executable
of the deployed script is referred to as a bot, or robot.

RPA is used across numerous business functions for tactical task automation.
Business and IT users can leverage RPA to:

 Move data in or out of application systems without human interaction (unattended

automation). Scripts are designed to replicate the actions of a person interacting with
those systems or documents, which usually do not have available APIs. The goal is
 to automate and complete a task successfully without human intervention. Typically,
unattended automation is triggered by a system and bots executed on a server.
 Automate tasks with a human in the loop (attended automation). RPA can extract
information from systems and related documents, shaping it and preparing it for
consumption by a human at the point of need. Typically, attended automation is
triggered by a human and bots executed on a local device.

Magic Quadrant
Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation
Source: Gartner (August 2023)

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Appian
 Appian is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its product, Appian RPA, focuses on
complementing the rich business process automation (BPA) capabilities available
within the Appian Platform. Appian also offers a low-code application platform
(LCAP), rich multiexperience capabilities, process mining and decision automation.
Appian RPA runs as a cloud service.

Appian has geographically distributed operations. Its customers tend to be large

enterprises in the financial services industry and the government sector.

Appian’s RPA product roadmap includes development of robot pools for task
delegation and integration of Appian’s AI skills.

Strengths

 Market understanding: Appian recognizes the role of RPA in wider automation use

cases and provides a single hyperautomation solution. Appian’s broader platform
provides RPA, BPA, LCAP, intelligent document processing (IDP) and
multiexperience capabilities, which are delivered via a cloud and underpinned by an
integrated data fabric. Organizations with a mature approach to hyperautomation
may benefit from Appian’s integrated platform.
 Product portfolio: Appian’s platform focuses on end-to-end process automation and
other high-value applications that require sophisticated rules and analytics. Appian
supports RPA as one tool to enable broader hyperautomation use cases. Its RPA
product augments BPA, decision support and low-code user interfaces with a
common data fabric.
 Ecosystem: Appian’s sales are increasingly partner-driven. Appian now claims to
have over 20,000 developers trained on its platform. Its marketplace, the Appian
AppMarket, has over 600 components, extensions and frameworks to accelerate
RPA development.

Cautions

 RPA focus: Appian’s narrative about its wider BPA and LCAP automation assets
overshadows its RPA offering. Appian positions its RPA product as a complementary
feature of its BPA and LCAP. Customers seeking a stand-alone RPA product might
not believe they require Appian’s broader process automation focus.
 Visibility: Gartner rarely receives inquiries about Appian RPA from buyers, unless
they already use other Appian Platform features. Many RPA buyers do not shortlist
Appian and are unaware that Appian offers a free community edition that includes
some of its RPA capabilities. Appian is investing heavily in brand awareness
campaigns in an effort to gain visibility with a wide range of buyers.
 Product features: Appian does not support an on-premises RPA orchestrator.
Although Appian has its own process discovery solution, it does not yet autogenerate
RPA workflows from task-mining actions. Some Gartner clients have indicated that
the design experience of Appian’s RPA lacks the rich functionality of its main
BPA/low-code platform and that debugging requires more technical expertise.
Appian provides limited support for programming languages other than Java (such
as Python and .NET), unlike many other RPA vendors.

Automation Anywhere

Automation Anywhere is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA product has been
rebranded as the Automation Success Platform, which offers capabilities beyond
RPA. Automation Anywhere’s RPA is available on-premises and in the cloud.
Automation Anywhere’s cloud-native automation offerings include RPA, API
capabilities, process orchestration, digital automation assistance (Automation Co-
Pilot), artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) tools and analytics. Process
discovery, a center of excellence manager, document automation and marketplace
integration (Bot Store) are available as additional options.

Automation Anywhere has global operations. Its customer base includes large
enterprises and small and midsize businesses (SMBs).

Automation Anywhere’s automation roadmap includes expansions of process

orchestration, API and generative AI capabilities (for its Document Automation
solution and Automation Co-Pilot) across the platform. It also includes a shift from
itemized pricing to use-case packaging to align better with business outcomes.

Strengths

 Innovation: Automation Anywhere has a reputation for developing innovative

features, including AISense for computer vision, IQ Bot for AI/ML enablement,
multipersona development, the cloud-based Automation Success Platform and the
Automation Anywhere Robotic Interface (AARI) for user experience (UX).
Automation Anywhere recently integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT with its Automation
Success Platform. The OpenAI ChatGPT package can streamline automation
processes by bringing generative AI capabilities directly to Automation Anywhere’s
Control Room.
 Market understanding: Automation Anywhere embeds automation in business
applications, so that users can realize the benefits of automation without leaving their
application of choice. Users can launch automations in web applications from
vendors like Avaya, Cisco, Genesys and Salesforce. This innovative strategy
 reduces barriers to RPA adoption and creates flexible options to weave attended and
unattended automation into core applications.
 Customer success: Automation Anywhere has developed an impressive customer
success strategy, the Pathfinder Program, to help customers start, develop and
scale their automation programs. This program aligns with an organization’s
hyperautomation journey and demonstrates deep understanding of customers’
technical and business challenges.

Cautions

 Cloud migration: Some of Automation Anywhere customers who experienced

challenges with the migration from the company’s legacy v11 platform to Automation
360 have stated they feel “on edge” about remaining with Automation Anywhere.
However, Automation Anywhere is close to putting these migration challenges
behind it. Gartner has seen a drop in client inquiries about Automation Anywhere
migration challenges, and the vendor has indicated that less than 2% of its
customers will remain on v11 by the end of 2023.
 Pricing: Automation Anywhere has eliminated its value-for-money, entry-level
package known as the Partner Pack. This raises the entry price point for new
Automation Anywhere customers, although in many cases they may find it on a par
with competing RPA offerings. Automation Anywhere has indicated that it wants to
begin moving away from product-centric packaging toward a packaged use-case
pricing strategy.
 Quality of partner implementations: Automation Anywhere has an extensive global
network of partners for RPA project implementation, but the quality of their work
varies. Some SMB clients have reported low-quality implementation work from
Automation Anywhere’s partners for small and midsize implementations.

Cyclone Robotics

Cyclone Robotics is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA products include
RPA Studio, RPA Robot, RPA Controller, Digital Workforce Platform, Robot-as-a-
Service, Intelligent Assistant and Process Intelligence. Cyclone Robotics has
repositioned itself as a provider of an AI-amplified, enterprise-level RPA product
portfolio integrated with GPT.

Cyclone Robotics’ operations are mainly in Asia/Pacific. It has customers of all sizes
across all industries.

Cyclone Robotics’ RPA roadmap includes support for incremental UI connectors to

line-of-business systems (such as those of ServiceNow and PeopleSoft) for global
 customers. It also includes RPA migration tools to convert scripts from other RPA
platforms into Cyclone RPA scripts, and to embed GPT into RPA Studio.

Strengths

 Product execution: Cyclone Robotics offers a mature portfolio of capabilities for

everything from basic RPA design to advanced use. Its platform provides strong
automation design and development functions, such as development support for
multiple personas and support for various operating systems (OSs), remote
developer collaboration and multiple programming languages. Its solid orchestration
setup will likely meet the performance needs of most enterprises.
 Offering (product) strategy: Cyclone Robotics has invested heavily in AI to deliver
services like its Intelligent Assistant (formerly known as CIRI) and the Cyclone AI
Skill Platform. It plans to integrate GPT into its products by the end of 2023, so that
clients can more easily use RPA to address a wide range of development
challenges.
 Market understanding: Cyclone Robotics has positioned itself as a leading vendor in
China’s RPA market. It has increased its market share significantly since 2022 by
gaining good insight into the needs of clients in China and by building a strong
partner ecosystem in China. Within the next two years, Cyclone Robotics intends to
expand cautiously into the markets of Hong Kong, Macau, Thailand, Vietnam, the
Philippines, Japan and Korea.

Cautions

 Overall viability: Cyclone Robotics has still not made an initial public offering and has
yet to make a profit. As it continues to invest in product development, sales and
marketing, and operations, the company may face financial pressure that could
hinder its ability to grow.
 UI integration and compliance: Cyclone Robotics does not offer prebuilt UI
connectors for global applications such as JD Edwards software, PeopleSoft and
SAP ECC. Nor does it support industrywide regulatory compliance protocols for its
bots, such those of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), FedRAMP, the
Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA), and the EU-U.S.
and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield Frameworks. However, Cyclone Robotics has
recently obtained SOC 2 and Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) 5 industry
certifications.
 Geographical presence: Cyclone Robotics’ primary focus is China’s RPA market. It
has only a small presence in the rest of Asia/Pacific, the U.S., Europe, and the
 Middle East and Africa. In light of the global economic downturn and associated
pressures, Cyclone Robotics has updated its global go-to-market strategy since
2022, but its coverage remains limited. Its expansion plan has yet to yield successful
results.

EdgeVerve Systems

EdgeVerve Systems is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA platform
consists of multiple components, including AssistEdge RPA, AssistEdge Engage and
AssistEdge Enterprise Personal Assistant. The platform uses process automation
and process discovery (AssistEdge Discover). AssistEdge Automation Studio is the
primary design and test environment. AssistEdge Control Tower is a web-based app
for managing and governing the RPA platform.

EdgeVerve is a wholly owned subsidiary of Infosys. EdgeVerve has operations

across the world. Most of its AssistEdge customers are large enterprises.

EdgeVerve’s RPA product roadmap includes OpenAI integration with AssistEdge

Automation Studio, a resilience wizard in AssistEdge Control Tower, integration with
security information and event management (SIEM) tools, and generation of next
best actions.

Strengths

 Operations: EdgeVerve’s automation program is supported by its parent

organization, Infosys. EdgeVerve delivers automation via transformation programs
that involve various service lines, such as those of Infosys’ BPM, automation, AI, and
data and analytics divisions. EdgeVerve’s integrated business model, which benefits
from Infosys’ ecosystem, is its key differentiator.
 Business model/pricing: EdgeVerve’s licensing strategy is based on bot count or
consumption, the latter measured both by time used and transaction volume.
EdgeVerve’s consumption-based pricing links the use of robots to scale of use and
improves business impact, UX and user security.
 Market understanding: EdgeVerve has responded to the shift from RPA to enterprise
automation by transforming AssistEdge RPA into a multifunction automation
platform. EdgeVerve’s AI-driven enterprise platform can meet the needs of buyers of
varying levels of hyperautomation maturity.

Cautions
 Market presence: EdgeVerve has yet to establish itself firmly in the RPA market,
even though it has customers in North America, Asia/Pacific and Europe and is
expanding its footprint in those regions. It has a much smaller footprint and partner
ecosystem than some other RPA vendors. Gartner receives very few inquiries about
EdgeVerve’s RPA products.
 Product features: EdgeVerve’s RPA development environment is primarily Windows-
based and does not support Linux or macOS. It does not offer automation
development for mobile/app-based environments, and the AssistEdge Enterprise
Personal Assistant cannot be deployed to many common ERP/CRM platforms and
applications.
 Marketing strategy: Many customers who do not engage with Infosys do not shortlist
EdgeVerve’s RPA product, despite its relatively broad automation offering and end-
to-end services. Compared with many RPA vendors, EdgeVerve has little visibility in
terms of platform community, developer ecosystem and online channels.

Hyland

Hyland is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA product, Hyland RPA, was
acquired from Another Monday. Hyland RPA includes a Windows Presentation
Foundation (WPF) desktop-based design studio, a Windows services-based runtime
called Hyland RPA Conductor, and a web-based orchestrator called Hyland RPA
Manager.

Hyland has operations and customers worldwide. It supports enterprise customers,

with a focus on the healthcare, education, financial services, insurance and
government sectors.

Hyland’s RPA product roadmap includes a framework for onboarding and

implementing prebuilt automations for vertical solutions. Hyland also plans to
optimize its platform for cloud hosting and integration with Hyland Experience, its
new cloud-native LCAP.

Strengths

 Business model: Hyland has succeeded in cross-selling its RPA product to existing

Hyland customers. Hyland RPA is an appealing option for enterprise customers who
want a packaged solution to automate tasks in content-centric business processes.
For new customers, Hyland offers a 60-day product trial and a free customized
process discovery session with a product expert.
 Viability: Hyland is performing well in a volatile economic climate. Hyland is a global
leader in the content services platform (CSP) market, and its RPA business grew by
 36%, year over year, in 2022. It plans to grow further by cross-selling Hyland RPA to
more of its existing 16,000 customers. Hyland’s global presence and healthy growth
are augmented by a diversified partner network of more than 475 organizations,
which provides customers with local resources and expertise.
 Vertical/industry focus: Hyland has built a broad portfolio of more than 13,000
customized industry solutions across six major verticals: healthcare, higher
education, government, insurance, financial services and cross-industry. It plans to
run industry-specific RPA campaigns and emphasize industry-specific solutions in its
RPA cross-selling efforts, including for the healthcare sector.

Cautions

 RPA focus: Hyland’s sales and marketing strategy focuses on cross-selling Hyland

RPA to existing Hyland customers. Hyland’s strong narrative around its CSP, BPA
and LCAP overshadows its RPA offering. Potential buyers who do not already use
Hyland products may not be aware of Hyland RPA, especially if they are seeking
stand-alone RPA solutions.
 Breadth of features: Hyland’s RPA does not support many common features. These
include support for an orchestrator (in this case, Hyland RPA Manager) in the cloud
(as platform as a service [PaaS]); the ability for remote developers to collaborate on
the same automation script/code at the same time; and attended bot support for
desktops other than Windows machines (that is, macOS and Linux desktops). Nor
does Hyland RPA offer prepackaged adapters for large-scale data migration to SAP
S/4HANA, Oracle and other big data systems. Furthermore, Hyland’s RPA platform
does not provide a direct connector to connect and automate applications running on
Citrix servers, although it does connect to virtual machines (VMs) via a computer-
vision-based technology called Vision Sensor.
 Market presence: Hyland has low visibility in the RPA market, compared with other
RPA vendors. Gartner rarely receives inquiries about Hyland RPA from buyers who
are not existing users of other Hyland solutions. Gartner’s market share research
indicates that Hyland has only a very small share of the RPA market.

IBM

IBM is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA product is IBM Robotic
Process Automation, which, as part of a broader, integrated hyperautomation suite,
offers RPA along with process mining, API orchestration, digital assistance, IDP and
AI capabilities. In this way, IBM provides an automation platform as a part of its
Cloud Pak for Automation, which helps end users discover, build and apply
automation solutions.
 IBM has geographically distributed operations. Its customers range from small to
large enterprises.

IBM’s RPA roadmap includes a no-code, web-based authoring tool to enable

business users to assemble automation flows from a catalog of bot skills, integrate
the newly developed Natural Recorder into RPA Studio, and expand IBM RPA’s
integration with IBM’s process- and task-mining capabilities.

Strengths

 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 together 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 journey.

Cautions

 RPA features: IBM supports Citrix and other VMs via its vision drivers, but, unlike
many of its competitors, does not offer connectors that can automate applications
running on Citrix or Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)-based machines. IBM does not
offer support for remote developers who need to work on the same script in parallel.
Nor does it yet offer a web- or mobile-based development studio for RPA script
development. It also lacks common features such as workflow templates, support for
continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and DevOps.
 Go-to-market strategy: IBM pursues a low-cost pricing strategy for its RPA product to
attract new customers, but is still not well-known in this market. Additionally, the
average time to deploy a first application is not fast enough to compete with IBM’s
startup competitors. Moreover, IBM’s RPA division has recently adopted a new
marketing strategy to target large enterprises with its AI-augmented products, which
is a departure from its traditional focus on selling RPA to SMBs. Clients may need to
 reexamine their product capability requirements and check whether IBM’s offering
still fits into their long-term roadmap for automation development.
 Vertical/industry strategy: IBM promotes RPA as just one of many features of its
broad automation platform. Compared with its competitors, IBM provides few options
for customers seeking industry-specific RPA solutions. IBM primarily depends on its
business partners and IBM Consulting to develop industry-specific RPA assets for
clients.

Laiye

Laiye is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA product, Laiye RPA, is well-
suited for use with diverse OSs, as it can automate in Windows, Android and Linux
environments.

Laiye’s operations are mainly in China, Asia/Pacific and Europe. Its customers are
mostly midsize and large enterprises.

Laiye’s RPA product roadmap includes an automated process generator that uses
large language models (LLMs), robot runtime environment templates, integration
interfaces with commonly used software development life cycle (SDLC) platforms,
integrated third-party intrusion detection systems, and an API connector builder
based on LLMs.

Strengths

 Market understanding: Laiye has focused on unifying its platform, so that users can
access all platform components as part of a single automation solution. It offers a
browser-based, no-code automation development tool for citizen developers and
business users. In 2022, it completed the acquisition of Intelligence Qubic, a China-
based autoML and IDP company. These developments reflect an understanding of
large enterprises’ needs. Following its acquisition of Mindsay in 2022, Laiye has
widened its footprint in Europe. Additionally, Laiye is building a global network of
partners to broaden its operations.
 Innovation: Laiye’s business model is to sell RPA and AI capabilities as an integrated
platform with its network of partners. Through its utility-based or revenue-sharing
model with vertical SaaS or other software companies, Laiye has created industry-
specific automation capabilities. Notably, its product roadmap includes an RPA co-
pilot capability that supports autogeneration of process snippets and customized
Python code for use cases not covered by built-in commands, LLM-driven
documentation of code, and LLM-powered classification and extraction for IDP.
 Offering strategy: Laiye’s product team regularly interviews customers, and Laiye
has an active community of more than 800,000 developers. A January 2023 release
of its RPA product provides compatibility with OSs such as KylinOS and Unity
Operating System (UOS). This release enables Laiye to serve a broader range of
customers.

Cautions

 UI integration: Laiye provides direct UI connectors for certain commonly used global

applications like Microsoft 365, SAP and Oracle, but fewer UI connectors than other
vendors. Although Laiye offers a range of connectors for applications commonly
used in China, its lack of other connectors may impede customers elsewhere.
 RPA features: Laiye does not support industrywide regulatory compliance protocols
for its bots, such those of the U.S. FDA, FedRAMP, FISMA, and the EU-U.S. and
Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield Frameworks. However, it does support the General Data
Protection Regulation (GDPR) and SOC 2. Also, it has only limited collaboration
features for RPA developers, and it lacks embedded features such as instant
messaging and other forms of collaboration that are available in competitors’ RPA
platforms. Furthermore, Laiye does not support any predictive analysis within the
task-mining module of its RPA offering.
 Viability: Laiye faces tough competition both in China and internationally. Its
approach of seamlessly integrating capabilities into a single automation platform is
not unique, as competitors offer similar integration through partnerships.

Microsoft

Microsoft is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA product, Power Automate, is
built on Azure and enables cloud-first and API-first automation, along with desktop-
based automation via Power Automate for desktop (PAD). Power Automate provides
RPA with API integration and orchestration, IDP, task and process mining, optical
character recognition (OCR) and AI.

Microsoft’s operations are geographically distributed. Its customer base includes

large enterprises and SMBs.

Microsoft’s RPA product roadmap includes reusable UI element collectors as

components within the Power Automate designer studio. Microsoft will make
additional cloud connectors available in the desktop flow designer and picture-in-
picture execution for attended automation as a digital assistant in a user’s desktop.

Strengths
 AI focus: Microsoft has embedded Microsoft 365 Copilot, its generative AI
component, within Power Automate. Microsoft’s investment in LLMs and
partnerships with third-party products such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT are intended to
disrupt the market. Microsoft plans to use LLMs and other models to easily create
automations for richer workloads.
 Microsoft ecosystem: Power Automate appears accessible to, and easy to adopt by,
existing Microsoft customers, due to its proximity to other components in the Power
Platform and Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Microsoft has a global customer base, with
more than 500,000 organizations using Power Automate. The Power Platform has
more than 500 implementation partners and a community of over 2 million users.
Gartner estimates that Microsoft’s RPA business grew by 125% from 2021 to 2022,
due to the wider availability of Power Automate.
 Pricing/sales strategy: Microsoft customers can often procure Power Automate at a
discount with their Microsoft 365 Enterprise license, which can reduce the cost of
RPA acquisition. Microsoft offers a limited free version of PAD, as well as a paid
premium offering on a per-user, per-month basis. A new prepaid consumption pricing
model will be generally available later in 2023, so customers will be able to choose
their preferred billing approach (prepaid or usage-based).

Cautions

 Clarity of RPA offering: Most Gartner clients do not understand the difference

between Power Automate and PAD. Power Automate users typically struggle to
navigate between Microsoft’s API-centric cloud flow, its RPA desktop flow from PAD,
and its connectors and apps from Teams. Many customers also struggle to
understand the platform licensing and what is included in their enterprise bundle.
 Integration with legacy back office: Some Microsoft customers have indicated
difficulties integrating legacy back-office systems, such as JD Edwards software, and
custom applications. Microsoft’s RPA is Windows-based and does not support Linux
or macOS.
 Cloud-first RPA orchestration: Power Automate supports RPA orchestration only in a
cloud. Although it supports runtime agents on Windows desktops, hosted machine
groups and some containerized environments that support the Windows GUI and
specific VMs (such as Citrix and RDP VMs), customers will benefit most by taking a
cloud-first approach.

NICE
 NICE is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA product, NICE RPA, comprises
NEVA Assist, which focuses on attended automation for global contact centers,
NEVA Unattended and NEVA Discover for process discovery.

NICE’s operations are geographically diversified. Its customers tend to be SMBs and
large enterprises.

NICE’s RPA product roadmap features an RPA migration tool, investment in NEVA-
combining capabilities to discover opportunities for self-service, and the addition of
“click to guide” compliance features to enable organizations to validate process
compliance with NEVA Discover.

Strengths

 Market understanding: NICE envisions the RPA market moving away from shared
services and back-office domains and toward an important technology stack within
enterprises’ customer-facing functions. NICE has responded to customers’ demands
for more specialized products to meet industry-specific challenges.
 Offering strategy: NICE is introducing AI-based agent augmentation by combining
RPA with speech and behavior triggers through NEVA Agent Assist. NICE has also
extended its partnership with Hyperscience for IDP-related use cases. Additionally, it
has introduced NEVA In-App and NEVA Integrate for enterprise application UI and
low-code API integration.
 Vertical/industry strategy: NICE targets global enterprises and contact centers by
offering specialized attended bots to augment its workforce management
functionality for a range of industries. Its automation community, open software
development kit (SDK) and center of excellence enhance developer collaboration
and are supplemented by a cloud-based automation studio and video-based courses
and tutorials.

Cautions

 Unattended automation: NICE’s RPA product is designed primarily for attended

automation. Customers may find it is more complicated to use for unattended
processes than are competitors’ pure unattended development tools. Feedback from
customers on Gartner’s Peer Insights platform indicates that NICE’s unattended
automation methods can be difficult to find and configure, and that the product
requires more technical skills for server installation and deployment.
 Product features: NICE does not provide built-in native OCR and autoML capabilities
within its RPA platform. Nor does it support industrywide compliance with regulations
such as those of the FDA, FedRAMP, Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), FISMA, and
 “good x practice” (GxP) for bots and platforms. However, as part of its roadmap for
RPA, NICE does plan to support FedRAMP and CSA by 2025.
 Operations: There were only two new releases of NICE’s RPA offering in 2022,
which was far fewer than the number of releases from NICE’s competitors. NICE
also lags behind its competitors in terms of the number of employees dedicated to
each function that supports an RPA offering.

Nintex

Nintex is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA product, Nintex RPA, is part
of the Nintex Process Platform, which also includes workflow automation, digital
forms, IDP, document generation, e-signature, process discovery, process mapping
(Nintex Process Manager) and BPA capabilities. Nintex acquired Kryon in 2022 and
leverages Kryon’s Full-Cycle Automation Suite.

Nintex’s operations are mainly in North America, EMEA, Australia and New Zealand.
Its RPA customers are generally midsize and large enterprises in numerous sectors,
with a concentration in banking and financial services.

Nintex’s RPA product roadmap includes a simplified installation experience, tighter

process discovery integration to enable automated bot development, and a new
administration app for its cloud managed-service offering.

Strengths

 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, an application that connects Nintex
Automation Cloud to on-premises RPA and other third-party systems.
 Customer ecosystem: Nintex has strong name recognition, with over 10,000
automation customers and over 1,000 RPA customers in more than 90 countries.
Existing Nintex customers may find value in its hundreds of prebuilt automation
templates and connectors for RPA and workflow automation.
 Process discovery: Building on its acquisition of Kryon, Nintex differentiates itself
with its integration of process discovery, automated bot development and attended
automation. Additionally, Nintex plans to embed process discovery more tightly in its
automation development life cycle.

Cautions
 Product features: Nintex RPA is focused on ease of use for less technical users, so it
lacks some developer-centric features found in many competing products. It lacks a
developer marketplace and support for CI/CD, and it has only limited collaboration
features for developers. It also has only limited native IDP capabilities, although
integrations with third-party IDP products are available. Nintex plans to address
many of these shortcomings by the end of 2023 in its upcoming product roadmap.
 Visibility: Like other large software providers that have entered the RPA market
through mergers and acquisitions, Nintex has yet to gain much visibility to, or interest
among, most RPA customers. Client inquiries received by Gartner about Nintex
mainly come from customers of Nintex’s other automation solutions, although Nintex
claims the majority of its RPA customers are net new clients.
 Vision: Nintex aims to differentiate itself by targeting the midsize enterprise market
and less technical citizen developers with an integrated RPA, BPA, and process
discovery platform, but this is a challenging market with higher customer turnover
and better-known competitors. Also, Nintex currently offers limited generative AI
capabilities via an OpenAI connector, though it plans to add generative AI to its
short-term product roadmap, with capabilities becoming available during the next 12
months.

Pegasystems

Pegasystems is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA product, Pega Robotic
Process Automation, is part of the Pega Infinity platform. It complements the
vendor’s broader BPA capabilities and other features, such as its LCAP and support
for CRM, multiexperience and business rules.

Pegasystems’ operations are geographically distributed. Its customers tend to be

large enterprises.

Pegasystems’ RPA product roadmap includes AI-assisted development within its

App Studio; an independent software vendor (ISV) launchpad for its developer
community and service partners to build their own solutions on the Pega Cloud SaaS
platform; and enhancements to X-ray Vision to improve self-healing capabilities.

Strengths

 Automation capabilities: Pegasystems’ RPA product offers attended and unattended

automation, real-time bot resource allocation, natural language processing (NLP)-
based email rerouting, self-healing capabilities and desktop mining. It integrates
tightly with Pega Infinity, which supports customers looking beyond RPA to
hyperautomation.
 Innovation: Pegasystems’ innovations include patented automation technology that
enables multithread attended automation at scale. This patented technology can also
respond dynamically to changes in underlying applications and business logic.
 Pega ecosystem: Pegasystems has a large ecosystem of customers and partners,
as well as a strong Pega Community to meet the automation requirements of large
enterprises. Pegasystems has developed relationships with many large enterprises
that have implemented hyperautomation with the complete Pega stack. This helps
Pegasystems create reusable accelerators that can meet the automation needs of its
customers.

Cautions

 Sales relationship and strategy: Pegasystems targets large enterprises with big

budgets. Although Pegasystems has made several updates to its pricing model, it
still may not be ideal for new RPA buyers seeking a lower entry price for RPA.
Furthermore, several Gartner clients have expressed concerns about the
implications of Pega’s ongoing legal disputes with Appian. We advise prospective
customers to monitor these proceedings closely.
 Complexity: Because the capabilities of Pegasystems’ RPA product extend beyond
tactical task automation, its implementations can be complex and often require deep
integration and extensive software configuration effort. The product is tightly coupled
with the core Pega Infinity platform and lacks the flexibility of “lighter” automation
tools. Customers focused on smaller, targeted use cases may prefer a simpler RPA
tool.
 Customer experience: Pegasystems’ RPA product has both strong advocates and
strong detractors, which results in disparate ratings. Its low satisfaction ratings on
Gartner’s Peer Insights platform are usually associated with implementation
initiatives that require more effort than was anticipated at the RPA design stage.
Several client inquiries received by Gartner concerning Pegasystems also mention
difficulty training or finding resources. However, Pegasystems has released several
updates in the past year to address these issues.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA product is MuleSoft RPA,
which includes RPA Manager (a cloud-based control panel integrated with Anypoint
Platform), RPA recorder (a business process recorder that can be triggered from
RPA Manager), RPA Builder (a Windows-based desktop development environment)
and RPA Bot (the runtime).
 Salesforce’s operations are geographically distributed. Its RPA customers tend to be
midsize and large enterprises.

Salesforce’s RPA product roadmap includes enhanced UI scraping; native Anypoint

Exchange API discovery from RPA Builder; the ability to submit task-mining
optimization ideas within the RPA platform; and native IDP for business users
supporting prebuilt and custom training models.

Strengths

 Product portfolio: Salesforce is a Leader in Magic Quadrants for multiple

technologies that complement RPA, including integration platform as a service
(iPaaS), API management and LCAPs. In combination with its wider software
portfolio, Salesforce’s automation capabilities have the potential to support an
enterprisewide hyperautomation strategy.
 Business model: Salesforce has a strong global partner network for implementations
and provides free accelerators in its App Exchange. It enables customers to choose
the timing with which to upgrade deployments and provides transparency, in terms of
details of releases, updates and patches, via a portal.
 Viability: Salesforce has a diverse customer base that values its RPA capabilities.
RPA is a clear part of Salesforce’s automation and integration product roadmap, as
shown by its acquisition of Servicetrace in 2021. Salesforce faces minimal viability
risks, compared with smaller competitors that may exit the market or be acquired.

Cautions

 Visibility: Salesforce’s RPA product has significantly less market visibility than the
RPA offerings of its competitors. Most prospective buyers who ask Gartner about
Salesforce’s RPA already have a large investment in Salesforce’s other solutions.
Salesforce has communicated its offering vision and future plans to its core
customers, but gained little attention outside this group.
 RPA features and support: Salesforce’s RPA has some gaps in its feature set, such
as IDP, autoML and the option to “bring your own script.” It runs only on Windows
(not macOS or Linux). Additionally, Salesforce’s RPA, which is offered on MuleSoft’s
managed cloud service, does not currently support an on-premises orchestrator.
Salesforce offers elevated support at additional cost for its RPA customers. It plans
to invest further in 2023 to enable RPA support throughout its customer service
organization.
 Sales execution/pricing: Salesforce does not offer a free trial to test its solution,
although proof of concepts are an option. Prices for Salesforce’s entry-point offering
 can be higher than those of some of its competitors’ entry-point offerings. 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.

Samsung SDS

Samsung SDS is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its rebranded RPA product
is the Brity Automation Platform, which includes design studios for technical
developers, citizen developers and orchestrators, for both on-premises and cloud
deployments. It integrates with Samsung SDS’s internal AI Contact Center and
visual capabilities.

Samsung SDS’s operations are mainly in South Korea. Its customer base is
concentrated in South Korea and Asia/Pacific, but it also has some clients in Europe
and North America. It competes in all market segments.

Samsung SDS’s RPA roadmap includes a generative-AI-driven automation code

generator, additional event triggers for its bots, and scheduling settings to support
personalized automation.

Strengths

 RPA scope: Samsung SDS has a comprehensive product portfolio, including RPA,

AI/ML and IDP offerings. It offers packaged solutions and professional services
together as bundled products. It provides content in multiple languages. Additionally,
it has improved its products’ usability in 2023, including that of its step recorder for
task mining.
 Viability: Samsung SDS’s RPA business achieved year-over-year revenue growth of
52% in 2022 (as estimated by Gartner). This growth significantly exceeded the RPA
market average and positioned Samsung SDS as the ninth-largest vendor in terms
of market share (by RPA revenue). We consider Samsung SDS a financially stable
vendor for RPA customers.
 Partner ecosystem: Samsung SDS’s RPA operations partner with more than 60
service providers, including professional services, support and product engineering
providers that offer a broad range of services. Samsung SDS works with its leading
consulting partners to offer a paid service that diagnoses and recommends AI-based
automation across business functions for its RPA customers.

Cautions
 Visibility: Samsung SDS’s limited geographic presence may deter organizations
outside Asia/Pacific. Although Samsung SDS is expanding its marketing outreach
program beyond Asia/Pacific, it lacks the visibility of many other RPA vendors.
Gartner clients do not typically shortlist Samsung SDS when evaluating RPA
products, and Gartner receives relatively few inquiries about its RPA product.
 UI integration: Samsung SDS does not offer prebuilt integrations or UI connectors for
enterprise systems such as those of Oracle, Salesforce and ServiceNow, or for IBM
mainframes. Samsung SDS offers a richer set of UI connectors for many local
applications used in South Korea and Asia/Pacific, but customers outside
Asia/Pacific receive less in this regard.
 SDLC, security and governance: Samsung SDS’s RPA product offers limited support
for collaboration between developers and other user personas. It does not support
test data generation, monitoring/metering of licensing usage patterns, agile planning
tools or integration with third-party agile development tools. Nor does it support key
third-party security vaults, such as CyberArk’s, or industrywide regulatory
compliance protocols such as those of the FDA, FedRAMP, FISMA, and the EU-U.S.
and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield Frameworks.

SAP

SAP is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA product, SAP Build Process
Automation, is an AI-powered, unified solution for RPA that also offers workflow and
business rules management. It is tightly integrated into the SAP Business
Technology Platform (BTP) stack and provides an intuitive UX for citizen developers,
along with support for rapid development and enterprise-grade security.

SAP’s operations are geographically distributed. Its customers tend to be midsize to

large enterprises.

SAP’s RPA product roadmap features automated business event triggering, AI-
assisted development with chat-based recommendations and LLMs, a refreshed UX,
and tighter integration with SAP Signavio, SAP Integration Suite (including via open
connectors), and other SAP and third-party applications.

Strengths

 SAP ecosystem: SAP has a large-scale ERP ecosystem and a global customer

base. Customers can benefit from its growing number of crowdsourced components,
industry-specific prebuilt assets and connectors, which enable RPA capabilities for
both SAP and non-SAP applications. SAP Consulting is incentivized to support
process automation customers.
 Product strategy: SAP has improved its product by enabling integration with SAP
Signavio (a process-mining tool) and embedding intelligence for authoring, execution
and unstructured data handling. It has also improved its process design with
branches, parallel approvals and subworkflows in Process Builder. It offers over
1,500 automation artifacts in 300 RPA packages and 80 larger process packages
across multiple business functions. SAP has a strong vision for end-to-end
automation that includes RPA, process mining, BPA and cloud ERP capabilities.
 Sales execution/pricing: SAP has made changes to its pricing model. SAP Build
Process Automation is included at no extra cost in S/4HANA GROW with SAP and
RISE with SAP bundles, and is available to all SAP BTP customers. SAP does not
charge extra for AI capabilities. It allows customers to choose from flexible licensing
options, such as consumption-based unattended and attended RPA (connection-
based); advanced user licenses for process creators; and participant-only licenses
for standard workflow users. These models can enable large-scale deployments
while supporting diverse user personas.

Cautions

 SAP-centric focus: Although SAP Build Process Automation can automate both SAP
and non-SAP processes, Gartner customers indicate that they perceive it as SAP-
centric. Potential buyers of SAP’s RPA need to check the quality of integration with
specific non-SAP applications.
 Market awareness: Marketing for SAP Build Process Automation typically targets
customers looking for comprehensive ERP business solutions including automation
technology. SAP’s competitors in the RPA market are more visible. Given SAP’s
relatively limited visibility in this market, customers may struggle to determine the
market’s perception of its RPA product, support and services.
 RPA features: SAP Build Process Automation does not provide on-premises RPA
orchestration. It also currently lacks other features commonly offered by its
competitors, such as support for macOS and Linux deployments (SAP will add this
later in 2023), a tool for calculating ROI, and a wide range of connectors to
orchestration engines.

SS&C Blue Prism

SS&C Blue Prism is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its RPA product, the Intelligent
Automation Platform, integrates with SS&C Blue Prism Chorus’ BPA suite, IDP
capabilities, and process intelligence, among others.
 SS&C Blue Prism has geographically distributed operations. Its customers include
large enterprises and SMBs.

SS&C Blue Prism’s RPA product roadmap includes a cloud-native SaaS platform
with flexible pricing; integration with the SS&C Everywhere data fabric to connect
data with many of SS&C’s 150-plus products; and significant enhancements to its
application modeler capabilities (including enhanced computer vision to improve
screen capture).

Strengths

 Product portfolio: SS&C Blue Prism offers a wide range of RPA capabilities,

including numerous connectors to enterprise applications and centrally managed
automation for highly regulated markets. SS&C Blue Prism has integrated its core
RPA product with other products within its intelligent automation portfolio to create a
unified platform that could be compelling for enterprise customers. It has also
released SS&C Blue Prism Desktop to support attended desktop automation.
 Business model: SS&C Blue Prism’s business model revolves around the strength of
its core RPA product, that product’s integration with capabilities across its portfolio
(including Chorus BPA), and strategic cloud alliances for multiple clouds, including
those of Microsoft (Azure) and Amazon Web Services. SS&C Blue Prism has more
than 168,000 active RPA users and a community of over 50,000 users across 5,000
companies.
 Bundling of solutions: To simplify the purchasing process, SS&C Blue Prism offers a
single, unified offering that includes an orchestrator, development studio, bot
licenses, product support, and limited IDP and process-mining capabilities.

Cautions

 Pricing: During Gartner inquiry sessions and proposal reviews, some customers

have indicated that prices for SS&C Blue Prism’s RPA product have effectively
increased at the time of contract renewal, mostly due to the inclusion of production
support costs. These costs were previously optional but are now mandated by SS&C
Blue Prism. Despite this policy change, however, the list price of SS&C Blue Prism’s
cloud offering has seen high single-digit percentage price decreases for a standard
three-year term.
 Compliance features: SS&C Blue Prism supports fewer industry regulatory
compliance standards than many of its competitors. It currently does not support
popular compliance standards such as FedRAMP, FISMA, Payment Card Industry
(PCI) and GxP.
 Embedded automation: SS&C Blue Prism’s embedded automation features are
limited to webpages that can be rendered outside the RPA platform. It does not
support prebuilt embedded automation for popular enterprise applications such as
those of Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow and Workday. Its RPA
platform does not yet support runtimes for macOS, Linux or other OSs.

UiPath

UiPath is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its product, the UiPath Business
Automation Platform, provides an end-to-end set of hyperautomation capabilities,
including RPA, AI, NLP, API automation, process orchestration, low-code app
development, process and task mining, IDP, and application testing. Its core RPA
product is a cloud-native offering with tailored design studios for professional and
citizen developers, in which they can create and consume automations in a secure,
collaborative and governed manner.

UiPath has global operations. It serves every buyer segment.

Recent AI enhancements include point-and-click experiences for citizen developers

to train ML models, a large-screen model for its AI computer vision technology, and
UiPath Communications Mining to enable robots to read and perform tasks based on
unstructured data or messages. The company’s short-term product roadmap
includes a native generative AI co-pilot for creating apps and automations with
natural language prompts.

Strengths

 Product strategy: UiPath has a strong brand and greatly influences the market with
its narrative about AI-powered automation. It continues to evolve rapidly from a pure
RPA tool vendor into an enterprise automation platform provider that combines RPA,
AI, NLP, API automation, IDP, process and task mining, process orchestration, low-
code app development, and application testing. It also offers prebuilt automation
solutions for finance, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing and other industries.
 Viability: UiPath has a strong presence and a strong ability to execute in the RPA
market. It is by far the largest vendor in terms of RPA-specific revenue. With a large
partner ecosystem and global customer demand, UiPath has a compelling vision for
building a stable platform that can meet customers’ automation needs.
 Customer ecosystem: UiPath has a diverse customer base of more than 10,000
enterprises across all industries. Customers who need to automate industry-specific
processes can use UiPath’s sizable RPA-specific partner ecosystem. This
 ecosystem provides industry experience, benchmarks and precreated assets to
augment industry capabilities available from the UiPath Marketplace.

Cautions

 Product strategy: UiPath could improve some of its complementary technologies,

such as its products for IDP, process mining and test automation, and its LCAP.
Although these technologies work well enough for customers who want to
standardize on UiPath’s platform for a unified automation strategy, some customers
have indicated that their mature hyperautomation practices and complex workflows
require capabilities beyond what UiPath offers.
 Pricing: Some UiPath customers with legacy on-premises pricing arrangements have
reported significant cost increases, although this greatly depends on the quantities
deployed. To simplify its diversifying portfolio, UiPath has introduced deployment-
agnostic licensing, known as Flex, as well as usage-based pricing for serverless
cloud RPA, IDP, AI and task mining.
 Partner services: Some customers have reported concerns about the delivery quality
provided by some of UiPath’s recommended partners. UiPath has one of the largest
RPA partner ecosystems, so quality may vary between its more than 5,000 systems
integrator partners. UiPath is revising its partner program to place more emphasis on
the quality of its partners, rather than their quantity.

Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change.
As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may
change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the
next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor.
It may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation
criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.

Added

 EdgeVerve Systems
 Hyland

Dropped

 WorkFusion: This vendor is not included in this Magic Quadrant because its RPA
strategy and capabilities do not align with Gartner’s inclusion criteria. Also,
 WorkFusion no longer focuses primarily on selling RPA. However, it maintains its
base of RPA customers.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

To qualify for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant, vendors had to:

 Demonstrate a clear and active go-to-market and sales strategy, primarily for RPA
software, as demonstrated by their website, reviews on Gartner’s Peer Insights
forum, social media communications, and direct or indirect marketing materials that
explicitly mention RPA.
 Sell RPA software directly to paying customers without engaging professional
services. Vendors had to provide at least first-line support for their RPA capabilities.
They must not sell their RPA product solely to, and for the use of, its professional
services and consultants.
 Offer a commercially supported enterprise offering — in other words, vendors must
not offer their platforms as open-source software.

All vendors also had to demonstrate presence in multiple regions, with at least 30
paying RPA customers (unique logos) each in at least two of the following regions as
of 31 January 2023:

 North America
 Latin America
 Europe, the Middle East and Africa
 Asia/Pacific, including Japan and China

They also had to have:

 A minimum consolidated market relevance index (MRI) score greater than 1.5 (see
Note 1).

In addition, vendors had to satisfy one of the following three criteria:

 At least $55 million in revenue in the financial year 2022 (FY22) from sales of RPA
software licenses, excluding revenue from professional services, consulting and any
systems integrator support (see Note 2).
 Either year-over-year revenue growth of at least 20% in FY22 from sales of RPA
software licenses, (excluding revenue from professional services, consulting and
 systems integrator support), or at least 500 paying RPA customers with a
consolidated MRI score greater than 2.5.
 A minimum consolidated MRI score greater than 4.

Vendors also had to offer the following capabilities natively within their RPA platform
or product as of 31 January 2023:

 Screen-scraping capabilities, with at least five UI connectors from the following list:
o Selenium IDE
o Microsoft Active Accessibility
o Microsoft UI Automation
o Java application connector
o SAP WinGUI
o Windows GUI
o Mainframe emulator
 Enterprise IT capabilities, including disaster recovery environments, high-availability
support, CI/CD, SDLC management and multipersona collaboration within the RPA
software.
 Support for RPA script development with standard programming languages or
vendor-specific low-code representations, including graphical development.
 Ability to record tasks and convert them into scripts that can be deployed.
 Support for both attended and unattended automation.
 Ability to orchestrate and administer users, scripts and the runtime, including
configuration, monitoring and security (a central orchestrator or control
panel/administrative component is essential).
 Ability to deploy bots in all of the following environments:
o Desktops
o Virtual machines
o Public and private clouds

We excluded vendors that:

 Did not offer integration via screen scraping.

 Offered only PaaS or back-end services without a desktop runtime component, an
orchestration component and front-end development tool/integrated development
environment to build the scripts/automation.
 Required a specific third-party component or product, or a white-labeled product, to
support core RPA capabilities.
 Only sold their RPA product as licensed software along with
development/professional services, where the product was used exclusively by the
vendor’s consultants/service providers.
 Did not offer a commercial enterprise RPA offering (that is, they offered a platform
only as open-source software) or that would retire their platform by the end of 2023.

Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
Gartner evaluates how well vendors’ processes, systems, methods and procedures
enable them to be competitive, efficient and effective.

Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Enlarge Table

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Product or Service High

Overall Viability High

Sales Execution/Pricing High

Market Responsiveness/Record Low

Marketing Execution High

Customer Experience High

Operations Medium

Source: Gartner (August 2023)

Completeness of Vision
Gartner also evaluates how well vendors demonstrate understanding of the RPA
market’s current and future direction — including in relation to innovations, customer
needs and competition — and the degree to which their vision aligns with Gartner’s.
This includes vendors’ ability to anticipate market forces and create new market
opportunities.

Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Enlarge Table

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Market Understanding High

Marketing Strategy High

Sales Strategy Medium

Offering (Product) Strategy High

Business Model Medium

Vertical/Industry Strategy Medium

Innovation High

Geographic Strategy Low

Source: Gartner (August 2023)

Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders
Leaders have an insightful understanding of the RPA market, a reliable track record,
the power to influence the market’s direction, and an ability to attract and retain
customers.
In the RPA market, Leaders demonstrate understanding of enterprise customers’
needs and of opportunities to expand functionality and add new products and
services to their core RPA offerings. Simply put, a Leader must have a market-
leading vision and the ability to deliver on that vision.

A Leader may not always be the best choice for every customer. A focused, smaller
vendor can sometimes provide superior support and commitment. Other vendors
may provide a specialized capability that is essential for some organizations, such as
enhanced security or specific features or functions (required, for example, by call
centers and individual desktop use cases). A vendor that focuses on RPA for a
specific vertical market or a limited geographic area may not be a Leader in the
overall market, but it may be a competitive option within its chosen market or area.

Challengers
Challengers excel at attracting a large customer base, but are often limited to one
part of the market.

In the RPA market, a Challenger may have a strong following for attended RPA, but
lack traction, commitment or sophistication in the unattended RPA market. A
Challenger must demonstrate sustained excellence in execution and a significant
following — a combination that few vendors have achieved in this dynamic, nascent
market.

A Challenger may become a Leader if it adopts an aggressive, innovative strategy to

expand its focus to encompass the entire market. It would also need to demonstrate
exceptional insight into the market’s direction and continue to execute excellently.

A Challenger may alternatively become a Visionary by sacrificing growth and instead

focusing on developing innovative, differentiating features and capabilities.

Visionaries
Visionaries are a market’s innovators. They propel a market forward by responding
to emerging customer demands and offering customers new opportunities to excel.

Visionaries must also show insightful understanding of market trends and innovative
strategies for marketing and sales, as well as for product and business management.
Typically, these vendors appeal to leading-edge customers, even if they have
minimal mainstream presence or name recognition. A Visionary’s ability to deliver
sustained, dependable execution in the mainstream enterprise market has yet to be
tested sufficiently.
 In the RPA market, Visionaries may invest in leading-edge hyperautomation
offerings, including RPA, that are not yet readily adopted by mainstream enterprise
customers. Visionaries excel in understanding the demands of enterprises that are
looking for fully inclusive automation support, as they often provide related tools like
AI, chatbots and process management.

A Visionary could eventually grow to become a Leader. Alternatively, a Visionary

may become a Niche Player if it decides to limit its target market by focusing on its
core competencies, technologies or existing customers. Equally, a Visionary could
become a Challenger by developing its specialties in order to advance in terms of
execution.

Niche Players
Niche Players typically specialize in a limited vertical or functional area, or have a
strong product that is limited to fewer parts of the market or only one part.

In the RPA market, Niche Players also include vendors that focus on other software
markets, but that are moving into the RPA market.

In the RPA market, Niche Players:

 Focus primarily on related tools, rather than RPA capabilities — for example,
process discovery or ML tools.
 Have yet to demonstrate excellent execution and success in terms of visibility,
market share and buyer interests.
 Have limited geographic reach.
 Exhibit an unclear vision.
 Focus only on a subset of use cases.

Niche Players often represent the best choice for a specific category of customer or
a particular use case. They typically offer specialized expertise, focused support
practices, flexible terms and conditions, lower costs, and greater commitment to a
particular market segment and its customers.

In this fast-evolving market, opportunities exist in all directions. Some Niche Players
are poised to improve their execution and evolve into Challengers. Others may
become Visionaries by developing innovative solutions that attract interest beyond
their niche segments. Still others may strengthen and broaden their businesses to
become Leaders.

Context
RPA automates repetitive tasks by emulating transactional steps currently taken by
humans, mainly via orchestrated UI interactions.

RPA platforms translate a human process or task into RPA software language to
create a script to follow (commonly known as a “robot” or “bot”). Additionally, a
runtime is allocated to execute the script by a control dashboard/orchestrator.

Software engineering leaders can develop bots programmatically or by using low-

code/no-code GUIs native to the RPA software platform.

Market Overview
The RPA software market reached $2.8 billion in 2022, up from $2.3 billion in
2021 (see Market Share Analysis: Robotic Process Automation, Worldwide, 2022).
This market, once the fastest-growing software segment, was the eighth-fastest-
growing software segment in 2022.

Although the RPA market’s annual growth of 22% far exceeded the average
worldwide software market’s growth of 11%, the RPA market’s expansion has
slowed during the past few years — from 62% in 2019, to 39% in 2020 and 31% in
2021.

The RPA market included more than 60 vendors as of 31 January 2023, but is
becoming more consolidated and competitive.

We discern the following key trends in this market.

RPA Is Evolving Into a General-Purpose Automation

Platform
As a technology platform, RPA software has changed entirely in the past five years.
It is evolving from a screen-scraping tool with minimal workflow capabilities into a
general-purpose automation platform.

All RPA vendors now offer a spectrum of capabilities that extend far beyond the
realm of orchestrated screen scraping. Many RPA products now offer task mining,
process mining, BPA, IDP, conversational AI, low-code UI development, workflow
orchestration and decision automation. Task mining enables automation of
employees’ desktop interactions. Process mining helps identify potential process
candidates for RPA. BPA facilitates orchestration and workflow automation of
complex end-to-end processes.

API-First and Cloud-First Automation Are Growing

Behind every automation lies some form of integration. While screen scraping
remains an important method of integrating complex and legacy systems of record,
API-first automation has become equally popular, due to the rise of SaaS and other
web-based applications. At the same time, improvements to microservice
orchestration, containerization and “deploy anywhere” capabilities are making cloud-
first automation approaches quite popular in the RPA market.

Vendors like Appian, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP and ServiceNow are setting a
new norm for cloud-first automation platforms by offering cloud-only orchestration.
Automation Anywhere, SS&C Blue Prism, Pegasystems and UiPath are positioning
their cloud-first capabilities to complement their existing on-premises RPA products.

Customers Are Building a Platform Ecosystem for

Hyperautomation
Application leaders are going beyond tactical automation to deliver greater efficiency,
efficacy and business agility. RPA technologies play an essential role in
hyperautomation — a discipline that helps combine several technologies in an
orchestrated manner to deliver end-to-end, intelligent, event-driven automation.

No single vendor currently offers the best capabilities across every category of
automation technology. Hence, most enterprises are building an ecosystem of
hyperautomation capabilities that draws on the strengths of multiple vendors’
products.

ChatGPT and Other LLMs Are Driving AI-Generated

Automation
As is evident in every aspect of business and IT, ChatGPT and LLMs are profoundly
impacting automation.

Almost every RPA vendor has either already experimented, or plans to experiment,
with including GPT models in their products or enabling APIs to known GPT vendors
such as OpenAI. They are also offering direct capabilities, such as automatic email
generation, prompts within workflow design, more accurate IDP model training,
process-mining analytics and AI-driven development of RPA scripts. Many RPA
vendors will launch incremental capabilities in the next one or two years, making AI-
generated automation an important capability.

Note 1: Market Relevance Index (MRI) Score

 When evaluating RPA vendors for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant, Gartner
calculated an overall market relevance index (MRI) score for each vendor on a scale
of 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest), based on a combination of factors, such as:

 Gartner client inquiry presence

 Number of Peer Insights reviews on gartner.com
 Social media presence
 Number of publicly visible job postings
 Search trends on third-party search engines

Note 2: Annual Revenue and Customer

Numbers
When evaluating vendors for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant, we examined their
revenue and customer numbers in FY22 (or, failing that, the calendar year 2022) for
RPA software licenses only (excluding professional services, maintenance, free trials
and other non-RPA software licenses).

SaaS subscription revenue included contract value for a calendar year, but excluded
any services included in an annual contract.

For multiyear contracts, we included only the contract value for the first 12 months.

All revenue was converted to U.S. dollars on a constant-currency basis to neutralize

the effect that foreign exchange rates can have on revenue.

The default accounting standard used was generally accepted accounting principles
(GAAP).

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined
market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills
and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as
defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.

Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's

financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the
likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will
continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the
organization's portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the

structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and
negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and

achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer
needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the
vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs

designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the
brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive
identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This
"mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives,
thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable

clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the
ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include
ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of
user groups, service-level agreements and so on.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments.

Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills,
experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to
operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs
and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest
degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape
or enhance those with their added vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently

communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website,
advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of
direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend
the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and
the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and

delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets
as they map to current and future requirements.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business

proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and

offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical
markets.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources,

expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings

to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography,
either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that
geography and market.

 
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