RPA/Automation market research with google

In case you have no $ to pay for Gartner report, let us use google search and vs “feature” to see how people compare products. Let’s start with UiPath:

What we see is that people mostly compare UiPath to automation anywhere, power automate, blue prism etc.. Now, let’s take one of the competitors in this list and repeat the same:

What we see is a similar result, with one additional interesting view, that when people decide between blue prism and UiPath, they are also more interested in the license cost and, that’s the funny thing, they trust more reddit than GARTNER for reviews.

I was also amazed to see python there. But if you have read my article Low Code vs. No Code, and few notes on Turing completeness and Conway’s law it is obvious that people wonder whether they should just code or use RPA (Low Code) tools to do the job.

Now, these RPA tools are mostly targeting “citizen developers”, folks that hardly know coding, they specialise in market/business automation, where API’s are simple, automation problems rather trivial, hence, huge lucrative market targeting office workers. Now, one thing that intrigued me was not to see Zapier there, so let’s do one more search:

That’s interesting. IFTTT? This used be a smart home IoT automation tool, but probably beaten up by Alexa and Google Home, so pivoting to Zapier’s world, world of SME automation. Which brings me to the IoT world, so let’s do some more digging. We will use Node-RED for this:

Indeed , IFTTT is at the bottom, we also see here n8n, and one IoT platform, thingsboard, sneaking from the makers space (since we started the search form Node-RED world):

Grafana? That is a great dashboard tool, so it looks as thingsboard is primarily used for IoT visualization. We also start seeing AWS and Azure IoT and thingworx (PTC):

Now we start seeing things like SCADA, and mindsphere, which is Siemens IoT industrial platform, so let’s do one more round:

We are getting back to IoT platforms, but also start seeing their competitors, like ABB and GE. Also, NODE-RED, which is something people use on the edge for industrial automation.

I was surprised not to see here Software AG, since this is also an automation middleware from Germany. How comes?

Interesting! Software AG is perceived more as a solution player, hence it is compared against Oracle, IBM, SAP etc..

Choosing your enemies

There are two ways people look at your product. One is the “unique selling point of your offering”, and the other one is how you compare to others in the similar space.

If you ever get a question from investors or potential customers on how you compare to company “X”, and that company is not in what you believe is what you do, you have a problem. So, chose your enemies wisely.