Blue Prism Enterprise – A Stagnant Product That Doesn’t Scale for Today’s Needs

[toijari]

I have been using Blue Prism since 2017 and have been involved in building an ecosystem of approximately 300 automated processes. Unfortunately, I must state that if we weren't already so deeply invested in the platform, I would recommend my organization to switch to another product.

The Blue Prism Enterprise application has not evolved significantly in the past eight years. The user interface is outdated, the developer experience is heavy, and performance is poor in large-scale environments. For example

• The platform does not scale: managing 300 processes causes continuous performance issues.

• The user interface has remained virtually unchanged since 2017.

• Chrome and Edge browser automation: the transition from Internet Explorer to Chrome/Edge was extremely problematic due to weak support for these browsers. Even today, this area has not improved significantly.

• In Windows 11 environments, Entra ID authentication for robot users is not supported. This shortcoming may ultimately be what forces us away from the Blue Prism IT's requirement.

• Testing tools are nearly nonexistent, making regression testing and validation unnecessarily manual.

• Despite being a core part of the platform, development, debugging, testing, Application Modeller, and version control functionalities have seen little to no meaningful improvement in the past eight years.

These are not isolated issues – they reflect a broader strategic stagnation in the development of the core Enterprise product. While the company is investing in new tools and cloud services, the foundation that many customers rely on has been left behind. This poses a serious risk to organizations that have built business-critical solutions on top of Blue Prism.

I would expect to see:

• A modern, responsive UI with customizable views

• A robust debugging and testing framework

• Intelligent and reliable browser automation

• Scalable orchestration for large environments

• Native support for modern version control and CI/CD pipelines

Has anyone else experienced similar limitations? What are your thoughts on the future of the Enterprise platform?

[Denis__Dennehy]

Wow @toijari those are some body-blow big hits at the old BP there!

If you think the product has not changed much sinch 2017, I can confirm it did not really fundamentally change much above the hood for a number of years before that.  You could probably pick up version 3.5 of the product and recognise it and use it as the same product being used today - but the reality is there have been a hell of a lot of change (and oh my... 3.5 was very buggy!!)

On your main problem of having difficulty managing 300 processes, that should not be the case - It might be worth reaching out to anyone in your network who is managing a similar sized estate, there are some Blue Prism customers with far more processes in use than that (and have had so for many years).  There are things you can do in your build and in dashboards you can easily create that should mean managing large numbers of processes can be orchestrated intelligently.  There are some well-known tools in the digital exchange that allow more automatic orchestration.

On the IE to Chrome migration, unfortunately that some problem exists in all other competitor products also.  We had been very lucky to have such a stable and rich IE interface for very many years, Chrome is different and that same functionality cannot be kept or transferred across.

On the rest of your issues and what you would like to see, I think they are very much the focus of the product team these days with the move to the cloud hybrid model similar to their competitors.  However, moving functionality across from a 20-year-old product is never easy...

[Michael_S]

Hi all, 

I'm just dropping in to say that we're actively listening to this discussion and are happy for it to continue, I know you'll all focus on constructive feedback, and we're taking notes. I have asked our product team to join in, they'll be along later with a response. 

Thanks for keeping it grounded, everyone 💙

[vrushalird]

Hi @toijari, finally someone pointed out these issues!

We are also facing some performance issues in Blue Prism Enterprise (v7.4). These issues were present in the earlier versions as well.

As the number of pages increases either in process or object, the performance goes down. And in the real world, we are always going to plug in additional functionalities which results in increasing the process/object size. Once the size hits a particular point, we start noticing some laggings while opening the process/object, or basically doing anything with it. 

I agree that if we take any other tool as well, it will behave the same to some extent. However, being a leader in this domain, we expect better experiences from the tool.

Would really like to see some significant changes in coming days 🙂

[faheemsd]

Dear @toijari ,

Thank you for sharing your experience — it's clear you've invested significant time and effort into building your Blue Prism ecosystem.

I’d like to offer a slightly different perspective by highlighting some advanced capabilities in Blue Prism Enterprise that are often underutilized — particularly in large, mature automation programs.

1. Scalability with Proper Infrastructure Planning

There are many organizations running 500+ live processes with Blue Prism today — some even exceeding 1,000 — especially in banking, insurance, and shared services. The key lies in collaborating with infrastructure, database, and IT teams to ensure:

• SQL Server and application servers are sized correctly

• Archiving and queue cleanup is automated

• Resource pools and Digital Workers are load-balanced efficiently

• Environment segregation (Dev, UAT, Prod) is clearly defined

• Logging is optimized to prevent database bloat

2. Workload Management & Intelligent Scheduling

Blue Prism’s Work Queues, Dynamic Scheduling, and APIs can be used to scale bot utilization effectively — especially when orchestrated via external triggers or workload balancers. With the right architecture, concurrent processing of large process volumes becomes much more efficient.

3. Improved Browser Automation

While IE-to-Chromium migration was painful, recent Blue Prism versions (v6.10 and 7.x) include Chrome and Edge browser extensions with better UI element handling, attribute-based selectors, and more stable spying modes. This continues to improve with community feedback.

Interestingly, there are large enterprises that have actually migrated from other product to Blue Prism — often due to its strong governance, security model, centralized control, and robust queue architecture that aligns well with complex business needs. These migrations aren't always publicized, but they do happen when long-term sustainability is the priority.

In my personal opinion, Blue Prism has all the essential capabilities needed to:

• Automate complex, rule-based business processes

• Integrate with other systems via APIs, web services, queues, and native connectors

• Deliver enterprise-grade orchestration and scalability

• Maintain strong security, auditability, and role-based access control

Yes, there are areas where Blue Prism needs to evolve (UI, Entra ID support), but it remains a very powerful, enterprise-grade platform when implemented well.
No RPA tool is perfect — each platform has its strengths and limitations. I’ve seen first-hand how organizations face scalability, browser compatibility, or integration issues across all three major platforms at different stages of maturity.

[faheemsd]

Dear @vrushalird 

You're absolutely right — as the number of pages in a process or object increases, performance can suffer. I've seen this especially in larger environments where objects and processes grow organically over time.

To help mitigate this:
Avoid creating too many pages in a single process. Instead, I recommend building sub-processes for different logical units and calling them from a main process. This improves both performance and maintainability.

Similarly, for objects, instead of putting all functionalities into one Business Object, split the logic into multiple smaller objects. Each one can focus on a specific application or module and then be orchestrated from a parent process or object layer.
Adhering to Blue Prism’s best practices is highly recommended to ensure processes run smoothly and efficiently 🙂

[robert.nicklin · Accepted solution]

Hello @toijari,

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts about Blue Prism Enterprise and its evolution over the last eight years. I think that I understand all the points you've raised, including the limitations you've faced, and I appreciate the feedback.

I'd like to provide some background on the developments that have taken place over the period in question before we dive into the specifics of your feedback. A lot has happened over the past 8 years, so I'll highlight just a few key points over this period:

• 16 versions of Blue Prism Enterprise have been released - this consisted of 2 major versions (v6.0 and v7.0) and 14 minor releases. These releases have introduced significant improvements to the platform through the iterative release of new features and functionality including but not limited to:
  • Introduction (and iterative improvement of) Chrome/Edge automation capabilities, including supporting the migration to Manifest v3
  • Support for REST API integration
  • Improved product architecture to reduce communications between components to improve performance and reliability
  • A public API
  • Citrix automation capabilities
  • A computer-vision powered spy mode
  • An enhanced application modeller interface
    
• In 2019, we acquired and integrated our partner Thoughtonomy resulting in:
  • The introduction of Blue Prism Cloud as an offering available to customers providing fully hosted and managed cloud platforms for automation development and execution
  • The incorporation Blue Prism Hub into our product portfolio and its subsequent release to our on-premise customers, extending our core RPA product with the addition of Automation Lifecycle Management (ALM) and human-in-the-loop capabilities via Interact
    
    
• Since its initial release to on-premise customers in 2019, we've released 7 new versions of Hub (6 minor, 1 major) and introduced 3 new plugins in the form of Authentication Server, Hub Control Room and Decision.
  
  
• 3 new products have been developed and introduced to the portfolio in the form of Capture, Decipher and Desktop.
  
  
• We've introduced a new, cloud-native platform that will evolve our technology stack and provide new services to both existing and new customers. This new platform will continue to offer integration with our existing products, allowing customers to access new features and capabilities while still leveraging their existing investments.

With all those releases in mind, we can start to talk to some of the specifics of your feedback:

• The platform does not scale: managing 300 processes causes continuous performance issues.
  I disagree with the general statement that Blue Prism Enterprise doesn't scale as we have many customers that have scaled our products to operate with hundreds of processes and runtime resources - as @Denis__Dennehy mentions it may be worth reaching out to other customers in your region (either in person or here, via the community) to see if there's anything that can be gained from observing how others are approaching the same level of scaled operation. I will acknowledge however that the orchestration of processes as environments scale can be challenging, and we've been taking steps to address this. In previous Blue Prism Enterprise releases, we've introduced performance improvements and minor changes to the Control Room UI as well as making functions available via the API, but the largest improvement we've made by far is in the recent delivery of our new orchestration capability, "Automation Orchestrator". By leveraging this new service, we expect to bring more capabilities to customers and make it easier for them to scale up to 300 processes and beyond with more intelligent orchestration (including new trigger types) with improved resilience.
  
  
• The user interface has remained virtually unchanged since 2017.
  We've made several changes to improve our existing interfaces across the interactive client - as most of our Community users are development focused, I'll concentrate on the changes that we've made in Design Studio in responding to this point. We've introduced a lot of new capabilities to our automation capabilities (accessed through Design Studio) over this time, but if we focus on UI changes specifically the largest of these came in the form of our new application modelling interface, the Enhanced Application Modeller, and Smart Vision which were released in Blue Prism Enterprise 7.3 in December 2023. Furthermore, our latest release, Blue Prism Enterprise 7.4, has brought navigation and usability improvements to both our new and existing design interfaces, making it easier for users to work with the platform. Our Product Roadmap sees us addressing these points further with the introduction of our Next Gen Automation Studio later this quarter, which will provide the first version of our new, browser-based automation development interface.
  
  
• Chrome and Edge browser automation: the transition from Internet Explorer to Chrome/Edge was extremely problematic due to weak support for these browsers. Even today, this area has not improved significantly.
  I acknowledge that the transition from Internet Explorer to Chrome and Edge browser automation was challenging, particularly early in the version 6 series. However, we've consistently improved these capabilities with each subsequent release and provided tools such as the IE conversion tool via the DX to assist with the transition between browsers. Between version 6 and 7, we overhauled our browser automation approach to address common customer pain points, resulting in a much-improved experience with browser automation in later releases.
  
  
• In Windows 11 environments, Entra ID authentication for robot users is not supported. This shortcoming may ultimately be what forces us away from the Blue Prism IT's requirement.
  Regarding Entra ID authentication, we understand the importance of supporting this feature, especially as customers move away from traditional Active Directory (AD) infrastructure. While integration with Entra ID for user authentication has been available for some time via Hub's Authentication Server (via SAML integration capabilities), the requirement for "full" integration with this tool extending out to runtime resources has been a relatively recent development as Enterprise organizations start to mature/iterate their IT infrastructure across the entire business and look to move away from leveraging AD as they have in the past. We're actively considering full Entra ID integration for future roadmap releases to meet the evolving requirements of our customers.
  
  
• Testing tools are nearly nonexistent, making regression testing and validation unnecessarily manual.
  Whilst the tools we offer for testing automations as they are built are comprehensive, we recognize that the effort required to upgrade Blue Prism (namely regression testing between versions) is a big challenge for our customers due to the lack of features to assist with ongoing validation/testing of automations. We plan to introduce new capabilities to assist customers in future upgrade soon and will continue to engage with customers on how we can look to reduce testing effort version by version in future across both our Blue Prism Enterprise and Next Gen products.
  
  
• Despite being a core part of the platform, development, debugging, testing, Application Modeller, and version control functionalities have seen little to no meaningful improvement in the past eight years.
  I'm pleased to highlight that our recent release of Blue Prism Enterprise 7.4 has significantly enhanced development, debugging, and testing capabilities within our product. At the same time, our Next Gen platform has introduced more native version control to our products which we'll be looking to develop further in time. We have further updates and improvements planned for later versions of both Blue Prism Enterprise and our Next Gen platform, which will continue to address customer needs and provide a more robust and scalable solution.

I hope this information provides more insight into our ongoing efforts to improve and evolve the Blue Prism Enterprise platform, but if you have further questions or feedback, we're always happy to connect with users and hear their thoughts directly.

We value your feedback and appreciate your continued investment in our products.

Regards,

Rob

[vrushalird]

Hello @faheemsd - thanks for your inputs.

We were earlier trying to create parent-child relationship to resolve this issue. However, that didn't reduce the number of pages much. Parent process became lightweight, but still the child process was having a lot of pages. We also thought of splitting the child process into multi-part processes, but that seem to further complicate the existing process logics. We also noticed the same behavior for lot of other processes too.

We, however, went ahead with object splitting and created multiple objects having a shared application modeller. 

We haven't noticed any issues in unattended sessions due to the process size but we are concerned if it may cause any issues in future.

Please let me know if there is anything else can do to resolve it. I had raised this issue earlier here -> Re: Blue Prism 7.4 Performance Issue – Slow Openin... - SS&C Blue Prism Community

[faheemsd]

Dear @vrushalird 

Thank you for sharing your workaround.

We haven't experienced any issues in unattended sessions due to process size so far, but we are concerned it might cause problems in the future: No need to worry — I have similar processes with a large number of pages that have been running smoothly in unattended mode 24/7 for a long time without any issues
Note: Make sure that logging is set to capture Error only for complex processes(for all processes as a best practice) in process and object studios.

[toijari]

🧭 Blue Prism Enterprise – A Product That Has Not Grown With Its Users

Thank you for the earlier comments and valuable perspectives. It’s been helpful to hear different experiences with Blue Prism.

However, I’d like to gently steer the conversation back to the intent of my original post. This is not about solving isolated technical issues, but about raising a broader concern: why Blue Prism has not evolved to meet the needs of demanding enterprise environments.

This discussion is not a request for help with specific technical problems. Those are part of our ongoing work with our vendor and are unlikely to be resolved permanently through community advice. Instead, I want to focus on the bigger picture: the direction of the product’s development and how it impacts user organizations.

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❗ A Low-Code Product Should Not Be Heavier Than Traditional IT

Blue Prism’s core value proposition—offering a faster, lighter alternative to traditional integration and manual work—has, in our case, played out quite the opposite:

• Lifecycle management is heavy and largely manual.
• Maintaining solutions requires deep technical expertise across multiple domains (RPA, databases, infrastructure, UI).
• Building stable solutions demands meticulous control over logging, data volumes, session handling, etc.—none of which are safeguarded by the product itself.

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🔍 From a Developer and Admin Perspective: Same Product, New Versions – Same Problems

• Control Room: Slow and prone to crashing. Scheduler Reports view slows down monthly unless history is manually purged from the database.
• Scheduler: Schedules often fail to start, even when the CLI returns a success message.
• Schedule Management: Only one user can edit at a time, and even then, saving often fails.
• Version Upgrades: Every upgrade introduces new issues. We’re constantly building new workarounds.
• Logging: Logs eventually stop opening unless aggressively cleaned via direct database updates. Built-in log cleanup has never worked reliably. Logging load itself can interfere with automation.
• UI: Functionally unchanged for years. No progress toward better usability or transparency.

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⚙️ From an Architecture and Performance Perspective

• Scalability: Starting 52 machines simultaneously takes over an hour.
• Performance degradation: Despite starting with a clean database during our 2024 Azure migration, performance continues to decline month by month.
• Custom orchestration and monitoring: We had to build our own because Blue Prism never provided a working solution. This is not an enhancement—it’s a patch.

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💸 From a Business Perspective – ROI Is Often Questionable

RPA has a narrow use case in a large enterprise where traditional IT automation is already mature. When the cost of maintaining Blue Prism solutions exceeds the cost of manual work—and when upgrades consume excessive time—many processes simply don’t get automated. That’s not what a low-code platform should lead to.

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⚠️ Product Development Cannot Be Outsourced to the Community

Digital Exchange is a good addition, but it doesn’t solve the core product’s shortcomings. For large enterprises, every community asset must be audited individually, creating a heavy validation process. That’s not a scalable model.

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📌 Background on Our Environment

• Industry: European financial and insurance group with multiple companies and strict regulatory requirements
• Blue Prism usage: Since 2016 (versions 5.0.11 → 7.1.2)
• Azure migration in 2024: Fully manual transition; database was corrupted and full of bugs
• Vendor: Digital Work Force (RAAS/PAAS hybrid model)
• Application and database servers: Hosted in the vendor’s Azure tenant
• Runtime resources: In our own Azure tenant, connected via VPN
• Orchestration and monitoring: Custom-built in 2018. It reads from an external database, triggers schedules, detects failures, and restarts processes via CLI
• Multiple RPA Windows users: Due to system constraints, we use separate Windows users per business process. Some processes require multiple users for parallel execution. This increases load, and Blue Prism does not scale to handle it. We mitigate this with database cleanups and resetting schedule trigger counters.

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🔄 Let’s Refocus on the Core Question

Why hasn’t Blue Prism evolved in a way that reduces the workload for developers, administrators, and business users—instead of increasing it? Blue prism automations could be much more profitable with small improvements.

We’re happy to continue the conversation. With nearly a decade of experience, we believe our insights could help shape the future of the platform.

Riku T
Lead Specialist | Views are my own