UiPath - Designed for heavyweight Enterprise. We're really not competing for the same market, but their tech is a similar approach. They go for fortunate 500, we go for everyone else.
Zapier - Axiom competes with zapier in some ways. We're different because we automate the Ui, not just APIs, and we integrate with Zapier.
Automatio.co - They seem to emphasise cloud running, and their tool looks a bit more complicated. Most of our bots are actually used locally, where the user processes their own data. We support running in the cloud too. It looks like they're charging for distribution, where we're freemium.
Phantombuster - They focus on templates, rather than 'build your own bot'. Also, nearly all social automations like LinkedIn.
There will be more.
Ultimately, I think browser automation will be similar to API automation, where Zapier, Tray.io et al, all compete with different approaches for different segments of the market.
It's a different approach, coupled to automating the desktop office ecosystem, whereas we're coupled to web-apps, and web APIs alone.
Secondly, it is more complicated, a bit more like Leapwork, whereas we're targeting Zapier-level complexity.
Axiom is already too complex for many people (it's why we mainly target these no-code Zapier types). We've seen every marginal % increase in complexity reduces the number of people who can build bots significantly.
Essentially, each RPA product has chosen a power vs ease-of-use trade-off for different segments. We're fixated on the Zapier / Airtable people, not the traditional desktop RPA people, whom I think Microsoft are targetting.
I think this might be more catered towards enterprises. But from what I remember they had tools for everything, and making a bot for a website would only take a few minutes from start to finish.
Many people forget that RPA is over 20 years old. UiPath basically took very old technology, modernised it, and re-applied it to new markets to become a $35 billion company (as of 2021).
The OG Browser RPA solution is iMacros, incidentally, which is now 20 years old! We aim to also modernise what they tried to do and take it to new markets. I guess time will tell whether we succeed at that re-application, like UiPath did on the desktop.
- simplescraper.io
- browserless.io
- include.ai
- apify
- browseai
In a way I suppose the high number of players in the market is validation.
-Simplescraper as the name suggests is very scraping focused, not process automation focused.
-Browserless is more like 'heroku for browser bots' (i.e. a cloud runtime).
-include.ai (having pivoted) are a tool for internal browser extensions.
-browseai focus on the monitoring use-case.
-apify are very cloud runtime focused (they price on the memory of their servers and are much higher than us - getting back into traditional RPA territory).
...speaking of which, I haven't even started on traditional, developer-centric RPA yet. For that there's obviously automation anywhere, blue prism, leapwork, electroneek...