Guide to RPA Marketplaces: Companies, History & Functionality

85% of RPA users report that RPA met or exceeded their expectations for non-financial benefits such as accuracy, timeliness, flexibility.

However, rolling out RPA solutions requires significant programming and customizations. Since RPA companies can not possibly build a custom solution for every process or task that will be automated, they rely on vendors to provide customized reusable solutions.

In this article we explain the advantages of reusability, explore what RPA marketplaces are, and their functionalities.

What are the advantages of reusability?

The benefits of reusable RPA bots are:

• Reduction in implementation time
• Reduction in RPA programming effort
• Process improvement: These plugins/bots are built for common, well-optimized processes.
  • Modifying your process to match these templates can simplify and increase the efficiency of your processes.
• Reduced maintenance cost: Though most bots do not offer this option, the future of bot stores will likely include maintained bots. Regulatory changes like GDPR impact all companies in similar ways and necessary changes could be rolled out to many companies automatically via bot updates. This would reduce maintenance costs and process disruptions. A single-bot codebase would be prepared by an RPA implementation company in case of a regulatory change. This code base would be used by numerous other companies that report bugs, reducing programming errors for all.

These reusable solutions are provided in marketplaces built by leading RPA companies:

Short history of RPA marketplaces

Automation Anywhere rolled out the first bot store which included ~360 bots, as of October 2021, covering business processes in major business functions such as finance & accounting, HR, IT, inventory management, manufacturing, sales, distribution, supply chain management, support, business applications by major tech vendors such as Adobe, Atlassian, CyberArk, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Twitter, Zendesk, Zoho, categories such as artificial intelligence, collaboration, insights, productivity, security and utility.

When we initially wrote this in 2017, we wrote that we expected other leading companies in the field to follow suit. By then, the UiPath team already mentioned that they were working on a marketplace on their Community forum. It is live now.

Marketplace functionality

RPA marketplace owners are still developing a lot of the typical marketplace functionality such as:

• Developer categorization: By categorizing apps developed by RPA companies themselves, those developed by certified solution providers and those developed by 3rd party developers, RPA marketplaces give users a quick but crude assessment of the developer
• Ratings: For most categories of RPA apps (e.g. OCR), there are multiple solutions to choose from and ratings help users rank solutions.
• Reviews: It’s far easier to improve products with feedback. Users leaving public comments to apps helps apps improve their functionality

Read our article on reusable RPA plugins to understand the different types of software offered in RPA marketplaces.

To benefit from this growing market you can submit your code to RPA marketplaces as a company or as a developer. Read our article on Python in RPA to learn more about how to build software for RPA marketplaces as a Python developer. The process is a bit different for .Net developers and we will cover that in the coming weeks.

For more on RPA

To learn more about RPA, read:

• Top 100+ RPA Use Cases/Projects/Examples
• 45 RPA Case Studies For Different Industries

If you still have any questions about RPA, feel free to download our in-depth whitepaper on the topic:

And if you believe your business will benefit from investing in an off-the-shelf RPA solution, feel free to check out data-driven list of RPA vendors and RPA consultants.

Get in touch with us to guide you through the process: