Top RPA Tools For Python Developers in 2024

Interest in RPA is booming. According to Gartner, RPA is the fastest-growing segment of the global enterprise software market and all industry analysts expect it to keep on growing. This growth has led to increasing interest in programming languages, such as .NET, which enable users to develop RPA bots. However, there are emerging RPA platforms based on Python. This means Python developers no longer need to use .Net to develop RPA solutions to benefit from this fast growing market.

In this article we explore the top Python platforms that developers can use to benefit from the growing RPA market.

List of Python-based RPA platforms

Initial RPA platforms were built on the .NET framework taking advantage of its close integration with the Windows OS. However, given Python’s growing popularity, it is no surprise that new RPA platforms are being built on top of Python:

Note: The vendor at the top is sponsored.

In addition to these vendors, UiPath, one of the major players in the RPA ecosystem, enables users to leverage Python to run specific scripts. However, UiPath’s RPA default programming language is .NET with some support for C#.

This list is specific to Python based RPA platforms. To see the full list of RPA vendors, feel free to visit our up-to-date list of RPA software vendors on our website.

Python developers can benefit from the growing RPA market in 3 ways

1. Build reusable plugins for marketplaces

Python developers can build reusable plugins for these RPA platforms to benefit from the growing RPA market both in terms of reputation and also financial rewards.

While RPA platforms provide the basic functionality to build bots, this basic functionality is limited. In most platforms, there are 300-400 functions which help end users manipulate UI and data. Beyond this, users need to rely on marketplaces where they can get access to thousands of different functions

Based on our analysis of existing RPA marketplaces and RPA case studies, these are the leading areas where Python libraries can be used to build widely used RPA plugins:

• Document processing is an important part of most repetitive business processes and invoice automation was the most common RPA example we encountered while researching RPA case studies. Therefore, plugins in RPA marketplaces for OCR and more advanced technologies for document data extraction can be beneficial for RPA users. Developers can build and monetize these plugins themselves or join vendors who are active in this area.
• Once data is extracted from documents, NLP and NLU tools are needed to analyze the text. Python probably has the largest set of NLP libraries including spaCy, Gensim and NLTK, all with >5k stars on github.
• Integrating machine learning to RPA bots is a growing area of interest as pattern recognition can enable bots to make decisions and take on more complex tasks. TensorFlow and PyTorch are some of the leading libraries in deep/machine learning
• Additional areas include image processing where OpenCV and Numpy are leading libraries and web scraping where Scrapy and Selenium are leading libraries.

This was a summary of RPA marketplaces from a Python developers’ perspective. Read our articles on reusable RPA plugins and RPA marketplaces to learn more about how they work.

2. Join development teams of proprietary Python RPA products

Joining the development teams of Python RPA products can allow you to develop your career in RPA via Python. However, given the few proprietary platforms, this is an opportunity for a relatively small number of developers. Most of the Python-based RPA platforms that we identified above are growing their teams, so it could be interesting to join them.

3. Contribute to open source RPA projects

We identified a few open source RPA projects. Contributing to them can allow developers to improve their reputation in open source and RPA.

We summarized the ways Python developers can contribute to the development of RPA and benefit from its fast growth. Feel free to comment if you see other ways for Python developers to develop RPA solutions.

For more on RPA

To learn more on RPA, feel free to read our comprehensive research on the topic:

• Ultimate Guide to Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
• 100+ RPA Usecases/ Applications/ Examples
• 45 RPA Case Studies: Explore RPA in your Industry & Function

To explore RPA in detail, download our in-depth whitepaper on the topic:

And if you want to leverage an off-the-shelf RPA solution to transform your business, check out our data-driven lists of RPA vendors and different automation solutions providers.

And reach out to us to guide you choose the right tool: