RPA vs. API in 2024: What Are Their Differences?

The abundance of automation technologies in the market today is, perhaps, one of the main catalysts encouraging 89% of companies to adopt a digital-first strategy.

But with so many tools to choose from, users might have difficulty choosing the correct tool for their business, or not know how to use multiple tools in tandem.

RPA and API are two of the popular technologies that businesses are leaning towards:

• 71% of the survey’s respondents expected to be using APIs more (Figure 1).
• 64% of businesses have already started on their RPA journey.

However, late adopters should not hop on the RPA-API hype train without knowing the destination.

In this article, we will explain the differences between RPA and API, and how they can be used together, so you can make an informed decision when it comes to investing in them.

What is RPA? 

RPA, or robotic process automation, are software bots that can replicate simple human actions, such as clicking and inputting data from one window onto the other, on a faster and higher scale. 

RPA bots can mainly be programmed to mimic humans in three ways:

• Screen recording – the user records how they carry out a task for the bot “to learn” it
• Coding – a developer writes lines of code for the bot to read and follow
• Drag & drop – citizen developers drag & drop pre-developed functionalities onto a script with minimal code-writings  

Learn more about the different types of RPA that can be programmed.

What are the use cases of RPA?

RPA’s use cases can be in back-office and front-office. Their efficiency makes them a good automation tool for copy-pasting data, answering customer queries, or sending mass emails on a predetermined intervals. 

Moreover, if users can augment their RPA with IA – that is, if they can add additional technologies to their bots, such as OCR, NLP, and ML algorithms – its cognitive functionality increases.

For instance, by combining OCR and RPA, the software can automatically digitize all of a company’s invoices by reading, understanding, and extracting data from unstructured formats and compiling them on the accounting software.

Sponsored:

For instance, Sicoob, a Brazilian financial cooperative, automated 13 business functions using IBM Robotic Process Automation, including:

• Insurance quotes
• Payroll loans
• Credit limit analysis

This resulted in 80% time savings and 10-20% cost savings.

What is API? 

API, or application programming interface, is a tool that allows data exchange between applications. 

Whenever you are on a website, it’s an API that allows you to have access to the things you want.

For instance, websites that track products’ prices on online retail stores to show you their patterns leverage API to do so.

What are some use cases of API?

1. Online travel

Online travel agencies are one of the most common use cases of API.

On Google, for instance, the traveler enters all the necessary data, such as their:

• Departure city,
• Destination city,
• Preferred departure and arrival date,
• Preferred seat class, and other variables.

Google, then, uses API to “tell” all the websites’ databases what you are looking for, gets the information from them, and provides them to you on a single, scrollable webpage.

2. Ride-sharing apps

Another use case of API is ride-sharing apps.

Uber, for instance, leverages satellite images and map services from Google Maps’ database. It’s the API that allows the exchange of useful information, such as the route traffic, navigation, alternate routing suggestions, etc., between Google Maps and Uber. 

In this scenario, Uber “orders” the API to get the traffic density along the route from Google Maps.

3. Administrative tasks

However, API’s use cases are not limited to B2C interactions alone.

Companies can use API to their finance processes, for instance, via the exchange of information from different finance applications (payables, receivables, invoices, taxes) on a singular platform.

Or in healthcare, the medical centers can leverage API to consensually get their patients’ vital signs from their smart wearables onto a singular database, accessible by the physician for real-time monitoring. 

To learn more about the use cases of API, click here. 

How are RPA and API different? 

RPA and API are different in that they have been designed for different purposes.

But if used in tandem – we will go over this point next – they can create an efficiently-automated workflow. 

RPA is designed to automate the undertaking of manual tasks to help companies save their staff from doing them. 

API is designed to allow the exchange of information between applications to make online interactions as a whole more streamlined. Thanks to API, you do not have to create a new account to sign up for different websites but can rather log in via your Google or Facebook credentials. 

How can RPA and API work together?

And that is a good segue into how API and RPA can work together. In our signing up for a website scenario, API allows the host website to get the user’s information from Google, for instance. And it’s RPA that, upon a new window popping up, has already filled your Google’s email address and password in the blanks so you wouldn’t have to do it yourself. 

The benefit of this to you, as an average user, is that to sign up for a new website all you had to do was choose whether you wanted to create your account via Google or Facebook. All the connecting of the website with the application and extracting and pasting data was done by API and RPA bots. 

Or in the workplace, RPA tells the API to check inventory level by exchanging inventory level information between the warehouse automation software and the supply chain management solution.

RPA, noticing that the inventory levels for a certain intermediary good are low, can then automatically create a purchase order and send it to the vendor, thus freeing your staff from doing so, and ensuring that production would not be halted because of a lack of intermediary goods.

Sponsored:

Argos Labs’ Python-based RPA software specializes in API integration. This means the solution can integrate with AI, ML, Data Science, and other SaaS solutions for data exchange and streamlined automation.

How to implement RPA in a business? 

We have an entire article dedicated to RPA implementation, so we won’t be going into details. But the main steps are:

1. Knowing how your processes work and which processes to automate with RPA
2. Choosing an RPA partner, and asking them to develop a solution specifically for you if needed
3. Augmenting your RPA bot with IA technologies
4. Testing your RPA bot
5. Running a pilot and taking it live
6. Maintaining your automated workflow.

How to implement API in a business?

Creating an API model generally lies upon 5 steps: 

1. Planning: This is where you start thinking about what you’d want your API to do. For instance, do you want an API that allows your online customers to make payments securely? Or do you want an API that exchanges supply chain data?
2. Developing: Your API developing team, via programming languages, can start to create an API model to exchange information between different applications. There are API design tools in the market for this specific purpose.
3. Testing: The development team should test the API model for bugs and glitches.
4. Deploying: This is where you take your API model live. This is also when you should keep asking for customers’ feedback. 
5. Maintaining: You should keep monitoring, maintaining, and updating the API for further improvements. 

Learn more about API implementation.   

For more on business process automation

To learn more about the different tools that work in the background to automate business processes, read:

• RPA vs BPM: What They Are, Differences, & Implementation
• In-Depth Guide Into IT Process Automation (ITPA)
• How to Use IoT & Process Mining Together?

And if you believe you would benefit from any of the following two technologies, click on the links below to view their data-driven lists of vendors.

• RPA solution
• API solution

Please reach out to us, and we will help you choose the best solution that’s tailored to your specific needs: