Sikuli: The Best Free RPA Tool In the Industry

What is RPA? It stands for robotics process automation and most companies are expanding their fintech identity by having employees automate their processes using these tools. Most companies nowadays are spending large amounts of money to purchase RPA tools such as Automation Anywhere and UiPath. What they do not realize is that a lot of these RPA features such as screen and background automation can be accessed for free using Sikuli. Sikuli takes what’s best from OpenCV and python modules to create a GUI that can outperform most RPA software that exist today. The best part about Sikuli is the fact that it is open source allowing a company to analyze the code to make sure there are no security risks. No existing RPA tool today would allow companies to have a look through their source code.

In my personal experience, the Sikuli software is able to be taught to employees pretty easily as its GUI has multiple functions that are utilized by typing either click() or type(). The top features that Sikuli offers is the ability to import python modules and use them with the built in OpenCV functions. You can combine OCR functionality, which allows you to read and grab text that cannot be copied, with filling out forms on the web. Through our various courses, we walk through multiple use cases such as invoice downloading, web data scraping, and other projects that can be automated without the need to spend thousands of dollars.

Sikuli has recently been converted into a self run applet meaning that it does not have to be installed to run. It can run off your AppData folder and is able to be integrated with Java coding if you have experience.

Below is a quick Sikuli tutorial we made to show the basic functionality of this program:

Digital Finance Learning offers a multitude of Sikuli guides and video training courses to teach you the basics and advanced utilities so check it out here.