ActiveBatch by Redwood vs VisualCron comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between ActiveBatch by Redwood and VisualCron based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Workload Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. VisualCron Report (Updated: May 2024).
771,170 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"ActiveBatch's Self-Service Portal allows our business units to run and monitor their own workloads. They can simply run and review the logs, but they can't modify them. It increases their productivity because they are able to take care of things on their own. It saves us time from having to rerun the scripts, because the business units can just go ahead and log in and and rerun it themselves.""The user interface is really incredible.""Approximately ~20 hours of manual effort have been reduced to ~5 hours with the help of ActiveBatch.""The product offers a centralized platform for managing activities across many environments, applications, etc.""Using this tool, if there are any huge failures, we immediately get an email notification, and the proper team will be informed, at which time they can act accordingly.""It has helped with scheduling complex jobs with simple scripts.""One of the most valuable features is the job templates. If we need to create an FTP job, we just drag over the FTP template and fill out the requirements using the variables that ActiveBatch uses. And that makes it reusable. We can create a job once but use it for many different clients.""ActiveBatch can automate predictable, repeatable processes very well. There is no real trick to what ActiveBatch does. ActiveBatch does exactly what you would expect a scheduling piece of software to do. It does it in a timely manner and does it with very little outside interference and fanfare. It runs when it is supposed to, and I don't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to double check it."

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"'ve only had a few cases where I've had to request support in the past 12 years of use, but the support response time and resolution were was extremely quick.""I love VisualCron because we previously spent a lot of time writing Power switches to connect to SQL Server. VisualCron makes it easier to execute services or connect to FileZilla by only adding the credentials to the master credentials stored in the solution.""It has improved our organization with more automation within the business departments and less administration and development in the IT department. Usually, as the IT department, we are the bottleneck for many requirements within the business. With this tool, the business departments are able to perform many task themselves.""What I like about VisualCron is that like its name, it's a very visual tool. In my previous company, there were a lot of scripts for all kinds of services, and through VisualCron, you get to group all flows and get a nice visual overview. VisualCron also has an alerting feature, so you receive alerts from it. VisualCron makes everything clearer and easier to maintain. Every other solution that I was looking for almost always needed a programmer, but with VisualCron, you can do what you need to do without programming skills, so this is another valuable feature of the tool.""VisualCron is a very powerful program to automate different steps in your business processes. We use it to automate replacing files and inform departments about the replacement.""The most valuable feature of VisualCron is its ability to schedule interactive jobs so that you can have interdependencies within the job and interdependencies of a job on another job, and so on.""We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works.""The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%."

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Cons
"Some of the advanced features in the user interface are a bit confusing even after referring to the documents.""They should offer pricing that is more affordable.""The user interface can be improved so that it is more appealing and accessible to new users.""Between version 10 and version 12 there was a change. In version 10, they had each object in its own folder. But on the back end, they saw it at the root level. So when we moved over to version 12, everything was in the same area mixed together. It was incredibly difficult and we actually had to create our own folders and move those objects—like schedules, jobs, user accounts—and manually put those into folders, whereas the previous version already had it.""It could be easier to provide dashboards on how many jobs are running at the same time; more monitoring.""There are some issues with this version and finding the jobs that it ran. If you're looking at 1,000 different jobs, it shows based on the execution time, not necessarily the run time. So, if there was a constraint waiting, you may be looking for it in the wrong time frame. Plus, with thousands of jobs showing up and the way it pages output jobs, sometimes you end up with multiple pages on the screen, then you have to go through to find the specific job you're looking for. On the opposite side, you can limit the daily activity screen to show only jobs that failed or jobs currently running, which will shrink that back down. However, we have operators who are looking at the whole nightly cycle to make sure everything is there and make sure nothing got blocked or was waiting. Sometimes, they have a hard time finding every item within the list.""They have some crucial design flaws within the console that still need to be worked out because it is not working exactly how we hoped to see it, e.g., just some minor things where when you hit the save button, then all of a sudden all your job's library items collapse. Then, in order to continue on with your testing, you have to open those back up. I have taken that to them, and they are like, "Yep. We know about it. We know we have some enhancements that need to be taken care of. We have more developers now." They are working towards taking the minor things that annoy us, resolving them, and getting them fixed.""There are very few documents that provide us with detailed information on the troubleshooting of errors that occur during integration with the existing environment."

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"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way.""VisualCron is software, and you will experience performance degradation when you scale up. VisualCron takes too much memory or CPU power. We have to increase the hardware resources of a specific server or system.""The documentation is a bit weak.""The only problem I face when I use the tool is that it doesn't contain much documentation or it doesn't have many video tutorials on its features.""The error timeout and info could be better. When making web request calls, it will time out sometimes and we won't get any useful info out of the error response.""I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run.""I want to improve the UI in VisualCron, as it's not as user-friendly, particularly when setting up the task scheduler. If you're familiar with the tool, then no problem, but if not, you'll have a problem typing text because sometimes, the cursor points to other places, so there's an issue with text box alignment in VisualCron. That was painful for me when I was just a VisualCron novice, but when you become used to it, there won't be a problem.""VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The price was fairly in line with other automation tools. I don't think it's exorbitantly expensive, relatively speaking."
  • "I don't think we've ever had a problem with the pricing or licensing. Even the maintenance fees are very much in line. They are not excessive. I think for the support that you get, you get a good value for your money. It's the best value on the market."
  • "It allows for lower operational overhead."
  • "Currently, we are paying approximately $7,000 yearly, which includes support."
  • "ActiveBatch is currently redesigning themselves. In the past, they were a low cost solution for automation. They had a nice tool that was very inexpensive. With their five-year plan, they will be more enhancement-driven, so they're trying to improve their software, customer service, and the way that their customers get information from them. In doing that, they're raising the price of their base system. They changed from one pricing model to another, which has caused some friction between ActiveBatch and us. We're working through that right now with them. That's one of the reasons why we're why we were evaluating other software packages."
  • "The pricing was fair. There are additional costs for the plugins. We have the standard licensing fees for different pieces, then we have the plugins which were add-ons. However, we expected that."
  • "I like ActiveBatch Workload Automation's licensing model because they're not holding you down on an agentless model or agent model, where every server needs to have an agent. That's the main selling point of the solution and I hope they stay that way."
  • "If you compare ActiveBatch licensing to Control-M, you're looking at $50,000 as opposed to millions."
  • More ActiveBatch by Redwood Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "ROI is 95 percent."
  • "We are fine with a rather cheap setup. Licensing with VisualCron is fair. You have a simple one-year licence in different sizes. There isn't a licensing jungle with hundreds of options and opt-ins."
  • "The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
  • "ROI is one month."
  • "VisualCron is correctly priced because it wasn't very cheap, and it wasn't overly expensive, so the price for it was set correctly. When my previous company bought VisualCron, it was €800 per server per year. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing for VisualCron a five because it was just right. The tool was affordable, and it has one of the most competitive pricing in the market."
  • "The price is a bit high."
  • More VisualCron Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Managing the workload and monitoring the tasks were very difficult with manual interventions. Now, by using ActiveBatch, the process is automated and it runs tasks on a scheduled basis.
    Top Answer:I'd advise users to start by knowing what the actual requirement is and thoroughly assess the automation needs. New users should take advantage of the demos and trial versions so they get an idea of… more »
    Top Answer:After upgrades we are facing a few issues and errors triggered, so focusing on this would be appreciated. Some of the advanced features in the user interface are a bit confusing even after referring… more »
    Top Answer:The most valuable feature of VisualCron is its ability to schedule interactive jobs so that you can have interdependencies within the job and interdependencies of a job on another job, and so on.
    Top Answer:The organization is paying for the VisualCron license, so I'm not aware of the current pricing for the tool.
    Top Answer:VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve.
    Ranking
    4th
    out of 51 in Workload Automation
    Views
    2,728
    Comparisons
    872
    Reviews
    23
    Average Words per Review
    658
    Rating
    9.3
    14th
    out of 51 in Workload Automation
    Views
    834
    Comparisons
    470
    Reviews
    5
    Average Words per Review
    750
    Rating
    8.0
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    ActiveBatch
    Learn More
    Overview

    Orchestrate your entire tech stack with ActiveBatch Workload Automation and Enterprise Job Scheduling. Build and centralize end-to-end workflows under a single pane of glass. Seamlessly manage systems, applications, and services across your organization. Eliminate manual workflows with ActiveBatch so you can focus on higher value activities that drive your company forward.

    Limitless Endpoints: Use native integrations and our low-code REST API adapter to connect to any server, any application, any service.

    Proactive Support Model: 24/7- US-based support and predictive diagnostics.

    Low Code Drag-and-Drop GUI: Easily build reliable, customizable, end-to-end processes.

    VisualCron combines many features into one product. Through scheduling you can set your Jobs to run on a specific time or event. The Tasks in each Job automate scripts and eliminate human errors. Through various Tasks you can integrate different systems through file transfer and conversion.

    Sample Customers
    Informatica, D&H, ACES, PrimeSource, Sub-Zero Group, SThree, Lamar Advertising, Subway, Xcel Energy, Ignite Technologies, Whataburger, Jyske Bank, Omaha Children's Hospital
    7 Eleven, ABB Sécheron SA, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Amazon Europe Core, Apple, Assa Abloy, Aston Martin, Banco Santander, BMW (Australia)
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Insurance Company21%
    Computer Software Company21%
    Printing Company8%
    Logistics Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm24%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Insurance Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm25%
    Logistics Company13%
    Pharma/Biotech Company13%
    Recruiting/Hr Firm13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Computer Software Company16%
    Healthcare Company7%
    Insurance Company7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise67%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise65%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business40%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise56%
    Buyer's Guide
    ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. VisualCron
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. VisualCron and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    771,170 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked 4th in Workload Automation with 35 reviews while VisualCron is ranked 14th in Workload Automation with 11 reviews. ActiveBatch by Redwood is rated 9.2, while VisualCron is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of ActiveBatch by Redwood writes "Flexible, easy to use, and offers good automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VisualCron writes "It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process". ActiveBatch by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood, Redwood RunMyJobs and IBM Workload Automation, whereas VisualCron is most compared with Microsoft Power Automate, Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Stonebranch and MOVEit. See our ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. VisualCron report.

    See our list of best Workload Automation vendors and best Managed File Transfer (MFT) vendors.

    We monitor all Workload Automation reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.