We performed a comparison between Fortra's JAMS and OpCon based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Fortra's JAMS is highly regarded for its effective job dependency tracking, visual representation of dependencies, warning and notification system, management of intricate scheduling needs, and comprehensive logging functionality. OpCon is praised for its adaptability, integration capabilities, self-service functionality, and automation capabilities.
Fortra's JAMS client interface lacks intuitiveness and options retrieval, while OpCon's web-based interface, Solution Manager, lacks functionality. Fortra's JAMS would benefit from a comprehensive training resource, whereas OpCon needs better documentation for upgrading.
Service and Support: Fortra's JAMS customer service receives high praise for being responsive, knowledgeable, and helpful. Customers appreciate the promptness of their responses and the availability of documentation and training resources. OpCon's customer service is also well-regarded, with customers praising the technical support team's ability to provide timely solutions and prevent disruptions. However, there have been occasional delays in issue resolution.
Ease of Deployment: Users find the initial setup for Fortra's JAMS to be simple and clear. The setup process for OpCon can be intricate and necessitates close collaboration with SMA consultants to achieve success.
Pricing: The cost of setting up Fortra's JAMS product is not specified, while OpCon is recognized as a pricey and intricate solution that demands a learning curve.
ROI: Fortra's JAMS saves time, boosts productivity, and is cost-effective. OpCon also delivers a high ROI by automating tasks, reducing the need for additional staff, and saving man-hours. OpCon also delivers a high ROI by automating tasks, reducing the need for additional staff, and saving man-hours.
Comparison Results: Fortra's JAMS receives positive user feedback compared to OpCon. Users appreciate JAMS for its simple setup, ability to handle job dependencies, automation capabilities, support and interactive agents, code-driven automation, flexible scheduling, and detailed logging for troubleshooting. JAMS is also seen as a valuable investment with a good return and earns high ratings for its responsive and knowledgeable customer service.
"The scheduling and execution of jobs are the most valuable features. The scheduling is important because if there is a task we want to execute at 4:00 AM, there's no way we will have someone who can manually run the job. In addition, we execute 100 to 200 jobs per day, and manual intervention is not an option."
"JAMS is easier to use and cheaper than our previous solution. The installation is more straightforward, and JAMS has a graphical user interface, so it's more accessible."
"We looked at other companies, like VisualCron, that were cheaper, but one of the main sticking points was the fact that they wouldn't have provided a central location for us to monitor across all servers. That was one of the biggest selling points of JAMS."
"It has definitely drastically improved our capabilities to scale our automation. Before JAMS, there were a lot of manual processes. We had a couple of operators who spent all day doing that. A lot of the time with human intervention and human processes, it is as good as the person who may be following a procedure and human error is a big problem."
"It's a full-featured job scheduling tool. The part that I liked the best was the support team. This tool was new, and we were all learning it and setting up the different jobs that were complex in nature. Their support team was very responsive in helping us out through the setup and resolving the issues. They have been incredibly awesome."
"The alerting in it is really targeted... you can set specific alerting so that if jobs in a given folder fail, certain people are alerted. You can also set security at the folder level, so that only people in those areas can go set them. That means that the alerting and security can be set at a very granular level."
"The most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."
"Fortra's JAMS helped us centralize job management across our platforms and applications. This is critical because we schedule tasks across multiple applications and operating systems, using triggers and start dates to coordinate their execution."
"The greatness of it is the flexibility of the scheduling and the integration of all platforms and processes. We have integrated it with everything from AIX to Microsoft Servers; with pretty much anything that we can."
"I have been pleased with the support that we can get from the European partners. I think they are very good. All the time, when we have a question, they have an answer. It is very reassuring to have that support every day. Then, you can concentrate on your job and OpCon is just there to work. For us, it's perfect."
"Thus far we have only had a few minor problems, all of which the vendor addressed quickly. We have not encountered any major problems. The product is very stable and reliable."
"We haven't freed up a full person's job using it, but there are a good handful of people for whom it has freed up about half of their time. And those employees love it. A lot of tasks are based on certain times, and they're no longer stuck doing those things at those times. We don't have to have anybody coming in early anymore. They can focus on the processing part of their jobs instead of the file moving and downloading."
"Previously, we would receive a file from a vendor, then we would have to go through and make changes to individual accounts in our core system. There are probably between 10 to 20 accounts any given week. It probably took around five minutes for it to run through the report and make all the changes, and that was if there was nothing complicated with all very straightforward changes. Now, that is done in 30 seconds."
"I rate OpCon support 10 out of 10. I've never had a problem with them. I've always been able to get answers quickly and always seem to find a knowledgeable person to assist with any questions."
"The solution has freed up employees to do more meaningful work as a result of automation. They don't have to sit there and wait for files to download. They don't have to stare at the screen while a process is running. It all runs in the background, doing it for them."
"The whole product is valuable to us because of the integrations that it has with the MCP and the Windows environments. You have to have the agent on each one of them that you want to monitor. The integrations that we have created are along the lines of extracting files and sending them through SFTP to another vendor. Those are the things that were taking a lot of time away from my staff."
"The ACL or access permission area needs to be improved. When it comes to defining and providing security permissions, it's a bit confusing if you are new to JAMS. JAMS needs to improve the features for security access or permissions."
"Improvements could be made in the service desk's knowledge and communication skills among engineers to better address customer needs and ensure issues are fully resolved."
"All my machines at work are Macs. JAMS client is a Windows-based thing. It is all built on .NET, which makes perfect sense. However, that means in order for me to access it, I need to connect to a VPN, then log onto one of our Azure VMs in order to access the JAMS client. This is fine, but if for some reason I am unable to do so, it would be nice to be able to have a web-based JAMS client that has all the exact same functionality in it. There are probably a whole bunch of disadvantages that you would get with that as well, but that is definitely something that would make life easier in a few cases."
"I would like a simple web interface that I could give to my team to go in and kill jobs or see why jobs died so that we don't have to drill down deeper into the application and know everything about it. It would be good to have a really clean web engine that would say here are the jobs running. We can then click to see the time running and whether any of them fails and other similar things. I know they have one, but it's not very simplistic."
"The client is horrible. Every time JAMS puts out a survey on what they can improve, I always say, "The client: When you are setting up jobs, it is quite horrible." The response has been, "Well, we are just using the Windows foundation," and I am like, "Why isn't it only your product?" We can get around it now that we know its quirks, but it is not the most user-friendly of tools out there. The UI is completely unintuitive. We had to go and open up a support ticket with JAMS just to get something back. It is not user-friendly at all."
"The UI could be better. There were some things that were not quite intuitive, such as the search tool. When we tried to search for jobs, we had to clear the entire search and then go in and enter the new search query. That's something that wasn't intuitive for a new user."
"If there were a softcover book on how to really take advantage of all of JAMS' tools, I would buy it. I do better with training books than online searching, so a book would be helpful."
"It does validations when you try to delete an object and if there are any dependencies in place, the deletion process will not proceed... there is no information provided as to what it was that caused the validation to fail... it's quite a tedious process to find which object is getting in the way."
"I would like to see OpCon being accessible using a mobile app."
"We would like a display of the created date, created by, and last modified date, as well as modified by."
"The products are extremely powerful and capable. Anytime you have such capability, the programming/configuration that goes into making it work can be complicated."
"The image-scanning features need improvement."
"The biggest area where there is room for improvement would be integration with their code. They've got a function for embedded scripts and it would be nice if that worked with a code or versioning management system, like GitLab."
"The UI refresh rate is really bad and needs improvement."
"There is room for improvement needed around setting up the calendars and frequencies. I would like more flexibility in what jobs run. Sometimes, with frequencies, I can't find what I want to without putting a little more labor into it."
"It was hard to automate in the beginning because there were a lot of concepts. I had to learn a lot of things, as I never used such a software before. I learned a lot of the concepts and ideas behind it in the beginning."
Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 27 reviews while OpCon is ranked 9th in Workload Automation with 56 reviews. Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0, while OpCon is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Fortra's JAMS writes "We can scale up our organization's scheduling and automation without having to add staff to the department". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OpCon writes "Gives us the ability to schedule dependent jobs across different mainframes". Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs, Tidal by Redwood and VisualCron, whereas OpCon is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Automic Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation and UiPath. See our Fortra's JAMS vs. OpCon report.
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