We performed a comparison between Stonebranch Universal Automation Center and Tidal Automation based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is highly regarded for its strong performance and visually appealing presentation. Users appreciate its capacity to establish connections between tasks and its efficient rerun feature. The platform boasts a user-friendly interface and a practical task monitoring tool. Tidal Automation shines with its exceptional job scheduling capabilities, enabling users to effortlessly schedule numerous tasks with interdependencies. Its unified interface provides a comprehensive view, granting flexibility to execute jobs across various servers.
Stonebranch could make the software available on the cloud to enhance safety and scalability. Additionally, the analytics feature and task monitor could be enhanced for better functionality. Users also suggest the addition of a mobile app for easier monitoring and calculation of job hours. Collaborating with the vendor for new solutions is also recommended. Tidal Automation users find the graphical user interface to be busy and tedious to navigate. They suggest simplifying the pricing model and improving the user interface, especially when it comes to drilling down into details. The process of migrating jobs and production statistics reporting could also be improved.
Service and Support: Users appreciate the technical support provided by Stonebranch, describing it as very good, excellent, and always available. Tidal Automation also receives positive feedback, with reviewers mentioning a responsive and knowledgeable support team.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for Stonebranch was considered moderately difficult due to the complexity of the infrastructure, resulting in some challenges. The initial setup for Tidal Automation was described as simple and easy, with a deployment process taking around three weeks. Users also found it relatively easy to learn how to use the system.
Pricing: Stonebranch Universal Automation Centercost-effective with favorable pricing ratings. The license requires annual payment. Tidal Automation offers fair and predictable pricing, accompanied by transparent licensing.
ROI: Stonebranch has proven to be] cost-effective. Tidal Automation offers a range of benefits including cost savings, improved efficiency, increased productivity, better risk management, and centralized job management.
Comparison Results: Stonebranch Universal Automation Center emerges as the preferred choice compared to Tidal Automation. Stonebranch stands out due to its intuitive and user-friendly interface, offering a graphical user interface (GUI) instead of relying solely on a command line.
"The support is good from Stonebranch Universal Automation Center."
"The ability to monitor tasks that are on the open-system side as well as our mainframe side gives us a one-window view of all our processes."
"We like that it has GUI and is not just a command line."
"The most valuable feature is the reliability of the agents, because we need them accessible and we need to run stuff. The agent technology and compatibility are top-notch."
"I love the Universal Controller. It's been great for us. We host it on-premise... It's High Availability, meaning there's failover from one server to the other if one goes down."
"When it comes to agent technology and compatibility with other vendors, from a platform perspective it was the one vendor that fit all the platforms that we have, from your old platforms - mainframe, NSK, IBM i - to the new ones, going into cloud and container"
"We lean a lot on the multi-tenancy that they offer within the product, the ability to get other people to self-manage their estate, versus having a central team do all the scheduling."
"I have found the agents to be so much simpler, when compared to ESP."
"We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads. The solution’s ability to manage and monitor these workloads is very easy and accurate. We have file dependencies for running jobs. The job does not start until a file exists on a completely different server, then where the job will run. So, it is cross systems."
"The best feature is that it allows task scheduling based on particular occurrences, like the receipt of files, database updates, or system notifications."
"I like the fact that I have control, and I am able to monitor. If there is an issue, I would be able to respond to any jobs that may fail. With any other scheduler that I know of, a lot of times, when I have a very complex script, if there is an issue in the middle of it, I have to let the whole process fail and then figure out a way to recover from it, whereas Tidal will stop the process, and I can resolve that issue. Once I resolve the issue, I can continue the process. This is very important for invoicing, accounts payable, accounts receivable, or any kind of financial reporting. It allows you to recover from an issue much more effectively than anything else that I have seen."
"The thing that I like the most is the reliability of the engine. The actual scheduling part of the product is pretty much flawless, but the stability of the product is what I find to be reassuring."
"One of the most useful features is being able to set up a schedule and create dependencies. The calendar can kick off processes at certain times, based on dependencies that you specify, like time, or whether another process has finished. Dependencies are the most useful thing."
"The feature that I find to be valuable, as I'm working with other folks, is the ability to cross-schedule across platforms, and the flexibility that comes with that."
"The most valuable feature is the job scheduler, where you can schedule thousands of jobs to execute at specific times."
"By leveraging machine learning algorithms, Tidal Automation can use this data to optimize turbine settings and improve overall efficiency and performance."
"There is room for improvement with its connectivity with the Microsoft SRS system. It is very weak. They keep telling us it works with it, and technically it does, but it does not provide a lot of visibility. We have lost a lot of visibility migrating to Stonebranch, compared with just running tasks on the SRS server. That's really about the only thing that is a sore point for us."
"Occasionally, we have an agent that doesn't come back up after patching. That doesn't happen very often... It's really just a restart of the agent and it comes back up. But that might be one thing that could be improved."
"The Universal Controller is decent for the money it costs... It needs some work to have full features, compared to other products that are out there, specifically IBM's Workload Scheduler."
"One hiccup we've had is due to the fact that we have other internal scheduling tools. We're able to talk to them, but we have trouble with some of the networking between them, so we're still trying to work out the kinks there."
"Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics."
"It can't handle negative written codes."
"It can be hard to manage the task monitor."
"It would be ideal if they had the exact same features as the CA Workload Automation DE series. It would be helpful to have calendaring options."
"There are several improvement points that our team has provided to the vendor."
"Their software installation and update process could use some improvements. I'm pretty sure they're working on that, but that's definitely an area where it could be streamlined a lot. There's still a lot of manual work that you have to do with the schedule when you deploy masters or do the agents."
"To better fit their unique needs, the solution should give more customization options."
"My complaint about their pricing model is that every year or every time technology changes or somebody has a new requirement, it usually means that I can schedule that with Tidal, but I would need another adapter. So, every time there is a change, I need a different adapter that I don't have. That's why it is harder to plan for Tidal growth because you have to buy a new adapter every time."
"We've had some quirky stuff happen on an occasional basis where a job does not take off. For example, a job we expected to be finished by 3:00 a.m. is sitting there and not executing when we come in in the morning. We have to go all the way back to the dependencies and then we can see that one of the dependencies has become unscheduled, for some reason. No changes were made to the schedule but this prerequisite job has, all of a sudden, become unscheduled. I have brought this up with Tidal's support but they have never had an answer for it."
"I don't know if Tidal wants to get into the business of monitoring long-running jobs, but that could be a feature for the future: a job launching and monitoring tool. Using Tidal for monitoring doesn't seem like a good fit, but if they could offer something that did that as an add-on or include it, it might be helpful."
"For the most part, the drill-down and the logging are really good. But if we take an Informatica job, for example: We have the ability, and the operators have the ability, to actually drill down and see, at a session level, where the failure is. There is, unfortunately, no way to extract that into an actual output email or failure email. It's not that that information is not available, but extracting it into an email would be a nice-to-have."
"The biggest improvement they need to work on is doing better QA checks before they release new patches and service packs. We do find that you can't trust getting the new product right away, as they have to get some bug fixes out. They do tend to have some bugs in the first iteration."
Stonebranch is ranked 16th in Workload Automation with 26 reviews while Tidal by Redwood is ranked 2nd in Workload Automation with 37 reviews. Stonebranch is rated 8.8, while Tidal by Redwood is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Stonebranch writes "Allowed us to develop workflows without having to train and develop very specialized skillsets". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tidal by Redwood writes "Great visibility with a single pane of glass and a low learning curve". Stonebranch is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and HCL Workload Automation, whereas Tidal by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation and Redwood RunMyJobs. See our Stonebranch vs. Tidal by Redwood report.
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