We performed a comparison between Fortra's JAMS and IBM Workload Automation 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 praised for its efficient handling of job dependencies and its automation features such as File Watchers, notifications, and code-driven automation. IBM Workload Automation is highly regarded for its ability to incorporate additional features upon user request, trigger jobs in multiple nodes, and maintain stability in monitoring batch applications.
Fortra's JAMS could enhance their user interface, search functionality, exception management, and reporting features. IBM Workload Automation requires improved navigation, job dependencies, daily schedule updates, and reporting visibility.
Service and Support: Customers have expressed satisfaction with Fortra's JAMS customer service, describing it as responsive, knowledgeable, and always helpful. The support team promptly addresses concerns and provides solutions to different problems. IBM Workload Automation's support is also highly praised, especially for assisting with issues that are out of customers' control. Nonetheless, some difficulties may arise in pinpointing the cause of specific problems.
Ease of Deployment: Users find the initial setup for Fortra's JAMS to be uncomplicated and user-friendly, as they are able to easily follow instructions on the webpage and deploy tasks efficiently. The initial setup for IBM Workload Automation may pose difficulties for individuals unfamiliar with IBM tools; however, with guidance, it becomes relatively easy.
Pricing: Fortra's JAMS has an initial investment in the first year, along with a yearly upkeep fee. Users consider the pricing reasonable and budget-friendly and appreciate its flexibility to accommodate expansion. IBM Workload Automation's pricing structure is personalized to each customer's agreement, varying between five and a thousand licenses based on usage.
ROI: Fortra's JAMS has been commended for its impressive return on investment, offering time savings, enhanced productivity, and cost-effectiveness. IBM Workload Automation's ROI is more uncertain and necessitates thorough research and analysis to gain a clearer comprehension.
Comparison Results: Fortra's JAMS is the preferred choice over IBM Workload Automation. Users appreciate JAMS for its user-friendly setup process, efficient handling of job dependencies, automation features, interactive agents, code-driven automation, flexible scheduling options, and detailed logging for problem-solving.
"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."
"Our company is based on data. Everything we do is data-driven, so it has been very valuable having one place where we can process all of the data and do batch schedules with chunks of data."
"The product is easy to use."
"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."
"I find the historical tracking feature of JAMS invaluable for reviewing past events."
"Being able to create a series of chained jobs, which are basically linked jobs is valuable."
"I didn't know about JAMS because I don't have a person with any challenges with the purchase administration. The feature or the user interface is user-friendly because of the readable icons or very descriptive icons. Though I'm a beginning user of JAMS, I had no issues using it."
"We also use the solution’s Interactive Agents. If we need to push something to our dealer portal, we can just drop a file in a folder and it goes. Running interactive tasks helps me users focus on business processes since I don’t have to take care of running the jobs manually."
"Provides a robust, full spectrum enterprise-wide WLA platform."
"I have supported this product in literally 100s of different environments and its unmatched in its ability to scale to any size."
"The whole product is valuable because it is a tool for batch automation."
"Technical support from IBM is very good."
"The most important feature is the creation of folders. It's a really great feature because you can organize the process with naming conventions."
"The project we worked on involved the running of nearly 24,000 job instances in a single day, so I would say that the solution is stable."
"The DWC, when configured correctly, is a great GUI tool to provide Self-Service Scheduling capabilities to the user community."
"This solution has a request feature where users can request the added features they need to have developed. Based on client voting for those features, these are developed and released."
"The documentation is not super... It's not as quick and slick as I'd like it to be."
"The tabs in the JAMS file transfer could be clearer. It would help us demonstrate to our client that JAMS not only automates jobs but also does fast transfers, and it's an alternative that supports and filters different kinds of platforms. Filtering file transfers will be highly beneficial to them."
"The search capability needs to be improved because when we try to search for a job, it's hard to do."
"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."
"As an admin, I would like to have a web-based GUI instead of a client application that we have to install on our PCs."
"The biggest area with room for improvement is the area that my organization benefits the most from using JAMS, and that is in custom execution methods. I happen to have a very good C# developer. Ever since we got JAMS, he has spent a lot of time talking to JAMS developers, researching the JAMS libraries, and creating custom execution methods. He's gotten very good at it. He is now able to create them and maintain them very easily, but that knowledge was hard-won knowledge. It was difficult to come by, and if I should ever lose this developer, then I would be hard-pressed to find anyone who could create JAMS custom execution methods quite as well as he can since there really isn't all that much help, such as documentation or information, available on how to create custom execution methods."
"With no programming experience, I find JAMS code-driven automation challenging due to the required PowerShell scripting."
"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."
"This solution does have bugs and could be improved in this regard. However, these bugs are resolved relatively quickly."
"It would be helpful to have a mobile app that could be used to follow the job schedule."
"Slow down on the releases a bit. I fully understand that IWA functionality is increasing at an amazing rate, but trying to keep up with the upgrades is rough."
"It should support other schedulers that aren't IBM products."
"Scalability-wise, it can be a little bit challenging."
"The performance of the previous versions could be better."
"The schedule refreshes daily and that's a challenge for us."
"The configuration of IBM Workload Automation has some challenges. We have a difficult time customizing it, but it is similar to other solutions."
Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 27 reviews while IBM Workload Automation is ranked 13th in Workload Automation with 28 reviews. Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0, while IBM Workload Automation is rated 8.2. 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 IBM Workload Automation writes "With an easy setup phase in place, agent-based installation can be done in minutes". Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs, Tidal by Redwood and VisualCron, whereas IBM Workload Automation is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, HCL Workload Automation, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Tidal by Redwood. See our Fortra's JAMS vs. IBM Workload Automation report.
See our list of best Workload Automation 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.