We performed a comparison between Fortra's JAMS and Stonebranch Universal Automation Center 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 notable for its effective tracking and visualization of job dependencies, along with its capability to establish warnings and notifications. It is also adept at managing intricate scheduling needs and offering comprehensive logging. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center demonstrates exceptional performance, provides graphical representation, and offers intuitive features.
Fortra's JAMS has areas for improvement in its user interface, search function, exception management, and reporting features. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center would benefit from cloud integration, improved analytics, and the addition of a mobile application for task monitoring.
Service and Support: Fortra's JAMS product has been highly praised by customers for its exceptional customer service, highlighting the support team's responsiveness, knowledgeability, and helpfulness in promptly resolving inquiries. Customers also appreciate the availability of comprehensive documentation and training resources. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center also receives positive feedback for its customer service. Users describe it as very good and excellent, emphasizing the support team's extensive knowledge and constant availability to assist.
Ease of Deployment: Fortra's JAMS received positive feedback for its initial setup, being described as straightforward and easy. Users found it simple to follow the instructions on the webpage and were able to deploy tasks quickly. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center's setup was considered average in terms of ease. Some users faced difficulties due to the complexity of the infrastructure.
Pricing: Fortra's JAMS offers an initial license cost in the first year, along with an annual maintenance cost. Users find this pricing to be fair and reasonable when compared to other options. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is considered more cost-effective than its competitors, receiving positive feedback regarding its pricing.
ROI: Fortra's JAMS has been praised for its value and cost-effectiveness, as it not only saves time and increases productivity but also offers visibility into job failures. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center has achieved substantial cost savings when compared to previous tools.
Comparison Results: Fortra's JAMS is the preferred product over Stonebranch Universal Automation Center. JAMS is praised for its straightforward and easy setup process, ability to handle dependencies between jobs, automation capabilities, support and interactive agents, code-driven automation feature, flexibility in scheduling, and extensive troubleshooting logging.
"The feature or capability to import a job is most valuable. We can import an existing job from different platforms, and all the configurations get migrated as well without modifying the code, job schedule, etc."
"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."
"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."
"One of the things I like the most, as a SQL DBA, is the fact that we can manipulate tables in the background. Also, the fact that you can have your own views and work with the product the way it fits best is a very helpful feature."
"While I appreciate the other features, the agent stands out for its ease of installation and configuration for JAMS monitoring."
"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."
"The planning capabilities are most valuable."
"I find the historical tracking feature of JAMS invaluable for reviewing past events."
"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."
"The Universal Agent is the most valuable feature. Being agent-based and being able to go across multiple technology stacks, which is what our workflows do, Stonebranch gives us the ability to bridge those disparate technologies. It enables us to remove the dependency-gap with the agent so we know the status of the workflow at each step."
"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."
"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"
"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."
"The support is good from Stonebranch Universal Automation Center."
"The tasks are incredibly capable, and as long as you name them with a nice, uniform naming convention, they are very useful. You can create some interesting workflows through various machines, or you can just have it kick off single tasks. All in all, I really like the Universal Task. You can do some mutually exclusive stuff, such as an "A not B" kind of thing. It has a lot of capabilities behind the scenes."
"The documentation is not super... It's not as quick and slick as I'd like it to be."
"JAMS handles exceptions fairly well but there are some areas where it might improve a little bit. It has to do with being able to automatically handle exceptions, out-of-the-box, rather than having to code them."
"We have had a lot of people working from home who can't always connect to the JAMS server. We use VPN, as most companies do, and we have it set up so that everybody can access the JAMS server. But many times, our people cannot access it... JAMS could do a better job of telling you what the problem is when you try to log in to the server."
"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."
"There could be a better simulation for banning the termination. You have to simulate every one of the processes in order to have an idea for better planning. This kind of simulation is broken and needs improvement."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It can be hard to manage the task monitor."
"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."
"I would rate Stonebranch somewhere in the middle for ease of setup. It wasn't too straightforward for us because our infrastructure is complex."
"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."
"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."
"It's not available on the cloud, so they should take that due to safety, security, and scalability."
Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 27 reviews while Stonebranch is ranked 16th in Workload Automation with 26 reviews. Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0, while Stonebranch is rated 8.8. 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 Stonebranch writes "Allowed us to develop workflows without having to train and develop very specialized skillsets". Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs, Tidal by Redwood and VisualCron, whereas Stonebranch is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and IBM Workload Automation. See our Fortra's JAMS vs. Stonebranch report.
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