Our latest evaluation compares Fortra's JAMS and Tidal by Redwood, two prominent Workload Automation Solutions, drawing insights from user reviews on PeerSpot.
Tidal offers robust workload management, scalable, event-driven scheduling, and graphical views regarding valuable features. Its integration capabilities with systems like ServiceNow and JD Edwards are particularly notable. JAMS is recognized for its effective tracking and visualization of job dependencies, user interface, and PowerShell capabilities.
However, both products have areas for improvement. Tidal could benefit from a more intuitive GUI, simplified licensing, AI and enhanced reporting capabilities. JAMS needs more precise documentation, especially for custom execution methods and better integration transparency. A global search feature and a fully web-based client are also suggested enhancements.
Looking at pricing and ROI, Tidal is praised for its predictable costs and value for functionality despite the complexity of licensing and adapters. JAMS is seen as reasonably priced with scalable licensing options, offering significant time and cost savings.
Ease of deployment is a highlight for both; Tidal is commended for its straightforward setup, involving minimal maintenance and a learning curve of just one to two hours, resulting in a three-week deployment timeframe. Similarly, JAMS is appreciated for its easy installation and configuration. Users could easily follow webpage instructions, with setup completed within hours and a native installation of SQL Express being a convenient feature.
Tidal users shared that customer service is responsive and knowledgeable. JAMS receives accolades for its quick, effective support and various communication channels.
In summary, both Tidal and JAMS are robust workload automation solutions with distinct strengths and minor areas for improvement. Their ease of deployment, feature sets, pricing, ROI, and customer service are well-regarded, making them competitive choices in their domain.
"The ability to sequence jobs is excellent; it means we don't have to schedule them individually, and if one fails, it doesn't unwind the entire workflow."
"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 code-driven automation for more complex scheduling requirements frees up time because it's really easy to use... It's almost like a stand-alone software that we can't live without."
"While I appreciate the other features, the agent stands out for its ease of installation and configuration for JAMS monitoring."
"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."
"I find the historical tracking feature of JAMS invaluable for reviewing past events."
"The product is easy to use."
"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."
"Tidal helps administrators and users to see the information that is relevant to them in that single pane of glass. They can see jobs running, they can see job history, and they can see job progression. If you look at alternatives like Airflow and clouds, you'd have to design your own UI to monitor the progress of the different jobs that you've created in Airflow. So Tidal is huge for us."
"It saves times due to automation. With some files, we do hundreds a day for a particular vendor. This would be hard to do manually. Also, the speed at which we can do this is excellent."
"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."
"Tidal Workload Automation Software provides the ability to quickly adapt to changing business requirements."
"We have to run about 12,000 jobs every day and the majority of them need to be launched from our ERP, JD Edwards. The native compatibility of the Tidal platform with JD Edwards dovetails with our greatest need. It's directly connected to the heart of our IT system. We couldn't work without it."
"The first, big thing that we got out of using Tidal Workload Automation was having a centralized view of the status of all of our batch processes across all these systems... We can look into the schedule at any given time and see if things are running on track or if they are falling behind. We can also see if something failed."
"Tidal Automation is very efficient and can quickly automate most manual and repetitive tasks."
"The versatility of being able to run on many different types of servers is valuable. There is also a versatility of different services that you could run jobs on. It's highly versatile. You can run a lot of different types of scripts on a lot of different types of servers. It interfaces with all of them."
"I would like to see the ability to interface with Microsoft group-managed service accounts, but they're still in the research phase. They need to ensure everything's legit and safe. The report designer and dashboards could also be improved. We're running 7.3, so I don't know if they have updated the reporting in 7.5, but I think the reports and dashboards could be better."
"When looking at a folder in JAMS with many jobs, it would be good to have better information in the list display of what's inside those jobs. We get some information, but other important details are missing."
"I'm not sure if they have fixed it in a newer version, but there is no global search in the version I have. If I have multiple sub-folders that are named for business units, like HR or IT, and I have to search for a job, I cannot search from the top. I have to go to the HR folder to search for a particular job, or to the IT folder."
"With no programming experience, I find JAMS code-driven automation challenging due to the required PowerShell scripting."
"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."
"Sometimes the UI is not the most responsive I've ever used. But because it does its job, I don't complain."
"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."
"The only thing that they could improve on is the fact that they don't have a browser version of JAMS. They've got all the bits and pieces there if you want to build your own web version of it. It does come with a web client, but it's pretty clunky. They could improve on that."
"The solution needs more advanced reporting and data visualization capabilities to enable deeper analysis of job performance and trends."
"Tidal's adaptability and user-friendliness could be increased by integrating it with additional programmes and platforms."
"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."
"Initially, it is complicated to understand the functionalities as there is limited product documentation."
"Understanding and using Tidal Automation could be overwhelming for someone with minimal programming language."
"When we patch to the next version, there is often a little thing that breaks. It has rarely been a big deal, but I always seem to have to follow up on one tiny issue. It would help if they had some better QA testing of their patches."
"Setting up the initial product was a little hard."
"The job failure alerts can be updated with more details for better troubleshooting."
Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 27 reviews while Tidal by Redwood is ranked 2nd in Workload Automation with 37 reviews. Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0, while Tidal by Redwood is rated 9.0. 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 Tidal by Redwood writes "Great visibility with a single pane of glass and a low learning curve". Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs and VisualCron, whereas Tidal by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs and OpCon. See our Fortra's JAMS vs. Tidal by Redwood report.
See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.
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