We performed a comparison between Fortra's Automate and OpCon based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about UiPath, Microsoft, Automation Anywhere and others in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)."The most valuable feature is the drag-and-drop interface, which is very Windows-like."
"The pricing is excellent. I would give them perfect marks in that regard."
"We have tried other RPA solutions like UiPath or Automation Anywhere. They are fantastic products but complex, and it's hard to understand everything. It would be best if you had a skilled developer or several. Automate is easy to implement, administer, and use. It's appropriate for us because our cases are simple and easy to automate. We don't need complicated tools with many features; We prefer to get a significant ROI quickly."
"Compared to other vendors, it's the scheduling tool because a lot of vendors want to charge you extra for their enterprise-level license to have a scheduling tool built in to give you the ability to set up regular schedules to run and do certain data checks."
"It gives us a central place to schedule tasks and run them distributed."
"The interface is simple, user-friendly, and very intuitive."
"The solution is continuously adding more integrations to help with workflows and bot and task creation."
"It's very easy to use. That's a big selling point for it. It has got a drag-and-drop interface, so you can quickly deploy bots."
"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."
"Often times there are criteria that cannot be determined by the system, which allows a human to make the determination and use the Self-Service Solution Manager to trigger a job."
"It allows us to have more information and more control than we previously had over the processes that are running in host systems."
"It is so simplistic that it gives us peace of mind. Before, we had all these processes that were run manually, such as different file transfers and jobs running for our core at certain times. Now, all that stuff is done automatically."
"The most valuable feature of OpCon is its scheduling capability, particularly for automating file transfers with vendors."
"It seems like it would scale well."
"The stability of this solution is awesome. It's the only product I've ever seen that you can actually build to fix itself if it has a problem. You'll build something and, if you find an issue, you can say, 'Hey, if this happens again, do this to correct it.'"
"File Watcher can run jobs when files are made available in a folder."
"I would like to see some better web automation, a wizard like the one in the product WinAutomation would be very nice."
"We really need a free development environment for customers. Building and testing automation on production isn't ideal."
"It's possible that they could use a stronger community for seeking guidance and help."
"The technical support could be better. We suffer from language barriers, as we are in Argentina."
"There is room for improvement regarding cloud functionality; there are a few missing features, and the logging could be better, especially air logging. We can go into logging events and create our own task, but it would be nice if this were more detailed."
"The workflow for variables could be better. The input and output of task-level variables could be made a little clearer in terms of passing those around from one task to another upon success, etc. Things like that could be a little easier potentially."
"While this solution is continually improving, as it is now, the user interface could use improvement when I compare it to a product like UiPath."
"The documentation is not that great."
"A way to select multiple jobs in the UI for a quick change or to hold, release, et cetera, would be nice."
"I think that they're working on this, but I wish that there was a more centralized area to be able to see what other people are doing... They have a community platform for OpCon users, but I want to see more of where somebody is doing this process in that way. They have a great community platform right now, but I feel that it could be developed."
"At first, it's a little clunky, but once you learn it, it actually is very simple. You have to get over that initial learning hump."
"The solution has quite a learning curve for beginners. It's challenging. I wouldn't rate it as super-easy to automate processes. It's medium-weight. I've used more complex software, but I've used simpler software."
"I would like more web-based training from SMA. That would be nice. Our primary OpCon representative is phenomenal, but we would like some training opportunities for learning on our own. When I started utilizing OpCon, the sheer breadth of it made for a very daunting task. I was almost fearful to start, not to mention fearful to go change things and possibly hinder a job."
"I would like to have an interface with PowerShell. PowerShell has a lot of functionality. We use it a lot because we're a Windows shop. Having a built-in tool or interface with PowerShell would go a long way."
"There are some limitations in the actual jobs that are created and how you're able to rename files. Suppose you're bringing in, say, 10, 15, or 20 reports from a core system, and you're using an "asterisk character" to identify files. For example, if you're grabbing files that start with this, end with this, but the characters in between could be different, it has to retain that same name in the destination. It won't allow you to rename them with a date stamp or the like."
"More functionality within self-service would be greatly appreciated."
Fortra's Automate is ranked 5th in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with 21 reviews while OpCon is ranked 9th in Workload Automation with 56 reviews. Fortra's Automate is rated 8.2, while OpCon is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Fortra's Automate writes "Can automate several processes with only one bot and is easy to implement, administer, and use". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OpCon writes "Gives us the ability to schedule dependent jobs across different mainframes". Fortra's Automate is most compared with Microsoft Power Automate, UiPath, MOVEit, Automation Anywhere (AA) and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, whereas OpCon is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Automic Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation and UiPath.
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