IBM Workload Automation vs Tidal by Redwood comparison

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4,909 views|3,293 comparisons
96% willing to recommend
Tidal Software by Redwood Logo
4,578 views|1,628 comparisons
97% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 12, 2023

We performed a comparison between IBM Workload Automation 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: IBM Workload Automation offers the option for clients to vote on and suggest new features, supports triggering jobs in multiple nodes, and provides a convenient way to monitor batch applications. Tidal Automation stands out with its efficient job scheduler, user-friendly interface, flexibility, and seamless integration with various systems.

IBM Workload Automation has addressed performance concerns and improved navigation, however, there are still challenges with job dependencies and daily schedule updates. The solution lacks stability, reporting visibility, and integration capabilities. Tidal Automation has a busy user interface and a complex pricing model, which may result in a steep learning curve. It needs better QA testing, enhanced job migration, and production statistics reporting. The solution does not offer AI capabilities, advanced reporting, or customization options.

Service and Support: IBM Workload Automation is praised for its technical support, particularly their lab advocacy program which provides in-depth code support. However, customers may face challenges in identifying the source of certain issues. Tidal Automation's customer service and support has a responsive and knowledgeable team. They are commended for their ability to address problems quickly and provide solutions, as well as their impressive product knowledge. However, there are occasional mentions of lower-priority items getting overlooked.

Ease of Deployment: The setup process for IBM Workload Automation can be difficult, particularly for individuals who are not familiar with IBM tools or application development. The setup for Tidal Automation is described as simple and uncomplicated, only necessitating a small number of servers and a database.

Pricing: The cost of setting up IBM Workload Automation is determined by the customer's contract and can vary based on the number of agents installed. Users consider the pricing of Tidal Automation to be reasonable and consistent, without a significant increase even with increased usage.

ROI: Based on available insights, IBM Workload Automation lacks user feedback on ROI determination. Tidal Automation garners favorable reviews highlighting cost savings, enhanced efficiency, and superior risk management.

Comparison Results: Tidal Automation is favored over IBM Workload Automation because of its simple setup process, user-friendly interface, and dependable job scheduler. Users like how Tidal Automation offers a consolidated view and allows real-time monitoring, as well as the flexibility to run jobs on various servers.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Workload Automation vs. Tidal by Redwood Report (Updated: May 2024).
772,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The DWC, when configured correctly, is a great GUI tool to provide Self-Service Scheduling capabilities to the user community.""The support from Cisco is very good. I was with them as a company for 40 years""Jobs can be triggered in multiple nodes.""The whole product is valuable because it is a tool for batch automation.""The initial setup is easy.""Jobs can be triggered in multiple nodes.""The most important feature is the creation of folders. It's a really great feature because you can organize the process with naming conventions.""Provides a robust, full spectrum enterprise-wide WLA platform."

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"It's easy to use and easy to administer, and it's very flexible.""Tidal Automation software provides real-time monitoring and alerts, allowing users to track job progress and identify potential issues before they cause delays or errors.""Thinking of all the people involved in checking jobs on a daily basis, manually running jobs or auditing them through standalone tools, and trying to connect them. We have saved hundreds of hours weekly, which is substantial.""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 Graphical Views feature is also very good for helping us to understand a job stream. It's great for providing a visual overview of the status of a workflow, especially the Critical Path view. That is one of our favorites.""The best feature of Tidal Workload Automation Software is its ease of integration with other systems, including ERP, CRM, and BI tools.""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.""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."

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Cons
"This solution does have bugs and could be improved in this regard. However, these bugs are resolved relatively quickly.""It should support other schedulers that aren't IBM products.""There should be more custom documentation, specifically around Java APIs. There should also be more training. In terms of features, we are currently using only 50% of its features. We don't use all features that are available, but there is always room for improvement in all of the tools.""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.""The configuration of IBM Workload Automation has some challenges. We have a difficult time customizing it, but it is similar to other solutions.""The schedule refreshes daily and that's a challenge for us.""The performance of the previous versions could be better.""Scalability-wise, it can be a little bit challenging."

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"Understanding and using Tidal Automation could be overwhelming for someone with minimal programming language.""From an administrative point of view, I wouldn't give really high marks to the solution. I actually entertained getting the JAWS application at one point. One of the shortcomings with the scheduler is the reporting capabilities. At least at the time, JAWS was the best that they had for a third-party integration. I think they've got things in the pipeline to help alleviate that gap.""The job failure alerts can be updated with more details for better troubleshooting.""Tidal Software interface could be more intuitive and user-friendly.""One thing I would like to see improved is that, currently, when an action is executed and finishes in Tidal, it's marked as either "success" or "failure." I would like more options that would flag a job according to multiple options, rather than just "good" or bad"... Tidal has told us that it's possible to do so through the product or with a workaround.""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.""The current user interface of Tidal Software is functional. However, it can be improved to make it more intuitive and user-friendly.""Setting up the initial product was a little hard."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "To my knowledge, IWA is the only WLA product that will provide "parallel tracking" capability to assist in upgrading from one platform to IWA."
  • "It is about one-third of the cost of a controller."
  • "The contract is with the customer with whom we are working, so IBM is not directly involved in this."
  • "We transitioned from a server license to per job license, and that saved us a lot money."
  • "Pricing depends on the number of agents that you install."
  • More IBM Workload Automation Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The new prices that we've received seem reasonable and comparable to the marketplace."
  • "We pay maintenance annually through Blue House of about $9,000. That's for our two environments: production and test."
  • "The pricing is pretty reasonable. That seems to help a lot versus other companies. There are no other fees aside from the standard licensing fees. There are other products out there where you pay based on how many jobs you run and so on, and I know that's very frustrating for users."
  • "The solution’s licensing model in terms of its flexibility and transparency regarding costs is pretty good. A person can buy the license, and if you decide to stop support, you can do that but still have the product. So, it's not like you're paying constantly to keep that license alive. Certainly, you want to keep support going too. Once you buy it, you own it. It's not like I have to keep paying somebody to keep using it."
  • "If you are willing to shop around to other vendors, you can possibly get a good price on your support license."
  • "Our annual maintenance cost is competitive for what we have and what they do."
  • "There are project, system, and server costs. Some of the things that they are doing is introducing new products. They are introducing what they call their Repository, which is a way for you to move a job. That doesn't cost anything to us, because it is reusing a tool called Transporter. The repository is the successor to Transporter, so we already own it and are sort of grandfathered in. But that new product requires a server and database, so now we have to go out and get a server and database. So, there is a cost there."
  • "...it is a pretty affordable scheduler tool that lets us do a lot. You get a lot of bang for the buck... The licensing model is hugely flexible."
  • More Tidal by Redwood Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Sometimes we have issues with the solution's stability. So, stability can be improved. Reporting and visibility of the solution need improvement. These days, we need more visibility. We need to access… more »
    Top Answer:We are using IBM Workload Automation to run batch operations. The development teams batches, and the team that makes a plan and schedules the batches to be executed, and keep track of the summary of… more »
    Top Answer:Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution.
    Top Answer:The price is reasonable in terms of the product’s functionality.
    Top Answer:Initially, it is complicated to understand the functionalities as there is limited product documentation. The setup and configuration of the software is a bit complicated. Providing the training… more »
    Ranking
    13th
    out of 51 in Workload Automation
    Views
    4,909
    Comparisons
    3,293
    Reviews
    3
    Average Words per Review
    428
    Rating
    8.0
    2nd
    out of 51 in Workload Automation
    Views
    4,578
    Comparisons
    1,628
    Reviews
    22
    Average Words per Review
    992
    Rating
    9.5
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler, IBM TWS
    Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler
    Learn More
    Tidal Software by Redwood
    Video Not Available
    Overview
    IBM Workload Automation is a complete solution for batch and real-time workload management, available for distributed mainframe or hosted in the cloud. Use it to drive business and IT workloads on hosted servers, with virtually no cost of ownership for your central server. Increase your productivity with powerful plan- and event-driven scheduling, and run and monitor your workloads wherever you are. This includes interfaces dedicated to application developers and operators, providing them both autonomy and precise governance.

    Tidal Software is a leading provider of enterprise workload automation solutions that orchestrate the execution of complex workflows across systems, applications and IT environments. With a comprehensive portfolio of products and services, Tidal optimizes mission-critical business processes, increases IT cost efficiencies and satisfies legal and regulatory compliance requirements. Hundreds of customers around the world count on Tidal for modernizing their workload automation and driving their digital transformation. Tidal Software is headquartered in Chicago with offices in Houston, London, Minsk, Belarus and Chennai, India. For more information, visit tidalsoftware.com.

    Sample Customers
    Standard Life Group, Banca Popolare di Milano, A*STAR, ArcelorMittal Gent
    Information Not Available
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm26%
    Manufacturing Company16%
    Computer Software Company11%
    University5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm33%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Insurance Company8%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Retailer17%
    Manufacturing Company17%
    Computer Software Company13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Manufacturing Company21%
    Financial Services Firm20%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Insurance Company8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business7%
    Midsize Enterprise3%
    Large Enterprise90%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business11%
    Midsize Enterprise7%
    Large Enterprise81%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business4%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise81%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise77%
    Buyer's Guide
    IBM Workload Automation vs. Tidal by Redwood
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Workload Automation vs. Tidal by Redwood and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    772,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    IBM Workload Automation is ranked 13th in Workload Automation with 28 reviews while Tidal by Redwood is ranked 2nd in Workload Automation with 37 reviews. IBM Workload Automation is rated 8.2, while Tidal by Redwood is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of IBM Workload Automation writes "With an easy setup phase in place, agent-based installation can be done in minutes". 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". IBM Workload Automation is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, HCL Workload Automation, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and BMC Compuware ThruPut Manager, whereas Tidal by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs, ActiveBatch by Redwood and Rocket Zeke. See our IBM Workload Automation vs. Tidal by Redwood 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.