We performed a comparison between ActiveBatch by Redwood and Appian based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Process Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Since I started using this product, I have been able to easily track everything as it mainly monitors, alerts, and looks after all the services - even across platform scheduling - which has helped me immensely."
"Since we are no longer waiting for an operator to see that a job is finished, we have changed our daily cycle from running in eight hours down to about five. We had a third shift-operator retire and that position was never refilled."
"What ActiveBatch allows you to do is develop a more efficient process. It gave me visibility into all my jobs so I could choose which jobs to run in parallel. This is much easier than when I have to try to do it through cron for Windows XP, where you really can't do things in parallel and know what is going on."
"We use the main job-scheduling feature. It's the only thing we use in the tool. That's the reason we are using the tool: to reduce costs by replacing manual tasks with automated tasks and to perform regular, repetitive tasks in a more reliable way."
"It can connect to a number of third-party/legacy systems."
"One of the valuable features is the ability to trigger workflows, one after another, based on success, without having to worry about overlapping workflows. The ability to integrate our BI, analytics, and our data quality jobs is also valuable"
"ActiveBatch helped us automate and schedule routine tasks such as data backups, file transfers, database updates, and report generation, which frees IT staff to focus on other studies."
"From a scheduling point of view, it is pretty good."
"It's a stable product."
"The application life cycle is very clear. I started learning it and giving some workshops to my team. Creating the users and the building is very structured. Documentation is nice and it's easy to learn."
"It's heavy on business processing in terms of logic, process workflows, and primarily on the process design modeler. Appian is really great at that. In terms of the full stack set from a low-code platform perspective, it's definitely an eye opener since it can be deployed via mobile app and on the web as well."
"Rapid development with low-code makes it easier to quickly get apps implemented and the time to break-even and ROI is much faster."
"Compared to other code tools that I've seen, Appian has a more robust rules engine"
"The solution has a lot of strong features for the financial industry, it is very easy to use."
"It is really simple to create a new app, and I like the data-centric aspect of the BPM tool."
"Recently, we added Appian Process Mining, Appian Portals, and now Appian RPA."
"The UI could potentially offer a more refined and user-friendly experience, fostering smoother interactions and facilitating easier navigation for users engaging with the application."
"Between version 10 and version 12 there was a change. In version 10, they had each object in its own folder. But on the back end, they saw it at the root level. So when we moved over to version 12, everything was in the same area mixed together. It was incredibly difficult and we actually had to create our own folders and move those objects—like schedules, jobs, user accounts—and manually put those into folders, whereas the previous version already had it."
"It does have a little bit of a learning curve because it is fairly complex. You have to learn how it does things. I don't know if it's any worse than any other tool would be, just because of the nature of what it does... the learning curve is the hardest part."
"There are some issues with this version and finding the jobs that it ran. If you're looking at 1,000 different jobs, it shows based on the execution time, not necessarily the run time. So, if there was a constraint waiting, you may be looking for it in the wrong time frame. Plus, with thousands of jobs showing up and the way it pages output jobs, sometimes you end up with multiple pages on the screen, then you have to go through to find the specific job you're looking for. On the opposite side, you can limit the daily activity screen to show only jobs that failed or jobs currently running, which will shrink that back down. However, we have operators who are looking at the whole nightly cycle to make sure everything is there and make sure nothing got blocked or was waiting. Sometimes, they have a hard time finding every item within the list."
"It could be easier to provide dashboards on how many jobs are running at the same time; more monitoring."
"We have faced a couple of issues where we were supposed to log a defect with ActiveBatch. That said, the Active batch Vendor Support is very responsive and reliable."
"As more organizations are moving towards a cloud-based infrastructure, ActiveBatch could incorporate more capabilities that support popular cloud platforms, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud."
"The user interface can be improved so that it is more appealing and accessible to new users."
"Architecture of product and scalabiility issues."
"I wouldn't say their response time is long, but it could be quicker."
"A point of improvement would be the SAIL forms. The built-in tool used to generate forms does not have debugging support (to view local variables as they change on live preview, and step-by-step valuation) which is a big drawback for form development. Moreover, the script language used to build SAIL forms does not support inheritance or lambda expressions (functions as arguments of other functions), which makes the code base more verbose."
"Appian could include other applications that we could reuse for other customers, CRM for example."
"Authoring tool is slow to use resulted in limitations on how quickly solutions can be built."
"We have clients that want to use Office 365, Microsoft Analytics, and Power Apps. Appian just isn't the same as using something specifically designed to cater to the Microsoft Suite."
"Appian could improve their customer-facing initiatives."
"The solution could improve robotic process automation."
ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked 6th in Process Automation with 35 reviews while Appian is ranked 3rd in Process Automation with 57 reviews. ActiveBatch by Redwood is rated 9.2, while Appian is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of ActiveBatch by Redwood writes "Flexible, easy to use, and offers good automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Appian writes "Low resource consumption, easy setup, and stable". ActiveBatch by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood, Redwood RunMyJobs and VisualCron, whereas Appian is most compared with Microsoft Power Apps, OutSystems, Camunda, ServiceNow and Pega BPM. See our ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Appian report.
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