We performed a comparison between ActiveBatch Workload Automation and Rocket Zena based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: ActiveBatch Workload Automation is highly regarded for its flexibility and wide range of capabilities, including prebuilt tasks, live monitoring, and automatic scheduling. Rocket Zena is commended for its user-friendly design, intuitive interface, diagram functionality, and the ability to schedule jobs across multiple platforms.
ActiveBatch Workload Automation could benefit from enhancements in managed file transfer, transition to a subscription model, cloud aspect, user interface, reliability of triggers, monitoring dashboard, price, documentation, and integration with cloud platforms and DevOps tools. Rocket Zena could improve visibility into connections between applications, monitoring of agents, process limitations, UI loading time, intuitiveness of UI, installation process, task stacking, documentation, distributed platform availability, server communication, and notification feature.
Service and Support: ActiveBatch Workload Automation has been praised for its customer service, as it offers helpful and reliable technical support. However, some customers have expressed concerns regarding the escalation process. Rocket Zena is also known for its positive customer service, with support staff who are knowledgeable and responsive. However, obtaining higher-level support may require more time.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for ActiveBatch Workload Automation was straightforward and uncomplicated, with no significant challenges encountered. However, there was a minor need for additional documentation during the file import process. Setting up Rocket Zena was more varied for users, with some finding it intricate and necessitating comprehension of various components. The integration with SAP posed a particular difficulty.
Pricing: ActiveBatch Workload Automation has a straightforward and quick setup process, with users finding the pricing to be fair and competitive. Rocket Zena is seen as a cost-effective and affordable choice, particularly suitable for smaller businesses.
ROI: ActiveBatch Workload Automation has proven to be highly effective in enhancing net revenue, resulting in noteworthy growth. Rocket Zena offers time-saving benefits and enhances accuracy in job scheduling, thereby reducing stress for engineers and administrators.
Comparison Results: ActiveBatch Workload Automation is highly preferred over Rocket Zena. Users appreciate ActiveBatch's simplicity, versatile features, scalability, and extensive automation capabilities. They find value in the prebuilt jobs, real-time monitoring, and automatic scheduling. ActiveBatch's extensive features and overall ease of use are highly valued.
"ActiveBatch has reduced work by providing automated workflows across several different applications."
"It has helped with scheduling complex jobs with simple scripts."
"The automation feature is a very valuable feature as the associates do not have to worry about performing repetitive tasks (i.e. endpoint security scans on a daily basis) that would take several hours to complete on a daily basis."
"From a scheduling point of view, it is pretty good."
"As far as centralization goes it's nice because we can see all these processes that are tied to this larger process. The commissions, FTP processing, the reporting, the file moves to the business users — all that is right there. It's very easy to read. It's easy to tie it together, visually, and see where each of these steps fits into the bigger picture."
"ActiveBatch can automate predictable, repeatable processes very well. There is no real trick to what ActiveBatch does. ActiveBatch does exactly what you would expect a scheduling piece of software to do. It does it in a timely manner and does it with very little outside interference and fanfare. It runs when it is supposed to, and I don't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to double check it."
"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."
"We leverage the solution's native integrations regularly. We have to get files from a remote server outside the organization, and even send things outside the organization. We use a lot of its file manipulation and SFTP functionality for contacting remote servers."
"I like the whole product, but specifically, I like the license part. It's very easy to acquire a license for this product."
"You can click Ctrl-G and bring a diagram view. You're able to view in a diagram format. The view that it provides is easy, and you can move to the left, up, or down. You can double-click on a certain process. It'll drill into that process and all of its underlying components. You can double-click on an arrow or a component, and it'll bring up a screen that'll have all the variables that are assigned to that particular piece, as well as the values at run time. So, the diagram feature of it, at least for me, is pretty valuable."
"We haven't had any problems since we installed it. It runs as expected, we haven't had any critical problems. It helps keeps the business running 24/7."
"In the latest upgrade, Zena added a web-based client. The more I use it, the more I like it. It's an excellent interface. They do a good job of steadily improving the solution to make it more useful."
"The most valuable feature is the FTP file transfer."
"I have used other tools with similar capabilities; it's the ease of use."
"From a Linux configuration point of view, Rocket Zena is straightforward. It's fairly easy to set up the server and agents once you know how to do it."
"Its FTP feature is very good, as is scheduling any process or task with the Zena client. I have found it to be very helpful. If a task fails, it gives you a prompt."
"I can't get the cleaning up of logs to work consistently. Right now, we are not setup correctly, and maybe it is something that I have not effectively communicated to them."
"The reporting needs improvement. There is a real need for the ability to generate audit reports on the fly. It needs to be a lot easier than what I can do right now. This is a major item for me."
"The product should be improved by providing a customization option."
"They have some crucial design flaws within the console that still need to be worked out because it is not working exactly how we hoped to see it, e.g., just some minor things where when you hit the save button, then all of a sudden all your job's library items collapse. Then, in order to continue on with your testing, you have to open those back up. I have taken that to them, and they are like, "Yep. We know about it. We know we have some enhancements that need to be taken care of. We have more developers now." They are working towards taking the minor things that annoy us, resolving them, and getting them fixed."
"ActiveBatch UI could use a little more help, and video tutorials would be greatly appreciated for user guides."
"It could be easier to provide dashboards on how many jobs are running at the same time; more monitoring."
"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."
"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."
"The scheduling mapping is a little disjointed. There is no wizard-type approach. There are a lot of different things that you have to do in completely different areas. They could probably add the functionality for creating all components of a mapping or an OPA schedule. The component creation could be done collectively rather than through individual components."
"In the next release, I would like to have an alert feature to indicate when an agent is down. Rocket Zena is not capable of sending alerts that the agent is down. As of now, you have manually monitor to see when the agent is down."
"Rocket Zena is a mainframe-based job scheduler. I would like it to be more open so that we can use it on a distributed platform."
"Another one that is probably a little bit bigger for me is that when there is an issue or there's an error, it writes on a different screen. I have to find the actual process name and go to a different screen to view the alert that got generated. On that screen, everyone's processes, not just the processes of the folks in my department, are thrown. It takes me a while to find the actual error so that I could go in there and look at the alert. It could be because of the way it was set up, but at least for me, it isn't too intuitive."
"One area where it could be improved is communication between the different servers. Sometimes there are processes that have already been completed but we get a status notification that they're still active."
"The UI is not intuitive, and it would be nice if there was a web interface."
"In the web interface, it stacks the tasks across the top, and they accumulate until you close or clean those out. That seems a little cumbersome. You must right-click and close all tabs constantly to keep the console clean and manage your views."
"In the next release, I would like the user experience to be improved. The user interface should be more appealing to gen-z."
ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked 4th in Workload Automation with 35 reviews while Rocket Zena is ranked 12th in Workload Automation with 9 reviews. ActiveBatch by Redwood is rated 9.2, while Rocket Zena 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 Rocket Zena writes "A continuously evolving, stable solution, with responsive support". ActiveBatch by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood and Redwood RunMyJobs, whereas Rocket Zena is most compared with Control-M, Rocket Zeke, IBM Workload Automation and AutoSys Workload Automation. See our ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Rocket Zena report.
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