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.
"Managing the workload and monitoring the tasks were very difficult with manual interventions. Now, by using ActiveBatch, the process is automated and it runs tasks on a scheduled basis."
"ActiveBatch has reduced work by providing automated workflows across several different applications."
"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."
"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 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."
"By implementing a sophisticated scheduling mechanism, the system allows for the precise triggering of jobs at user-selected frequencies, enabling a seamless and automated execution of tasks according to specified time intervals."
"Approximately ~20 hours of manual effort have been reduced to ~5 hours with the help of ActiveBatch."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the FTP file transfer."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I have found the scheduling feature the most valuable. I can map dependencies by using ASG-Zena. It gives a nice, quick visualization as to where things are."
"I have used other tools with similar capabilities; it's the ease of use."
"I like the whole product, but specifically, I like the license part. It's very easy to acquire a license for this product."
"The thing I've noticed the most is the Help function. It's very difficult, at times, to find examples of how to do something. The Help function will explain what the tool does, but we're not a Windows shop at the data warehouse. Our data warehouse jobs actually run on Linux servers. Finding things for Linux-based solutions is not as easy as it is for Windows-based solutions. I would like to see more examples, and more non-Windows examples as well, in the Help."
"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."
"Some of the advanced features in the user interface are a bit confusing even after referring to the documents."
"The documentation is very limited, and it can be improved."
"One thing I've noticed is that navigation can be difficult unless you are familiar with the structure that we have in place. If someone else had to look at our ActiveBatch console and find a job, they might not know where to find it."
"A cloud option is not provided as a free feature, making it a costly solution for smaller organizations."
"The help center and documentation are not that helpful."
"Any product is going to have some room for improvement, no matter what. I see the company has already ventured into AWS and they're constantly trying to improve the managed file transfer which they have recently improvised. I think they bought a software called JSCAPE and they're trying to improve it, which is good. I am not sure if JSCAPE would be part of the base product but currently, you have to buy a separate license for it, which doesn't make sense. If it was Microsoft, ServiceNow, or integrating with other software vendors, I would understand but JSCAPE is now in-house and I'm not sure if they can justify having a separate license for JSCAPE. I would probably expect them to be packaging JSCAPE into the base product. They did switch over from a perpetual license model to a subscription model, which hurt the company a little bit. Nobody is offering the perpetual model anymore. As long as the transition is fair for both the companies, I think it should be fine and not burn us out."
"The documentation has room for improvement."
"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."
"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."
"The UI is not intuitive, and it would be nice if there was a web interface."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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.
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.