We performed a comparison between ActiveBatch Workload Automation and Stonebranch Universal Automation Center 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 versatility and ease of use. It offers prebuilt jobs, real-time monitoring, and automatic scheduling. Users appreciate the REST API adapters and native integrations. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is praised for its performance and graphical representation. Users find its ability to set dependencies between jobs and rerun functions beneficial. The graphical user interface and task monitor are user-friendly.
ActiveBatch Workload Automation has opportunities for improvement in various aspects such as managed file transfer, user interface, trigger reliability, monitoring dashboard, and integration with DevOps tools. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could enhance its offerings through cloud availability, advanced analytics, and a mobile app for convenient job hour monitoring and calculation.
Service and Support: ActiveBatch has received mostly positive feedback for its customer service, with users appreciating the helpful and reliable technical support. However, there are suggestions for improvement. Stonebranch has received high praise for its customer service, with users describing it as very good, excellent, and always available to provide assistance.
Ease of Deployment: The initial setup for ActiveBatch is straightforward and uncomplicated, with minimal challenges. However, there is a slight requirement for additional documentation when importing files. The setup for Stonebranch is deemed average in terms of simplicity, with some difficulties arising from the intricate infrastructure. Stonebranch offers support during the migration process and promptly addresses configuration and maintenance problems.
Pricing: The setup cost for ActiveBatch Workload Automation is straightforward and can be done quickly. Users find the pricing reasonable and competitive compared to other options. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is more affordable than its rivals, which makes it a favored choice for businesses.
ROI: ActiveBatch has proven to be highly effective, delivering valuable features and driving a notable boost in net revenue. Although specific ROI figures are not provided, the platform has garnered praise for its positive outcomes. Stonebranch stands out for its impressive cost savings.
Comparison Results: ActiveBatch Workload Automation is the preferred choice when comparing it to Stonebranch Universal Automation Center. Users appreciate ActiveBatch's ease of use during setup, as well as its versatility and prebuilt jobs for streamlined batch processing and process automation. The software's scalability, automation, and administration console are also highly praised.
"It is very useful in sending confidential files through FPP servers."
"The nice thing about ActiveBatch is once we have created a specific job that can be easily be replicated to another job, then minimal changes will have to be made. This makes things nice. Reduction of coding is substantial in a lot of cases. The replication of one job to another is just doing a few minor tweaks and rolling it into production. This decreases our development costs substantially."
"One of the most valuable features is the job templates. If we need to create an FTP job, we just drag over the FTP template and fill out the requirements using the variables that ActiveBatch uses. And that makes it reusable. We can create a job once but use it for many different clients."
"Easy to configure and simple to develop new features."
"The Jobs Library has been a tremendous asset. For the most, that's what we use. There are some outliers, but we pretty much integrate those Jobs Library steps throughout the process, whether it's REST calls, FTP processes, or file copies and moves... That has helped us to build end-to-end workflows."
"ActiveBatch provides summary reports and logs for further analysis and improvements in monitoring servers, which is very handy."
"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."
"For developers, it is easy to orchestrate the workflows and the integration has been very easy."
"The interface is very user-friendly and easy to navigate."
"I can name the aliases on the agent, so if we need a passive environment for an agent, that's one of the nice features. If our primary goes down, I can bring up the passive one and I don't have to change anything in the scheduling world. It will start running from that new server."
"We lean a lot on the multi-tenancy that they offer within the product, the ability to get other people to self-manage their estate, versus having a central team do all the scheduling."
"We like that it has GUI and is not just a command line."
"When it comes to agent technology and compatibility with other vendors, from a platform perspective it was the one vendor that fit all the platforms that we have, from your old platforms - mainframe, NSK, IBM i - to the new ones, going into cloud and container"
"Stonebranch performs well, and the graphical representation is excellent. Overall, it requires more technical effort from our teams, but the solution is intuitive, so anybody can use it."
"The ability to monitor tasks that are on the open-system side as well as our mainframe side gives us a one-window view of all our processes."
"The most valuable feature is the reliability of the agents, because we need them accessible and we need to run stuff. The agent technology and compatibility are top-notch."
"It could be easier to provide dashboards on how many jobs are running at the same time; more monitoring."
"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."
"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."
"Setting up the software was hard."
"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."
"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."
"The help center and documentation are not that helpful."
"A nice thing to have would be the ability to comfortably pass variables from one job to another. That was one of the things that I found difficult."
"There is a component called the OMS, which is the message broker. We rely on infrastructure, resiliency, and availability for that piece. If that could change to be highly available just as a software component, so that we don't have to provide the high-available storage, etc. for it, that would be a plus. It would just be cheaper to run."
"There is room for improvement with its connectivity with the Microsoft SRS system. It is very weak. They keep telling us it works with it, and technically it does, but it does not provide a lot of visibility. We have lost a lot of visibility migrating to Stonebranch, compared with just running tasks on the SRS server. That's really about the only thing that is a sore point for us."
"I would rate Stonebranch somewhere in the middle for ease of setup. It wasn't too straightforward for us because our infrastructure is complex."
"It's not available on the cloud, so they should take that due to safety, security, and scalability."
"It can be hard to manage the task monitor."
"Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics."
"The Universal Controller is decent for the money it costs... It needs some work to have full features, compared to other products that are out there, specifically IBM's Workload Scheduler."
"Occasionally, we have an agent that doesn't come back up after patching. That doesn't happen very often... It's really just a restart of the agent and it comes back up. But that might be one thing that could be improved."
ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked 4th in Workload Automation with 35 reviews while Stonebranch is ranked 16th in Workload Automation with 26 reviews. ActiveBatch by Redwood is rated 9.2, while Stonebranch is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of ActiveBatch by Redwood writes "Flexible, easy to use, and offers good automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Stonebranch writes "Allowed us to develop workflows without having to train and develop very specialized skillsets". ActiveBatch by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood, Redwood RunMyJobs and VisualCron, whereas Stonebranch is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, Control-M, Redwood RunMyJobs, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and IBM Workload Automation. See our ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Stonebranch report.
See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.
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