We performed a comparison between Fortra's JAMS and OpCon based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Fortra's JAMS is highly regarded for its effective job dependency tracking, visual representation of dependencies, warning and notification system, management of intricate scheduling needs, and comprehensive logging functionality. OpCon is praised for its adaptability, integration capabilities, self-service functionality, and automation capabilities.
Fortra's JAMS client interface lacks intuitiveness and options retrieval, while OpCon's web-based interface, Solution Manager, lacks functionality. Fortra's JAMS would benefit from a comprehensive training resource, whereas OpCon needs better documentation for upgrading.
Service and Support: Fortra's JAMS customer service receives high praise for being responsive, knowledgeable, and helpful. Customers appreciate the promptness of their responses and the availability of documentation and training resources. OpCon's customer service is also well-regarded, with customers praising the technical support team's ability to provide timely solutions and prevent disruptions. However, there have been occasional delays in issue resolution.
Ease of Deployment: Users find the initial setup for Fortra's JAMS to be simple and clear. The setup process for OpCon can be intricate and necessitates close collaboration with SMA consultants to achieve success.
Pricing: The cost of setting up Fortra's JAMS product is not specified, while OpCon is recognized as a pricey and intricate solution that demands a learning curve.
ROI: Fortra's JAMS saves time, boosts productivity, and is cost-effective. OpCon also delivers a high ROI by automating tasks, reducing the need for additional staff, and saving man-hours. OpCon also delivers a high ROI by automating tasks, reducing the need for additional staff, and saving man-hours.
Comparison Results: Fortra's JAMS receives positive user feedback compared to OpCon. Users appreciate JAMS for its simple setup, ability to handle job dependencies, automation capabilities, support and interactive agents, code-driven automation, flexible scheduling, and detailed logging for troubleshooting. JAMS is also seen as a valuable investment with a good return and earns high ratings for its responsive and knowledgeable customer service.
"We also use the solution’s Interactive Agents. If we need to push something to our dealer portal, we can just drop a file in a folder and it goes. Running interactive tasks helps me users focus on business processes since I don’t have to take care of running the jobs manually."
"Being able to create a series of chained jobs, which are basically linked jobs is valuable."
"It makes everything that we want to do so much easier. We have had a number of instances in the past where we have had developers who have been working on a project, and even though we have had JAMS for all these years, they will create some SQL Server Agent job, or something like that, to run a task. When it is in code review and development is complete, the question always comes around, "Can JAMS do this?" The answer has always been, "Yes." Pretty much anything we have ever developed could be run by JAMS."
"I find the historical tracking feature of JAMS invaluable for reviewing past events."
"The interface is good, and it's very easy to define and create jobs. If a job is not running or there is an error, the solution will send an email. That's all very good and very useful."
"The most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."
"The code-driven automation for more complex scheduling requirements frees up time because it's really easy to use... It's almost like a stand-alone software that we can't live without."
"While I appreciate the other features, the agent stands out for its ease of installation and configuration for JAMS monitoring."
"Having the jobs laid out while attaching dependencies is a nice addition to the program."
"There are a lot of valuable features. The version that we're currently casting, Self Service, is going to be the most valuable to us. It is going to allow us to open up the doors, broaden our automation capability and help other business units to be able to automate a lot of the little things that they do from day to day. I'm really looking forward to being able to help other areas with their automation needs. Self Service is really key."
"When a lot of jobs are scheduled on different platforms, without any interaction possible between them, it's very difficult to manage things. With OpCon we avoid this difficulty. It's very visual."
"It can run scripted tasks automatically over and over without intervention. That is what it does and the part that I really like because repetitive tasks need to be done over and over, day after day, no matter what day of the week it is. It is difficult to have staff do these manually and consistently, especially over weekends or through the night. Instead, you can have OpCon do them."
"It allows us to have more information and more control than we previously had over the processes that are running in host systems."
"The most valuable feature is the automation in general."
"It has streamlined operations, specifically with the timing of our processes. We don't have to worry about if things are going to run at a certain time. The automation allows us to say, "Okay, we want this to run at this time, and this to not run until that is done." So, it has really streamlined the accuracy and timeline of when jobs run throughout the day."
"We recently did a branch acquisition of another bank, though not a full bank. With that, we had to convert all of their ACH transactions. It was a very complicated product that we received from our core provider, Fiserv, for some translation programs. It was very cumbersome to run through the process, convert it out, get output files, etc. Without anyone touching it, I was able to automate the full process from pulling in the files from this other bank, converting everything needed, and posting it to our customer's account 24-hours throughout the day."
"There could be a better simulation for banning the termination. You have to simulate every one of the processes in order to have an idea for better planning. This kind of simulation is broken and needs improvement."
"It does validations when you try to delete an object and if there are any dependencies in place, the deletion process will not proceed... there is no information provided as to what it was that caused the validation to fail... it's quite a tedious process to find which object is getting in the way."
"The UI could be better. There were some things that were not quite intuitive, such as the search tool. When we tried to search for jobs, we had to clear the entire search and then go in and enter the new search query. That's something that wasn't intuitive for a new user."
"Improvements could be made in the service desk's knowledge and communication skills among engineers to better address customer needs and ensure issues are fully resolved."
"The product does not allow the users to cut and paste the job names from the screen."
"With no programming experience, I find JAMS code-driven automation challenging due to the required PowerShell scripting."
"The biggest area with room for improvement is the area that my organization benefits the most from using JAMS, and that is in custom execution methods. I happen to have a very good C# developer. Ever since we got JAMS, he has spent a lot of time talking to JAMS developers, researching the JAMS libraries, and creating custom execution methods. He's gotten very good at it. He is now able to create them and maintain them very easily, but that knowledge was hard-won knowledge. It was difficult to come by, and if I should ever lose this developer, then I would be hard-pressed to find anyone who could create JAMS custom execution methods quite as well as he can since there really isn't all that much help, such as documentation or information, available on how to create custom execution methods."
"The ACL or access permission area needs to be improved. When it comes to defining and providing security permissions, it's a bit confusing if you are new to JAMS. JAMS needs to improve the features for security access or permissions."
"What can get complicated is if you're doing anything more than just the built-in jobs. If you're using the more advanced features, troubleshooting becomes extremely complicated."
"I have noticed lately that [tech support's] first answers tend to be, "Let's upgrade it to the latest and greatest first," without looking into anything. The last couple of times I've logged a ticket that's been the response, which is a little frustrating. We're not big on just upgrading on a whim. We do full testing."
"The products are extremely powerful and capable. Anytime you have such capability, the programming/configuration that goes into making it work can be complicated."
"I would like to have an interface with PowerShell. PowerShell has a lot of functionality. We use it a lot because we're a Windows shop. Having a built-in tool or interface with PowerShell would go a long way."
"I would like OpCon to implement a reporting feature on the dashboard that displays historical data for specific jobs. Ideally, this feature would allow us to view the past seven days or the next seven days, but with a specific focus on highlighting instances where a particular job has historically failed, particularly on Saturdays over the past year."
"The image-scanning features need improvement."
"There is one feature that has been a difficult problem, and right now, OpCon can't do it. I'm not sure if it should be expected to, but we have tried to get it to where it could start a process on an external database."
"Do your first install, your first upgrade, with SMA. It's simple, it's as per the manual, as per the training, but you need that little bit of confidence."
Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 27 reviews while OpCon is ranked 9th in Workload Automation with 56 reviews. Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0, while OpCon is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Fortra's JAMS writes "We can scale up our organization's scheduling and automation without having to add staff to the department". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OpCon writes "Gives us the ability to schedule dependent jobs across different mainframes". Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood, Redwood RunMyJobs and VisualCron, whereas OpCon is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Automic Workload Automation and UiPath. See our Fortra's JAMS vs. OpCon report.
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