We performed a comparison between Fortra's JAMS and Redwood Software - Workload Automation Edition 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 impressive job dependency tracking and visualization, as well as its automation features such as File Watchers. Redwood Software is praised for its robust job definition capabilities and user authority restrictions. It also excels in error handling and integration with multiple systems.
Fortra's JAMS product has room for improvement in various areas such as its client interface, search capability, handling of exceptions, ACL area, troubleshooting, encryption code, and PGP engine. Redwood Software could enhance its reporting features, monitoring and alert service, user interface, cloud-native features, documentation, customer support, value-added features, security standards, UI, application integration, data pulling, and graphical user interface.
Service and Support: Fortra's JAMS product has excellent customer service. The team is responsive, knowledgeable, and helpful, providing quick solutions. Customers appreciate the documentation and training. Redwood Software's customer service is generally positive but can be improved. The support team delivers good service, but Fortra's JAMS stands out for its responsiveness and comprehensive support.
Ease of Deployment: Users found the initial setup for Fortra's JAMS to be simple and efficient, with clear instructions provided on the webpage. Tasks were deployed quickly. Redwood's setup was described as complicated and time-consuming. Some users struggled due to the large number of jobs and the complexity of the existing system.
Pricing: Fortra's JAMS has a setup cost for the first year, with an additional annual maintenance cost. Users find this pricing fair and reasonable compared to other solutions. Redwood offers a unique pricing model based on the number of job executions. While the setup cost may be slightly expensive, users believe it is worthwhile due to the product's value and user framework.
ROI: Fortra's JAMS has been shown to be a budget-friendly solution that enhances efficiency and saves time. Evaluating Redwood Software's ROI is challenging, but users have noticed favorable outcomes and given it high ratings.
Comparison Results: Fortra's JAMS is the preferred option when comparing it to Redwood Software - Workload Automation Edition. JAMS is praised for its ease of setup, ability to handle job dependencies, automation capabilities, extensive troubleshooting logs, and user-friendly interface. Users also appreciate the reasonable pricing, positive return on investment, and highly rated customer service.
"JAMS has improved my organization by taking a myriad of manual processes and allowing us to automate them. It enables our folks to focus more on tasks that require their human intelligence and their creativity and less on just mundane tasks. It increases efficiency, accuracy, and consistency."
"The product is easy to use."
"The planning capabilities are most valuable."
"The ability to sequence jobs is excellent; it means we don't have to schedule them individually, and if one fails, it doesn't unwind the entire workflow."
"The fact that we no longer need to use Excel spreadsheets is huge. Before JAMS, every group was keeping track of their own batch jobs. Nobody really knew what the other jobs were. So, if jobs failed, other groups wouldn't necessarily know. With JAMS, everything is done through a single scheduler. You can choose who to notify."
"JAMS is easier to use and cheaper than our previous solution. The installation is more straightforward, and JAMS has a graphical user interface, so it's more accessible."
"The overall product is fantastic. I love it. It has been a fantastic, solid product. If I have one tiny bit of a problem with it, the support team gets in touch with me right away. I don't know if I've had another service that has been as fantastic as the JAMS support team."
"Being able to create a series of chained jobs, which are basically linked jobs is valuable."
"Multi-platform scheduling makes it easier this way rather than accessing one platform at a time."
"Redwood manages all complex job workflow processes."
"This product is simple and easy to use."
"It conjures simplicity from the depths of complexity, effortlessly shouldering burdensome workloads."
"Redwood RunMyJobs has been very useful for job scheduling and checking and monitoring jobs."
"It can centralize and support on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments seamlessly."
"The automated alert response is very useful for long-running and failed jobs during off-business hours."
"Redwood is of value to our organization due to of its ease of use and the ability to automate and orchestrate any platform that we utilize today."
"It is important to receive notifications if a charged job fails and SQL is halted. JAMS does not provide halted notifications by default, which is a critical feature that needs to be added."
"All my machines at work are Macs. JAMS client is a Windows-based thing. It is all built on .NET, which makes perfect sense. However, that means in order for me to access it, I need to connect to a VPN, then log onto one of our Azure VMs in order to access the JAMS client. This is fine, but if for some reason I am unable to do so, it would be nice to be able to have a web-based JAMS client that has all the exact same functionality in it. There are probably a whole bunch of disadvantages that you would get with that as well, but that is definitely something that would make life easier in a few cases."
"I'm not sure if they have fixed it in a newer version, but there is no global search in the version I have. If I have multiple sub-folders that are named for business units, like HR or IT, and I have to search for a job, I cannot search from the top. I have to go to the HR folder to search for a particular job, or to the IT folder."
"The only thing that they could improve on is the fact that they don't have a browser version of JAMS. They've got all the bits and pieces there if you want to build your own web version of it. It does come with a web client, but it's pretty clunky. They could improve on that."
"One thing that I know that the JAMS people said that they were working on that would be huge for us is a search capability so that you could search for tasks. It may be available in version 7 or in a future release of 7. I think that's on their roadmap. But right now, for us to do a search, we have to search through database queries."
"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."
"The product does not allow the users to cut and paste the job names from the screen."
"The addition of machine learning capabilities could help Redwood Workload Automation Software better predict job and workflow performance, detect anomalies, and optimize operations based on historical data."
"It lacks some of the common reporting features. I'm a bit surprised that there aren't some standard reports to be able to extract any data on usage. They've described to us that customers have different reporting needs, so they let them develop those, but reporting is a common need. It would be helpful to have it as part of the solution."
"Adding machine learning and AI capabilities would enable Redwood to automate more complex business processes and tasks."
"It has limited reporting features; some basic reporting features are missing."
"We'd like to see an integration with ServiceNow to raise the tickets/incidents in ServiceNow."
"The user interface of Redwood can be improved a bit to make it more user-friendly and interesting."
"The reports are downloaded in .CAR file format, which makes it difficult to convert to an Excel file."
"Having a graphical user interface for the dashboard would be great."
Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 27 reviews while Redwood RunMyJobs is ranked 3rd in Workload Automation with 30 reviews. Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0, while Redwood RunMyJobs is rated 9.6. 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 Redwood RunMyJobs writes "Simple to use, increases CPU speed, and reduces the cost of machine time". Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood and VisualCron, whereas Redwood RunMyJobs is most compared with Control-M, Stonebranch, Tidal by Redwood and AutoSys Workload Automation. See our Fortra's JAMS vs. Redwood RunMyJobs report.
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