Our latest evaluation compares Fortra's JAMS and Tidal by Redwood, two prominent Workload Automation Solutions, drawing insights from user reviews on PeerSpot.
Tidal offers robust workload management, scalable, event-driven scheduling, and graphical views regarding valuable features. Its integration capabilities with systems like ServiceNow and JD Edwards are particularly notable. JAMS is recognized for its effective tracking and visualization of job dependencies, user interface, and PowerShell capabilities.
However, both products have areas for improvement. Tidal could benefit from a more intuitive GUI, simplified licensing, AI and enhanced reporting capabilities. JAMS needs more precise documentation, especially for custom execution methods and better integration transparency. A global search feature and a fully web-based client are also suggested enhancements.
Looking at pricing and ROI, Tidal is praised for its predictable costs and value for functionality despite the complexity of licensing and adapters. JAMS is seen as reasonably priced with scalable licensing options, offering significant time and cost savings.
Ease of deployment is a highlight for both; Tidal is commended for its straightforward setup, involving minimal maintenance and a learning curve of just one to two hours, resulting in a three-week deployment timeframe. Similarly, JAMS is appreciated for its easy installation and configuration. Users could easily follow webpage instructions, with setup completed within hours and a native installation of SQL Express being a convenient feature.
Tidal users shared that customer service is responsive and knowledgeable. JAMS receives accolades for its quick, effective support and various communication channels.
In summary, both Tidal and JAMS are robust workload automation solutions with distinct strengths and minor areas for improvement. Their ease of deployment, feature sets, pricing, ROI, and customer service are well-regarded, making them competitive choices in their domain.
"The planning capabilities are most valuable."
"Fortra's JAMS helped us centralize job management across our platforms and applications. This is critical because we schedule tasks across multiple applications and operating systems, using triggers and start dates to coordinate their execution."
"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."
"We looked at other companies, like VisualCron, that were cheaper, but one of the main sticking points was the fact that they wouldn't have provided a central location for us to monitor across all servers. That was one of the biggest selling points of JAMS."
"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."
"Our company is based on data. Everything we do is data-driven, so it has been very valuable having one place where we can process all of the data and do batch schedules with chunks of data."
"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."
"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."
"The versatility of being able to run on many different types of servers is valuable. There is also a versatility of different services that you could run jobs on. It's highly versatile. You can run a lot of different types of scripts on a lot of different types of servers. It interfaces with all of them."
"We wouldn't be able to do many of the complex scheduling that we do today without it. For us, it is a mission-critical app. Because if it doesn't work or has a problem, then SAP doesn't function. It is that critical. So, it's an essential tool for us to manage and run SAP jobs."
"Tidal Automation is very efficient and can quickly automate most manual and repetitive tasks."
"From a management standpoint, when using the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads, I've never had a problem with the application. It's very interactive, especially with the different security levels that they offer."
"Tidal Automation offers extensive monitoring and reporting features that let users keep track of the status of their workflows and quickly spot any problems."
"Tidal Automation’s most valuable feature is customization. It can work and connect with any app."
"The most valuable feature is the job scheduler, where you can schedule thousands of jobs to execute at specific times."
"We had a number of different schedulers in this organization and we've been porting everything that was running out of these other, unrelated schedulers into this scheduler. That has afforded us the ability to set up direct dependencies between processes that couldn't talk to one another before. Over the 15 years, we've definitely gained a lot from that. What had been manual controls have become automated controls..."
"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 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."
"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."
"JAMS lacks source control features. Our previous solution had job control language, but JAMS doesn't. When migrating between versions, JAMS doesn't migrate all the data, like job change history, etc. Also, the scheduler doesn't have a way to make jobs invisible, so you can temporarily turn a job off if you decide not to run it today."
"The search capability needs to be improved because when we try to search for a job, it's hard to do."
"JAMS handles exceptions fairly well but there are some areas where it might improve a little bit. It has to do with being able to automatically handle exceptions, out-of-the-box, rather than having to code them."
"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."
"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."
"I don't know if Tidal wants to get into the business of monitoring long-running jobs, but that could be a feature for the future: a job launching and monitoring tool. Using Tidal for monitoring doesn't seem like a good fit, but if they could offer something that did that as an add-on or include it, it might be helpful."
"The biggest improvement they need to work on is doing better QA checks before they release new patches and service packs. We do find that you can't trust getting the new product right away, as they have to get some bug fixes out. They do tend to have some bugs in the first iteration."
"The UI might have the potential to provide a more polished and user-centric encounter, promoting seamless engagements and simplifying the navigation process for individuals interacting with the software."
"Setting up the initial product was a little hard."
"Tidal Software interface could be more intuitive and user-friendly."
"Understanding and using Tidal Automation could be overwhelming for someone with minimal programming language."
"When we patch to the next version, there is often a little thing that breaks. It has rarely been a big deal, but I always seem to have to follow up on one tiny issue. It would help if they had some better QA testing of their patches."
"I would like more involvement with the cloud."
Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 27 reviews while Tidal by Redwood is ranked 2nd in Workload Automation with 37 reviews. Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0, while Tidal by Redwood is rated 9.0. 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 Tidal by Redwood writes "Great visibility with a single pane of glass and a low learning curve". Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs and VisualCron, whereas Tidal by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs and VisualCron. See our Fortra's JAMS vs. Tidal by Redwood report.
See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.
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