We performed a comparison between Fortra's JAMS 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: Fortra's JAMS is highly regarded for its job dependency tracking and visualization, while Rocket Zena is praised for its user-friendly interface. JAMS offers robust automation features, while Zena excels in cross-platform job scheduling and FTP file transfer.
Fortra's JAMS client interface can be more user-friendly and efficient in terms of options retrieval. Rocket Zena lacks clarity in displaying connections between applications/components. Fortra's JAMS could enhance its accessibility by introducing a browser version and providing more comprehensive documentation. Rocket Zena would benefit from a more intuitive user interface and the availability of RPM packages for installation.
Service and Support: Fortra's JAMS customer service is commended for being quick, knowledgeable, and helpful, offering prompt solutions and comprehensive resources. Rocket Zena receives positive feedback, with responsive and knowledgeable support, although obtaining higher-level assistance may be more time-consuming.
Ease of Deployment: Fortra's JAMS initial setup is described as straightforward and easy, with users quickly deploying tasks by following webpage instructions. Rocket Zena's setup varied among users, with some finding it easier as new users but others finding it complex and requiring an understanding of different components. Integration with SAP posed a particular challenge for Zena.
Pricing: Fortra's JAMS has a setup cost in the first year, along with a yearly maintenance cost. Users see this pricing as reasonable and budget-friendly when compared to other options. Rocket Zena is recognized as a cost-effective and affordable choice, particularly suitable for small businesses.
ROI: Fortra's JAMS and Rocket Zena have both delivered positive results in terms of saving time, increasing productivity, and offering cost-effectiveness. Fortra's JAMS also provides ease of use and visibility into job failures, while Rocket Zena has improved accuracy and alleviated stress for engineers and administrators.
Comparison Results: Fortra's JAMS is the preferred choice when compared to Rocket Zena. Users appreciate JAMS for its easy setup, ability to handle job dependencies, extensive automation features, user-friendly interface, and excellent customer support. JAMS is favored due to its overall functionality and ease of use.
"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."
"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."
"It's a full-featured job scheduling tool. The part that I liked the best was the support team. This tool was new, and we were all learning it and setting up the different jobs that were complex in nature. Their support team was very responsive in helping us out through the setup and resolving the issues. They have been incredibly awesome."
"One of the things I like the most, as a SQL DBA, is the fact that we can manipulate tables in the background. Also, the fact that you can have your own views and work with the product the way it fits best is a very helpful feature."
"The most valuable feature for us is that it's DR-ready. With respect to disaster recovery, it has the built-in capability for failover to our DR site. If all of the required ports are open, it can be done seamlessly."
"The alerting in it is really targeted... you can set specific alerting so that if jobs in a given folder fail, certain people are alerted. You can also set security at the folder level, so that only people in those areas can go set them. That means that the alerting and security can be set at a very granular level."
"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."
"It has definitely drastically improved our capabilities to scale our automation. Before JAMS, there were a lot of manual processes. We had a couple of operators who spent all day doing that. A lot of the time with human intervention and human processes, it is as good as the person who may be following a procedure and human error is a big problem."
"The most valuable feature is the FTP file transfer."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I like the whole product, but specifically, I like the license part. It's very easy to acquire a license for this product."
"We haven't had any problems since we installed it. It runs as expected, we haven't had any critical problems. It helps keeps the business running 24/7."
"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."
"I have used other tools with similar capabilities; it's the ease of use."
"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."
"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."
"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 product does not allow the users to cut and paste the job names from the screen."
"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."
"When looking at a folder in JAMS with many jobs, it would be good to have better information in the list display of what's inside those jobs. We get some information, but other important details are missing."
"The search capability needs to be improved because when we try to search for a job, it's hard to do."
"The UI is not intuitive, and it would be nice if there was a web interface."
"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."
"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 documentation has room for improvement."
"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."
"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."
"In the next release, I would like the user experience to be improved. The user interface should be more appealing to gen-z."
"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."
Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 27 reviews while Rocket Zena is ranked 12th in Workload Automation with 9 reviews. Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0, while Rocket Zena is rated 8.4. 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 Rocket Zena writes "A continuously evolving, stable solution, with responsive support". Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs, Tidal by Redwood and VisualCron, whereas Rocket Zena is most compared with Control-M, Rocket Zeke, IBM Workload Automation, AutoSys Workload Automation and ActiveBatch by Redwood. See our Fortra's JAMS vs. Rocket Zena report.
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