We performed a comparison between Fortra's JAMS 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: Fortra's JAMS is notable for its effective tracking and visualization of job dependencies, along with its capability to establish warnings and notifications. It is also adept at managing intricate scheduling needs and offering comprehensive logging. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center demonstrates exceptional performance, provides graphical representation, and offers intuitive features.
Fortra's JAMS has areas for improvement in its user interface, search function, exception management, and reporting features. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center would benefit from cloud integration, improved analytics, and the addition of a mobile application for task monitoring.
Service and Support: Fortra's JAMS product has been highly praised by customers for its exceptional customer service, highlighting the support team's responsiveness, knowledgeability, and helpfulness in promptly resolving inquiries. Customers also appreciate the availability of comprehensive documentation and training resources. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center also receives positive feedback for its customer service. Users describe it as very good and excellent, emphasizing the support team's extensive knowledge and constant availability to assist.
Ease of Deployment: Fortra's JAMS received positive feedback for its initial setup, being described as straightforward and easy. Users found it simple to follow the instructions on the webpage and were able to deploy tasks quickly. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center's setup was considered average in terms of ease. Some users faced difficulties due to the complexity of the infrastructure.
Pricing: Fortra's JAMS offers an initial license cost in the first year, along with an annual maintenance cost. Users find this pricing to be fair and reasonable when compared to other options. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is considered more cost-effective than its competitors, receiving positive feedback regarding its pricing.
ROI: Fortra's JAMS has been praised for its value and cost-effectiveness, as it not only saves time and increases productivity but also offers visibility into job failures. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center has achieved substantial cost savings when compared to previous tools.
Comparison Results: Fortra's JAMS is the preferred product over Stonebranch Universal Automation Center. JAMS is praised for its straightforward and easy setup process, ability to handle dependencies between jobs, automation capabilities, support and interactive agents, code-driven automation feature, flexibility in scheduling, and extensive troubleshooting logging.
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I like how you can add new execution methods on the fly. It isn't overly complex to add Python script support to an execution method in the JAMS system. The scheduling is excellent. You can schedule a maintenance window and take that resource unit out of everything. It halts all of the jobs."
"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 most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."
"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."
"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 Universal Agent is the most valuable feature. Being agent-based and being able to go across multiple technology stacks, which is what our workflows do, Stonebranch gives us the ability to bridge those disparate technologies. It enables us to remove the dependency-gap with the agent so we know the status of the workflow at each step."
"We like that it has GUI and is not just a command line."
"The support is good from Stonebranch Universal Automation Center."
"I have found the agents to be so much simpler, when compared to ESP."
"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."
"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."
"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"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see the ability to interface with Microsoft group-managed service accounts, but they're still in the research phase. They need to ensure everything's legit and safe. The report designer and dashboards could also be improved. We're running 7.3, so I don't know if they have updated the reporting in 7.5, but I think the reports and dashboards could be better."
"Sometimes the UI is not the most responsive I've ever used. But because it does its job, I don't complain."
"The client is horrible. Every time JAMS puts out a survey on what they can improve, I always say, "The client: When you are setting up jobs, it is quite horrible." The response has been, "Well, we are just using the Windows foundation," and I am like, "Why isn't it only your product?" We can get around it now that we know its quirks, but it is not the most user-friendly of tools out there. The UI is completely unintuitive. We had to go and open up a support ticket with JAMS just to get something back. It is not user-friendly at all."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It's not available on the cloud, so they should take that due to safety, security, and scalability."
"I have a request regarding our agent on the mainframe. It may time out when communicating to the Universal Controller, when the mainframe is extremely busy. That can cause a task which is running at that time to not see the results of the job that ran on the mainframe. It happens sporadically during times of really busy CPU usage. We're expecting that enhancement from them in the fourth quarter."
"Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics."
"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 would be ideal if they had the exact same features as the CA Workload Automation DE series. It would be helpful to have calendaring options."
"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."
"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."
"It can be hard to manage the task monitor."
Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 27 reviews while Stonebranch is ranked 16th in Workload Automation with 26 reviews. Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0, while Stonebranch is rated 8.8. 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 Stonebranch writes "Allowed us to develop workflows without having to train and develop very specialized skillsets". Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs, Tidal by Redwood and VisualCron, whereas Stonebranch is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and IBM Workload Automation. See our Fortra's JAMS vs. Stonebranch report.
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