We performed a comparison between Stonebranch Universal Automation Center and Tidal Automation based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is highly regarded for its strong performance and visually appealing presentation. Users appreciate its capacity to establish connections between tasks and its efficient rerun feature. The platform boasts a user-friendly interface and a practical task monitoring tool. Tidal Automation shines with its exceptional job scheduling capabilities, enabling users to effortlessly schedule numerous tasks with interdependencies. Its unified interface provides a comprehensive view, granting flexibility to execute jobs across various servers.
Stonebranch could make the software available on the cloud to enhance safety and scalability. Additionally, the analytics feature and task monitor could be enhanced for better functionality. Users also suggest the addition of a mobile app for easier monitoring and calculation of job hours. Collaborating with the vendor for new solutions is also recommended. Tidal Automation users find the graphical user interface to be busy and tedious to navigate. They suggest simplifying the pricing model and improving the user interface, especially when it comes to drilling down into details. The process of migrating jobs and production statistics reporting could also be improved.
Service and Support: Users appreciate the technical support provided by Stonebranch, describing it as very good, excellent, and always available. Tidal Automation also receives positive feedback, with reviewers mentioning a responsive and knowledgeable support team.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for Stonebranch was considered moderately difficult due to the complexity of the infrastructure, resulting in some challenges. The initial setup for Tidal Automation was described as simple and easy, with a deployment process taking around three weeks. Users also found it relatively easy to learn how to use the system.
Pricing: Stonebranch Universal Automation Centercost-effective with favorable pricing ratings. The license requires annual payment. Tidal Automation offers fair and predictable pricing, accompanied by transparent licensing.
ROI: Stonebranch has proven to be] cost-effective. Tidal Automation offers a range of benefits including cost savings, improved efficiency, increased productivity, better risk management, and centralized job management.
Comparison Results: Stonebranch Universal Automation Center emerges as the preferred choice compared to Tidal Automation. Stonebranch stands out due to its intuitive and user-friendly interface, offering a graphical user interface (GUI) instead of relying solely on a command line.
"The support is good from Stonebranch Universal Automation Center."
"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."
"The features are upgraded, and every six months they're releasing patches."
"The ability to monitor tasks that are on the open-system side as well as our mainframe side gives us a one-window view of all our processes."
"I like the dashboard and the various workflows."
"I have found the agents to be so much simpler, when compared to ESP."
"We like that it has GUI and is not just a command line."
"I love the Universal Controller. It's been great for us. We host it on-premise... It's High Availability, meaning there's failover from one server to the other if one goes down."
"It has been super stable. There are no complaints on stability. We would not be using it if Tidal wasn't stable."
"The Graphical Views feature is also very good for helping us to understand a job stream. It's great for providing a visual overview of the status of a workflow, especially the Critical Path view. That is one of our favorites."
"Tidal helps administrators and users to see the information that is relevant to them in that single pane of glass. They can see jobs running, they can see job history, and they can see job progression. If you look at alternatives like Airflow and clouds, you'd have to design your own UI to monitor the progress of the different jobs that you've created in Airflow. So Tidal is huge for us."
"The job dependency is something that you cannot have in a regular, simple cron job or simple scheduler dependency. The event-driven jobs are core for us, as we really need that. Therefore, we really need Tidal with its ability to run thousands of jobs per day."
"We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads. The solution’s ability to manage and monitor these workloads is very easy and accurate. We have file dependencies for running jobs. The job does not start until a file exists on a completely different server, then where the job will run. So, it is cross systems."
"It is intended to enable large-scale automation environments, making it appropriate for companies with complicated processes and big data volumes."
"With other tools, you do not have the ability to schedule jobs on their own. You need to create a group and then assign everything to that group. Only then will the job be able to execute. In Tidal, you can schedule a single job and there is no need to create a group. That's what I like the most."
"By leveraging machine learning algorithms, Tidal Automation can use this data to optimize turbine settings and improve overall efficiency and performance."
"The Universal Controller is decent for the money it costs... It needs some work to have full features, compared to other products that are out there, specifically IBM's Workload Scheduler."
"Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics."
"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't handle negative written codes."
"It's not available on the cloud, so they should take that due to safety, security, and scalability."
"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."
"It can be hard to manage the task monitor."
"I would rate Stonebranch somewhere in the middle for ease of setup. It wasn't too straightforward for us because our infrastructure is complex."
"They can do better reporting in terms of production statistics reporting."
"From an administrative point of view, I wouldn't give really high marks to the solution. I actually entertained getting the JAWS application at one point. One of the shortcomings with the scheduler is the reporting capabilities. At least at the time, JAWS was the best that they had for a third-party integration. I think they've got things in the pipeline to help alleviate that gap."
"Understanding and using Tidal Automation could be overwhelming for someone with minimal programming language."
"The solution needs more advanced reporting and data visualization capabilities to enable deeper analysis of job performance and trends."
"Tidal's adaptability and user-friendliness could be increased by integrating it with additional programmes and platforms."
"We've had some quirky stuff happen on an occasional basis where a job does not take off. For example, a job we expected to be finished by 3:00 a.m. is sitting there and not executing when we come in in the morning. We have to go all the way back to the dependencies and then we can see that one of the dependencies has become unscheduled, for some reason. No changes were made to the schedule but this prerequisite job has, all of a sudden, become unscheduled. I have brought this up with Tidal's support but they have never had an answer for it."
"The GUI, the graphical user interface, gets a little bit busy."
"Some users have complained that the initial setup process is complicated and time-consuming, while others have suggested that the software could offer more freedom in customizing processes."
Stonebranch is ranked 16th in Workload Automation with 26 reviews while Tidal by Redwood is ranked 2nd in Workload Automation with 37 reviews. Stonebranch is rated 8.8, while Tidal by Redwood is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Stonebranch writes "Allowed us to develop workflows without having to train and develop very specialized skillsets". 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". Stonebranch is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and HCL Workload Automation, whereas Tidal by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation and Redwood RunMyJobs. See our Stonebranch vs. Tidal by Redwood report.
See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.
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