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.
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."
"There won't be a memory outage issue, as it uses its own server/ECC memory only."
"The best feature I love about Redwood is the real-time event monitoring and alerting."
"There are various ways in which you can construct jobs depending on your business needs and requirements."
"It is very easy and easy to use, and minimal supervision is required to run it."
"It can centralize and support on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments seamlessly."
"Its monitoring and alerting features are what I found the most valuable."
"It saves us a lot of time and money by doing jobs automatically."
"Multi-platform scheduling makes it easier this way rather than accessing one platform at a time."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I would like a simple web interface that I could give to my team to go in and kill jobs or see why jobs died so that we don't have to drill down deeper into the application and know everything about it. It would be good to have a really clean web engine that would say here are the jobs running. We can then click to see the time running and whether any of them fails and other similar things. I know they have one, but it's not very simplistic."
"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."
"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 documentation is not super... It's not as quick and slick as I'd like it to be."
"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."
"Redwood Software has a high price tag, especially for small and medium-sized businesses that might not have the funds to engage in a complete automation system."
"The user interface of Redwood can be improved a bit to make it more user-friendly and interesting."
"The dashboard provided can be made more visually appealing and could include more critical data that would help associates in one glance get the required information."
"Redwood automation software could be made more user-friendly and intuitive, making chores and automation processes easier for users to complete."
"I have not noted any downsides."
"The product can improve customer service."
"Having a graphical user interface for the dashboard would be great."
"The job log has a size limit."
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, AutoSys Workload Automation and IBM Workload Automation. See our Fortra's JAMS vs. Redwood RunMyJobs report.
See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.
We monitor all Workload Automation reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
