We performed a comparison between Fortra's JAMS and VisualCron based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Workload Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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 product is easy to use."
"It makes everything that we want to do so much easier. We have had a number of instances in the past where we have had developers who have been working on a project, and even though we have had JAMS for all these years, they will create some SQL Server Agent job, or something like that, to run a task. When it is in code review and development is complete, the question always comes around, "Can JAMS do this?" The answer has always been, "Yes." Pretty much anything we have ever developed could be run by JAMS."
"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 scheduling and execution of jobs are the most valuable features. The scheduling is important because if there is a task we want to execute at 4:00 AM, there's no way we will have someone who can manually run the job. In addition, we execute 100 to 200 jobs per day, and manual intervention is not an option."
"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."
"While I appreciate the other features, the agent stands out for its ease of installation and configuration for JAMS monitoring."
"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."
"I love VisualCron because we previously spent a lot of time writing Power switches to connect to SQL Server. VisualCron makes it easier to execute services or connect to FileZilla by only adding the credentials to the master credentials stored in the solution."
"We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works."
"'ve only had a few cases where I've had to request support in the past 12 years of use, but the support response time and resolution were was extremely quick."
"It has improved our organization with more automation within the business departments and less administration and development in the IT department. Usually, as the IT department, we are the bottleneck for many requirements within the business. With this tool, the business departments are able to perform many task themselves."
"What I found most beneficial from VisualCron is that you can directly connect it with different databases, user accounts, and credentials. You can run queries from one machine to another using the credentials, unlike PowerShell, that's run by the machine itself. With VisualCron, you can directly ask other machines and run requests through user credentials. Suppose you have an AWS or Azure environment. In that case, you can maintain the connection between on-premises and cloud-based machines, which is the type of setup in the organization I'm working for. You can directly call some of the services via VisualCron on your local on-premises machine, and I found that an excellent feature of the tool."
"What I like about VisualCron is that like its name, it's a very visual tool. In my previous company, there were a lot of scripts for all kinds of services, and through VisualCron, you get to group all flows and get a nice visual overview. VisualCron also has an alerting feature, so you receive alerts from it. VisualCron makes everything clearer and easier to maintain. Every other solution that I was looking for almost always needed a programmer, but with VisualCron, you can do what you need to do without programming skills, so this is another valuable feature of the tool."
"VisualCron is a very powerful program to automate different steps in your business processes. We use it to automate replacing files and inform departments about the replacement."
"The most valuable feature of VisualCron is its ability to schedule interactive jobs so that you can have interdependencies within the job and interdependencies of a job on another job, and so on."
"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."
"Fortra is getting much better with documentation and examples, but there is still room for improvement."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"If there were a softcover book on how to really take advantage of all of JAMS' tools, I would buy it. I do better with training books than online searching, so a book would be helpful."
"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."
"The documentation is a bit weak."
"An area for improvement in VisualCron is its cluttered interface. It isn't always easy to find all functionalities, so what VisualCron needs is a user interface expert who can improve the interface. There's a learning curve in terms of finding what you need from the interface of VisualCron. The technical support for VisualCron also needs improvement in terms of response time. Currently, there's no live support or hotline you can call to get quick answers, so this is what I'd like to see in the next version of VisualCron. A less cluttered and more streamlined interface, where you don't need to hunt for some of the features, is also what I'd like to see in the next VisualCron update."
"VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve."
"There are some conditions in the mail trigger, but you can only use them as an "AND" condition, not as an "OR" condition. This is an improvement that could be useful. For example, some people put "invoice" in the subject and others put "invoice" in the body. If I want to make a trigger for everybody whose sending invoices, I have to make two jobs for this now."
"Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way."
"The only problem I face when I use the tool is that it doesn't contain much documentation or it doesn't have many video tutorials on its features."
"VisualCron seems to operate like an efficient machine when it comes to improvements and enhancements and new features. I always appreciate the quick response I get when bringing up an issue or coming up with suggestions. I've mentioned before that it would be great to see a move away from SQLCE and XML configuration files."
Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 27 reviews while VisualCron is ranked 13th in Workload Automation with 11 reviews. Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0, while VisualCron 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 VisualCron writes "It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process". Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs and Tidal by Redwood, whereas VisualCron is most compared with Microsoft Power Automate, Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation and Stonebranch. See our Fortra's JAMS vs. VisualCron report.
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