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.
"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."
"We like that it has GUI and is not just a command line."
"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."
"I have found the agents to be so much simpler, when compared to ESP."
"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 tasks are incredibly capable, and as long as you name them with a nice, uniform naming convention, they are very useful. You can create some interesting workflows through various machines, or you can just have it kick off single tasks. All in all, I really like the Universal Task. You can do some mutually exclusive stuff, such as an "A not B" kind of thing. It has a lot of capabilities behind the scenes."
"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."
"We lean a lot on the multi-tenancy that they offer within the product, the ability to get other people to self-manage their estate, versus having a central team do all the scheduling."
"It has been super stable. There are no complaints on stability. We would not be using it if Tidal wasn't stable."
"The feature that I find to be valuable, as I'm working with other folks, is the ability to cross-schedule across platforms, and the flexibility that comes with that."
"Tidal Automation’s most valuable feature is customization. It can work and connect with any app."
"It's the most efficient tool in doing repetitive tasks and saves a lot of time with minimum possibility of error."
"Thinking of all the people involved in checking jobs on a daily basis, manually running jobs or auditing them through standalone tools, and trying to connect them. We have saved hundreds of hours weekly, which is substantial."
"Especially in the newer versions of Tidal, the segmentation of user permissions enables us to give people operator permissions for their jobs, to rerun jobs, but view-only for other groups' jobs. We're able to keep people from hurting themselves or other groups accidentally. The permissioning is really good."
"The data management on offer was valuable."
"Tidal Automation is very efficient and can quickly automate most manual and repetitive tasks."
"I would rate Stonebranch somewhere in the middle for ease of setup. It wasn't too straightforward for us because our infrastructure is complex."
"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."
"One hiccup we've had is due to the fact that we have other internal scheduling tools. We're able to talk to them, but we have trouble with some of the networking between them, so we're still trying to work out the kinks there."
"It can be hard to manage the task monitor."
"It can't handle negative written codes."
"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."
"Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics."
"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."
"The software's performance and scalability could be improved, particularly when dealing with large-scale workloads or complex business processes."
"The current user interface of Tidal Software is functional. However, it can be improved to make it more intuitive and user-friendly."
"I'm still hoping with Explorer to be able to see end-to-end job streams. That's not really something that's easy to see today in the web client. However, I haven't worked with Explorer yet. One of the things that we have found frustrating is not being able to see an end-to-end job stream across multiple applications within Tidal. We use jobs for that right now, but I have high hopes that we'll be able to see that in Explorer."
"One area for improvement is the command-line interface and the API to bulk-load jobs. It's a little bit kludgy, but we still manage without it. They're working on it and it's getting better all the time. In addition, the documentation for their API for creating jobs needs to be updated. It's a bit of a learning curve."
"With the client, we have had certain issues. The user interface for Tidal is a little slow. A lot of people would love this tool if they had a faster user interface. The drill-down functionality should be much quicker than what it is pulling out now. If I fill out some data, then it takes awhile to get that data back onto the screen. It's not as fast as we were expecting."
"The biggest improvement they need to work on is doing better QA checks before they release new patches and service packs. We do find that you can't trust getting the new product right away, as they have to get some bug fixes out. They do tend to have some bugs in the first iteration."
"One thing I would like to see improved is that, currently, when an action is executed and finishes in Tidal, it's marked as either "success" or "failure." I would like more options that would flag a job according to multiple options, rather than just "good" or bad"... Tidal has told us that it's possible to do so through the product or with a workaround."
"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."
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.
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