We performed a comparison between ActiveBatch by Redwood and Appian based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Process Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."ActiveBatch can automate predictable, repeatable processes very well. There is no real trick to what ActiveBatch does. ActiveBatch does exactly what you would expect a scheduling piece of software to do. It does it in a timely manner and does it with very little outside interference and fanfare. It runs when it is supposed to, and I don't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to double check it."
"The most valuable feature is its stability. We've only had very minor issues and generally they have happened because someone has applied a patch on a Windows operating system and it has caused some grief. We've actually been able to resolve those issues quite quickly with ActiveBatch. In all the time that I've had use of ActiveBatch, it hasn't failed completely once. Uptime is almost 100 percent."
"Approximately ~20 hours of manual effort have been reduced to ~5 hours with the help of ActiveBatch."
"ActiveBatch helped us automate and schedule routine tasks such as data backups, file transfers, database updates, and report generation, which frees IT staff to focus on other studies."
"There are hundreds of pre-built steps."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is the versatility of the prebuilt jobs."
"The REST API adapters and native integrations for integrating and orchestrating the software stack are very flexible."
"We are able to integrate it into multiple third-party tools like email, backup, tracking systems, SharePoint, Slack alerts, etc."
"There is a version coming out every six months with performance improvements."
"There is no need to worry about vulnerabilities in the system, because Appian built a secure system."
"Appian's most valuable features are the quick time it takes to develop for the market. It's easy and faster than other BPM solutions."
"Rapid development with low-code makes it easier to quickly get apps implemented and the time to break-even and ROI is much faster."
"Another advantage of this tool is its reports and records. You can maintain dashboards, layouts. If you with a Java solution, it takes six months time. If you use this tool, you can finish in one or one and a half months' time."
"The application life cycle is very clear. I started learning it and giving some workshops to my team. Creating the users and the building is very structured. Documentation is nice and it's easy to learn."
"The tool is very flexible."
"Recently, we added Appian Process Mining, Appian Portals, and now Appian RPA."
"It could be easier to provide dashboards on how many jobs are running at the same time; more monitoring."
"The user interface can be improved so that it is more appealing and accessible to new users."
"A nice thing to have would be the ability to comfortably pass variables from one job to another. That was one of the things that I found difficult."
"The product should be improved by providing a customization option."
"Whenever there is an overload, we are seeing crashes happening."
"There is this back and forth, where ActiveBatch says, "Your Oracle people should be dealing with this," and Oracle people say, "No, we don't know anything about ActiveBatch." Then, it all falls back on me as to what happens. Nobody is taking responsibility. This is the biggest failing for ActiveBatch."
"One thing I've noticed is that navigation can be difficult unless you are familiar with the structure that we have in place. If someone else had to look at our ActiveBatch console and find a job, they might not know where to find it."
"Between version 10 and version 12 there was a change. In version 10, they had each object in its own folder. But on the back end, they saw it at the root level. So when we moved over to version 12, everything was in the same area mixed together. It was incredibly difficult and we actually had to create our own folders and move those objects—like schedules, jobs, user accounts—and manually put those into folders, whereas the previous version already had it."
"We would like to see more reduced latency. We would like to make sure that the scale-out factor will be much more as workloads come in."
"I wouldn't say their response time is long, but it could be quicker."
"Appian has a few areas for improvement, which my organization raised with the Appian team. One is the Excel output which is limited to fifty columns when it should be up to two hundred or three hundred columns."
"Occasionally, certain pre-made modules may not be necessary and customers may desire greater customization options. Instead of being limited to pre-designed features, they may prefer a more flexible version that allows for greater customization."
"Sometimes, clients expect us to implement ERP using Appian, which is very complicated. In such cases, I don't believe that Appian is a good tool for that."
"The tool itself is pretty good, but the main area that we struggled with was the backend. The frontend development is really good, but the backend modeling can be streamlined a little bit. There are good integrations, but tying them through the data layer and then up into the frontend could be improved a little bit. It does read/write on the data source, and you can configure it to just write or just read, but there is a little bit of work involved."
"It would be useful if they could create an academy or forum in the future to help active users answer questions they have about the solution."
"We would like to have more granular control for interface styling."
ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked 6th in Process Automation with 35 reviews while Appian is ranked 3rd in Process Automation with 57 reviews. ActiveBatch by Redwood is rated 9.2, while Appian is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of ActiveBatch by Redwood writes "Flexible, easy to use, and offers good automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Appian writes "Low resource consumption, easy setup, and stable". ActiveBatch by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood, VisualCron and IBM Workload Automation, whereas Appian is most compared with Microsoft Power Apps, OutSystems, Camunda, ServiceNow and Pega BPM. See our ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Appian report.
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