We performed a comparison between ActiveBatch Workload Automation and Fortra's JAMS based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: ActiveBatch Workload Automation offers a versatile and user-friendly experience with prebuilt jobs, real-time monitoring, scalability, and support for a wide range of platforms. Fortra's JAMS stands out for its strong job dependency tracking, automation capabilities, warnings, support, and emphasis on code-driven automation.
ActiveBatch could enhance its managed file transfer, user interface, trigger reliability, documentation, support services, software setup process, customization options, and pricing. Fortra's JAMS would benefit from improvements in client interface, search functionality, training resources, documentation, UI responsiveness, integration capabilities, source control features, and access permission management.
Service and Support: ActiveBatch Workload Automation has received positive feedback regarding its customer service, specifically highlighting the helpful and reliable technical support. However, there are concerns regarding the service model and availability of the hotline. Fortra's JAMS is highly praised for its responsive and knowledgeable support team, promptness of responses, and availability of documentation and training resources. Customers express overall satisfaction with JAMS' customer service.
Ease of Deployment: The initial setup for ActiveBatch Workload Automation was straightforward, with a minor need for additional documentation during file import. Configuring it on different operating systems like Windows and Linux proved to be slightly complex. Fortra's JAMS had a simple and easy setup procedure, with users easily following instructions on the webpage and swiftly deploying new tasks. Although some users encountered confusion or difficulties, they were able to seek assistance from JAMS support.
Pricing: Users find the setup cost for ActiveBatch Workload Automation to be quick and simple, with reasonable and competitive pricing. Users consider the pricing of JAMS to be fair and affordable.
ROI: ActiveBatch Workload Automation has been highly regarded for its positive impact on net revenue. Fortra's JAMS is admired for its cost-effectiveness, time-saving features, and improved productivity, all achieved without requiring additional staff.
Comparison Results: ActiveBatch Workload Automation is the preferred choice when compared to Fortra's JAMS. Users praise ActiveBatch for its versatility, easy-to-use interface, prebuilt jobs, and user-friendly configuration. It stands out in scheduling, monitoring, and providing valuable insights.
"Since we are no longer waiting for an operator to see that a job is finished, we have changed our daily cycle from running in eight hours down to about five. We had a third shift-operator retire and that position was never refilled."
"One of the valuable features is the ability to trigger workflows, one after another, based on success, without having to worry about overlapping workflows. The ability to integrate our BI, analytics, and our data quality jobs is also valuable"
"The software offers real-time monitoring and reporting features that let IT teams keep tabs on the progress of their batch operations and workflows."
"It can connect to a number of third-party/legacy systems."
"For developers, it is easy to orchestrate the workflows and the integration has been very easy."
"Approximately ~20 hours of manual effort have been reduced to ~5 hours with the help of ActiveBatch."
"The user interface is really incredible."
"The REST API adapters and native integrations for integrating and orchestrating the software stack are very flexible."
"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."
"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."
"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 most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."
"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."
"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."
"I find the historical tracking feature of JAMS invaluable for reviewing past events."
"Our company is based on data. Everything we do is data-driven, so it has been very valuable having one place where we can process all of the data and do batch schedules with chunks of data."
"As more organizations are moving towards a cloud-based infrastructure, ActiveBatch could incorporate more capabilities that support popular cloud platforms, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud."
"The UI could potentially offer a more refined and user-friendly experience, fostering smoother interactions and facilitating easier navigation for users engaging with the application."
"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."
"The product should be improved by providing a customization option."
"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."
"It could be easier to provide dashboards on how many jobs are running at the same time; more monitoring."
"An area for improvement in ActiveBatch Workload Automation is its interface or GUI. It could be a little better. There isn't any additional feature I'd like to see in the tool, except for the GUI, everything looks good."
"They have some crucial design flaws within the console that still need to be worked out because it is not working exactly how we hoped to see it, e.g., just some minor things where when you hit the save button, then all of a sudden all your job's library items collapse. Then, in order to continue on with your testing, you have to open those back up. I have taken that to them, and they are like, "Yep. We know about it. We know we have some enhancements that need to be taken care of. We have more developers now." They are working towards taking the minor things that annoy us, resolving them, and getting them fixed."
"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."
"Sometimes the UI is not the most responsive I've ever used. But because it does its job, I don't complain."
"It does validations when you try to delete an object and if there are any dependencies in place, the deletion process will not proceed... there is no information provided as to what it was that caused the validation to fail... it's quite a tedious process to find which object is getting in the way."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The documentation is not super... It's not as quick and slick as I'd like it to be."
"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."
ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked 4th in Workload Automation with 35 reviews while Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 27 reviews. ActiveBatch by Redwood is rated 9.2, while Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of ActiveBatch by Redwood writes "Flexible, easy to use, and offers good automation". On the other hand, 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". ActiveBatch by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood, VisualCron and IBM Workload Automation, whereas Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, Tidal by Redwood, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs and VisualCron. See our ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Fortra's JAMS report.
See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.
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