We performed a comparison between ActiveBatch by Redwood and webMethods ActiveTransfer based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Managed File Transfer (MFT) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."ActiveBatch's Self-Service Portal allows our business units to run and monitor their own workloads. They can simply run and review the logs, but they can't modify them. It increases their productivity because they are able to take care of things on their own. It saves us time from having to rerun the scripts, because the business units can just go ahead and log in and and rerun it themselves."
"Error Handling is one of the best standout features of ActiveBatch."
"The product offers a centralized platform for managing activities across many environments, applications, etc."
"Easy to configure and simple to develop new features."
"It is very useful in sending confidential files through FPP servers."
"We leverage the solution's native integrations regularly. We have to get files from a remote server outside the organization, and even send things outside the organization. We use a lot of its file manipulation and SFTP functionality for contacting remote servers."
"From a scheduling point of view, it is pretty good."
"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."
"The core product can be used not only for automatic file transfers between applications, but also as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)."
"ActiveTransfer lets us maintain the file in the staging area before we transfer it. After that, we can remove the file to make sure that the reconciliation process is done. Sometimes we will zip and unzip the files, but if we have a GKB file, we often ignore it."
"Setting up the software was hard."
"There are some issues with this version and finding the jobs that it ran. If you're looking at 1,000 different jobs, it shows based on the execution time, not necessarily the run time. So, if there was a constraint waiting, you may be looking for it in the wrong time frame. Plus, with thousands of jobs showing up and the way it pages output jobs, sometimes you end up with multiple pages on the screen, then you have to go through to find the specific job you're looking for. On the opposite side, you can limit the daily activity screen to show only jobs that failed or jobs currently running, which will shrink that back down. However, we have operators who are looking at the whole nightly cycle to make sure everything is there and make sure nothing got blocked or was waiting. Sometimes, they have a hard time finding every item within the list."
"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."
"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."
"The thing I've noticed the most is the Help function. It's very difficult, at times, to find examples of how to do something. The Help function will explain what the tool does, but we're not a Windows shop at the data warehouse. Our data warehouse jobs actually run on Linux servers. Finding things for Linux-based solutions is not as easy as it is for Windows-based solutions. I would like to see more examples, and more non-Windows examples as well, in the Help."
"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."
"A cloud option is not provided as a free feature, making it a costly solution for smaller organizations."
"It does have a little bit of a learning curve because it is fairly complex. You have to learn how it does things. I don't know if it's any worse than any other tool would be, just because of the nature of what it does... the learning curve is the hardest part."
"Some things could be improved, especially how ActiveTransfer handles third-party file transfers. It would be nice to have a native file-watching mechanism for when you're scheduling jobs with a third-party scheduler. Currently, we are using an outside file watcher solution to check the files before the file transfer. It checks the location to see if the file is there. If the file is there, it will prepare it for transfer. If the file isn't available, it will send an email it can create a ticket send it now. We recommended adding this file watcher mechanism."
"I have noticed that webMethods ActiveTransfer has had problems when handling large files. For example, when we receive (and perform operations on) files that are larger than about 16 MB, the software starts losing performance."
ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked 5th in Managed File Transfer (MFT) with 35 reviews while webMethods ActiveTransfer is ranked 17th in Managed File Transfer (MFT) with 2 reviews. ActiveBatch by Redwood is rated 9.2, while webMethods ActiveTransfer is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of ActiveBatch by Redwood writes "Flexible, easy to use, and offers good automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of webMethods ActiveTransfer writes "It lets us maintain the file in the staging area before we transfer it". ActiveBatch by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood, VisualCron and IBM Workload Automation, whereas webMethods ActiveTransfer is most compared with Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT, Axway AMPLIFY Managed File Transfer, BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer and Fortra's Globalscape Managed File Transfer. See our ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. webMethods ActiveTransfer report.
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