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.
"As far as centralization goes it's nice because we can see all these processes that are tied to this larger process. The commissions, FTP processing, the reporting, the file moves to the business users — all that is right there. It's very easy to read. It's easy to tie it together, visually, and see where each of these steps fits into the bigger picture."
"It is very useful in sending confidential files through FPP servers."
"Easy to configure and simple to develop new features."
"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 REST API adapters and native integrations for integrating and orchestrating the software stack are very flexible."
"Using this tool, if there are any huge failures, we immediately get an email notification, and the proper team will be informed, at which time they can act accordingly."
"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 nice thing about ActiveBatch is once we have created a specific job that can be easily be replicated to another job, then minimal changes will have to be made. This makes things nice. Reduction of coding is substantial in a lot of cases. The replication of one job to another is just doing a few minor tweaks and rolling it into production. This decreases our development costs substantially."
"JAMS is easier to use and cheaper than our previous solution. The installation is more straightforward, and JAMS has a graphical user interface, so it's more accessible."
"The fact that we no longer need to use Excel spreadsheets is huge. Before JAMS, every group was keeping track of their own batch jobs. Nobody really knew what the other jobs were. So, if jobs failed, other groups wouldn't necessarily know. With JAMS, everything is done through a single scheduler. You can choose who to notify."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."
"The ability to sequence jobs is excellent; it means we don't have to schedule them individually, and if one fails, it doesn't unwind the entire workflow."
"I didn't know about JAMS because I don't have a person with any challenges with the purchase administration. The feature or the user interface is user-friendly because of the readable icons or very descriptive icons. Though I'm a beginning user of JAMS, I had no issues using it."
"While I appreciate the other features, the agent stands out for its ease of installation and configuration for JAMS monitoring."
"I like how you can add new execution methods on the fly. It isn't overly complex to add Python script support to an execution method in the JAMS system. The scheduling is excellent. You can schedule a maintenance window and take that resource unit out of everything. It halts all of the jobs."
"Some of the advanced features in the user interface are a bit confusing even after referring to the documents."
"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."
"Providing some detailed training materials could be very helpful for new users who have very limited technical information about the tool."
"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."
"ActiveBatch UI could use a little more help, and video tutorials would be greatly appreciated for user guides."
"The documentation is very limited, and it can be improved."
"ActiveBatch is a little complex."
"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."
"I'm not sure if they have fixed it in a newer version, but there is no global search in the version I have. If I have multiple sub-folders that are named for business units, like HR or IT, and I have to search for a job, I cannot search from the top. I have to go to the HR folder to search for a particular job, or to the IT folder."
"The search capability needs to be improved because when we try to search for a job, it's hard to do."
"The only thing that they could improve on is the fact that they don't have a browser version of JAMS. They've got all the bits and pieces there if you want to build your own web version of it. It does come with a web client, but it's pretty clunky. They could improve on that."
"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."
"JAMS lacks source control features. Our previous solution had job control language, but JAMS doesn't. When migrating between versions, JAMS doesn't migrate all the data, like job change history, etc. Also, the scheduler doesn't have a way to make jobs invisible, so you can temporarily turn a job off if you decide not to run it today."
"The product does not allow the users to cut and paste the job names from the screen."
"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."
"The ACL or access permission area needs to be improved. When it comes to defining and providing security permissions, it's a bit confusing if you are new to JAMS. JAMS needs to improve the features for security access or permissions."
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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