We performed a comparison between Rocket Zena and Stonebranch Universal Automation Center based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Rocket Zena is highly regarded for its simplicity, intuitive interface, and diagram capability. It provides Linux configuration, Docker-based deployment, versatile job scheduling, and a browser-based client. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center receives high acclaim for its efficiency, visual presentation, and capability to establish job dependencies. It boasts a graphical interface, a valuable task monitor, and reliable scalability.
Rocket Zena could improve its visibility into connections between applications, monitoring of agents, UI loading time, intuitive UI, installation process, task stacking, documentation, distributed platform availability, and notification feature. Stonebranch could benefit from cloud availability, enhanced analytics, improved task monitor, mobile app, and collaboration with the vendor for future releases.
Service and Support: Rocket Zena's customer service and support is commended for their quick responses and willingness to understand and address problems. However, obtaining higher-level support may be time-consuming. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center's customer service is highly praised, with users finding the support to be very good, excellent, and always available. The support team is knowledgeable and resolves issues efficiently.
Ease of Deployment: Users had mixed experiences with the initial setup of Rocket Zena, with some finding it easier and others finding it complex. The integration with SAP was particularly challenging. The initial setup of Stonebranch Universal Automation Center was rated as average in terms of ease, however, the complexity of the infrastructure may lead to some difficulties.
Pricing: Rocket Zena is highly regarded for its cost-effectiveness and affordability, especially for smaller businesses. It is applauded for having a lower setup cost compared to Control-M. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is noted for being cheaper than its rivals and has received positive feedback on its pricing.
ROI: Rocket Zena has demonstrated its value by saving time and enhancing accuracy, resulting in a positive return on investment and reduced stress. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center has achieved notable cost savings compared to the previous tool.
Comparison Results: Rocket Zena is the preferred product over Stonebranch Universal Automation Center. Users appreciate Rocket Zena's ease of use, user-friendly interface, and efficient management of complex operational workflows. It offers cross-platform job scheduling, a web-based client, and a whiteboard interface for task setup and troubleshooting.
"You can click Ctrl-G and bring a diagram view. You're able to view in a diagram format. The view that it provides is easy, and you can move to the left, up, or down. You can double-click on a certain process. It'll drill into that process and all of its underlying components. You can double-click on an arrow or a component, and it'll bring up a screen that'll have all the variables that are assigned to that particular piece, as well as the values at run time. So, the diagram feature of it, at least for me, is pretty valuable."
"Its FTP feature is very good, as is scheduling any process or task with the Zena client. I have found it to be very helpful. If a task fails, it gives you a prompt."
"From a Linux configuration point of view, Rocket Zena is straightforward. It's fairly easy to set up the server and agents once you know how to do it."
"The most valuable feature is the FTP file transfer."
"I have found the scheduling feature the most valuable. I can map dependencies by using ASG-Zena. It gives a nice, quick visualization as to where things are."
"I have used other tools with similar capabilities; it's the ease of use."
"In the latest upgrade, Zena added a web-based client. The more I use it, the more I like it. It's an excellent interface. They do a good job of steadily improving the solution to make it more useful."
"I like the whole product, but specifically, I like the license part. It's very easy to acquire a license for this product."
"When it comes to agent technology and compatibility with other vendors, from a platform perspective it was the one vendor that fit all the platforms that we have, from your old platforms - mainframe, NSK, IBM i - to the new ones, going into cloud and container"
"The features are upgraded, and every six months they're releasing patches."
"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."
"I like the dashboard and the various workflows."
"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."
"We like that it has GUI and is not just a command line."
"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."
"The support is good from Stonebranch Universal Automation Center."
"The UI is not intuitive, and it would be nice if there was a web interface."
"Another one that is probably a little bit bigger for me is that when there is an issue or there's an error, it writes on a different screen. I have to find the actual process name and go to a different screen to view the alert that got generated. On that screen, everyone's processes, not just the processes of the folks in my department, are thrown. It takes me a while to find the actual error so that I could go in there and look at the alert. It could be because of the way it was set up, but at least for me, it isn't too intuitive."
"In the web interface, it stacks the tasks across the top, and they accumulate until you close or clean those out. That seems a little cumbersome. You must right-click and close all tabs constantly to keep the console clean and manage your views."
"The scheduling mapping is a little disjointed. There is no wizard-type approach. There are a lot of different things that you have to do in completely different areas. They could probably add the functionality for creating all components of a mapping or an OPA schedule. The component creation could be done collectively rather than through individual components."
"One area where it could be improved is communication between the different servers. Sometimes there are processes that have already been completed but we get a status notification that they're still active."
"Rocket Zena is a mainframe-based job scheduler. I would like it to be more open so that we can use it on a distributed platform."
"The documentation has room for improvement."
"In the next release, I would like to have an alert feature to indicate when an agent is down. Rocket Zena is not capable of sending alerts that the agent is down. As of now, you have manually monitor to see when the agent is down."
"It can be hard to manage the task monitor."
"There is a component called the OMS, which is the message broker. We rely on infrastructure, resiliency, and availability for that piece. If that could change to be highly available just as a software component, so that we don't have to provide the high-available storage, etc. for it, that would be a plus. It would just be cheaper to run."
"It's not available on the cloud, so they should take that due to safety, security, and scalability."
"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."
"There is room for improvement with its connectivity with the Microsoft SRS system. It is very weak. They keep telling us it works with it, and technically it does, but it does not provide a lot of visibility. We have lost a lot of visibility migrating to Stonebranch, compared with just running tasks on the SRS server. That's really about the only thing that is a sore point for us."
"It can't handle negative written codes."
"I would rate Stonebranch somewhere in the middle for ease of setup. It wasn't too straightforward for us because our infrastructure is complex."
"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."
Rocket Zena is ranked 12th in Workload Automation with 9 reviews while Stonebranch is ranked 16th in Workload Automation with 26 reviews. Rocket Zena is rated 8.4, while Stonebranch is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Rocket Zena writes "A continuously evolving, stable solution, with responsive support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Stonebranch writes "Allowed us to develop workflows without having to train and develop very specialized skillsets". Rocket Zena is most compared with Control-M, Rocket Zeke, IBM Workload Automation, AutoSys Workload Automation and ActiveBatch by Redwood, whereas Stonebranch is most compared with AutoSys Workload Automation, Control-M, Redwood RunMyJobs, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and IBM Workload Automation. See our Rocket Zena vs. Stonebranch report.
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