We performed a comparison between Automic 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: Automic Workload Automation is highly appreciated for its strong performance, flexibility, and straightforward setup process. Fortra's JAMS receives accolades for its exceptional job tracking abilities and efficient automation functionalities.
For Automic Workload Automation, suggested enhancements include the adoption of industry standards and seamless automation processes, better language support, a more intuitive interface, enhanced web-based functionalities, and improved file transfer management. Fortra's JAMS could benefit from improvements in terms of user-friendliness, search functionality, available training resources, handling of exceptions, reporting and dashboard capabilities, source control features, documentation quality, access permissions management, resolution of connectivity issues, and notification system.
Service and Support: Automic Workload Automation's customer service has been met with varying feedback, with some expressing concerns regarding response times and challenges in contacting the support team. Fortra's JAMS customer service is commended for its responsiveness, expertise, and assistance.
Ease of Deployment: Users have found that the setup process for Automic Workload Automation can take anywhere from one to five days depending on the implementation and project size. Fortra's JAMS is known for its straightforward and easy setup, with users finding it quick and simple.
Pricing: Automic Workload Automation has a high setup cost compared to Fortra's JAMS. Users view JAMS as fair, affordable, and a worthwhile investment.
ROI: Automic Workload Automation does not offer concrete ROI figures, however, the absence of license renewal implies it is perceived as an added cost. Fortra's JAMS has demonstrated substantial ROI by saving time, enhancing productivity, and proving to be cost-effective.
Comparison Results: Fortra's JAMS is highly recommended over Automic Workload Automation. JAMS is praised for its simple setup, capability to handle job dependencies, and comprehensive monitoring and control features. Users find JAMS easy to use, with centralized management and helpful customer support. JAMS stands out with its intuitive interface, superior job dependency tracking, and more affordable pricing options.
"I like that Automic Workload Automation has many features compared to other products. There are a lot of good features, and architecture-wise there is a valuable client concept. The architecture and the multi-tenancy is a multi-client concept. That is also useful."
"Stability has been great. My team, we call ourselves "the invisibles" because things run so well that sometimes you almost feel like you have to try to break something to actually get acknowledged."
"A good piece of software is like a good referee. If it's doing good, you don't notice it. That's the good thing about Automic. We don't even notice that it's there a lot of the time. It's a very, very stable product."
"The most valuable features are the predefined templates for application-specific jobs and the access for different users."
"With the automation, we are able to provide background services. It is very economical and not possible to do manually."
"We use it with automation, getting more speed to solve business processes."
"It is scalable. We can grow it out."
"We have all of our payroll being done in the platform. There are a lot of different processes that need to be taken care of, and they all need to be linked together. When you put them into a workflow, and you know that you've built logic into that workflow, and you have alerting, it's something you can step back from. You don't have to be worried about every single piece of that puzzle. If something goes wrong, you have confidence that some alerting will let you know. It streamlines, it makes things go faster, less eyes on glass."
"We looked at other companies, like VisualCron, that were cheaper, but one of the main sticking points was the fact that they wouldn't have provided a central location for us to monitor across all servers. That was one of the biggest selling points of JAMS."
"The most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."
"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 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."
"The alerting in it is really targeted... you can set specific alerting so that if jobs in a given folder fail, certain people are alerted. You can also set security at the folder level, so that only people in those areas can go set them. That means that the alerting and security can be set at a very granular level."
"Being able to create a series of chained jobs, which are basically linked jobs is valuable."
"We also use the solution’s Interactive Agents. If we need to push something to our dealer portal, we can just drop a file in a folder and it goes. Running interactive tasks helps me users focus on business processes since I don’t have to take care of running the jobs manually."
"The search is sometimes a little bit slow."
"Content of file transfers cannot be searched by the system, but has to be done by the user interface. This is not good, as it has been erased often."
"The workflows should be clearer and more expressive."
"They need to refine the system basics instead of adding more features."
"They need to handle cross datacenter failover. They have a really good High Availability solution that works well within a single sysplex, but in our environment, since we have two main datacenter locations, we have two separate sysplex."
"Today, we use a rich client for this product. In the future, or for the next release, they will be using a web interface. This web interface is not as scalable as the rich client for us. The web client is not 100 percent programmed as we need it."
"We would like to have some features with the AWI with the founding technique, which cannot currently be delivered."
"An area for improvement would be SQL performance. While tracing SQL traffic, we noticed a lot of commands that cause contention/locks as well as forced waits. The efficiency of the SQL could be greatly improved (in some cases by simply replacing nested Selects and using NOLOCK hints)."
"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."
"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."
"With no programming experience, I find JAMS code-driven automation challenging due to the required PowerShell scripting."
"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."
"JAMS handles exceptions fairly well but there are some areas where it might improve a little bit. It has to do with being able to automatically handle exceptions, out-of-the-box, rather than having to code them."
"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."
"All my machines at work are Macs. JAMS client is a Windows-based thing. It is all built on .NET, which makes perfect sense. However, that means in order for me to access it, I need to connect to a VPN, then log onto one of our Azure VMs in order to access the JAMS client. This is fine, but if for some reason I am unable to do so, it would be nice to be able to have a web-based JAMS client that has all the exact same functionality in it. There are probably a whole bunch of disadvantages that you would get with that as well, but that is definitely something that would make life easier in a few cases."
"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."
Automic Workload Automation is ranked 7th in Workload Automation with 85 reviews while Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 27 reviews. Automic Workload Automation is rated 8.2, while Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Automic Workload Automation writes "A tool requiring an easy setup phase that provides its users with flexibility and flow chart visibility ". 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". Automic Workload Automation is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Dollar Universe Workload Automation and AppWorx Workload Automation, whereas Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, Tidal by Redwood, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs and VisualCron. See our Automic Workload Automation vs. Fortra's JAMS report.
See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.
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