Our latest evaluation compares Fortra's JAMS and Tidal by Redwood, two prominent Workload Automation Solutions, drawing insights from user reviews on PeerSpot.
Tidal offers robust workload management, scalable, event-driven scheduling, and graphical views regarding valuable features. Its integration capabilities with systems like ServiceNow and JD Edwards are particularly notable. JAMS is recognized for its effective tracking and visualization of job dependencies, user interface, and PowerShell capabilities.
However, both products have areas for improvement. Tidal could benefit from a more intuitive GUI, simplified licensing, AI and enhanced reporting capabilities. JAMS needs more precise documentation, especially for custom execution methods and better integration transparency. A global search feature and a fully web-based client are also suggested enhancements.
Looking at pricing and ROI, Tidal is praised for its predictable costs and value for functionality despite the complexity of licensing and adapters. JAMS is seen as reasonably priced with scalable licensing options, offering significant time and cost savings.
Ease of deployment is a highlight for both; Tidal is commended for its straightforward setup, involving minimal maintenance and a learning curve of just one to two hours, resulting in a three-week deployment timeframe. Similarly, JAMS is appreciated for its easy installation and configuration. Users could easily follow webpage instructions, with setup completed within hours and a native installation of SQL Express being a convenient feature.
Tidal users shared that customer service is responsive and knowledgeable. JAMS receives accolades for its quick, effective support and various communication channels.
In summary, both Tidal and JAMS are robust workload automation solutions with distinct strengths and minor areas for improvement. Their ease of deployment, feature sets, pricing, ROI, and customer service are well-regarded, making them competitive choices in their domain.
"The scheduling and execution of jobs are the most valuable features. The scheduling is important because if there is a task we want to execute at 4:00 AM, there's no way we will have someone who can manually run the job. In addition, we execute 100 to 200 jobs per day, and manual intervention is not an option."
"While I appreciate the other features, the agent stands out for its ease of installation and configuration for JAMS monitoring."
"The most valuable feature for us is that it's DR-ready. With respect to disaster recovery, it has the built-in capability for failover to our DR site. If all of the required ports are open, it can be done seamlessly."
"The product is easy to use."
"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."
"Being able to create a series of chained jobs, which are basically linked jobs is valuable."
"The most valuable feature is the easily accessible data in the database because we run a lot of SQL scripting against the database."
"One of the things I like the most, as a SQL DBA, is the fact that we can manipulate tables in the background. Also, the fact that you can have your own views and work with the product the way it fits best is a very helpful feature."
"The most valuable feature is the job scheduler, where you can schedule thousands of jobs to execute at specific times."
"It's the most efficient tool in doing repetitive tasks and saves a lot of time with minimum possibility of error."
"It is intended to enable large-scale automation environments, making it appropriate for companies with complicated processes and big data volumes."
"We have to run about 12,000 jobs every day and the majority of them need to be launched from our ERP, JD Edwards. The native compatibility of the Tidal platform with JD Edwards dovetails with our greatest need. It's directly connected to the heart of our IT system. We couldn't work without it."
"By leveraging machine learning algorithms, Tidal Automation can use this data to optimize turbine settings and improve overall efficiency and performance."
"Tidal Automation software provides real-time monitoring and alerts, allowing users to track job progress and identify potential issues before they cause delays or errors."
"It's easy to use and easy to administer, and it's very flexible."
"The first, big thing that we got out of using Tidal Workload Automation was having a centralized view of the status of all of our batch processes across all these systems... We can look into the schedule at any given time and see if things are running on track or if they are falling behind. We can also see if something failed."
"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."
"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."
"Improvements could be made in the service desk's knowledge and communication skills among engineers to better address customer needs and ensure issues are fully resolved."
"The search capability needs to be improved because when we try to search for a job, it's hard to do."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The product’s UI is outdated. They should work on this particular area."
"Tidal Automation could be further integrated with other systems used in the operation of tidal energy systems, such as weather forecasting tools, energy management systems, or asset management software."
"Some users have complained that the initial setup process is complicated and time-consuming, while others have suggested that the software could offer more freedom in customizing processes."
"With the client, we have had certain issues. The user interface for Tidal is a little slow. A lot of people would love this tool if they had a faster user interface. The drill-down functionality should be much quicker than what it is pulling out now. If I fill out some data, then it takes awhile to get that data back onto the screen. It's not as fast as we were expecting."
"Setting up the initial product was a little hard."
"When we patch to the next version, there is often a little thing that breaks. It has rarely been a big deal, but I always seem to have to follow up on one tiny issue. It would help if they had some better QA testing of their patches."
"One of the weaknesses of the product is, when something happens, it's difficult to find out the root cause. There are a lot of logs you can take a look at in Tidal. Sometimes, they are useful, but other times, they're not. That is mostly relegated to the administrative team. Users for the most part don't see that and don't know anything about that. They just know they have a problem, then it's up to the administrative team to see what happened and figure out the problem."
"For the most part, the drill-down and the logging are really good. But if we take an Informatica job, for example: We have the ability, and the operators have the ability, to actually drill down and see, at a session level, where the failure is. There is, unfortunately, no way to extract that into an actual output email or failure email. It's not that that information is not available, but extracting it into an email would be a nice-to-have."
Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 27 reviews while Tidal by Redwood is ranked 2nd in Workload Automation with 37 reviews. Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0, while Tidal by Redwood is rated 9.0. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tidal by Redwood writes "Great visibility with a single pane of glass and a low learning curve". Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs and VisualCron, whereas Tidal by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs and OpCon. See our Fortra's JAMS vs. Tidal by Redwood report.
See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.
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