We performed a comparison between Fortra's JAMS 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: Fortra's JAMS is notable for its effective tracking and visualization of job dependencies, along with its capability to establish warnings and notifications. It is also adept at managing intricate scheduling needs and offering comprehensive logging. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center demonstrates exceptional performance, provides graphical representation, and offers intuitive features.
Fortra's JAMS has areas for improvement in its user interface, search function, exception management, and reporting features. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center would benefit from cloud integration, improved analytics, and the addition of a mobile application for task monitoring.
Service and Support: Fortra's JAMS product has been highly praised by customers for its exceptional customer service, highlighting the support team's responsiveness, knowledgeability, and helpfulness in promptly resolving inquiries. Customers also appreciate the availability of comprehensive documentation and training resources. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center also receives positive feedback for its customer service. Users describe it as very good and excellent, emphasizing the support team's extensive knowledge and constant availability to assist.
Ease of Deployment: Fortra's JAMS received positive feedback for its initial setup, being described as straightforward and easy. Users found it simple to follow the instructions on the webpage and were able to deploy tasks quickly. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center's setup was considered average in terms of ease. Some users faced difficulties due to the complexity of the infrastructure.
Pricing: Fortra's JAMS offers an initial license cost in the first year, along with an annual maintenance cost. Users find this pricing to be fair and reasonable when compared to other options. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is considered more cost-effective than its competitors, receiving positive feedback regarding its pricing.
ROI: Fortra's JAMS has been praised for its value and cost-effectiveness, as it not only saves time and increases productivity but also offers visibility into job failures. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center has achieved substantial cost savings when compared to previous tools.
Comparison Results: Fortra's JAMS is the preferred product over Stonebranch Universal Automation Center. JAMS is praised for its straightforward and easy setup process, ability to handle dependencies between jobs, automation capabilities, support and interactive agents, code-driven automation feature, flexibility in scheduling, and extensive troubleshooting logging.
"The interface is good, and it's very easy to define and create jobs. If a job is not running or there is an error, the solution will send an email. That's all very good and very useful."
"Fortra's JAMS helped us centralize job management across our platforms and applications. This is critical because we schedule tasks across multiple applications and operating systems, using triggers and start dates to coordinate their execution."
"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 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."
"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."
"The product is easy to use."
"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."
"The planning capabilities are most valuable."
"The Universal Agent is the most valuable feature. Being agent-based and being able to go across multiple technology stacks, which is what our workflows do, Stonebranch gives us the ability to bridge those disparate technologies. It enables us to remove the dependency-gap with the agent so we know the status of the workflow at each step."
"We lean a lot on the multi-tenancy that they offer within the product, the ability to get other people to self-manage their estate, versus having a central team do all the scheduling."
"The tasks are incredibly capable, and as long as you name them with a nice, uniform naming convention, they are very useful. You can create some interesting workflows through various machines, or you can just have it kick off single tasks. All in all, I really like the Universal Task. You can do some mutually exclusive stuff, such as an "A not B" kind of thing. It has a lot of capabilities behind the scenes."
"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."
"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."
"The support is good from Stonebranch Universal Automation Center."
"The most valuable feature is the reliability of the agents, because we need them accessible and we need to run stuff. The agent technology and compatibility are top-notch."
"The ability to monitor tasks that are on the open-system side as well as our mainframe side gives us a one-window view of all our processes."
"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 product does not allow the users to cut and paste the job names from the screen."
"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 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."
"As an admin, I would like to have a web-based GUI instead of a client application that we have to install on our PCs."
"Sometimes the UI is not the most responsive I've ever used. But because it does its job, I don't complain."
"Fortra is getting much better with documentation and examples, but there is still room for improvement."
"If there were a softcover book on how to really take advantage of all of JAMS' tools, I would buy it. I do better with training books than online searching, so a book would be helpful."
"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."
"Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics."
"It can't handle negative written codes."
"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."
"It can be hard to manage the task monitor."
"The Universal Controller is decent for the money it costs... It needs some work to have full features, compared to other products that are out there, specifically IBM's Workload Scheduler."
"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."
"Occasionally, we have an agent that doesn't come back up after patching. That doesn't happen very often... It's really just a restart of the agent and it comes back up. But that might be one thing that could be improved."
Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 26 reviews while Stonebranch is ranked 16th in Workload Automation with 26 reviews. Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0, while Stonebranch is rated 8.8. 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 Stonebranch writes "Allowed us to develop workflows without having to train and develop very specialized skillsets". Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, Tidal by Redwood, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs 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 Fortra's JAMS vs. Stonebranch report.
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