Fortra's JAMS vs VisualCron comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Fortra's JAMS and VisualCron based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Workload Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Fortra's JAMS vs. VisualCron Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The overall product is fantastic. I love it. It has been a fantastic, solid product. If I have one tiny bit of a problem with it, the support team gets in touch with me right away. I don't know if I've had another service that has been as fantastic as the JAMS support team.""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.""The code-driven automation for more complex scheduling requirements frees up time because it's really easy to use... It's almost like a stand-alone software that we can't live without.""It has definitely drastically improved our capabilities to scale our automation. Before JAMS, there were a lot of manual processes. We had a couple of operators who spent all day doing that. A lot of the time with human intervention and human processes, it is as good as the person who may be following a procedure and human error is a big problem.""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 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.""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."

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"I love VisualCron because we previously spent a lot of time writing Power switches to connect to SQL Server. VisualCron makes it easier to execute services or connect to FileZilla by only adding the credentials to the master credentials stored in the solution.""We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works.""'ve only had a few cases where I've had to request support in the past 12 years of use, but the support response time and resolution were was extremely quick.""What I found most beneficial from VisualCron is that you can directly connect it with different databases, user accounts, and credentials. You can run queries from one machine to another using the credentials, unlike PowerShell, that's run by the machine itself. With VisualCron, you can directly ask other machines and run requests through user credentials. Suppose you have an AWS or Azure environment. In that case, you can maintain the connection between on-premises and cloud-based machines, which is the type of setup in the organization I'm working for. You can directly call some of the services via VisualCron on your local on-premises machine, and I found that an excellent feature of the tool.""What I like about VisualCron is that like its name, it's a very visual tool. In my previous company, there were a lot of scripts for all kinds of services, and through VisualCron, you get to group all flows and get a nice visual overview. VisualCron also has an alerting feature, so you receive alerts from it. VisualCron makes everything clearer and easier to maintain. Every other solution that I was looking for almost always needed a programmer, but with VisualCron, you can do what you need to do without programming skills, so this is another valuable feature of the tool.""VisualCron is a very powerful program to automate different steps in your business processes. We use it to automate replacing files and inform departments about the replacement.""It helped us reduce manual steps.""The ability to clone jobs to shorten the time it takes to implement a process has been invaluable, but its flexibility also gives us the ability to create a job that can handle a multifaceted process with a complex workflow."

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Cons
"Sometimes the UI is not the most responsive I've ever used. But because it does its job, I don't complain.""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.""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 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 tabs in the JAMS file transfer could be clearer. It would help us demonstrate to our client that JAMS not only automates jobs but also does fast transfers, and it's an alternative that supports and filters different kinds of platforms. Filtering file transfers will be highly beneficial to them.""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.""It is important to receive notifications if a charged job fails and SQL is halted. JAMS does not provide halted notifications by default, which is a critical feature that needs to be added.""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."

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"An area for improvement in VisualCron is its cluttered interface. It isn't always easy to find all functionalities, so what VisualCron needs is a user interface expert who can improve the interface. There's a learning curve in terms of finding what you need from the interface of VisualCron. The technical support for VisualCron also needs improvement in terms of response time. Currently, there's no live support or hotline you can call to get quick answers, so this is what I'd like to see in the next version of VisualCron. A less cluttered and more streamlined interface, where you don't need to hunt for some of the features, is also what I'd like to see in the next VisualCron update.""VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve.""VisualCron seems to operate like an efficient machine when it comes to improvements and enhancements and new features. I always appreciate the quick response I get when bringing up an issue or coming up with suggestions. I've mentioned before that it would be great to see a move away from SQLCE and XML configuration files.""The only problem I face when I use the tool is that it doesn't contain much documentation or it doesn't have many video tutorials on its features.""I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run.""There are some conditions in the mail trigger, but you can only use them as an "AND" condition, not as an "OR" condition. This is an improvement that could be useful. For example, some people put "invoice" in the subject and others put "invoice" in the body. If I want to make a trigger for everybody whose sending invoices, I have to make two jobs for this now.""Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way.""The error timeout and info could be better. When making web request calls, it will time out sometimes and we won't get any useful info out of the error response."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It was $10,000 for the first year. Then, there is a maintenance cost for licensing every year that we get billed $5,000 for every year."
  • "JAMS is close to the lower end of the pricing models for enterprise scheduling solutions. They are much cheaper than Control-M, as well as some other products that I've used. I also don't know of another solution where you can actually get true, unlimited licensing, where you can have as many instances and as many agents as you want."
  • "This is a good product at a fair price."
  • "It's certainly a lot cheaper than Tivoli and Control-M. In comparison to them, you get a lot more bang for your buck. You get pretty much the whole functionality and more, in some cases, when compared to Control-M, but at a fraction of the price."
  • "It's expensive, to be honest, but it does the job."
  • "The pricing is very fair. We have seen very minimal to no price increases over the years. We are not banging down the door of support all the time either. I would imagine if we were a company that submitted a dozen support tickets a week for the last nine years, then it might be a little different because we would be eating up everybody's time. However, for what we get out of it, the pricing is extremely fair. Back when we were originally looking and brought in JAMS, we were looking at a couple of the other competitive products that were in this space, but the pricing from JAMS was far and away better than what the other competitors could offer for the same functionality."
  • "Our licensing is pretty cheap because we have a state solution. So, we pay only $1,000 a year."
  • "I haven't been involved in the financial side for several years, but we buy one host and unlimited agents, and we get a reasonable price for that. We're happy with the amount we pay and the scalability it provides."
  • More Fortra's JAMS Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "ROI is 95 percent."
  • "We are fine with a rather cheap setup. Licensing with VisualCron is fair. You have a simple one-year licence in different sizes. There isn't a licensing jungle with hundreds of options and opt-ins."
  • "The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers."
  • "ROI is one month."
  • "VisualCron is correctly priced because it wasn't very cheap, and it wasn't overly expensive, so the price for it was set correctly. When my previous company bought VisualCron, it was €800 per server per year. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the pricing for VisualCron a five because it was just right. The tool was affordable, and it has one of the most competitive pricing in the market."
  • More VisualCron Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:JAMS is priced competitively compared to similar solutions and offers flexible licensing options to cater to user needs.
    Top Answer:I am also supporting and reselling Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT and am interested in Genesys' file-transfer solution of Genesys. Compared to GoAnywhere, Genesys has limited options. The tabs in the JAMS… more »
    Top Answer:The most valuable feature of VisualCron is its ability to schedule interactive jobs so that you can have interdependencies within the job and interdependencies of a job on another job, and so on.
    Top Answer:The organization is paying for the VisualCron license, so I'm not aware of the current pricing for the tool.
    Top Answer:VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve.
    Ranking
    5th
    out of 49 in Workload Automation
    Views
    2,178
    Comparisons
    712
    Reviews
    19
    Average Words per Review
    1,479
    Rating
    9.2
    14th
    out of 49 in Workload Automation
    Views
    869
    Comparisons
    501
    Reviews
    5
    Average Words per Review
    750
    Rating
    8.0
    Comparisons
    Learn More
    Overview

    JAMS is an enterprise job scheduling and workload automation solution that manages IT processes – from simple batch processes and scripts, to cross-platform workflows that integrate jobs running on multiple servers and business applications. JAMS enables you to define, schedule, execute and monitor jobs from a single centralized console.

    JAMS can automate jobs on any platform - Windows, Linux, UNIX, IBM i, zOS, and OpenVMS and includes native application integrations to run jobs specific to databases, BI tools, and ERP systems. Its extensive automation features enable you to run jobs on any schedule, as well as trigger off the completion of other events. JAMS centrally monitors the status of all jobs, provides notifications of failure (or success), and maintains a detailed audit trail and log of every execution.

    JAMS helps enterprises eliminate the slack, security risks, and lack of visibility associated with trying to automate critical business processes with a jumble of homegrown, single-platform scheduling tools and scripts. Once jobs are centrally managed in JAMS, IT teams can rest assured that JAMS is managing the cross-platform workflows and delivering measurable results to the business.

    A Key Part of Fortra (the new face of HelpSystems) JAMS is proud to be part of Fortra’s comprehensive portfolio. Fortra simplifies today’s complex business landscape by bringing complementary products together to solve problems in innovative ways. These integrated, scalable solutions address the many challenges you face in streamlining your operations. With the help of JAMS Enterprise Job Scheduler and other solutions, Fortra is your relentless ally, here for you every step of the way on your automation journey.

    VisualCron combines many features into one product. Through scheduling you can set your Jobs to run on a specific time or event. The Tasks in each Job automate scripts and eliminate human errors. Through various Tasks you can integrate different systems through file transfer and conversion.

    Sample Customers
    Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital
    7 Eleven, ABB Sécheron SA, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Amazon Europe Core, Apple, Assa Abloy, Aston Martin, Banco Santander, BMW (Australia)
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm35%
    Comms Service Provider13%
    Government13%
    Computer Software Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Manufacturing Company14%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Healthcare Company9%
    REVIEWERS
    Pharma/Biotech Company14%
    Recruiting/Hr Firm14%
    University14%
    Non Profit14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Computer Software Company17%
    Healthcare Company7%
    Insurance Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business41%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise37%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise64%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise56%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise57%
    Buyer's Guide
    Fortra's JAMS vs. VisualCron
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Fortra's JAMS vs. VisualCron and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 26 reviews while VisualCron is ranked 14th in Workload Automation with 10 reviews. Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0, while VisualCron 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 VisualCron writes "It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process". Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, Tidal by Redwood, AutoSys Workload Automation and Redwood RunMyJobs, whereas VisualCron is most compared with Microsoft Power Automate, Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation and UiPath. See our Fortra's JAMS vs. VisualCron report.

    See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.

    We monitor all Workload Automation reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.