We performed a comparison between ActiveBatch by Redwood 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."The user interface is really incredible."
"Approximately ~20 hours of manual effort have been reduced to ~5 hours with the help of ActiveBatch."
"From a scheduling point of view, it is pretty good."
"Error Handling is one of the best standout features of ActiveBatch."
"ActiveBatch helped us automate and schedule routine tasks such as data backups, file transfers, database updates, and report generation, which frees IT staff to focus on other studies."
"Using this tool, if there are any huge failures, we immediately get an email notification, and the proper team will be informed, at which time they can act accordingly."
"We are able to integrate it into multiple third-party tools like email, backup, tracking systems, SharePoint, Slack alerts, etc."
"One of the valuable features is the ability to trigger workflows, one after another, based on success, without having to worry about overlapping workflows. The ability to integrate our BI, analytics, and our data quality jobs is also valuable"
"It helped us reduce manual steps."
"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."
"The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%."
"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."
"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."
"We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works."
"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."
"It has improved our organization with more automation within the business departments and less administration and development in the IT department. Usually, as the IT department, we are the bottleneck for many requirements within the business. With this tool, the business departments are able to perform many task themselves."
"It could be easier to provide dashboards on how many jobs are running at the same time; more monitoring."
"The interface is not that user-friendly and is a little tough to navigate."
"There are some issues with this version and finding the jobs that it ran. If you're looking at 1,000 different jobs, it shows based on the execution time, not necessarily the run time. So, if there was a constraint waiting, you may be looking for it in the wrong time frame. Plus, with thousands of jobs showing up and the way it pages output jobs, sometimes you end up with multiple pages on the screen, then you have to go through to find the specific job you're looking for. On the opposite side, you can limit the daily activity screen to show only jobs that failed or jobs currently running, which will shrink that back down. However, we have operators who are looking at the whole nightly cycle to make sure everything is there and make sure nothing got blocked or was waiting. Sometimes, they have a hard time finding every item within the list."
"We have faced a couple of issues where we were supposed to log a defect with ActiveBatch. That said, the Active batch Vendor Support is very responsive and reliable."
"The documentation is very limited, and it can be improved."
"One thing I've noticed is that navigation can be difficult unless you are familiar with the structure that we have in place. If someone else had to look at our ActiveBatch console and find a job, they might not know where to find it."
"The help center and documentation are not that helpful."
"ActiveBatch is a little complex."
"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."
"I want to improve the UI in VisualCron, as it's not as user-friendly, particularly when setting up the task scheduler. If you're familiar with the tool, then no problem, but if not, you'll have a problem typing text because sometimes, the cursor points to other places, so there's an issue with text box alignment in VisualCron. That was painful for me when I was just a VisualCron novice, but when you become used to it, there won't be a problem."
"The documentation is a bit weak."
"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."
"VisualCron is software, and you will experience performance degradation when you scale up. VisualCron takes too much memory or CPU power. We have to increase the hardware resources of a specific server or system."
"I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run."
"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."
"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."
ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked 4th in Workload Automation with 35 reviews while VisualCron is ranked 14th in Workload Automation with 11 reviews. ActiveBatch by Redwood is rated 9.2, while VisualCron is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of ActiveBatch by Redwood writes "Flexible, easy to use, and offers good automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VisualCron writes "It's user-friendly, and I didn't need long to understand the process". ActiveBatch by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood, Redwood RunMyJobs and IBM Workload Automation, whereas VisualCron is most compared with Microsoft Power Automate, Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Stonebranch and MOVEit. See our ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. VisualCron report.
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