OpCon vs Tidal by Redwood comparison

SMA Technologies and Tidal Software by Redwood are both solutions in the Workload Automation category. SMA Technologies is ranked #7 with an average rating of 9.1, while Tidal Software by Redwood is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.5. SMA Technologies holds a 1.7% mindshare in WA, compared to Tidal Software by Redwood’s 4.7% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of SMA Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Tidal Software by Redwood users who would recommend it.

OpCon

Read 59 OpCon reviews

1,883 Views
1,695 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Tidal by Redwood

Read 37 Tidal by Redwood reviews

2,191 Views
2,169 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

OpCon

Tidal by Redwood

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

Tidal by Redwood and OpCon compete in the workload automation category. Tidal has the upper hand in enterprise-wide scheduling, while OpCon is particularly effective in financial services due to its advanced automation capabilities.

Features: Tidal by Redwood excels with its holiday-aware job scheduling, segmenting user permissions, and recent client upgrades that enhance security and satisfaction. It offers robust calendaring and cross-platform capabilities to maintain productivity. OpCon shines in automation, especially for financial operations, handling error management effectively and simplifying complex processes with its self-service and integration features.

Room for Improvement: Tidal could improve its reporting capabilities and integration for monitoring long-running jobs. Users mention a learning curve for onboarding and suggest aligning user experience with modern standards. OpCon could enhance its visual interface and improve its entry-level documentation. Optimizations within its graphical interface are also recommended to improve user interaction and handle complex task sequences more efficiently.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tidal operates primarily on on-premise models with partial support for hybrid and cloud environments. It emphasizes responsive customer service post-separation from Cisco. OpCon, also on-premise, is noted for a helpful and knowledgeable support team. Both prioritize extensive after-deployment support, with Tidal focusing on video and technical documentation for better user transition.

Pricing and ROI: Tidal offers a flexible licensing model that is predictable, providing significant ROI through operational savings in scheduling. OpCon, despite a higher initial cost, offers long-term cost benefits by potentially replacing full-time staff with automation solutions, particularly in financial services. Clients of both solutions should consider additional feature costs beyond base deployments, with Tidal praised for transparency in pricing and OpCon delivering ROI through detailed analytics and automation efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed OpCon vs. Tidal by Redwood Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

OpCon vs. Tidal by Redwood

September 2025

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Helped 871,688 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

OpCon

Ranking in Workload Automation

7th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Tidal by Redwood

Ranking in Workload Automation

13th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of OpCon is 1.7%, down from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tidal by Redwood is 4.7%, up from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Workload Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
OpCon	1.7%
Tidal by Redwood	4.7%
Other	93.6%

Workload Automation

Featured Reviews

Jose Rivera Hernandez

Senior VP of Technology at Triangle Credit Union

Helps automate all kinds of jobs and it's worth the price because it saves a lot of time and money

One problem that I had with them when we got SMA Technologies is that sometimes the jobs fail, but they automatically restart. SMA Technologies automatically gets a notification that the job has failed, and they restart it on their end, so now, we have the job restarting twice. There were times when we came into the office in the morning, and we had two files because the job ran twice. I do not know if the system can prevent a job from running the second time. If a job has run successfully, or it is running, it should not run again.

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Steve Mikula

IT Scheduling Manager at Paychex, Inc.

Very reliable processing engine, and scheduling is flawless—crucial elements in our financial transaction processing

Because we've been on it for 20 years, it's pretty easy for us to automate jobs with Tidal at this point. It has become second nature. It's pretty simplistic to set up and get going, although there are different levels of complexity you can have within the product. It depends on how simple you want to keep it. If you just keep it: Job A, Job B, Job C, Job D, that becomes pretty simple. But when you start integrating some complex calendars that use sub-calendars—and you can go three, four, or five deep to set up schedules—it becomes more complicated. The beauty of it is you can go as deep as you need to. We can get really complex or we can keep it simple. We have some use cases for both scenarios. The thing that I like the most is the reliability of the engine. The actual scheduling part of the product is pretty much flawless, but the stability of the product is what I find to be reassuring. We are a financial company, we move billions of dollars a day, and if we don't have our transactions processed in a timely manner we can be penalized and our clients can be penalized. It can have a serious financial impact.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"It allows us to have more information and more control than we previously had over the processes that are running in host systems."

"Since we got it configured, it has just done the job day in, day out. Being able to rely on it and know that it's going to happen, whether there's a person over it or not, is really good."

"It makes everything simpler. Once OpCon is in, it just repeats itself day after day. We don't have to worry about whether a process will be missed. It will run every single time. We are not dropping jobs or missing stuff. When you have multiple institutions, it's very easy to miss jobs. You get on a roll, start doing things, and then forget somebody. With OpCon, everything is done."

"The most valuable features are its integration into Windows, into VM, and into AIX, as well as SQL."

"It seems like it would scale well."

"The automation part of OpCon is the most valuable for us, with all the core processing. It's really mostly hands-off unless we have failures. In our old days, we'd spend a good part of the day doing processing via manual tasks. We don't have to do any of that any longer."

"Reliability is always important, and the reliability of the system is outstanding."

"It allows us to organize everything into a process flow throughout the day for our different tasks that we have to run. So, it keeps everything organized. It is easy to monitor and adjust, if we need to."

More OpCon pros

"The data management on offer was valuable."

"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."

"For us, the calendaring system is very robust. Some of the teams have very specific requests for when they need jobs to run. That's been really valuable, because a lot of times, when people run scripts, if they run on a holiday, they're going to fail... A couple of times a month it probably saves us work and the necessity of logging in from home and checking to make sure everything's okay."

"We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads. That's the biggest use for us and that's the biggest advantage."

"It's the most efficient tool in doing repetitive tasks and saves a lot of time with minimum possibility of error."

"It saves times due to automation. With some files, we do hundreds a day for a particular vendor. This would be hard to do manually. Also, the speed at which we can do this is excellent."

"The thing that I like the most is the reliability of the engine. The actual scheduling part of the product is pretty much flawless, but the stability of the product is what I find to be reassuring."

"We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads. The solution’s ability to manage and monitor these workloads is very easy and accurate. We have file dependencies for running jobs. The job does not start until a file exists on a completely different server, then where the job will run. So, it is cross systems."

More Tidal by Redwood pros

Cons

"The ability to retrieve information from logs in variables to display relevant information would be helpful."

"The process of getting automations done and the process of testing them is a little complicated."

"The initial setup is very complex, but that's not necessarily something that needs to be improved. I'm told that in the next version they're improving the upgrade process. So that's in the works already."

"There is some difficulty with the ease of use when I don't have some of the templates that were already created. More templates would be great. Non-core featured templates are my biggest struggle."

"I believe there's room for improvement, and while I think it's something they are considering, I would welcome seeing OpCon integrate with a broader range of systems and third-party products."

"Stability is an area for improvement. There are FTP agents that run on the MCP and they are there so that we can transfer a file from the MCP to the Windows environment or vice versa. Sometimes, and nobody has been able to figure out why, it just goes down, and all of my jobs that need it are hanging or failing... It would be very helpful if they could figure out what in the world is happening with that FTP client that's on the MCP."

"It's not something you can just quickly grab, try, run, and play with. You have to get the knowledge and train yourself. It was easy for me, but I also took the time to throw myself into it. There is a learning curve to a certain extent. You have to learn the rules."

"It would be nice to go to a fully thin client."

More OpCon cons

"The software's performance and scalability could be improved, particularly when dealing with large-scale workloads or complex business processes."

"The solution needs more advanced reporting and data visualization capabilities to enable deeper analysis of job performance and trends."

"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."

"The job failure alerts can be updated with more details for better troubleshooting."

"One area for improvement is the command-line interface and the API to bulk-load jobs. It's a little bit kludgy, but we still manage without it. They're working on it and it's getting better all the time. In addition, the documentation for their API for creating jobs needs to be updated. It's a bit of a learning curve."

"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."

"The biggest improvement they need to work on is doing better QA checks before they release new patches and service packs. We do find that you can't trust getting the new product right away, as they have to get some bug fixes out. They do tend to have some bugs in the first iteration."

"I know they are working on it, but there needs to be better reporting. Currently, there are only three or four reports that we can get off of the system. That needs to be improved. They already have a solution to this in the new version. I.e., a schedule of all the jobs running for one day, specifically calling out what dependencies that job relies on. It would be like a flow chart of how the day's jobs would run."

More Tidal by Redwood cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Compared to AutoSys and ISE, OpCon was a lot cheaper to put in. AutoSys is hundreds of thousands of dollars to just install it because they don't have an interface into our system. You have to teach them what your system does."

"While the base pricing is reasonable, the à la carte options are making the overall cost more complicated and potentially problematic."

"Yearly, we're paying about $62,000. OpCon has an all-inclusive feature and module license, but you pay per task."

"The purchasing price was in the $30,000 or $40,000 range, but I don't remember how much of that was licensing or installation and how it was broken out."

"This solution is certainly not the cheapest, but we win in time."

"The pricing is over $100,000 for our credit union and I believe it's $89,000 for our clients, in total, annually."

"Our licensing is on a yearly basis."

"Operating OpCon comes with a cost."

More OpCon pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is pretty reasonable. That seems to help a lot versus other companies. There are no other fees aside from the standard licensing fees. There are other products out there where you pay based on how many jobs you run and so on, and I know that's very frustrating for users."

"They work with you on licensing. So, it has been great. Everybody has different licensing, but I've had good luck with the licensing. They've been very accommodating. You basically need to buy a license for each physical server, but then you're allowed an unlimited number of virtual servers."

"The price is reasonable in terms of the product’s functionality."

"The licensing model's flexibility is awesome. The way it's licensed for us is that it's licensed per master and then per agent. We have an enterprise agreement, so we have unlimited agents, and we have it on 500 devices."

"Our annual maintenance cost is competitive for what we have and what they do."

"We are satisfied with the pricing of Tidal. It's in the moderate range and it feels very achievable for us."

"Their pricing seems very fair. It is more than the other solutions, but the functionality and the support are very much there. You pay for the job scheduler, and then they have certain things that are built into it, such as the FTP processes. If you then want to do JD Edwards jobs, you need an adapter. If you want to do SQL jobs, there is another adapter. Similarly, if you want to do Oracle jobs, there is an adapter. It is like there is the base and then there are the adapters for the jobs that you want to do, but it seems that's also how they pay for each of those adapters and keep them up to date."

"There are project, system, and server costs. Some of the things that they are doing is introducing new products. They are introducing what they call their Repository, which is a way for you to move a job. That doesn't cost anything to us, because it is reusing a tool called Transporter. The repository is the successor to Transporter, so we already own it and are sort of grandfathered in. But that new product requires a server and database, so now we have to go out and get a server and database. So, there is a cost there."

More Tidal by Redwood pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

45%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Non Profit

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	29
Large Enterprise	19

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	38

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about OpCon?

My favorite feature is the dashboard feature, which shows jobs that are running, and completed, any failures, and provides dashboard reporting.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpCon?

I am the one who signs the contract. In the beginning, when I started working here, it seemed very expensive, but after I learned everything that it does, I found it worth the price. I would recomm...

See all answers

What needs improvement with OpCon?

See all answers

What do you like most about Tidal Automation?

Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Tidal Automation?

The price is reasonable in terms of the product’s functionality.

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Tidal Automation?

I would recommend Tidal Automation by Redwood as the first priority for users looking for any automation tool. Overall, I rate Tidal Automation by Redwood a nine out of ten.

See all answers

Comparisons

Control-M vs OpCon

Compared 27% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs OpCon

Compared 12% of the time

IBM Workload Automation vs OpCon

Compared 11% of the time

VisualCron vs OpCon

Compared 10% of the time

Automic Automation vs OpCon

Compared 6% of the time

More OpCon Competitors

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 29% of the time

Control-M vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 16% of the time

Automic Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 10% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 2% of the time

More Tidal by Redwood Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

OpCon

October 2025

Download OpCon product report

Buyer's Guide

Tidal by Redwood

September 2025

Download Tidal by Redwood product report

Also Known As

No data available

Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler

Overview

OpCon enhances automation with features like auto-scheduling and Corelation KeyStone integration, empowering users with self-service capabilities. Its intuitive interface and flexibility boost productivity, providing reliable automation and efficient file transfers.

OpCon is a powerful automation platform known for streamlining operations through features like auto-scheduling and robust integration capabilities. It facilitates seamless automation, allowing users to execute tasks without direct environment access and simplifies job dependencies. Users benefit from self-service capabilities, which enable easy task execution by non-IT staff, reducing errors and human intervention. With its modern interface, OpCon supports efficient file transfers and integrates effectively with multiple systems, enhancing productivity. While offering significant scalability, OpCon users suggest improvements in web functionality, script-writing, and graphical displays, along with enhancements in user authorization and notification systems. There is also a need for better template management, clearer logging, improved mobile accessibility, and expanded training resources.

What are OpCon's Key Features?

Auto-scheduling: Efficiently automates task scheduling.
Corelation KeyStone Integration: Allows for automation without direct environment access.
Self-service Capabilities: Enables non-IT users to execute tasks with ease.
Modern Interface: Simplifies job dependencies and task management.
File Transfers: Supports secure and efficient file management.
Flexibility: Integrates with diverse systems to boost productivity.

What ROI Can Users Expect?

Increased Productivity: Automation reduces manual task dependency.
Error Reduction: Streamlined processes minimize human intervention.
Scalability: Supports growing business needs effectively.
Time Savings: Frees up resources for strategic initiatives.

OpCon is widely used in industries like financial services, where automation and scheduling tasks are critical. Financial institutions rely on OpCon for core processing tasks, including reporting, automated workflows, and vendor file exchanges. The platform handles high volumes of jobs across platforms, ensuring efficient operations and reducing reliance on manual processes.

SMA Technologies

Tidal Software is a leading provider of enterprise workload automation solutions that orchestrate the execution of complex workflows across systems, applications and IT environments. With a comprehensive portfolio of products and services, Tidal optimizes mission-critical business processes, increases IT cost efficiencies and satisfies legal and regulatory compliance requirements. Hundreds of customers around the world count on Tidal for modernizing their workload automation and driving their digital transformation. Tidal Software is headquartered in Chicago with offices in Houston, London, Minsk, Belarus and Chennai, India. For more information, visit tidalsoftware.com.

Tidal Software by Redwood

Sample Customers

LOHR, Carnival Cruise Lines, Herbalife, Digital Federal Credit Union, Synergent, Frandsen Bank & Trust

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

OpCon vs. Tidal by Redwood

September 2025

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