VisualCron Reviews

We use VisualCron for all our automation needs, like connecting to FileZilla, calling APIs, generating PGP keys, creating encryption files with the PGP key login to Azure, etc. It can automatically log in to SQL Server and execute SQL script jobs in bulk. We had 2,000-3,000 users at my previous company.

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. 

VisualCron needs a community forum. To use VisualCron, you need to understand various use cases, so it would be helpful if they had an active user community where we could post questions and get answers. 

 I used VisualCron for one year, from 2021 to 2022.

I rate VisualCron nine out of 10. It's highly stable. During my time at my previous company, it locked up one or two times, but it's extremely stable overall. 

I rate VisualCron six out of 10. 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 rate VisualCron support eight out of 10. I contacted the support team once because we faced some issues connecting SMTP to VisualCron. 

Positive

I deployed VisualCron once on my personal system for a 45-day trial. It takes five to 10 minutes to deploy.

I used Control-M in the past. VisualCron is a Microsoft product, and I love Microsoft because its solutions are user-friendly. I was new when I joined the company, and it didn't take much time to understand the process.

I rate VisualCron nine out of 10. I don't have any need for VisualCron in my current role, but I would recommend it if it is required. We can do so much automation by clicking here and there. 

We use VisualCron as a job scheduling tool.

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. VisualCron also has the ability to run PowerShell commands through the jobs.

VisualCron's command console is a little bit difficult to understand and needs to improve.

As a business, we've been using VisualCron for at least eight years.

VisualCron seems fairly stable, but we do have the occasional, unexplained stop. I rate VisualCron an eight out of ten for stability.

VisualCron is a scalable solution. I rate VisualCron an eight out of ten for scalability.

Our application support teams have never really complained about VisualCron's technical support team.

Positive

We've got the latest version in the SIT environment for testing. We're about two versions behind in the live environment while we test the latest upgrade.

Overall, I rate VisualCron an eight out of ten.

It's a scheduling tool. We can configure it and schedule different tasks and it will automatically process this task in a timely manner.

We have some applications running in the server and built them to be executed in a timely manner. We use this tool to trigger those applications and process some specific tasks. 

This tool actually is meant for scheduling purposes. If I have to execute a task that needs to be executed on a daily basis at night, at 10:00 PM, for example, it can perform some tasks at a specific time based on our configuration.

If I want to send some files to a specific location, to some specific client, and then, after, if I want to send an email to that client that I have uploaded the file to their particular location, just to notify them, I can do that using this product. We can do some configuration in the VisualCron tool. We can create a job and in the job, we can define some tasks, for example, task one, task two, and task three, and they will follow some order and process. Based on that order and process, we can configure when the job should be executed, whether it's at night, at 10:00 PM every day or after five minutes every day, or whatever we require.

There are lots of options for configuration.

The application itself has many features.

It supports a lot of plugins. 

We don't have to do any coding. We just plug and play and it works.

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. That means I have to explore it by looking into the tool. I find all the features by myself, as there is not much good documentation to help me. I have to explore everything from a scratch.

It's not that easy to set up.

I am using this tool for the last three to four years.

It's stable. I do not face many problems. We have had a couple of applications running for the last three or four years and we do not face any problems so far.

This is not actually a web application. It's a desktop application. There is no concern about scalability here. We can configure as many applications within it as we want. We do not see any problem with that.

We use this tool to configure and deploy a lot of software. There are only a few people or some DevOps who are responsible for deploying the software in their applications. Therefore, in terms of people, there are fewer, however, in terms of how many pieces of software are using that tool, that is actually the concern here. If you think about scalability, it actually means how many applications it can handle. And that's not a problem.

I've never contacted their technical team. Whatever I implemented and developed, I did it by myself. I faced some problems during activating users in the tool, however, we have our internal engineers and we discussed problems with the team. Internally, we are able to solve the problem. We don't require their support team.

It's not that easy to implement. It's totally a technical thing. For my company, actually, I have to deploy and install and configure everything in the production server since I am the only person to have access to the server. Not everyone can just install it on the server. There are lots of things to configure manually inside the application.

Only a technical person or an expert with this type of thing. It's not like anyone from the team can do it. It's quite complex. On top of that, they don't provide much detailed documentation.

The maintenance is easy. It's not difficult since once you have it installed unless your license has expired. If your license is expired, you have to plug in the license to enable it.

There are lots of applications that can be deployed using this tool, and there is an option to group the application by some grouping name. It can easily filter out from their UI, however, their UI has lots of features. At a glance, it looks quite complex, however, after doing some work on it, you may be familiar with it, as there are lots of features on its UI, with lots of buttons and lots of menus. That can be quite tricky.

The licensing is paid on a yearly basis, not a monthly or daily basis. My manager actually provided me with the license on the server so I had to install the application on the server, and then I had to plug in the license. I installed that application in 2019 on the production server. So far, I do not have to update the license. It's still running. I'm not sure when we have to renew. 

My company purchased the solution. I'm not sure how much was paid.

We are partners. 

It's a third-party application. Our company purchased it. We have a license for that application. We installed the application on one of our on-premise servers where we deploy the applications and those applications are being used by the tool to configure and trigger on a daily basis.

The first thing new users need to know is why they are going to use it. There are lots of features and lots of options. How it will benefit a company depends based on the need. It has a very minimal, very easy configuration and a very complex setup. It's a good idea to know a few basic concepts of the VisualCron application before getting started. It will help with work in the long run.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We're using VisualCron to manage jobs, schedule tasks, and even send emails that notify you whenever a job or task fails. It's a task management tool.

As we're monitoring everything through VisualCron, the tool makes the whole process easy. The Windows Task Scheduler previously handled new tasks, and it was more complicated because you had to make some changes, stop, then redeploy Windows Task Scheduler. In VisualCron, it's much easier because you just have to go into a specific job, add a new task, then set up the sequence. If a task fails, you'll get an email notification from VisualCron, and then you can rectify the issue.

Using the Windows Task Scheduler means you have to do some coding while using VisualCron means the tool takes care of the coding from the backend. You're just using the visual interface of VisualCron, creating the logic, and telling the tool what actions need to be performed, so VisualCron would take care of everything on the backend for you, which helps you manage time better.

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.

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.

An additional feature I'd like VisualCron to have in its next release is CI/CD support, though my organization uses GitHub for it. It'll be a plus point for VisualCron if it can support CI/CD and have GitHub features for DevOps that it currently doesn't have.

I've been using VisualCron for almost two years. I'm still using it.

VisualCron is a pretty stable product so far.

Scalability-wise, I'm not one hundred percent sure, but you can install VisualCron on different machines. You also have the option to handle it from one system, but it becomes more risky for an organization if you have everything on one system.

Technical support for VisualCron is excellent, as the team quickly responds via email. If there's an urgent issue and you're a paid user, the team will directly call you based on the region you're in, try to understand your scenario or problem, then guide you on how to solve it.

On a scale of one to five, my rating for VisualCron support is a four, as I'm pretty satisfied with the support overall. However, some users may not be satisfied, probably because of not following instructions from the technical support team.

Setting up any new product for the first time could be a bit troublesome, but what's good about VisualCron is that it has an online community where you can ask questions and get fast replies. There's a community that can help you out, even with how to set up VisualCron. You can search for information or ask a question to the community to get help on your exact scenario and how you can achieve your goal.

The initial setup for VisualCron had a minimal requirement. Hence, setting the tool up was pretty straightforward for my team, but in terms of using the task scheduler, my team didn't know how, but there's a big community where my team got the support it needed.

On a scale of one to five, I'm rating the initial setup for VisualCron as three. It wasn't difficult to set up, though it had some challenges.

The organization is paying for the VisualCron license, so I'm not aware of the current pricing for the tool.

VisualCron is the first RPA tool I've used. I haven't evaluated others, though my organization previously used the Windows Task Scheduler for scheduling tasks.

I'm pretty satisfied with VisualCron, so my rating is eight out of ten, though I'm not using all its features. It's been a beneficial tool for me. In specific scenarios, a new user could face a bit of difficulty using VisualCron. Still, once you get used to it, it's like driving a car on the highway where you could face some issues but eventually solve the problems as you travel.

Around fifty people use VisualCron within the organization. It's used twice a week, and the DevOps team uses it more often, depending on the projects.

I used VisualCron for automatization, particularly for moving files around. I also used it for integration, so it's a middleware solution. When two systems need to talk to each other but speak different technical languages, such as different APIs, XMLs, or file imports and exports, I used VisualCron to translate the export from one system to another.

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.

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.

I used VisualCron in my previous job, and I've used it for more than three years. The last time I used VisualCron was less than a year ago. I switched jobs, so I'm no longer using the tool.

VisualCron is a rock-solid tool, and it's very well-engineered, so I didn't have problems with VisualCron in terms of stability.

My previous company had a limited setup for VisualCron with only two servers but based on my experience with setting up the second server, the tool can scale pretty well. I have no doubts about VisualCron scaling pretty well.

The technical support team for VisualCron was knowledgeable and up-to-date, but the response time was slow. You only get support through ticketing or email, but it takes the support team at least two days to get back to you. There was no hotline to call for urgent issues, so that's a bit of a shame.

VisualCron support gave very knowledgeable answers, though, and the bug I found in one of the setups was fixed in the next release. Once the technical support team comes back to you with an answer, you'll either be provided with a workaround or a fix, so it was pretty good.

On a scale of one to five, I'm rating the support for VisualCron a four. It would have been a five if the response was a bit quicker.

My previous company remained with VisualCron because you don't even need a programmer to move existing workflows to the tool, including setting up VisualCron. It was more point-and-click-and-drag-and-drop instead of real programming, and this was a big requirement for the company. Other tools need a real programmer, while VisualCron doesn't, so sticking with the tool was a no-brainer.

VisualCron worked for the company, and it had more out-of-the-box integrations. The tool has a wide spectrum of existing interfaces with Azure, Microsoft, and even Oracle products.

The initial setup for VisualCron was easy because it just required following the wizard, then clicking Next, Next, then it's done.

On a scale of one to five, my rating for the VisualCron setup is a four.

VisualCron was implemented in-house. My previous company was a very small media company with less than one hundred people, and it didn't have that many technical people, so everything needed to be very easy because if the setup or process was complex, and the person who did that left the company, then nobody would know what to do, so everything needed to be clear.

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.

Two colleagues handled the configuration and setup for VisualCron, but the flows were defined within the system and used throughout the whole company, so a hundred or so people used VisualCron.

VisualCron was used daily because all the flows ran constantly, and the company I was with during that time had a lot of different use cases, so people were always running jobs, and over two hundred different workflows were running on VisualCron.

My rating for VisualCron is a nine out of ten because I was very happy with it.

I was a customer of VisualCron.

We use the solution mainly for reporting purposes.

The tool has reduced our operational costs by 40%. A lot of manual processes have been automated.

The product runs smoothly within Windows. It is easy to integrate VisualCron into our existing systems.

The documentation is a bit weak. The tool must provide a better set of documentation.

I have been using the solution for four years.

I am satisfied with the tool’s stability.

I am satisfied with the tool’s scalability.

The technical support is a bit weak, but they are changing it. I'm waiting to see how things will be solved.

The price is a bit high. However, it is okay.

There's no revenue related to the product. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use it for replacing files from our FTP server to our network work folders or as an email selector for invoices. We receive invoices into a certain mailbox depending on the sender address where we make mail triggers. In the trigger, we can manage what to do with the attachments:

1. We put the invoice into a process folder. 
2. We put the attachments into a subfolder where we merge the invoice with attachments. 
3. Once you make the job/trigger in every mail, it is processed automatically.

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.

Mail trigger: When a mail is delivered into a specific inbox, you can fire off your task depending on this.

Event trigger: When a file is placed in a certain folder, you fire off your task depending on this.

There are a lot of tasks that you can use for all kinds of stuff. 

It's very useful to use variables which help you to specify some jobs.

The forum is very useful.

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.

Seven years.

Good.

Very good.

Michael and Henrik from support are very kind, helpful, and almost always available for questions when there is something wrong with a job (you have made), but is not working anymore. The have helped me often with different things. 

The forum is very useful for solutions on things you want to change or problems you are struggling with.

No.

Straightforward with the help of support.

In-house.

One month.

No.

We use this product for practically everything when it comes to data management and much more. We've been able to automate a great number of processes that make us more efficient, eliminating manual processes that free up our employees to take on more of their prioritized projects on a daily basis. It also greatly helps with communication, whether it be for error reporting or status reporting. It's hard to come up with a primary use case when we've been able to improve so many different processes.

VisualCron has helped us with regular processing and simple tasks, but a key advantage to using it is the ability to automate practically any process. There are so many different task types, it would be difficult to find a problem that a VisualCron job couldn't solve. 

We were on a proprietary platform that handled all of our data management needs, but the implementation of VisualCron has rendered that platform almost obsolete. The only thing we use it for now is configuration. 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.

The Database, Process and File tasks are probably the most used task types for our operation. A lot of these powerful tasks are used in a single job, taking on a workflow that formerly required multiple systems, third party components, and/or software programs to assemble a complete process. VisualCronv is currently handling so many different critical processes for our company, it's become a key factor in our livelihood and success. This tool has also sparked a lot of innovation from our analysts and developers.

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 support was lightning quick starting a response to this suggestion by allowing configuration of the location of log data, so I'm sure a move to persist everything to any version of SQL Server is close.

I have been using VisualCron for 4+ years.

We've yet to experience a situation where this platform has become unstable, and the logging/communication features provide a high level of comfort for any IT professional.

The ability to host separate instances on different servers leads me to believe that there shouldn't be a user out there with a bad impression. There are certain task types that can be used to perform operations that could put a significant load on a server, but these tasks are only as stable as the responsible developer using them. That said, there are plenty of debugging and logging configurations and features to help make any task stable.

VisualCron technical support has been second to none. The turnaround on bug fixes, enhancements, and new features in the release cycle is very impressive. I deal with many third parties and I've never seen anything like it.

We were stuck using SSIS and a proprietary portal/service, which involved a lot of from-the-ground-up development, working with several third-party components that had to be maintained and supported. After experiencing the power of this product, it was very easy to make the switch.

The initial setup is very straightforward, as easy as installation and basic configuration.

The setup of VisualCron is so straightforward, only one IT professional was required to get it up and running. Once live, I recommend enforcing best practices and the use of variables to prevent hard-coding key values that could change during the lifetime of the software.

Our ROI is incalculable. This tool has prevented the need for an uncountable number of development projects and has eliminated countless manual tasks that have sprung up in the daily activities brought on by the whirlwind nature of the business we're in.

The pricing is extremely fair, and because of that, I recommend purchasing multiple instances to split out the processing load across multiple application servers.

We found VisualCron on the web very early in the process, which stopped our research dead in its tracks.

It's been a lifesaver.

Our primary use case is for automating encryption and transfer of files between our internal systems and systems of our business partners.        

We were using custom-coded solutions for encryption and sFTPing files, which required developer time and maintenance. VisualCron enabled us to create these types of jobs very easily without developer time. By renewing our maintenance agreement, we stay on top of security requirement changes.

• Post-sales support: I'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.
  
  
  


• Ability to use job variables within a job. This allows us to make reusable job templates for similar activities and just update the job variables associated with the new instance.
  
  
  


• Branching logic and conditional execution of tasks within a job.

• Logging and ability to send error alerts on job failure to appropriate IT and/or business contacts.

I would like for VisualCron to expand audit log to show who changed job variables that are initialized per job run.

Add additional security to control visibility and/or modification of jobs to different roles or persons. This would allow the shared use of a common server while avoiding accidental changes to jobs by persons who shouldn't be able to maintain them.        

I have been using VisualCron for 12 years (since 2008).

It's been very solid.

I've seen no performance issues as we increased usage.

I've very rarely had to reach out to support, but the response time and resolution was very quick in the few incidents I needed to reach out.

They also have an active user community forum which is helpful for learning.

We used "homegrown" code along with other vendor libraries. VisualCron is easier to maintain and can be done by non-developers, allowing us use our developer resources more efficiently.

Easy setup.

We had an in-house setup.

VisualCron is easy to set up and use with good documentation.

I suggest having two licenses, one for production and another for development/testing.
(jobs / settings can be exported from one system to the other allowing easy migration after test validation). Having two environments will allow you to test server upgrades and/or VisualCron upgrades without impacting your production environment).

We did not; this was a good fit and reasonably priced.

VisualCron has enabled us to efficiently automate and maintain many tasks with minimal effort from our internal IT resources.  I strongly recommend it.

It is quick and easy to use scheduling and some simple SQL jobs. We have some tools to automate our stuff, including CI/CD stuff (like Jenkins) and building pipelines. For the every day business user, this is way too complicated. It breaks a fly on the wheel for these sort of requirements. VisualCron is a handy tool that we (the IT department) provide for the business departments to obtain easy access when automating and scheduling. We absolutely love this nifty piece of software.

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.

Simplicity is the most valuable feature. You just use the tool. Some preferences and permissions are not quite self-explanatory, but those are rather advanced features. Our internal customers are able to perform their tasks without our assistance.

The guys work very hard and that amazes us with every major release. Our suggestion to make it better and more manageable in terms of GDPR: Implement it in a very partnership way. 

Over five years.

It has worked like a charm for five years. We have had more problems with the Windows Server beneath it than with VisualCron.

Scalability seems possible, but currently we are using a small setup without the need to scale.

Those guys are amazing. Their support answers quickly. 

Michael and Henrik are always friendly and competent. I love them. 

We still use other software for similar tasks, but those are with DevOps in mind. Those are way too complicated for business users. If you're looking for a GUI tool, VisualCron is the best that we have found so far

Straightforward.

In-house: It was a simple setup.

Don't know the number, but very high. 

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.

OpenStudio, Airflow, and Talend.

I absolutely love these guys. We have had web sessions, mails, and forum support. There are always friendly and very quick regarding understanding problems and answering.