We performed a comparison between ActiveBatch by Redwood and Appian based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Process Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Since we are no longer waiting for an operator to see that a job is finished, we have changed our daily cycle from running in eight hours down to about five. We had a third shift-operator retire and that position was never refilled."
"Error Handling is one of the best standout features of ActiveBatch."
"From a scheduling point of view, it is pretty good."
"The software offers real-time monitoring and reporting features that let IT teams keep tabs on the progress of their batch operations and workflows."
"ActiveBatch has reduced work by providing automated workflows across several different applications."
"It has helped with scheduling complex jobs with simple scripts."
"It is very useful in sending confidential files through FPP servers."
"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"
"Recently, we added Appian Process Mining, Appian Portals, and now Appian RPA."
"It is really simple to create a new app, and I like the data-centric aspect of the BPM tool."
"It's heavy on business processing in terms of logic, process workflows, and primarily on the process design modeler. Appian is really great at that. In terms of the full stack set from a low-code platform perspective, it's definitely an eye opener since it can be deployed via mobile app and on the web as well."
"Appian's most valuable feature is that we can create end-to-end process workflows with minimum turnaround."
"The initial setup was seamless. We didn't run into any hardships at all."
"The initial setup is easy."
"Appian has many valuable features, the first being the ease of development—rapid development. Second, the process of learning the product and tool is faster when compared to its peers in the market. It's closer to low-code, and while it's still not very easy, it's more low-code than other products in the industry. Appian has a good user interface, a seamless model user interface, which comes without additional coding. It can also integrate with multiple systems."
"In terms of interface, it's very good. In terms of infrastructure, it's amazing and already using multiple tools behind the scenes. It's a low-code platform, so it's very easy to implement."
"The user interface can be improved so that it is more appealing and accessible to new users."
"An area for improvement in ActiveBatch Workload Automation is its interface or GUI. It could be a little better. There isn't any additional feature I'd like to see in the tool, except for the GUI, everything looks good."
"Any product is going to have some room for improvement, no matter what. I see the company has already ventured into AWS and they're constantly trying to improve the managed file transfer which they have recently improvised. I think they bought a software called JSCAPE and they're trying to improve it, which is good. I am not sure if JSCAPE would be part of the base product but currently, you have to buy a separate license for it, which doesn't make sense. If it was Microsoft, ServiceNow, or integrating with other software vendors, I would understand but JSCAPE is now in-house and I'm not sure if they can justify having a separate license for JSCAPE. I would probably expect them to be packaging JSCAPE into the base product. They did switch over from a perpetual license model to a subscription model, which hurt the company a little bit. Nobody is offering the perpetual model anymore. As long as the transition is fair for both the companies, I think it should be fine and not burn us out."
"The documentation is very limited, and it can be improved."
"It could be easier to provide dashboards on how many jobs are running at the same time; more monitoring."
"The thing I've noticed the most is the Help function. It's very difficult, at times, to find examples of how to do something. The Help function will explain what the tool does, but we're not a Windows shop at the data warehouse. Our data warehouse jobs actually run on Linux servers. Finding things for Linux-based solutions is not as easy as it is for Windows-based solutions. I would like to see more examples, and more non-Windows examples as well, in the Help."
"The product should be improved by providing a customization option."
"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."
"It needs better integration with our existing application ecosystem."
"The documentation needs to be improved."
"A point of improvement would be the SAIL forms. The built-in tool used to generate forms does not have debugging support (to view local variables as they change on live preview, and step-by-step valuation) which is a big drawback for form development. Moreover, the script language used to build SAIL forms does not support inheritance or lambda expressions (functions as arguments of other functions), which makes the code base more verbose."
"One of the areas that Appian is working on is to improve its UI capabilities and give more flexibility to the UI."
"The ability of the interface to load automatic data is not great."
"Appian is easy to set up, but JBoss is complex. JBoss is the application server for running Appian."
"We have clients that want to use Office 365, Microsoft Analytics, and Power Apps. Appian just isn't the same as using something specifically designed to cater to the Microsoft Suite."
"Occasionally, certain pre-made modules may not be necessary and customers may desire greater customization options. Instead of being limited to pre-designed features, they may prefer a more flexible version that allows for greater customization."
ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked 6th in Process Automation with 35 reviews while Appian is ranked 3rd in Process Automation with 57 reviews. ActiveBatch by Redwood is rated 9.2, while Appian is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of ActiveBatch by Redwood writes "Flexible, easy to use, and offers good automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Appian writes "Low resource consumption, easy setup, and stable". ActiveBatch by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood, VisualCron and IBM Workload Automation, whereas Appian is most compared with Microsoft Power Apps, OutSystems, Camunda, ServiceNow and Pega BPM. See our ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Appian report.
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