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ActiveBatch by Redwood vs BMC AMI Ops comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 15, 2026

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

JAMS
Sponsored
Ranking in Workload Automation
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
ActiveBatch by Redwood
Ranking in Workload Automation
9th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Process Automation (16th), Managed File Transfer (MFT) (10th)
BMC AMI Ops
Ranking in Workload Automation
23rd
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Mainframe Management (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of JAMS is 3.0%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ActiveBatch by Redwood is 3.1%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BMC AMI Ops is 2.3%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Workload Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
JAMS3.0%
ActiveBatch by Redwood3.1%
BMC AMI Ops2.3%
Other91.6%
Workload Automation
 

Featured Reviews

LV
Principal Data Base And Infrastructure Engineer at a outsourcing company with 501-1,000 employees
Automation has replaced nightly monitoring and delivers reliable, unified job scheduling
We have really enjoyed working with JAMS in terms of notifications, alerts, and streamlining. There used to be a process with Automate, which is another product from Fortra, but even before that, the other division of the company that we were merging with had a tool that was built in-house called a file handler or file distributor. It was an in-house developed tool, but it was not as streamlined or as efficient as JAMS is. We literally had to have a dedicated nighttime person monitoring. Although we are 24/7, the divisions of the company that we were using JAMS for have been small scale. While we have automated it, we have streamlined it in such a way that notifications go out and alerts go out, but if there is anything, then we get paged and alerted, and if anything needs to happen at midnight, we can wake up. On the other hand, with the tool I mentioned, the file handler and distributor, we used to have a dedicated nighttime person that had to be sitting and monitoring it to see when a file arrived, whether it met the conditions, and then execute the next particular job. By using JAMS, we have gained a lot more efficiencies in terms of all of those to streamline it, and there is no necessary need for having an overnight engineer just keeping an eye on all of this.
Sai  - PeerSpot reviewer
Ai/Data Analyst at CSD
Automation has streamlined complex data workflows and now saves time on recurring reporting
To improve ActiveBatch by Redwood, the UI could be more modern and intuitive, and another thing that comes to mind is that it can feel overwhelming when workflows become large and complex. Troubleshooting can take extra time when there are multiple dependencies, jobs, and integrations running together. Better visualization of workflow relationships and easier debugging would really help. I would also appreciate seeing more simplified onboarding and documentation for newer users, as there is a learning curve at the beginning. Another improvement area could be smarter analytics or AI-driven recommendations, such as proactively identifying workflow bottlenecks, failed job patterns, or optimization suggestions instead of relying mostly on manual monitoring. From an operational perspective, faster configuration for integrations and cloud-based workflows would make implementation smoother, especially in environments working heavily with APIs and data pipelines. I have covered the main points regarding needed improvements. Overall, the platform is very capable and reliable for automation and workflow scheduling, especially in data-heavy environments. Most of the improvements I want are around making it easier for day-to-day use, such as a more intuitive UI, simpler troubleshooting for complex workflows, better onboarding for newer users, and more intelligent monitoring or optimization insights. The core functionality is strong, and the biggest opportunity is improving the overall user experience and simplifying operational management.
Sachin Mohanty - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Operations Engineer at PowerSchool India Pvt.Ltd
Integrated monitoring has improved real-time visibility and reduced manual incident resolution
BMC AMI Ops has helped my organization positively by reducing the manual monitoring process. Before this tool was implemented, the operators had to constantly watch the dashboard and logs, and issues could be missed if nobody noticed them. With BMC AMI Ops, alerts automatically notify the operations team, allowing users to focus on tasks instead of constantly monitoring these things, reducing the need for manual monitoring and enabling focus on other priority tasks. BMC AMI Ops provides strong monitoring and operational visibility capabilities; however, enhancements in dashboard customization could further improve the overall user experience. Additional automation capabilities will provide greater operational efficiency. The best features that BMC AMI Ops offers, in my experience, are real-time monitoring, intelligent alerts, performance management, automation capabilities, and centralized visibility. The real-time feature stood out the best for me, as it provides system health information, detects issues, and impresses me. The intelligent alerts in BMC AMI Ops are automated notifications in my company, generating notifications for alerts when the system detects abnormal conditions or goes down. For example, when the CPU usage is too high, storage usage crosses the threshold, batch jobs are delayed, transaction response time degrades, or a critical application fails, these intelligent alerts create notifications.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Our company is based on data. Everything we do is data-driven, so it has been very valuable having one place where we can process all of the data and do batch schedules with chunks of data."
"Getting JAMS in place was a game changer for us back then."
"Being able to create a series of chained jobs, which are basically linked jobs is valuable."
"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."
"JAMS has helped save IT staff time by automating tasks previously performed with scripts, and its scheduling feature has been particularly useful."
"Previously, we manually managed file transfers by writing our scripts. The automated MFT feature is great for me and the company. It helps us know where the files are going and enables us to track errors if anything fails. It also makes the connection seamless for third-party vendors."
"We can see all the batch execution status within the tool itself, which saves money, time, and cost, allowing us to handle everything in one single tool."
"The key benefits about JAMS is having the ability to run long running jobs on-premise as compared to products like Azure Data Factory."
"By implementing a sophisticated scheduling mechanism, the system allows for the precise triggering of jobs at user-selected frequencies, enabling a seamless and automated execution of tasks according to specified time intervals."
"It has helped with scheduling complex jobs with simple scripts."
"Overall, it has helped to improve workflow completion times by 70 to 80 percent, easily."
"ActiveBatch can automate predictable, repeatable processes very well. There is no real trick to what ActiveBatch does. ActiveBatch does exactly what you would expect a scheduling piece of software to do. It does it in a timely manner and does it with very little outside interference and fanfare. It runs when it is supposed to, and I don't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to double check it."
"I find this to be the easiest product that I have ever used, especially compared to Robot Schedule and CA AutoSys as well as an in-house scheduling software that I had designed and developed at one time."
"Easy to configure and simple to develop new features."
"I found ActiveBatch Workload Automation to be a very good scheduling tool, and what I like best about it is that it has very less downtime when managing many complex scheduling workflows, so I'm very impressed with ActiveBatch Workload Automation."
"There are hundreds of pre-built steps."
"Batch smoothing our 4HRA and implementation of group capacity profiles has allowed us to run sub-capacity and lower our MLC."
"My team leverages the observability and intelligent monitoring capabilities of BMC AMI Ops to gain early visibility into potential performance and operational issues, and the proactive monitoring and analytics features have helped us identify anomalies sooner, reduce troubleshooting time, and improve overall system availability."
"MainView has enabled me, in the past, to solve production problems faster, or even avoid them preemptively with warnings."
"The integration of IMS commands is very useful, because you do not have to switch to another tool to problem solve solutions."
 

Cons

"I would like to see the ability to interface with Microsoft group-managed service accounts, but they're still in the research phase. They need to ensure everything's legit and safe. The report designer and dashboards could also be improved. We're running 7.3, so I don't know if they have updated the reporting in 7.5, but I think the reports and dashboards could be better."
"All my machines at work are Macs. JAMS client is a Windows-based thing."
"The product does not allow the users to cut and paste the job names from the screen."
"With no programming experience, I find JAMS code-driven automation challenging due to the required PowerShell scripting."
"The documentation is not super... It's not as quick and slick as I'd like it to be."
"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."
"JAMS doesn't allow us to implement SOC controls. We are a company that trades stocks on the New York Stock Exchange, so all our transactions are audited. It has a feature that saves the file for only a month but doesn't segregate the data between finance and SOC-related compliance."
"JAMS could be improved with a web client that is accessible and as fast as a normal website, eliminating the need to RDP to the servers to access the JAMS client."
"The help center and documentation are not that helpful."
"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."
"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."
"The documentation is very limited, and it can be improved."
"To improve ActiveBatch by Redwood, the UI could be more modern and intuitive, and another thing that comes to mind is that it can feel overwhelming when workflows become large and complex."
"I have faced struggles to understand, set up the tool, and implement it in my early days as a new user."
"One way ActiveBatch by Redwood can be improved is through a more intuitive user interface for 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."
"BMC AMI Ops provides strong monitoring and operational visibility capabilities; however, enhancements in dashboard customization could further improve the overall user experience."
"An expansion for distributed systems would be great, but probably not workable."
"More visualisation and support for mobile devices would be good."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Definitely check how many single processes you want to run and count them as jobs. That is how you would work out your pricing on JAMS. For example, if you're running a number of commands and you can put them all into one script and run that script, you can count that as one job."
"Take advantage of its scalability. You can start small. The initial cost is very reasonable. Once you have started picking up the tool and adopting it, then you can scale up from there and buy more agents."
"It's expensive, to be honest, but it does the job."
"JAMS is relatively inexpensive, with additional costs only incurred for tags, other services, and optional support renewals."
"JAMS is priced competitively compared to similar solutions and offers flexible licensing options to cater to user needs."
"In the end, you'll find that it's really worth the price. There is some sticker shock, but it's worth every dime."
"For what it does, the product is priced very well."
"There are no additional costs other than the license for Fortra's JAMS which is affordable."
"I don't think we've ever had a problem with the pricing or licensing. Even the maintenance fees are very much in line. They are not excessive. I think for the support that you get, you get a good value for your money. It's the best value on the market."
"I like ActiveBatch Workload Automation's licensing model because they're not holding you down on an agentless model or agent model, where every server needs to have an agent. That's the main selling point of the solution and I hope they stay that way."
"The price was fairly in line with other automation tools. I don't think it's exorbitantly expensive, relatively speaking."
"Currently, we are paying approximately $7,000 yearly, which includes support."
"If you compare ActiveBatch licensing to Control-M, you're looking at $50,000 as opposed to millions."
"The pricing was fair. There are additional costs for the plugins. We have the standard licensing fees for different pieces, then we have the plugins which were add-ons. However, we expected that."
"It allows for lower operational overhead."
"ActiveBatch is currently redesigning themselves. In the past, they were a low cost solution for automation. They had a nice tool that was very inexpensive. With their five-year plan, they will be more enhancement-driven, so they're trying to improve their software, customer service, and the way that their customers get information from them. In doing that, they're raising the price of their base system. They changed from one pricing model to another, which has caused some friction between ActiveBatch and us. We're working through that right now with them. That's one of the reasons why we're why we were evaluating other software packages."
"If you already use other products from BMC, you might be able to get a package deal from BMC's sales department."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
9%
Performing Arts
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
24%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise20
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise50
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the pricing was acceptable. I have gone with JAMS licen...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
I am fine with what JAMS offers and have nothing to suggest for improvement. JAMS' code-driven automation is not wide...
What is your primary use case for JAMS?
My main use case for JAMS is scheduling, which is the primary usage. I am mainly using JAMS for scheduling various jo...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ActiveBatch Workload Automation?
I was not directly involved in the pricing, setup cost, and licensing decisions for ActiveBatch by Redwood, so my exp...
What needs improvement with ActiveBatch Workload Automation?
One way ActiveBatch by Redwood can be improved is through a more intuitive user interface for new users. I rate Activ...
What is your primary use case for ActiveBatch Workload Automation?
My main use case for ActiveBatch by Redwood is automating complex job scheduling and workflow orchestration across mu...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
I have worked from 1973 with all kind of systems in large enterprises across the world. And have experience with all ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
ActiveBatch
BMC MainView, BMC Automated Mainframe Intelligence, Ops Monitoring, Ops Automation for Batch ThruPut
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Teradata, Arconic, General Dynamics, Yum!, CVS Health, Comcast, Ghiradelli, & Boston’s Children’s Hospital
Informatica, D&H, ACES, PrimeSource, Sub-Zero Group, SThree, Lamar Advertising, Subway, Xcel Energy, Ignite Technologies, Whataburger, Jyske Bank, Omaha Children's Hospital
Dillard's
Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. BMC AMI Ops and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.