No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

ActiveBatch by Redwood vs Tidal by Redwood comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 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)
Tidal by Redwood
Ranking in Workload Automation
18th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 Tidal by Redwood is 3.8%, down from 3.9% 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%
Tidal by Redwood3.8%
Other90.1%
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.
JG
Batch Production Manager at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
Its versatility, ease of use, scalability, and cost-effectiveness make it a 10/10 and the best of the breed
The company is not really big. One of the areas that they are working on is improving the process of migrating jobs from the lower environment to the upper environment. They had used a tool called Transporter, which was a little difficult to use, but they've now released a new tool in August, which I've not yet used, to do that. It's probably called Repository or something like that, but it's a tool for migrating jobs from the lower environment to the upper environment. That's where they needed to improve, and it looks like they may have, but I haven't tried the tool yet. They can do better reporting in terms of production statistics reporting.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We looked at other companies, like VisualCron, that were cheaper, but one of the main sticking points was the fact that they wouldn't have provided a central location for us to monitor across all servers. That was one of the biggest selling points of JAMS."
"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."
"The alerting in it is really targeted... you can set specific alerting so that if jobs in a given folder fail, certain people are alerted. You can also set security at the folder level, so that only people in those areas can go set them. That means that the alerting and security can be set at a very granular level."
"The key benefits about JAMS is having the ability to run long running jobs on-premise as compared to products like Azure Data Factory."
"The fact that we no longer need to use Excel spreadsheets is huge."
"The fact that we no longer need to use Excel spreadsheets is huge. Before JAMS, every group was keeping track of their own batch jobs. Nobody really knew what the other jobs were. So, if jobs failed, other groups wouldn't necessarily know. With JAMS, everything is done through a single scheduler. You can choose who to notify."
"JAMS saves us on the order of thousands of hours per year."
"The user-friendly and adaptable scheduler allows us to manage various scheduling scenarios."
"ActiveBatch by Redwood has positively impacted my organization by efficiently managing a significant volume of data and workflow between our database and applications on the web browser."
"The best feature that ActiveBatch by Redwood offers is the user interface."
"Automating the scheduled data workflows and integrations helped improve analyst productivity by around 25 to 30%, mainly because less time was spent manually triggering jobs or fixing missed dependencies."
"It has improved our workflow completion rates by five hours per day, because we execute our workflows daily."
"The REST API adapters and native integrations for integrating and orchestrating the software stack are very flexible."
"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."
"We use the main job-scheduling feature. It's the only thing we use in the tool. That's the reason we are using the tool: to reduce costs by replacing manual tasks with automated tasks and to perform regular, repetitive tasks in a more reliable way."
"ActiveBatch has reduced work by providing automated workflows across several different applications."
"I like the fact that I have control, and I am able to monitor. If there is an issue, I would be able to respond to any jobs that may fail. With any other scheduler that I know of, a lot of times, when I have a very complex script, if there is an issue in the middle of it, I have to let the whole process fail and then figure out a way to recover from it, whereas Tidal will stop the process, and I can resolve that issue. Once I resolve the issue, I can continue the process. This is very important for invoicing, accounts payable, accounts receivable, or any kind of financial reporting. It allows you to recover from an issue much more effectively than anything else that I have seen."
"Tidal Automation’s most valuable feature is customization. It can work and connect with any app."
"Thinking of all the people involved in checking jobs on a daily basis, manually running jobs or auditing them through standalone tools, and trying to connect them. We have saved hundreds of hours weekly, which is substantial."
"Tidal Automation is very efficient and can quickly automate most manual and repetitive tasks."
"The Graphical Views feature is also very good for helping us to understand a job stream. It's great for providing a visual overview of the status of a workflow, especially the Critical Path view. That is one of our favorites."
"The versatility of being able to run on many different types of servers is valuable. There is also a versatility of different services that you could run jobs on. It's highly versatile. You can run a lot of different types of scripts on a lot of different types of servers. It interfaces with all of them."
"Tidal Workload Automation Software provides the ability to quickly adapt to changing business requirements."
"We wouldn't be able to do many of the complex scheduling that we do today without it. For us, it is a mission-critical app. Because if it doesn't work or has a problem, then SAP doesn't function. It is that critical. So, it's an essential tool for us to manage and run SAP jobs."
 

Cons

"JAMS handles exceptions fairly well but there are some areas where it might improve a little bit. It has to do with being able to automatically handle exceptions, out-of-the-box, rather than having to code them."
"The error messages from JAMS often need clarification, hindering our ability to resolve issues swiftly."
"The search capability needs to be improved because when we try to search for a job, it's hard to do."
"I'm not sure if they have fixed it in a newer version, but there is no global search in the version I have. If I have multiple sub-folders that are named for business units, like HR or IT, and I have to search for a job, I cannot search from the top. I have to go to the HR folder to search for a particular job, or to the IT folder."
"The JAMS automation code isn't so clean."
"Improvements could be made in the service desk's knowledge and communication skills among engineers to better address customer needs and ensure issues are fully resolved."
"Sometimes the UI is not the most responsive I've ever used. But because it does its job, I don't complain."
"As an admin, I would like to have a web-based GUI instead of a client application that we have to install on our PCs."
"They have some crucial design flaws within the console that still need to be worked out because it is not working exactly how we hoped to see it, e.g., just some minor things where when you hit the save button, then all of a sudden all your job's library items collapse. Then, in order to continue on with your testing, you have to open those back up. I have taken that to them, and they are like, "Yep. We know about it. We know we have some enhancements that need to be taken care of. We have more developers now." They are working towards taking the minor things that annoy us, resolving them, and getting them fixed."
"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."
"Except for the GUI, everything looks good."
"I think ActiveBatch by Redwood can be improved by providing a tutorial during the process or smart help, as sometimes it is not so intuitive to use."
"There are very few documents that provide us with detailed information on the troubleshooting of errors that occur during integration with the existing environment."
"As more organizations are moving towards a cloud-based infrastructure, ActiveBatch could incorporate more capabilities that support popular cloud platforms, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud."
"ActiveBatch UI could use a little more help, and video tutorials would be greatly appreciated for user guides."
"I can't get the cleaning up of logs to work consistently. Right now, we are not setup correctly, and maybe it is something that I have not effectively communicated to them."
"From an administrative point of view, I wouldn't give really high marks to the solution. I actually entertained getting the JAWS application at one point. One of the shortcomings with the scheduler is the reporting capabilities. At least at the time, JAWS was the best that they had for a third-party integration. I think they've got things in the pipeline to help alleviate that gap."
"The GUI, the graphical user interface, gets a little bit busy. You have these flyouts that sometimes are a little tedious to get through."
"Initially, it is complicated to understand the functionalities as there is limited product documentation."
"Understanding and using Tidal Automation could be overwhelming for someone with minimal programming language."
"One thing I would like to see improved is that, currently, when an action is executed and finishes in Tidal, it's marked as either "success" or "failure." I would like more options that would flag a job according to multiple options, rather than just "good" or bad"... Tidal has told us that it's possible to do so through the product or with a workaround."
"Tidal Software interface could be more intuitive and user-friendly."
"My complaint about their pricing model is that every year or every time technology changes or somebody has a new requirement, it usually means that I can schedule that with Tidal, but I would need another adapter. So, every time there is a change, I need a different adapter that I don't have. That's why it is harder to plan for Tidal growth because you have to buy a new adapter every time."
"The user interface is the place that needs the most work. If and when we find issues with the product, they are usually in that area. If I had to choose, that's where I'd want issues, as opposed to in the engine. But the UI is average. It's a little sluggish at times and there are some bugs in it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's expensive, to be honest, but it does the job."
"The pricing of JAMS has not been an issue for us, as it has allowed us to save time."
"For what it does, the product is priced very well."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"JAMS is close to the lower end of the pricing models for enterprise scheduling solutions. They are much cheaper than Control-M, as well as some other products that I've used. I also don't know of another solution where you can actually get true, unlimited licensing, where you can have as many instances and as many agents as you want."
"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."
"JAMS is relatively inexpensive, with additional costs only incurred for tags, other services, and optional support renewals."
"The licensing model for JAMS is straightforward and based on the number of agents, not the number of jobs you run. It's cheap and fairly simple."
"It allows for lower operational overhead."
"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."
"If you compare ActiveBatch licensing to Control-M, you're looking at $50,000 as opposed to millions."
"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."
"Currently, we are paying approximately $7,000 yearly, which includes support."
"The price was fairly in line with other automation tools. I don't think it's exorbitantly expensive, relatively speaking."
"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 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."
"We think the pricing is very fair. We have been happy with the pricing compared to some of the other solutions in the space."
"The solution enables admins and users to see the information relevant to them, but this is bundled as an add-on that we would have to pay for."
"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."
"The solution’s licensing model in terms of its flexibility and transparency regarding costs is pretty good. A person can buy the license, and if you decide to stop support, you can do that but still have the product. So, it's not like you're paying constantly to keep that license alive. Certainly, you want to keep support going too. Once you buy it, you own it. It's not like I have to keep paying somebody to keep using it."
"I have had no issues with the licensing."
"This solution is a bit expensive in the current world where everybody is trying to cut down on certain things."
"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."
"Our licensing model for Tidal is on an annual basis. It is very good and works well for us. Tidal's licensing is very transparent and simple. It lets you know, for the amount you use, that's the price that you pay. So, we buy X number of licenses, and we know that this is where we are. I'm very happy with that. I saw the licensing modules on other platforms, and I didn't like them. Other companies and solutions would calculate the connections, adapters, and instances. I think that's the reason that BMC was pretty expensive: They just didn't understand what our needs are."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Workload Automation solutions are best for your needs.
900,838 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
10%
Performing Arts
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Performing Arts
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
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise38
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JAMS?
I was not really involved in the pricing, setup cost, and licensing at that level. I am more involved in the technica...
What needs improvement with JAMS?
To improve JAMS, it should resolve the issues with the JD Edwards application and the need for the SSH client connect...
What is your primary use case for JAMS?
My main use case for JAMS is to install, set up, and configure for customers working with JD Edwards application. A s...
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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

No data available
ActiveBatch
Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler
 

Interactive Demo

 

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
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Tidal by Redwood and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,838 professionals have used our research since 2012.