ActiveBatch by Redwood vs Tidal by Redwood comparison

ActiveBatch by Redwood and Tidal Software by Redwood are both solutions in the Workload Automation category. ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked #9 with an average rating of 9.4, while Tidal Software by Redwood is ranked #12 with an average rating of 9.2. ActiveBatch by Redwood holds a 2.8% mindshare in WA, compared to Tidal Software by Redwood’s 4.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of ActiveBatch by Redwood users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Tidal Software by Redwood users who would recommend it.

ActiveBatch by Redwood

Read 35 ActiveBatch by Redwood reviews

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1,613 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Tidal by Redwood

Read 37 Tidal by Redwood reviews

2,404 Views
2,380 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

ActiveBatch by Redwood

Tidal by Redwood

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

Tidal by Redwood and ActiveBatch by Redwood compete in the realm of automation solutions. Tidal stands out for scheduling precision and customization, while ActiveBatch gains the upper hand in user-friendliness and integration capabilities.

Features: Tidal Workload Automation excels with advanced calendaring, job dependencies, and resource allocation customization, enhancing productivity. It supports multi-platform scheduling and integration with various systems. ActiveBatch is known for its extensive library of pre-built job steps, drag-and-drop functionality, and strong cross-platform integration, streamlining workflow automation.

Room for Improvement: Tidal faces challenges with its transporter tool for job transfers and has a steep learning curve, needing better reporting tools. It could enhance its cloud integration and monitoring capabilities. ActiveBatch has complexity in job search functionalities and could improve its user interface to be more beginner-friendly. Both tools would benefit from cloud integration and user experience improvements.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tidal is primarily deployed on-premises but offers hybrid and private cloud capabilities. Its customer service has improved after transitioning from Cisco to STA. ActiveBatch supports on-premises and cloud environments with reliable customer support, though there is room for enhancing responsiveness and clarity.

Pricing and ROI: Tidal offers flexible licensing models suitable for various organizations, perceived as cost-effective with enterprise agreements. It shows significant ROI in productivity gains and cost management. ActiveBatch also provides competitive pricing and flexible options, but recent changes to subscription models have caused some concerns. Its ROI is notable in complex job scheduling and task automation.

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

Buyer's Guide

ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Tidal by Redwood

July 2025

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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

ActiveBatch by Redwood

Ranking in Workload Automation

9th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Process Automation (9th), Managed File Transfer (MFT) (10th)

Tidal by Redwood

Ranking in Workload Automation

12th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Workload Automation category, the mindshare of ActiveBatch by Redwood is 2.8%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tidal by Redwood is 4.6%, up from 3.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Workload Automation

Featured Reviews

Shubham Bharti

Senior Analyst at Capgemini

Flexible, easy to use, and offers good automation

Occasionally, I find myself contemplating if there is room for improvement in the user interface (UI), and envisioning that with certain enhancements. The UI could potentially offer a more refined and user-friendly experience, fostering smoother interactions and facilitating easier navigation for users engaging with the application. New users might encounter a minor setback due to the absence of readily accessible training videos, which could have otherwise proven to be an invaluable resource in aiding their initial familiarization with the platform, potentially hindering their seamless onboarding process and delaying their ability to harness the software's full range of capabilities to its utmost potential.

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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

"We are able to integrate it into multiple third-party tools like email, backup, tracking systems, SharePoint, Slack alerts, etc."

"The software offers real-time monitoring and reporting features that let IT teams keep tabs on the progress of their batch operations and workflows."

"For developers, it is easy to orchestrate the workflows and the integration has been very easy."

"Approximately ~20 hours of manual effort have been reduced to ~5 hours with the help of ActiveBatch."

"It is very useful in sending confidential files through FPP servers."

"As far as centralization goes it's nice because we can see all these processes that are tied to this larger process. The commissions, FTP processing, the reporting, the file moves to the business users — all that is right there. It's very easy to read. It's easy to tie it together, visually, and see where each of these steps fits into the bigger picture."

"Error Handling is one of the best standout features of ActiveBatch."

"The nice thing about ActiveBatch is once we have created a specific job that can be easily be replicated to another job, then minimal changes will have to be made. This makes things nice. Reduction of coding is substantial in a lot of cases. The replication of one job to another is just doing a few minor tweaks and rolling it into production. This decreases our development costs substantially."

More ActiveBatch by Redwood pros

"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 Automation offers extensive monitoring and reporting features that let users keep track of the status of their workflows and quickly spot any problems."

"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."

"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."

"We use the solution for cross-platform and cross-application workloads. That's one of the core reasons we chose it. It's one of a few things in the industry that can be used for cross-platform integration."

"The data management on offer was valuable."

"It's easy to use and easy to administer, and it's very flexible."

"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

"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."

"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."

"They could provide an easier installation guide or technical support to the organizations during the installation process."

"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."

"It does have a little bit of a learning curve because it is fairly complex. You have to learn how it does things. I don't know if it's any worse than any other tool would be, just because of the nature of what it does... the learning curve is the hardest part."

"Some of the advanced features in the user interface are a bit confusing even after referring to the documents."

"The monitoring dashboard could have been more user-friendly so that in the monitoring dashboard itself we can see the total number of jobs created in the system and how many were currently active/scheduled/chained."

"I have faced struggles to understand, set up the tool, and implement it in my early days as a new user."

More ActiveBatch by Redwood cons

"Their software installation and update process could use some improvements. I'm pretty sure they're working on that, but that's definitely an area where it could be streamlined a lot. There's still a lot of manual work that you have to do with the schedule when you deploy masters or do the agents."

"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."

"Tidal Software interface could be more intuitive and user-friendly."

"With the client, we have had certain issues. The user interface for Tidal is a little slow. A lot of people would love this tool if they had a faster user interface. The drill-down functionality should be much quicker than what it is pulling out now. If I fill out some data, then it takes awhile to get that data back onto the screen. It's not as fast as we were expecting."

"Initially, it is complicated to understand the functionalities as there is limited product documentation."

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

"I'm still hoping with Explorer to be able to see end-to-end job streams. That's not really something that's easy to see today in the web client. However, I haven't worked with Explorer yet. One of the things that we have found frustrating is not being able to see an end-to-end job stream across multiple applications within Tidal. We use jobs for that right now, but I have high hopes that we'll be able to see that in Explorer."

"The drill-down into details using the Graphical Views feature is a bit difficult and not that helpful. If you want to go into the details, you have to go to the Job Activity. Graphical Views is not that easy for getting that kind of information."

More Tidal by Redwood cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price was fairly in line with other automation tools. I don't think it's exorbitantly expensive, relatively speaking."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Currently, we are paying approximately $7,000 yearly, which includes support."

"It allows for lower operational overhead."

"If you compare ActiveBatch licensing to Control-M, you're looking at $50,000 as opposed to millions."

"We think the pricing is very fair. We have been happy with the pricing compared to some of the other solutions in the space."

"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 solution has no hidden costs. It helps me to plan forward into the future. I know that I can add another 100 or a thousand jobs, and that's how much it will cost me today."

"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."

"We've been able to purchase more adapters because the cost of the product has been very reasonable."

"If you are willing to shop around to other vendors, you can possibly get a good price on your support license."

"There have been pricing increases, but with the reduction that our company obtained from Tidal this year, the pricing has become very acceptable for this type of product."

"The new prices that we've received seem reasonable and comparable to the marketplace."

More Tidal by Redwood pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

19%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about ActiveBatch Workload Automation?

Managing the workload and monitoring the tasks were very difficult with manual interventions. Now, by using ActiveBatch, the process is automated and it runs tasks on a scheduled basis.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ActiveBatch Workload Automation?

I'd advise users to start by knowing what the actual requirement is and thoroughly assess the automation needs. New users should take advantage of the demos and trial versions so they get an idea o...

See all answers

What needs improvement with ActiveBatch Workload Automation?

After upgrades we are facing a few issues and errors triggered, so focusing on this would be appreciated. Some of the advanced features in the user interface are a bit confusing even after referrin...

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 needs improvement with Tidal Automation?

Initially, it is complicated to understand the functionalities as there is limited product documentation. The setup and configuration of the software is a bit complicated. Providing the training vi...

See all answers

Comparisons

Control-M vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 18% of the time

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 15% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 10% of the time

AutoSys Workload Automation vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 9% of the time

Automic Automation vs ActiveBatch by Redwood

Compared 7% of the time

More ActiveBatch by Redwood Competitors

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 31% of the time

Control-M vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 20% of the time

Automic Automation vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 9% of the time

Redwood RunMyJobs vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 9% of the time

Stonebranch vs Tidal by Redwood

Compared 4% of the time

More Tidal by Redwood Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ActiveBatch by Redwood

July 2025

Download ActiveBatch by Redwood product report

Buyer's Guide

Tidal by Redwood

July 2025

Download Tidal by Redwood product report

Also Known As

ActiveBatch

Tidal Workload Automation, Cisco Workload Automation, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler

Overview

ActiveBatch by Redwood enhances efficiency with features like job scheduling, integration, and real-time monitoring. It supports diverse platforms, automates tasks, and offers a single-pane view with robust security.

ActiveBatch streamlines automation by offering drag-and-drop functionality, pre-built job steps, and native integrations. Its customizable workflows and alert system aid in managing complex workloads like data processing and server monitoring across hybrid environments. While it effectively reduces manual errors and enhances productivity, areas like navigation and support for cloud platforms need enhancement. New users may face challenges due to its complexity and steep learning curve, and further improvements in reporting, mobile access, and training could provide additional support to users.

What important features does ActiveBatch offer?

Comprehensive Job Scheduling: Manages and automates complex workloads efficiently.
Integration Capabilities: Seamlessly connects with different platforms and applications.
Real-time Monitoring: Offers a single-pane view for quick issue identification.
Customizable Workflows: Tailors processes to specific organizational tasks.
Robust Alert System: Ensures timely notifications for critical events.
Data Protection: Incorporates strong security measures for secure operations.

What benefits should be considered when evaluating ActiveBatch?

Enhanced Efficiency: Automates repetitive tasks, reducing manual intervention.
Improved Productivity: Streamlines processes across hybrid environments.
Error Reduction: Decreases likelihood of manual errors.
Platform Support: Provides integration with diverse systems.

In finance, ActiveBatch is implemented for orchestrating batch processes and data management. The healthcare industry utilizes it for automating patient data updates and server monitoring, while the retail sector benefits from file transfers and inventory management automation.

ActiveBatch by Redwood

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

Informatica, D&H, ACES, PrimeSource, Sub-Zero Group, SThree, Lamar Advertising, Subway, Xcel Energy, Ignite Technologies, Whataburger, Jyske Bank, Omaha Children's Hospital

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Buyer's Guide

ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Tidal by Redwood

July 2025

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