We performed a comparison between ActiveBatch by Redwood and vCenter Orchestrator 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."Easy to configure and simple to develop new features."
"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."
"It can connect to a number of third-party/legacy systems."
"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."
"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."
"The product offers a centralized platform for managing activities across many environments, applications, etc."
"What ActiveBatch allows you to do is develop a more efficient process. It gave me visibility into all my jobs so I could choose which jobs to run in parallel. This is much easier than when I have to try to do it through cron for Windows XP, where you really can't do things in parallel and know what is going on."
"The automation feature is a very valuable feature as the associates do not have to worry about performing repetitive tasks (i.e. endpoint security scans on a daily basis) that would take several hours to complete on a daily basis."
"I am impressed with the tool's easiness to work with VMware solutions."
"It is very stable. I have been using vCenter Orchestrator from version three now to six plus."
"We have excellent technical support. They have always been helpful when we have needed them."
"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."
"In regards to the workflows, the fact that we can actually have a full dashboard library of all the existing workflows on this is great. We can see all the workflows and what all the actions do and can work with scripts."
"The backup and recovery times are very quick."
"Technical support is helpful."
"vCenter Orchestrator is easy to use."
"Some of the advanced features in the user interface are a bit confusing even after referring to the documents."
"I have faced struggles to understand, set up the tool, and implement it in my early days as a new user."
"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."
"The user interface can be improved so that it is more appealing and accessible to new users."
"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."
"One thing I've noticed is that navigation can be difficult unless you are familiar with the structure that we have in place. If someone else had to look at our ActiveBatch console and find a job, they might not know where to find it."
"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."
"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 product lacks GUIs. The tool should have more GUIs available, along with easier product documentation."
"When the SSO certificate needs to be renewed, the upgrading and testing are quite complicated."
"I would like to see, from within the Web Console, being able to define the project and custom templates per user; almost like how CloudSpec has approached the solution."
"Many times, customers' licenses are not used because the client is not aware of the features and the product benefits. When somebody is buying a product, they just do a default configuration."
"The interface could be improved to bring greater user-friendliness and ease of use."
"I believe vCenter Orchestrator should be part of VMware vSphere's basic bundle. As a product, vCenter Orchestrator should not be licensed at all because the world has progressed way beyond what it can offer."
"The response time of vCenter Orchestrator's support could be improved."
"I liked the previous client better than the current web client of vCenter Orchestrator, though my colleagues like the client now. The technical support for vCenter Orchestrator needs improvement."
ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked 6th in Process Automation with 35 reviews while vCenter Orchestrator is ranked 9th in Process Automation with 44 reviews. ActiveBatch by Redwood is rated 9.2, while vCenter Orchestrator 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 vCenter Orchestrator writes "Enables us to do administration on a centralized layer when using multiple VMware ESX servers". ActiveBatch by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood, Redwood RunMyJobs and VisualCron, whereas vCenter Orchestrator is most compared with VMware Aria Automation, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Cisco UCS Director and ServiceNow Orchestration. See our ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. vCenter Orchestrator report.
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